Cocaine was first discovered in 1860 by Albert Niemann, a German chemist who identified it as the active chemical compound in the coca leaf. Before 1914, when cocaine was still legal in the United States, it was consumed primarily as an ingredient in tonics, ointments, wines, and other products. It was the original “Coca” in Coca-Cola. Vin Mariani, a well-known coca wine, had the face of Pope Leo XIII on its label. Leo and his successor, Pope Pius X, were both fans of the drink. During the temperance movement, however, cocaine was banned along with other drugs in the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914. Over the next few decades, its use dropped significantly in America as amphetamines started to become more popular.
In the late 1970s, however, the use of cocaine began to rise again. Instead of being an ingredient in various products, though, people were ingesting the drug straight up their noses as a powder, a method that had far more intense effects for the user. Just as alcohol prohibition led to the consumption of alcohol in more dangerous ways, the prohibition of coca eventually led to a trend of ingesting the drug in ways that were baffling to South Americans, where chewing on coca leaves or brewing them in tea has been commonplace for many generations.
As this far more potent way of ingesting cocaine became more widespread, addictions and overdoses continued to grab headlines throughout the 1980s. With the Anti Drug Abuse Act of 1986, Congress and the President were given unprecedented leeway to allocate military resources to fight this “epidemic” where they mistakenly believed was its source – South American coca fields.
Nations where coca was being grown, like Peru, Colombia, and Bolivia, initially rejected the idea of allowing the United States to use its military to eradicate it. Coca had cultural value in the regions where it was grown, and had long been a very useful stimulant for people living at high altitudes. But eventually, they found reasons to get on board.
In Colombia, the government had been fighting left-wing radical groups like FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, for decades. As cocaine use grew in the late 1970s, FARC found ways to profit from it – both by providing protection for traffickers and from participating in trafficking directly. It led to an explosion in their fighting capacity and their ability to buy off government officials. FARC and other formerly inconsequential groups became serious threats to Bogota. In Peru, the anti-government group Shining Path also found ways to profit from the illegal trade and gain unprecedented power.
The tentativeness over the unbalanced way America was expecting South American countries to wage the drug war for them subsided, and governments began to make requests for military equipment and other assistance to fight these groups. The ideological battle over how to properly deal with the drug habits of Americans just wasn’t as urgent as stopping their own regimes from being overthrown.
In Central America, where ruling regimes were far more fragile, the battle to disrupt drug trafficking routes often did result in complete government overthrows. The solution from the United States was the same as elsewhere, to use military force to defeat the groups involved in drug trafficking. But the mindsets of those in power who received military aid were often more interested in holding on to their power than in disrupting the flow of cocaine. As a result, we ended up with allies like Manuel Noriega of Panama, who was praised for his cooperation while secretly being on the other side of the drug war. In 1989, President Bush invaded Panama to depose him.
Throughout the 1980s, the CIA became more and more involved with fighting the drug trade, but their role became quite convoluted the deeper they sank into the quagmire. Initially, the legislation introduced during the Reagan years intended for the CIA to assist in drug interdiction, but as they waged it, they realized that most of the people caught transporting drugs were expendable and would be quickly replaced if captured or killed. As a result, they began targeting only those at the very top of the trade. But in order to capture those folks, though, they would often have to become undercover participants in the trade themselves. In the end, they discovered that even the people at the top are quickly replaced or, even worse, they were just pawns – taking out the rivals of corrupt government officials who were also secretly participating in the trade. Clusterfuck accomplished.
The conflicts that South America’s drug war got us entangled in were often battles between a mostly European ruling class and an indigenous underclass. Coca farming had long been a way of life in Bolivia’s indigenous Chapare region. In 1986, the United States conducted Operation Blast Furnace, the first time American troops (along with six Black Hawk helicopters) were used in an eradication effort on the continent. While not as major a cocaine exporter as Colombia, drug traffickers had far more influence in Bolivian politics, taking power once in 1980 and staging another failed coup attempt in 1984.
