Pubdate: Sun, 1 Aug 2010
Source: New York Times (NY)
Page: BR21
Copyright: 2010 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Robert Perkinson
Note: Robert Perkinson is the author of "Texas Tough: The Rise of 
America's Prison Empire."

DRUG OF CHOICE

COCAINE NATION

How the White Trade Took Over the World

By Tom Feiling

351 pp. Pegasus Books. $27.95.

The Drug Enforcement Administration Museum and Visitors Center may be 
America's most uninspiring attempt at war commemoration. Its 
low-budget displays, stuffed into a sterile building near the 
Pentagon, strive for a good-versus-evil story line but exude 
uncertainty. Snapshots of officers atop piles of impounded narcotics 
fail to convey the urgency of battle. Confiscated drug paraphernalia 
showcase wily ingenuity as much as social menace. But across the 
Potomac, next to Congressional Cemetery, rises a more fitting tribute 
to the "war on drugs": Washington's city jail, through which 18,000 
inmates pass each year, 89 percent of them black and three-quarters 
of them incarcerated for nonviolent of-fenses. With its X-shaped 
towers surrounded by razor wire, the sprawling complex devours 
resources but, most criminologists agree, does comparably little to 
protect the public. It stands as a monument to punitive government bloat.

Now four decades old, America's drug war, initiated in its modern 
form by Richard Nixon, has burned through $1 trillion and helped make 
the United States the most locked-down country on earth. Yet victory 
still recedes from view. In 1970, some 20 million Americans had 
experimented with illegal drugs; by 2007, 138 million had. While drug 
purity has increased, street prices over the long term have dropped 
- -- precisely the opposite trajectory promised by drug warriors. Small 
wonder that a growing number of skeptics, from George Will to George 
Soros, have called for a serious change of course.

With a new regime in Washington, led by a president who admits to 
having used cocaine in his youth and a drug czar who rejects martial 
metaphors, this is a good time to look back on America's first "war 
without end" and its pre-eminent target, as the documentary filmmaker 
Tom Feiling does in "Cocaine Nation."

An impassioned and wide-ranging if occasionally jumbled survey of 
"the white trade" and its enemies, Feiling's book (published last 
year in Britain as "The Candy Machine") begins with the extraction of 
the ancient coca leaf's most potent alkaloid, cocaine, in the 
mid-19th century. Possessing wondrous qualities -- a pharmaceutical 
company boasted that cocaine could "make the coward brave, the silent 
eloquent, and render the sufferer insensitive to pain" -- the product 
swept the globe as an additive to medicine, wine (Ulysses S. Grant 
was an early quaffer) and, of course, Coca-Cola, whose red and white 
colors, Feiling writes, pay homage to the Peruvian flag.

This initial cocaine craze petered out in the first half of the 20th 
century, in the wake of pharmacy regulation, drug control protocols 
and consumers' second thoughts. But another, larger wave rose in the 
1970s, as hedonists from Hollywood to Wall Street turned cocaine into 
"the Champagne of drugs," as The New York Times declared in 1974. 
Because most users of the stimulant never became addicted, and 
because they had "upper-class cachet," Feiling notes, its resurgence 
was at first greeted with a shrug by government. Gerald Ford's White 
House observed that cocaine "does not usually result in serious 
social consequences, such as crime, hospital emergency room 
admissions or death."

But when suppliers introduced a down-market product, crack cocaine, 
in the 1980s -- "cocaine for poor people," as one dealer described it 
to Feiling -- social panic ensued. Crack is pharmacologically 
identical to powder cocaine, but its smokable rocks produce quicker, 
more intense highs (and harder falls). Attracting legions of users in 
decaying urban centers, it contributed to property crime, child 
neglect, homicidal turf battles and, not least, political reaction. 
Brandishing a bag of crack in the Oval Office, the first President 
Bush called illegal drugs "the gravest domestic threat facing our 
nation." No-knock police raids and mandatory minimum sentencing 
followed. The drug war became total war, overstuffing jails and 
exacerbating racial inequality but failing to create a "drug-free America."

This domestic tale of destruction has been well chronicled by 
journalists, social scientists and addicts-turned-memoirists. What 
sets Feiling's book apart is his analysis of how America's insatiable 
appetite for narcotics and its zealous determination to quash those 
cravings have spread misery and violence across the globe.

During cocaine's postwar renaissance, mafiosi based in Cuba met 
demand in the United States, the world's largest cocaine market. But 
after the revolution, coca capitalists dispersed, chartering new 
organizations, establishing new labs and supply lines, and 
demonstrating remarkable adaptability in response to law-enforcement 
pressure. Production shifted from Peru to Bolivia to Colombia, and is 
now shifting back to Peru. Snuffed out in one area, cocaine surges in another.

Feiling vividly describes the supply side of the cocaine business, 
which, he argues, "thrives on the poverty not just of individuals and 
communities, but of governments." In Colombia, which remains the 
world's leading producer of cocaine despite the $5 billion in 
anti-narcotics and counterinsurgency aid the United States has fed 
into the country since 2000, Feiling profiles campesinos in the rural 
Putumayo district whose primary source of income is coca, although 
they receive relatively little for their crops. In a region where 
markets are distant, roads are poor and the prices for legal produce 
like yucca and plantains are low, the coca farmers "become slaves of 
the mafia," a Colombian congressman tells Feiling -- the rural 
correlates of low-level street dealers in America who risk death and 
imprisonment to earn "roughly the federal minimum wage." At the top 
of the cocaine hierarchy, drug barons make millions, but their 
careers tend to be short, their fortunes soaked with blood. Because 
of the violence perpetrated by traffickers and insurgents, and the 
more pervasive violence committed by right-wing paramilitaries and 
the government, Colombia's population of internally displaced people 
ranks second only to Sudan's.

As radar surveillance has pushed smuggling routes from the sky and 
sea to the land, the drug war's front lines have moved to Mexico, 
where trafficking--related violence has claimed more than 22,000 
lives since 2007. Although the Mexican government's latest offensive 
may yet constrict supply, curtail corruption and reduce rather than 
provoke carnage, the length and complexity of the United 
States-Mexico border (and the money to be made breaching it) presents 
a daunting challenge. "Americans consume roughly 290 metric tons of 
cocaine a year," Feiling writes, a load that "could be carried across 
the U.S.-Mexican border in just 13 trucks. Instead, it seeps in in 
thousands of ingenious disguises."

Although Feiling doesn't soft-pedal the harm of drug dependence -- to 
addicts, mainly, but also to their families and communities -- he 
argues convincingly that the remedy promoted most aggressively by the 
United States has proved far worse than the disease. As an 
alternative, he develops a lengthy brief for a solution he admits 
stands little chance of implementation: legalization. There would be 
costs, he acknowledges, including, perhaps, wider experimentation and 
addiction, but he contends that restrictions on marketing, elevated 
vice taxes and a proliferation of treatment beds instead of jail 
cells could hardly fail more spectacularly than has prohibition. Hard 
as it is to imagine, the least ruinous solution to the white scourge 
may be the white flag of surrender. 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake