Abraham Lincoln took cocaine and ate mercury

Abraham Lincoln treated his depression with cocaine and "blue mass pills," which contained a toxic amount of mercury.

Sources/further reading:
The Personal Finances of Abraham Lincoln by Harry E. Pratt https://archive.org/details/personalfinances00prat
Curious Events In History by Michael Powell
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https://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/linc.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_of_Abraham_Lincoln
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2007/02/11/cokehead-or-bedhead/

Click here for an annotated version of the script:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Vwv7QbQ-yndPeIYrvessUL6ul4QTpqRAQ44R5kFVfEw/edit?usp=sharing

#ushistory #abrahamlincoln #abrahamlincolnbiography

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Abraham Lincoln was the first American president to use cocaine.

To be fair, it was before he got elected, and it was possibly to treat his depression. On October 12, 1860 Lincoln walked into a drugstore in Springfield, Illinois and bought fifty-cents’ worth of cocaine.

Today, if a presidential candidate got caught buying or using cocaine, a lot of folks might reconsider voting for them. However, back then cocaine was legal. You could even buy it in grocery stores and through the mail. Heck, it was a brand new drug that most people didn’t fully understand. In fact, it had only been first named “cocaine” the year before Lincoln bought it and first isolated from the coca plant four years before that.

But cocaine wasn’t the only harmful thing Lincoln took to treat his depression.

Before that, he took blue mass pills that contained mercury. Mercury can be highly toxic if swallowed, and, according to at least one study, Lincoln consumed a daily dose of mercury around 9,000 times the safe level to consume according to the EPA. Lincoln was known to have wild mood swings and sometimes acted weirdly, and some historians now think it was because he was slowly poisoning himself to death with mercury.