The battles continued throughout the 90s, sucking up billions of taxpayer dollars and doing nothing to reduce the amount of cocaine coming into the United States. In fact, by the year 2000, Colombian coca production had increased to an area of 163,000 hectares. There was little difference between the Bush and Clinton Administrations when it came to dealing with coca production. As their failures mounted, their tactics simply became more extreme.
By the time the Clinton Administration introduced Plan Colombia in 2000, spraying a glyphosate-based herbicide from airplanes on suspected coca and poppy fields had become the standard tactic for trying to solve America’s drug addiction problems. Peruvian leaders Alan Garcia and Alberto Fujimori complained throughout the 1990s that they couldn’t support America’s drug eradication efforts unless they put more emphasis on helping farmers grow alternate crops. The aerial eradication solution didn’t leave much room for that. America’s unwillingness to budge on how their battle with drug traffickers should be waged started to isolate those who stood by us. A failed policy was about to be shifted into overdrive.
As expected, the $5 billion Plan Colombia did nothing to reduce the amount of cocaine coming into the United States. In fact, while the amount of acreage where eradication took place increased rapidly, coca production stayed steadily above 80,000 hectares every year, which doesn’t even take into account how farmers have adapted to produce more with less land. To emphasize the magnitude of the failure, the price of cocaine in the United States continued its decades-long decrease, even as the prices of many of our basic needs – from health care to energy costs to food – had been going up. The failure of Plan Colombia has been so stark that a Republican, Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, strongly chastised the Drug Czar’s office recently for trying to claim otherwise.
Despite this record, the Colombian government of Alvaro Uribe remains one of the few remaining defenders of American drug policy in the region, and it’s no surprise why. Our military assistance over the years has allowed for FARC to be greatly minimized in their influence, even if there’s been no impact on the amount of drugs being grown there and being sent to the United States. There’s also mounting evidence that pro-Uribe right-wing paramilitaries are now profiting from drug trafficking.
The recently proposed trade agreement with Colombia had been pushed by President Bush as a reward to an ally. They’ve often pointed to the battle against cocaine trafficking as justification for this close alliance, even attempting to paint Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez as a supporter of drug trafficking, but there’s been no evidence to support such an accusation. Amazingly, though, the agreement’s terms were highly counterproductive to reducing cocaine production because the reduction of tariffs on imported American agricultural products will just make it even harder for Colombian farmers to find crops other than coca that they can profit from.
Outside of Colombia, though, support for how we’re waging the drug war is much worse. In Bolivia, an indigenous coca farmer from the Chapare region named Evo Morales was elected President in 2005. He was the first-ever Bolivian President with indigenous roots, and he ran on a platform that strongly rejected Bolivian cooperation with America’s drug war. His opposition continued in the face of numerous threats from the United States. In November of last year, he expelled the DEA and accused it of taking part in drug trafficking. The DEA rejects the allegations.
In Peru, a longstanding policy that allowed for the Peruvian military to shoot down suspected drug planes was ended in 2001 after a plane carrying missionaries from Michigan was shot down by a Peruvian jet. Republican Congressman Peter Hoekstra, a man who no one could possibly mistake for a bleeding-heart liberal, has railed against the CIA’s attempts to operate outside of the law and for their blatant obstructionism.
This is where our South American anti-drug efforts were always bound to end up. Not only were we choosing a flawed strategy, but we also made it part of the mandate of the agency overseeing the effort not to consider alternatives. It was only a matter of time before it descended into unhinged extremism.
American demand for a drug that heightens your senses, makes you more sociable, and allows you to stay awake throughout Saturday night is never going to fade away. The right way to deal with it is to go back to where we were before 1914, where you could purchase coca tonics and other concoctions where the amount and purity of the ingredients are regulated and safe. Instead of unleashing a wave of addictions, we’ll much more likely find that Pope Pius liked his coca wine for the same reason that we like to drink Red Bull mixed with vodka these days, and that the two drinks aren’t too much different. By allowing the demand for cocaine’s effects to be satisfied in a safe and regulated manner, we can undercut the flow of money that has led to bloody conflict in South America.
