Gaedcke named the alkaloid "erythroxyline", and published a description in the journal Archiv der Pharmazie.In 1856, Friedrich Wöhler asked Dr. Carl Scherzer, a scientist aboard the Novara (an Austrian frigate sent by Emperor Franz Joseph to circle the globe), to bring him a large amount of coca leaves from South America. In 1859, the ship finished its travels and Wöhler received a trunk full of coca. Wöhler passed on the leaves to Albert Niemann, a PhD student at the University of Göttingen in Germany, who then developed an improved purification process.Niemann described every step he took to isolate cocaine in his dissertation titled Über eine neue organische Base in den Cocablättern (On a New Organic Base in the Coca Leaves), which was published in 1860 and earned him his Ph.D. He wrote of the alkaloids "colourless transparent prisms" and said that "Its solutions have an alkaline reaction, a bitter taste, promote the flow of saliva and leave a peculiar numbness, followed by a sense of cold when applied to the tongue." Niemann named the alkaloid "cocaine" from "coca" (from Quechua "kúka") + suffix "ine".The first synthesis and elucidation of the structure of the cocaine molecule was by Richard Willstätter in 1898. It was the first biomimetic synthesis of an organic structure recorded in academic chemical literature. The synthesis started from tropinone, a related natural product and took five steps. Because of the former use of cocaine as a local anesthetic, a suffix "-caine" was later extracted and used to form names of synthetic local anesthetics.
The rate and extent of absorption from inhalation of cocaine is similar or greater than with intravenous injection, as inhalation provides access directly to the pulmonary capillary bed. The delay in absorption after oral ingestion may account for the popular belief that cocaine bioavailability from the stomach is lower than after insufflation. Compared with ingestion, the faster absorption of insufflated cocaine results in quicker attainment of maximum drug effects. Snorting cocaine produces maximum physiological effects within 40 minutes and maximum psychotropic effects within 20 minutes. Physiological and psychotropic effects from nasally insufflated cocaine are sustained for approximately 40–60 minutes after the peak effects are attained.Cocaine crosses the blood-brain barrier via both a proton-coupled organic cation antiporter and (to a lesser extent) via passive diffusion across cell membranes. As of September 2022, the gene or genes encoding the human proton-organic cation antiporter had not been identified.Cocaine has a short elimination half life of 0.7–1.5 hours and is extensively metabolized by plasma esterases and also by liver cholinesterases, with only about 1% excreted unchanged in the urine. The metabolism is dominated by hydrolytic ester cleavage, so the eliminated metabolites consist mostly of benzoylecgonine (BE), the major metabolite, and other metabolites in lesser amounts such as ecgonine methyl ester (EME) and ecgonine. Further minor metabolites of cocaine include norcocaine, p-hydroxycocaine, m-hydroxycocaine, p-hydroxybenzoylecgonine (pOHBE), and m-hydroxybenzoylecgonine. If consumed with alcohol, cocaine combines with alcohol in the liver to form cocaethylene.