Pubdate: Wed, 11 Sep 2002
Source: Houston Chronicle (TX)
Copyright: 2002 Houston Chronicle Publishing Company Division, Hearst Newspaper
Contact:  http://www.chron.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/198
Author: Jim Haney

THE SCOURGE THAT SEEMS SO PLEASANT

COCAINE : An Unauthorized Biography. By Dominic Streatfeild. St. Martin's 
Press, $27.95; 498 pp.

IT has been said there is no greater sensation on earth than a cocaine 
high. In very short order, a snort of the glimmering white powder produces 
an overwhelming feeling of well-being, mental clarity and boundless energy 
- - not to mention a sort of post-orgasmic glow in the solar plexus. Smoking 
it only intensifies the feeling. Injecting it, well, that defies description.

Given a limitless supply of the stuff in their water, laboratory animals 
will abandon food, sleep, sex, grooming and all other drugs, dosing 
themselves until they literally die of exhaustion.

In the great Pandora's box of scourges, cocaine is peculiarly suited to 
destroy the human race, precisely because it feels so damn good. 
Legislating against it is pointless, as the painful experience of 4,000 
years has shown. Indeed, it is an immutable historical fact that 
prohibition has only made matters worse - over and over and over again.

Those who doubt it, particularly those who write and enforce the nation's 
drug laws, should read this startling book. Because even the most ardent 
drug policy zealots will not be able to walk away with their basic 
arguments intact.

Released last year in the United Kingdom, which is only now grappling with 
the crack epidemic that has laid waste to much of urban poor America, the 
book has been a "popular history" best seller there for months.

It is not a polemic. Rather it is a sane and sober review of a vast body of 
accumulated knowledge dislodged from forgotten archives, obscure texts, 
government records, definitive histories and human sources with impeccable 
credentials.

These include drug smugglers, cartel barons, psychiatrists, disillusioned 
federal agents, teenage hit men, policy experts, addiction researchers and 
chemists. Among them is an Amazonian peasant who extracts an intoxicating 
paste worth many times its weight in gold from bundles of green coca leaves 
with a caustic soup of battery acid and gasoline.

No less an authority than Milton Friedman, architect of modern 
"supply-and-demand" theory and a top economic adviser to Presidents Reagan 
and Nixon, is read to conclude that cocaine as a global commodity is 
impervious to eradication efforts.

Worse, prohibition succeeds only in making dangerous men richer by 
artificially inflating prices for a desirable and plentiful product that is 
effectively exempt from taxation. And so it has been since forever.

 From the ancient pre-Incan civilizations of South America, which employed 
cocaine 's anesthetic properties to pioneer invasive surgical procedures as 
early as 2,500 B.C., to the blood-vengeance drug syndicates of modern 
Colombia and Mexico, cocaine has always been in demand. And no government 
on earth has ever been able to stamp it out.

Perhaps not surprisingly, it took Western capitalism to produce so perfect 
a product.

As Dominic Streatfeild amply demonstrates, it was U.S. and European drug 
companies that perfected the chemical process that took a humble leaf that 
had been safely chewed by Andean peasants for centuries to relieve hunger, 
altitude sickness and menstrual cramps and concentrated it into the potent 
euphoric that now plagues the world.

By the early 1900s, the drug companies had marketed cocaine as a feel-good 
additive and cure-all in cough drops, nasal sprays, snuffs, teas, wines and 
a wide array of patent medicines endorsed by the likes of Sigmund Freud.

Coca-Cola swiftly came to be associated with vigor - promising to enhance 
even sexual potency - and remained the world's best-selling thirst quencher 
long after the drug was removed from the soda under the first of many 
Draconian prohibition movements to sweep the nation's legislatures.

Streatfeild passes no judgments on these early regulations. Something had 
to be done, because the country was by then crawling with hopeless addicts, 
including one of the founders of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

But the regulations set in motion the by now familiar pattern of 
criminalization, political demagoguery, racially biased prosecution and 
fantastical profiteering that places $92 billion a year in the hands of 
megalomaniacs, giving them the means to unleash military adventures that 
topple tall buildings and governments alike.

It is the breadth, ambition and importance of Streatfeild's work that will 
make its one flaw all but unbearable to serious readers. Inexcusable in a 
work of history, the book lacks footnotes. For this, the publisher should 
be flogged.

While the text is replete with source citations, its value to posterity may 
be short-lived because none but the most determined scholar will have the 
patience to plow through 500 pages in search of the book's many buried jewels.
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MAP posted-by: Larry Stevens