Should people be allowed by law to mess up their own minds and bodies any way they choose? In this provocative survey of one of the world's most alluring narcotics, Dominic Streatfeild demonstrates that the legal prohibition of drugs does even more harm than the drugs themselves.
The 1919 Volstead Act in the United States did not prevent Americans from drinking alcohol; it only became more dangerous and expensive. Prohibition brought about organised crime, the corruption of police, judges and politicians, and the sale of a lot of poisonous bootleg booze. Banning cocaine and other drugs has created a vast international criminal conspiracy to manufacture, smuggle and distribute them, at enormously inflated prices, while perverting whole national economies and political systems.
Streatfeild does not plead, except, perhaps, by implication, for the decriminalisation of cocaine; he only presents the history of the drug and an account of its disastrous contemporary prevalence, reaching its markets by the bribery and subversion of governments at every level and over countless dead bodies. Legislators continue to argue about how best to cope with the crisis in the producing countries, especially in Latin America, and in the countries where the traffickers sell cocaine, especially the United States, also the lesser consumers with growing appetites and financial resources such as Ireland.
He pin-points a major difficulty by quoting a passage from Aldous Huxley's A Treatise on Drugs (1931) which makes it clear that the demand for mind-transforming narcotics has always been too strong to be eliminated by legal dictate.
"Everywhere and at all times men and women have sought, and duly found, the means of taking a holiday from the reality of their generally dull and often acutely unpleasant existence. A holiday out of space, out of time, in the eternity of sleep or ecstasy, in the heaven or the limbo of visionary fantasy," wrote Huxley.
And sometimes a pint of plain is not your only man. Coca, the Peruvian plant from which, by a simple chemical process, cocaine is derived, has been cultivated abundantly since time immemorial. The Incas praised it as a divine blessing - and an aphrodisiac. The leaf of the plant is only mildly narcotic, yet it can serve both as an anaesthetic and a stimulant. Peasants still chew it to alleviate hunger and fatigue, to make being a peasant seem not all bad.
Streatfeild gives credit to a graduate student at the University of Gottingen, Albert Niemann, for discovering in 1859, for his PhD, how to extract cocaine from coca. In the second half of the 19th century, coca, in one form or another, was the significant ingredient in many patent medicines obtainable without prescriptions. Coca was in the original formula for CocaCola, but later withdrawn. Freud was an habitual user of cocaine when he was writing his seminal work, The Interpretation of Dreams. Cocaine was superseded by synthetic anaesthetics for surgery, but, at the beginning of century rapidly gained acceptance as a recreational drug. In the United States in 1905, according to the Committee on the Acquirement of the Drug Habit, there were 200,000 addicts.
In 1934, when Cole Porter wrote that "Some get their kicks from cocaine", sniffing the drug was so expensive that it was considered chic. Compared with heroin, it was regarded as practically harmless, except for such inconveniences as perforated nasal septa and occasional cases of the heebie-jeebies, the screaming meanies and suicidal paranoia. In the 1960s, it became well known that the Beatles enjoyed LSD and cocaine. The protagonists of the movie Easy Rider, a box-office hit, had lots of laughs while smuggling cocaine (until they were murdered). In 1970, Rolling Stone and Newsweek, among others, actually endorsed cocaine. During the Reagan presidency's "War Against Drugs", when the First Lady urged children "just say no" to drugs, it was too late: they had just said yes.
Streatfeild has done a marvellous job of research to make his book totally current now that the supply of drugs has escalated astronomically on both sides of the Atlantic to keep pace with rising demand and disposable incomes. What makes Cocaine outstanding is that he did not put it together simply in libraries. He interviewed all sorts of experts and ventured into some dangerous places in Peru, Bolivia and Colombia to meet some dangerous billionaires.
He made me sigh with nostalgia for the relatively small-scale scenarios of 1982. That was the year I investigated the drugs traffic through the Turks & Caicos Islands and found that the Colombians were paying $25,000 for each plane refuelled by the Caicos Air Services. As Dominic Streatfeild dramatically reveals, the situation is much worse now.
Patrick Skene Catling is a writer and critic