Pro coke and pro racism

The late nineteenth century was a time when many of the turmoil that we struggle with today was born, and the Roman Catholic Church was as the center of most of it. According to one of the liberal thinkers of the age, Paolo Mantegazza:

On the use of coca:

Paolo Mantegazza also believed that drugs and certain foods would change humankind in the future, and defended the experimental investigation and use of cocaine as one of these miracle drugs (its addiction potential was not known at the time). When Mantegazza returned from South America, where he had witnessed the use of coca by the natives, he was able to chew a regular amount of coca leaves and then tested on himself in 1859. Afterwards, he wrote a paper titled Sulle Virtù Igieniche e Medicinali della Coca e sugli Alimenti Nervosi in Generale ("On the hygienic and medicinal properties of coca and on nervous nourishment in general"). He noted enthusiastically the powerful stimulating effect of cocaine in coca leaves on cognition:

"... I sneered at the poor mortals condemned to live in this valley of tears while I, carried on the wings of two leaves of coca, went flying through the spaces of 77,438 words, each more splendid than the one before...An hour later, I was sufficiently calm to write these words in a steady hand: God is unjust because he made man incapable of sustaining the effect of coca all life long. I would rather have a life span of ten years with coca than one of 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 centuries without coca."

On racial supremacy:

In a time when the popular and official science and culture in Italy were still under heavy influence of the Roman Catholic Church, Mantegazza was a staunch liberal and defended the ideas of Darwinism in anthropology, his research having helped to establish it as the "natural history of man". From 1868 to 1875 he maintained a correspondence with Charles Darwin, too. Mantegazza's natural history, however, must be considered to be from a racist/social Darwinist perspective, evident in his "Morphological Tree of Human Races." This tree maps three principles: a single European metanarrative marshals all of the world's many cultures; human history is imagined as progressive, with the European human as the pinnacle of progress and development; lastly, a ranking of different races onto a hierarchical structure. If one envisions a tree, the Aryan race is the topmost branch, followed by Polynesians, Semites, Japanese, and moving downward to the bottommost branch, the "Negritos." Mantegazza also designed an "Aesthetic Tree of the Human Race" with similar results.