His colleague Wilhelm Lossen elucidated the chemical formula of cocaine in 1865, and the chemical structure was obtained by Richard Willstatter in 1898. Cocaine is a tropane alkaloid, ...

When the normal mice got cocaine, they ran really fast on a spinning rod (think of it as the rodent equivalent of a log-rolling contest). When the mice got JWH133, they ran slower.

Here we report the first structure of a cocaine-degrading enzyme. The bacterial esterase, cocE, hydrolyzes pharmacologically active (−)-cocaine to a nonpsychoactive metabolite with a rate faster ...