Cocaine Confidential Read Free

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    By the turn of the century, cocaine’s addictive qualities had helped it acquire a somewhat darker reputation. The subject of hysterical and lurid stories in the press, it was increasingly associated with prostitution and crime and became the repository for many of Middle America’s fears about its black population.
    An increasingly hostile legal climate saw the banning of sales of the drug outright in many states as well as the implementation of various items of Federal legislation that culminated in the Harrison Act of 1914, which introduced significantly stricter legislative controls over the sale of the drug. These effectively made it illegal to use it for recreational purposes – and indeed outlawed many of its previous medical uses. It was later banned in the UK in 1920 amid reports of crazed soldiers in the First World War as well as a series ofmoral panics surrounding the death of dancers like Billie Carleton.
    More than any other country, the US endeavoured to stamp out both the cultivation and abuse of the drug, but their efforts in the 1950s and 1960s saw little conspicuous reward; use of the narcotic continued to skyrocket, especially once the infamous cartels took control of the Colombian coke business and began to flood the market with unprecedented amounts of white powder. The excesses of the hedonistic seventies were typified by nightclubs such as the legendary New York club Studio 54, where customers snorted cocaine off table-tops in full view of other people. And recreational cocaine really took off in the UK in the early-to-mid-1980s. As a reporter on the London tabloids, I frequently visited nightclubs in pursuit of all sorts of stories, mainly about crime and celebrities. In those places, I found the drug’s use was rampant among the rich and famous. I remember watching men queuing up to snort a line in the lavatories of one well-known West End club. The attendant did nothing to prevent it and stood by in expectation of some big tips from the coke-sniffing clientele.
    It was probably no coincidence that Ronald Reagan’s publicly lauded ‘war’ against Colombian cocaine was declared in the same decade. An eradication programme was launched in which billions of US taxpayers’ dollars were used to wipe out cocaine production by spraying chemicals on all Colombia’s coca fields and offering subsidies to farmers to grow other things. It was a lot easier said than done.
    In fact, the US’s decision to target Colombia’s cocaine production created room for its neighbours step up their own coke production, which is why in 2012 Peru became the world’s number one producer of the drug. Cocaine had been closely linked to Peruvian history for almost as long as it has been in Colombia. In neighbouring Bolivia, production has also steadily risen since 1970. Bolivia has recently experienced a wave of coca nationalism, an explicit reaction against the repeated efforts of the US authorities to demonise the use, and combat the cultivation, of the leaf. Many Bolivians refuse to accept that cocaine is an illegal substance and they see its production as a vital part of the nation’s economy. Indeed it’s arguable that the financial survival of the eastern Andes as a whole remains dependent on the production of cocaine.
    The US has sponsored efforts similar to those employed previously in Colombia to stamp out the cultivation of coca in the other South American countries. But their attempts to substitute other crops have met with equally limited success. Nothing else provides a comparable income.
    The new market leader Peru exports about 60,000 tons of the drug a year, and Bolivia a further 50,000 tons. Brazil and Ecuador have also expanded their operations very rapidly in recent years and small plantations in other countries such as Panama, Venezuela and Argentina raise the total amount produced by South and Central Americans to at least 200,000 tons annually.