The Andean Cocaine Industry. - book reviews

ORBIS, Fall, 1997 by Patrick Lloyd Hatcher

Drug abuse in the United States long predates the twentieth century. In fact, early Freudians initially sang the praises of cocaine as a wonder drug for use in psychoanalysis and therapy, and peddlers of patent medicine and elixirs had no difficulty finding unwitting customers for their nineteenth-century potions. Kevin Riley, author of Snow Job, admits to his astonishment when he discovered that early bottlings of Coca Cola contained small but potent doses of cocaine, and that by 1885 pharmacists and door-to-door salesmen routinely hawked the drug to sufferers of hay fever, sinusitis, and chronic fatigue. Hence, by the time playwright Eugene O'Neill penned the heartbreaking autobiographical drama Long Day's Journey Into Night about his mother's morphine addiction, it was already an all-too-familiar American story. All this came about, of course, through a lack of basic knowledge, but once out of the bottle, the narcotic genie could not be put back even after his baneful effects were well publicized and his chemicals outlawed. Instead, hard and soft drugs of all varieties strengthened their grip on the fringes of mainstream American society until, as author Paul Stares indicates in Global Habit, the flower children of the 1960s came openly to celebrate the liberating qualities of now-trendy drugs and rock stars intoned the creed, "I believe in chemistry."

To measure the impact of the drug culture on American culture at large one need only contrast the 1960s Broadway musical Hair, whose chorus assured the audience that in the dawning Age of Aquarius one could lose all inhibitions with the aid of drugs and free love, with the musical hit of the 1990s, Rent, in which the main characters are dying of drug overdoses and sexually-transmitted diseases. The Age of Aquarius became instead the Age of Anxiety, and hippie dreams turned into nightmares for Generation X within a popular culture increasingly torn between denial and despair.

Nothing illustrates the baby-boom generation's confusion regarding its casual embrace of drugs better than President Clinton's own statements about marijuana. As a candidate he said that he had smoked, but not inhaled pot. More recently, he told an MTV audience that he wishes he could have inhaled, prompting a Time magazine cover story that observed, "The President's sneaking snickering (MTV) line - a kid still putting one over on his parents - suggested the boomer's ambivalence about pot and a kind of time-warping refusal to see it or themselves honestly."(1) At the core of the debate remains the question of whether users of soft drugs such as marijuana tend to graduate to hard drugs such as cocaine and heroin. The consensus among the authors under review is sometimes, not always - and for psychological even more than for physical reasons. As Riley notes, Hollywood's glitterati lend both categories of drugs a positively glamorous image. To be sure, some die of the hard stuff - like teen star River Phoenix who was found convulsing on a sidewalk in front of a Los Angeles night spot. Others are busted by police, such as film actor Robert Downey, Jr., who was arrested in July 1996 as he sped through Malibu in a truck containing a pharmacoepia of illegal drugs and weapons. But the publicity won him a December 1996 spot with Diane Sawyer on the highly rated program "Prime Time Live." Downey confessed that drug use was as casual around his house as drinking white wine with Thanksgiving dinner, and that he had started on drugs before he had reached the age of eight.(2)

A Clear and Present Danger

Not surprisingly since they have written serious scholarly works about it, all six authors reviewed here regard the international drug trade as a clear and present danger to the U.S. national interest and even security. LaMond Tullis, for instance, relying on United Nations sources, places illicit drug trafficking ahead of the oil industry in total cash volume and second only to the international weapons trade. He cites evidence to the effect that U.S. consumer expenditures on illegal drugs in the late 1980s amounted to more than $100 billion and perhaps as much as $300 billion per year, a sum exceeding the gross domestic product of eighty-eight countries worldwide. As a result, the big narcotics cartels are able to marshal resources, technology, and weapons - and purchase official compliance in countries where drugs are harvested, processed, transhipped, and consumed - on a scale that dwarfs the resources of drug enforcement agencies. What is more, the governments in the wealthy consuming nations are handicapped by their need to pursue their counternarcotics campaigns in great part inside the relatively poor producing countries, which lack the ability or even the incentive to assault the drug magnates and destroy their lucrative "cash crops." None of the authors, therefore, are optimistic about the campaign against the illicit drug trade, and find little evidence to the effect that the American "war on drugs" has had any discernible effect on the supply of cocaine, for instance, into the United States.(3)