Will people go overboard and drink way too many coca drinks? Certainly. Will there still be people who are addicted to cocaine in its powder form and have no interest in consuming it in far less potent forms? Absolutely. But what we’ve learned from harm reduction efforts in places like Zurich, Sydney, and Vancouver is that treating these problems as health problems is still far more effective than trying to enforce prohibitions on their use. The idea that the drug war is some giant firewall against mass addiction has long been shown to be a myth. One need only look at drug addiction rates from the late 19th century when cocaine products were legal and easily available to everyone. They are no different than they are now.
But common sense is still not allowed in the drug debate. The answer to this failed strategy is always to be more enthusiastic in implementing it. In 2005, Joe Biden pushed his latest attempt to eliminate South American coca. It was a bill that allowed for research into mycoherbicides, toxic fungi that could be deployed in coca growing areas to make it impossible to grow anything.
Despite evidence that coca and poppy plants would simply become resistant to mycoherbicides over time, and that the use of this biological weapon in the drug war could very easily lead to human casualties in the areas it was deployed, Biden worked with Utah Senator Orrin Hatch to get it passed through the Senate. Thankfully, the bill was restricted to allow for research to only be done within the United States, as the State Department, the CIA, and even the DEA thought it would be a terrible idea to use WMD’s in the drug war.
It would be great of cocaine wasn’t addictive…. I can’t count the number of my friends that have died from cocaine overdoses on both hands. The process is simple. The more you use, the more it alters your brain where you crave it even more, and more, and more, and so on until death in too many people. Some people have more resistance than others.
I have little resistance. I am luck to be alive.
a dear friend of mine once told me that,
“After three years of sobriety, I still have frequent
PHYSICAL cravings to go out and smoke some crack.”
another friend curbed his coke crave by smoking
pot every day for a couple of months. no relapse
in 20 years and only smokes pot every 3 months or
so, but i think he beats off alot.
Instead of countless millions spent in a failed attempt to destroy poppy and coca crops while enriching criminals, maybe we should just buy the damned stuff, push out the dealers and the cartels, process and sell it ourselves and make a profit. Things couldn’t be any worse than they are now.
Just another reminder, please keep these comments on topic.
I have an idea which is a little different from Steve’s. Since some medicines are chemical derivatives or have similar chemical characteristics, why not buy the stock and process it into pain reducing medicines? I’m positive this would lead to cheaper pain reduction medicines.
@6: Good idea Puddy – it has already been done. Heroin is diacetyl morphine. It works exactly the same but has higher lipid solubility and gets into the brain faster for more of a high.
Unfortunately, the druggies do just the opposite. Take the legal medications and after a few chemical modification – viola – better high. Methamphetamine, for instance, is methylated amphetamine and can be made from some more common ingredients that I won’t list here. The general idea is to make the substance more lipid soluble so it gets into the brain faster – that triggers the dopaminergic responses of the pleasure/reinforcement pathways in the brain.
The same brain pathways (ventral tegmental dopaminergic) that elicit pleasureable responses from everyday activities such as eating certain foods and sex.
Whoa correctnotright, there is NOTHING about drugs that is better than sex.
I’ve been dismayed by the damage done to the lives of many by drugs, and it’s accompanying damage to American life by the accompanying crime and dependency of far to many people.
But it’s also clear to see that a “war on drugs”, fought mostly overseas and at our borders, hasn’t worked. If you believe in Adam Smith conservative economics, its clear to see why. The more we are succesful at interdicting drugs, the higher the price, therefore the more people are willing to invest larger sums, and take bigger risks, to smuggle it into the U.S. Now they are even building submarines in South America to be used as one-way freighters to get drugs into the U.S.!!!!!
