Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography
by Dominic Streatfeild
Not only does the title say it all but the back cover says it all too—”The story of cocaine isn’t just about crime. It’s about psychoanalysis, about empire building, about exploitation, about emancipation, about money, and, ultimately, about power. To tell the story of the twentieth century without reference to this drug and its contribution is to miss a vital and fascinating strand of social history.”
Streatfeild mentions on more than one occasion that the history of coca (not cocaine) is a mighty task to get your hands around. First of all, there is the problem of coca only growing in certain areas of South America. Secondly, there is the problem of Science taking so long to properly categorize and get to the root of what coca actually is. Thirdly, because coca was really only used by local South American cultures (i.e.-”savages” as seen by the rest of the world) no one bothered to write anything of substance about it. Finally, by the time people realized that you could make cocaine out of coca plants, the distinction was lost: everyone thinks of a coca plant as cocaine, regardless of the fact that this could not be farther from the truth.
In spite of the multiple brick walls Streatfeild admittedly ran into in researching the origins of coca, he does a phenomenal job writing this book. Streatfeild is known primarily for being a documentary film maker and it shows here as his ability to thread history, opinion, and the numerous secondary and tertiary story lines is nothing short of remarkable. I have never done cocaine, never knew the difference between coca and cocaine, and was too young to know the intricacies of things such as the introduction of crack and the Iran-Contra scandal but this book was fascinating from the get-go and the 500 pages read like it was really 250 pages long. The one thing that makes Cocaine such an easy read is that you realize pretty early on that cocaine can be used as a microcosm of most if not all of society’s problems.
When the early Spaniards descended on South America they realized almost immediately that the natives were chewing this crazy concoction of coca leaves and an alkali component. The early settlers and the Church saw this immediately as a tool of the Devil. What the indigenous people knew (and had known for centuries) was that coca allowed the user to work longer hours in between meals (coca is very rich in vitamins and nutrients), could cure many things such as diarrhea, malaria, ulcers, as well as helping stabilize your body while hiking high into the Andes. Oh, and it also made you feel good and acted as an aphrodisiac. This, in a nutshell, would embody how we all would view coca and cocaine—it is a tool of the Devil and the worst drug you can possibly take… but it is the greatest drug in the world and can act as an anaesthetic and a wonder cure-all; it is an aphrodisiac… except that it is not really because it makes you numb or makes you think only about the drug; it is a destructive commodity that has ruined many South American governments and people… except that it mostly seems to be the fault of the U.S. Cocaine in particular has an extremely checkered past. From the years leading up to Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams until the early 1980′s, cocaine has enjoyed a roller coaster ride that has seen it be marketed as The Greatest Medicinal Drug Ever Made to the “third scourge of the Earth” and everything in between.
The one constant that seems to be prevalent throughout the history of coca and cocaine is that a certain linear template unfolded and it follows as such–Step 1: so long as the rich upper class and doctors (read: white people) are using the drug it is fine; Step 2: the drug is so fine that any quack company or group of doctors will testify to its curing of everything; Step 3: upon further review, the drug may in fact be harmful and should not be used altogether; Step 4: the drug needs to be made illegal; Step 5: when all else fails and the public isn’t clamoring to have the drug abolished, start publishing stories about how black people are now users; Step 6: finally, when all the white people are scared of the events of Step 5, start publicly crying about the need for more guns because all black people, when they are high, start to rape white women, kill white men, and are impervious to bullets. If you think I’m making up Step 6 Streatfeild cites reference after reference (including our nation’s own bastion of Intellectual Liberal-mindedness, The New York Times) during the early twentieth century as to how this was seen as a legitimate threat. Black men raped white women and could not be brought down by shooting at them. Guess what happened? A lot of black people were needlessly incarcerated and wrongfully accused in the name of drug legislation. Sound familiar?
All in all, though, the book is just plain interesting. From the back story on the Incas (who knew that in the history of man there did exist a form of Socialism that worked for more than two generations?) to the modern narcodemocracies in South America and their histories, from Freud to Coca-Cola, and from crack to the current U.S. policies for the War On Drugs it is beyond fascinating. Cocaine in itself represents a microcosm of some of our inability to separate dogma from uneducated contradictions (of which I was totally guilty of before reading this). For example, Coca-Cola never contained cocaine—it was coca; crack did not just appear out of nowhere—it was a firestorm created almost exclusively by the media; places like Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia will always be chaotic and it is because of our own inability to control our drug problem (think about it, if you were a farmer would you rather grow bananas and get $200 per year or grow coca, sell it to a cartel so that they can make it in to cocaine for $2400 per year?); but most importantly, the government cannot fix this problem with money and guns.
Drugs will always be a problem in the U.S. but cocaine is especially thedrug that can’t be killed. If for nothing else this book is recommended reading because the politicians in our grandkid’s time will still think that giving $1 billion to Bolivia as an incentive to grow maize instead of coca will still be par for the course.
The way I see it the only way to eradicate drug use is build a wall around all of our borders, allow no foreign ships or planes to land in our borders, shut down all forms of external communication (we don’t want kids to hear/see celebrities talking about drugs, right?), and institute the death penalty for second-time offenders. Short of that, drugs are here to stay so it’s probably worth looking into the how’s and why’s of their existence, which is roughly 6,000 times more than any member of our government has ever done.
