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classification of drugs >>> caffeine >>>

Caffeine

Coffee

The home of the coffee tree seems to be Ethiopia; somewhere between 12^th and 15^th century it was transferred to Arabia, from where its usage was spread all over the world. No matter that the Koran forbids strictly all exciting beverages, it was exactly the Arabic culture contributed to its popularity. Many legends about how the properties of the coffee were first found. According to one of them the credit goes to the goats of a Muslim monastery in Yemen. The dervishes noticed that after the monastery’s goats had eaten from the leaves of some tree, they began to leap jolly and in a careless manner and to play as little kids. Soon the beverage, prepared from the leaves of this tree, became the favorite one of the hermits, who drank it in order to clarify their thoughts and not to fall asleep during the long night vigils. 

The British king Charles II closed for a certain period all of the coffeehouses in the country. In Germany, which has been famous for a long time with its police force, existed special agents, who traced the admirers of the forbidden drink; we can suppose that the unfortunate agents, in the interest of their duties, were forced to drink coffee in order to sneak the violators’ circle. At all events these precautions just arose the public discontent and served as an advertisement of coffee.  

Recently coffee has succeeded in turning into an immutable part of people’s life in most European countries, no matter whether we speak about the popular in South America “espresso”, or about the rare, but abundant “schwarz-coffee”, or about the sweet and heavy Turkish coffee. It is made from the fruits of the coffee tree “Coffea arabica”, which is cultivated today in many countries in Africa and South America. Each of its fruits contains two pips – these are the well-known to all of us grains; their coverings also contain caffeine and because of the fact that the concentration of sugar there is very high, it is used in many countries-producers for obtaining alcohol drinks. Coffee is prepared from the grains after they have been roasted and this process has no other purpose but to better the aroma of the beverge. The caffeine content in the different sorts of coffee varies between 1 and 2,5%.