And by using U.S. funds, and even troops and equipment, to attempt to stamp out the drugs at their initial source (Columbia, Peru, etc.), we find that we are funding BOTH SIDES of the drug war – U.S. citizens are sending billions of dollars overseas to buy the drugs, and even more billions overseas to try to stamp out the product. In the end, we only distort the economy of those foreign nations, destroy their political systems due to the huge amounts of money poured in from the U.S., and create generations of peasants who view the U.S. as their enemy (killing peasants for growing a crop destined for wealthy U.S. citizens). One cant’ help but wonder at the injustice of U.S. helicopters machine-gunning Columbian or Peruvian peasants simply for trying to make $1,000 a year from their crops rather than $100 a year, whereas in the U.S. wealthy children who partake of the drugs and happen to be caught are merely put into a diversion and treatment program (paid for by their parents).
In the meantime, unfriendly military groups within those foreign countries are subsidized by U.s. dollars, sometimes from both sides of the war. Sometimes their incomes rival those of the legitimate government.
At least legalization of some type would reduce the outflow of U.S. dollars overseas for illegal and untaxed drugs, and eliminate the need to pay foreign governments to fight the drugs.
Interesting fact from Milton Friedman, the conservative economist:
legal businesses make 10% profit in a good year. 20% is great, 30% is amazing.
ILLEGAL businesses, for example selling illegal drugs, can make 2000% profit. This menas they can also afford guns & weapons to defend their business territory.
Milton Friedman says we should legalize all drugs, since it takes away the massive profit potential. I used to disagree, but reluctantly had to see his point. It’s all about economics, oddly enough…
Puddy;
Millions of American women disagree with you, many find that chocolate creates more pleasurable sensations than does sex.
But I guess it might depend upon your partner….
Hey Lee, hasn’t anybody written an authoritative book which outlines (without bias) the total economic drain on the U.S. due to the combination of illegal drugs and the drug war?
I suspect there are lots of studies out there which attempt to quantify the economic loss within the U.S. due to illegal drug use, in terms of loss of productive lives, child abuse/neglect, cost of increased health care, lower life expectancy, etc.
But then there is the loss of economic power due to the outflow of billions of dollars annually for the product.
And then there’s the cost of foreign aid to nations directly attributable to combating the drug problem, and to counter the political power of the narcotics cartells.
So, how would this balance out, economically, with legalization? I guess it might vary depending upon the drug – pot has the least harmful consequences and the lowest price, so that might even itself out.
rhp6033: Any woman who needs the chocolate drug over sex has a partner who ain’t doing it right.
rhp6033:
You forgot this drug clock?
So, Puddy, take home a box of high-quality chocolates, and give your wife a choice of the chocolates or sex with you. Make it clear that it’s either-or, she can’t have both.
See which one she chooses – I’ll bet she tries to buy the box of chocolates with offers of sex later.
RHP
A Simple Idea
Why not depoliticize the FDA?
One simple question is about the actual dangers of diffferent drugs. The terms “narcotic,” “addictive,” etc. are thrown around a lot but usually have no meaning.
A simple step toward a RATIONAL policy, might be to just depoliticize the FDA and require them to provide OBJECTIVE criteria on any substance, legal or illegal, in wide use. To assure a lack of Bush-like intervention, we could ask the nati0nal Academy of Sciences to review the FDA’s classification.
I suspect this would involve addressing three categories:
1. Addictive. Many supposedly addictive drugs are not physically addictive. This is an essential difference, for example, between marijuana and heroin.
2. Proven Effects. There is as much or more mythology as there are facts. Some drugs, used in “proper” doses are not harmful .. eg cocaine, but can be in oversode. Other, eg LSD, can be harmful even in low doses.
3. Open shelf, prescription vs illegal classifications.
Puddy,
I am reasonable sure we could make a pill that would be FAR more pleasurable than sex.
Would you invest $$ in the endeavor?
Would the radical religious remnant object to a drug that provided sexual pleasure without the need for physical contact?
Why?
To extend this argument, on eof the oddities of your bible is that lack of a statemetn that Jesus was a virgin. Is there a secret agenda here we non messianics do not know?
SeattleJew – Pushing the envelope with #17?
I’ll let John Barelli answer your Jesus was a virgin questions questions because he’s more of your political persuasion.
