The author, a distinguished physician, wrote: “[The Negro fiend] imagines that he hears people taunting and abusing him, and this often incites homicidal attacks upon innocent and unsuspecting victims.” And he continued, “the deadly accuracy of the cocaine user has become axiomatic in Southern police circles…. the record of the ‘cocaine nigger’ near Asheville who dropped five men dead in their tracks using only one cartridge for each, offers evidence that is sufficiently convincing.”
Cocaine, in other words, made black men uniquely murderous and better marksmen. But that wasn’t all. It also produced “a resistance to the ‘knock down’ effects of fatal wounds. Bullets fired into vital parts that would drop a sane man in his tracks, fail to check the ‘fiend.’”
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By 1914, however, the law’s proponents had found an important ally in their quest to get it passed: the mythical “negro cocaine fiend,” which prominent newspapers, physicians and politicians readily exploited. Indeed, at congressional hearings, “experts” testified that “most of the attacks upon white women of the South are the direct result of a cocaine-crazed Negro brain.”
