Cocaine

Cocaine is a stimulant defined in the novel by a contrast between brief, concentrated cerebral pleasure and the body-centered effects associated with morphine. Its rapid onset and quickly recurring craving make it both a chemical experience and an image of the brain as a system that can be stimulated, studied, and controlled. The text connects that model to Dr. Benway’s account of the mind, to the use of drugs in interrogation, and to a wider narrative of unstable identity and memory.

Effects and Pattern of Use

In one account, cocaine is injected into a vein and brings a rush of pleasure described as moving directly through the brain. The intensity is followed by a desire for another dose within ten minutes; the craving can prompt a person to cross town in search of more. Yet the same passage distinguishes wanting cocaine from an unavoidable need: if it cannot be obtained, the person can eat, sleep, and forget it. That qualification complicates the image of compulsive pursuit rather than presenting every episode of use as an unbroken dependence.

A later comparison makes the distinction between cocaine and morphine explicit. Morphine’s pleasure is described as visceral, whereas cocaine acts through the brain’s pleasure connections. The craving lasts only a few hours, while those channels remain stimulated, and then subsides; the text says there is no withdrawal syndrome. Cocaine is thus associated with a temporary, electrically imagined demand rather than the more bodily pattern assigned to morphine. Eukodol, by contrast, is characterized as combining features of both drugs.

Brain, Technology, and Interrogation

Dr. Benway places cocaine within a broader speculation about thinking machines. The study of machines, he argues, can teach people about the brain, while technological devices externalize aspects of human functioning. Cocaine becomes his example of pleasure as neural activation: a sensation a thinking machine might also experience if its connections could be stimulated. His analogy turns the drug’s effects into a model of the brain as circuitry, not simply a source of inward feeling.

The same discussion links drugs to interrogation. Dr. Benway calls drugs an essential tool for attacking a subject’s personal identity while acknowledging that different substances can undermine an interrogator’s aims. He says barbiturates are of little use against a subject who can be broken by crude methods, and that scopolamine may dissolve resistance but impair memory so badly that secrets and cover stories become confused. Other substances, including mescaline, harmaline, LSD, bufotenine, and muscarine, are described as successful in some cases. Cocaine’s account of brain stimulation therefore sits within a larger, disturbing theory in which chemistry is used to manipulate thought and recall.

Identity, Classification, and Control

Dr. Benway’s interrogation doctrine also proposes exploiting a subject’s asserted cover identity. He describes a female agent who forgot her original identity and merged with her cover story, remaining a fricoteuse in Annexia. From that case he develops a method of reinforcing a subject’s stated identity until the alternative becomes unconscious and can be approached through drugs and hypnosis. The passage connects the management of identity to sexual coercion and humiliation; in neutral terms, it presents these as techniques of institutional control rather than as medical care.

A separate examination of Carl Peterson shows the same administrative logic in public-health language. The doctor presents the state’s role as adjusting conditions to individual citizens, then compares sexual deviation to tuberculosis and invokes prophylactic obligations to protect others. He explains that suspected tuberculosis may lead the relevant department to request a fluoroscopic examination, and frames Carl’s appointment as a kind of psychic examination. Read beside Dr. Benway’s methods, this scene shows how the novel’s institutions translate personal identity and sexuality into matters for diagnosis, surveillance, and intervention. Cocaine is not itself the subject of that examination, but its place in the novel’s account of chemical control belongs to the same concern with systems that claim authority over the mind.

Recurrence and Narrative Significance

Cocaine’s effects are rendered through recurring language of codes and connections: the drug activates pleasure pathways, while another account describes reading words as if they carried code significance and interpreting a sequence of illnesses as a message. These fragments do not establish that cocaine causes those later experiences. Instead, their juxtaposition contributes to a narrative in which perception, bodily states, and meaning can become difficult to separate.

The novel also places cocaine amid discontinuous records of the past: a secretary looks up from a comic book to report that the Sweitzers already liquefy; old photographs recall Panama City and a druggist; and a memory of an overdose of Majoun leads into disorientation in a villa outside Tangier. These moments do not supply further evidence about cocaine’s pharmacology, but they show how drug references coexist with abrupt shifts in recollection and identity. Cocaine’s most specific role remains its sharp contrast between a short-lived cerebral craving and bodily drug effects; its wider significance lies in the way that contrast feeds the book’s recurring examination of the brain as both an experiencing subject and a target of control.