Regarding a instead of sex pill – test trial it on byebyegoober. He fantasizes on other people’s spouses. It would remove his fantasies. Wait a minute… for the trial to work he needs a brain. It’s patently obvious he lost his brain years ago.
rhp6033@15 – Interesting hypothesis. Have you documented this in your house?
Puddy,
Weaseling out of a sensitive situation? Hmmmm.
SeattleJew@20: As I stated before, this is for the liberal religious scholars here. I want them to answer your question, lefty to lefty…
rhp6033: There is a drug problem in The Villages in FLA. It’s a big retirement community for the NY/NJ/Conn Donkey.
I guess you could try your chocolate test on them…
After thirty years of spending $30 Billion a year, drugs are cheaper and more available than ever. You’d think even the corrupt filth in Washington DC would realize that it’s not reducing drug use, on the other hand if the goal was to create another special interest group: the Narco-dependents of the police and prison industries, it’s been a great success.
Puddy;
Are you trying to tell me that there is a drug problem in Florida? That’s news??????
By the way, Florida is an interesting state, with just about equal shares of southern conservatives and northern liberals. I’ve got family there (southern conservatives near Orland), and I can assure you that drug problms aren’t restricted to the coastal communities.
@12
Hey Lee, hasn’t anybody written an authoritative book which outlines (without bias) the total economic drain on the U.S. due to the combination of illegal drugs and the drug war?
I’m not sure that that’s been done yet. It’s easier said than done to quantify that.
rhp6033:
The drug problem is with seniors in The Villages compound. You should read about it. It’s more than Viagra.
@15 SJ
As long as we are tossing around terminology, the word addiction itself is typically not used scientifically, because it is too broad.
Usually, “addiction” is referred to as either physical or psychological dependence, in order to distinguish these two different types of dependence.
While it is true that some drugs can cause both physical and psychological dependence (heroin, cocaine), some drugs have more of one type of dependence or the other.
Most drugs that cause psychological dependence stimulate the dopaminergic pathways in the ventral tegmental area of the brain (the pleasure/reinforcement pathways). These drugs include alcohol, nicotine, cocaine, heroin, benzodiazepienes (Valium, xanax) and others.
@26 CNR Unhhuh
The problem with the terms is that while physical dependence is an objective endpoint, psychological dependence .. as a term .. is often poorly defined.
A good start, therefoere, is to distinguish anyhting for wh8ch we have hard evidence from less secure data.
As for cocaine, is it true that it is physically addictive? I have not eread a lot of cocaine literature but my impression is that cocaine may not be any more addictive than other habituating agents .. e.g. coffee or tobacco. Do people who use coke get physically sick when it is withdrawn? Animals too?
A very thoughtful article. Controlled ingestion of regulated cocain and indeed, marijuana might well be beneficial to many withoout adverse consequence. Having said that, however, it must be kept out of the hands of children. I’m afraid that we have better control over the exposure of young people to alcohol than we do over “illegal” drugs
I have a couple problems with this statement. Having been down the road of addiction, and been surrounded by users of drugs for most my adult life, I’m certainly familiar with drugs, their uses, and effects on…society, health, and otherwise, both for good and for bad. However, I’m not dismayed by the so called “damage” done by drugs, but dismayed by the damage done by the drug war. Drugs are objects, they physically can’t cause crime…it’s the laws and policy surrounding drugs that lead to increases in “crime” by criminalizing people and acts that otherwise should be no problem (for the vast majority of people) in a free society.
If the U.S. wanted to all of a sudden criminalize ice cream, all of a sudden we’d have an increase in “crime” and “criminal activity” by those people who enjoy eating ice cream, and all of a sudden people would be talking about how “ice cream causes crime/destruction/misery/etc…not to mention our prisons would be full of “morally bankrupt” ice cream “addicts” who “just can’t help themselves”.
I know it’s a bit of nitpicking, to pick on you for saying that “drugs cause crime” given that I know you are not a supporter of the drug war to begin with…and I obviously agree with you that the drug war is a total waste, but I just wanted to point this out because sometimes it’s good evidence of how far this propaganda has permeated all of our lives, even those of us that don’t support the drug war. That is all.
Good series of articles by the way.