Cocaine Nation

by Thomas Feiling

  The distinction between legal and illegal drugs is arbitrary and increasingly hard to maintain. Its main purpose seems to be to support a façade of nominal abstention behind which the United States dopes itself up to its collective eyeballs. The actor Heath Ledger died in New York City on 22 January 2008 of acute intoxication by the combined effects of oxycodone, hydrocodone, diazepam, temazepam, alprazolam and doxylamine. Commercial names for these legal drugs include the anti-anxiety medications Valium and Xanax, the painkillers OxyContin and Hydrocodone, and the sleeping aids Restoril and Unisom.41 The abuse of legal sedatives is not a crime, and perhaps as a result the press treated the death of Heath Ledger as a tragedy brought on by anxiety and insomnia.

  Across the developed world, children grow up in an environment in which mood-altering, pain-killing, sleep-inducing substances are accepted and widely marketed. Aspirin, tranquillizers, caffeine, antidepressants, alcohol, tobacco and a welter of other psychoactive substances are part of modern urban life. Eleven million Americans use illegal marijuana every month, but the second most abused class of drugs in the United States is legal prescription drugs.42 Between 2000 and 2004, the commercial distribution of pharmaceuticals in the United States more than doubled. By 2006, one in ten teenagers admitted to non-medical use of painkillers such as OxyContin and Hydrocodone.43

  In the United Kingdom, the Home Office says that the misuse of benzodiazepines has caused 17,000 deaths since their introduction in the 1960s. A parliamentary inquiry into misuse of prescription drugs warned that ‘although the reclassification of some substances from prescription-only to over-the-counter has resulted in often significant cost savings for consumers, the abuse of these substances can result in dependency, addiction, hospitalization and potentially even death’. A total of 1,135 Britons died as a result of an adverse reaction to legal drugs in 2007, including 25 who overdosed.44 By any reckoning, this makes legal drugs more dangerous than illegal drugs like cocaine, which killed 147 people in England and Wales in 2004. Furthermore, ‘death by cocaine’ is open to interpretation because cocaine is often used in conjunction with other drugs, there are no instructions on the side of the packet and its contents are often cut with phenacetin, ketamine or whatever other white powder the dealer happens to have to hand.45

  The drug of choice among adolescents and adults in the United States is alcohol, a fact that no drug tsar can afford to address fully because of the huge financial and political clout wielded by the drinks industry. The United Kingdom’s Misuse of Drugs Act of 1971 stipulates that drugs be separated into classes A, B or C to indicate the potential danger they pose to their users, with class A being the most harmful and class C the least. Neither alcohol nor tobacco is even classified as a harmful drug. The health, social and crime-related costs of drug misuse in the United Kingdom have been estimated to be between £10 billion and £16 billion a year.46 Most arise from the use of legal drugs. Tobacco and alcohol account for about 90 per cent of all drug-related deaths in the UK. Forty per cent of all hospital illnesses are estimated to be caused by tobacco smoking. Every year, half a million Britons go into hospital suffering the long and/or short term effects of alcohol abuse, and every year that abuse kills 25,000 of them.47

  Even in the United States, where there has been a terrible epidemic of hard drug abuse for over twenty years, the £49 billion bill for dealing with the consequences of illegal drug use in 1992 was far outweighed by the £74 billion cost of alcohol abuse.48 In 2007, an article in the Lancet admitted that there was no justification for the current classification of drugs. Its authors wrote that if the classification were to be revised according to their findings, alcohol would be reclassified as a class A and tobacco as a class B drug.49

  How can the physical harm done by cocaine be used to justify its prohibition, when the mortality rate among tobacco smokers in the United States is one hundred times that of cocaine users?50 Indeed, how much of a concern can the physical health of its people really be to the United States government, when fifteen times as many Americans die from illnesses associated with poor diet and lack of exercise than from the use of illegal drugs?51 Would the harm done by alcohol, tobacco or even fast food be reduced by making them illegal? As Judge Jim Gray has said, ‘we’re doing a pretty effective job in the court system today, of holding people to account for their actions with regard to another highly dangerous, sometimes addictive drug, namely alcohol. You don’t have to make drugs illegal to be able to make people accountable for their actions.’

  Plato recognized as much 2,400 years ago. ‘We are not going to vilify Dionysus’ gift. It is enough that wine is banned for those under the age of eighteen and that, until the age of thirty, men drink it in measure and avoid excessive drunkenness.’52 The French philosopher Michel de Montaigne went a step further when he asserted, in a series of essays published in 1580, that the law had no business interfering in excessive drunkenness either. ‘I would wish that even in debauchery a man outdid his companions, so that when he refused to indulge in vice, it was not because he lacked the knowledge or the power but simply the will. A man should be ashamed not to dare or to be able to do what he sees his companions doing. Such a one should stick by the kitchen fire.’53

  At its worst, drug use is a vice, but it is not a crime. A vice is an act by which a man damages himself, or his possessions. Nobody practises their vice with criminal intent: they are motivated by their pleasures, however unconventional they may be, not by wishing pain on others. The distinction between a vice and a crime is the bedrock on which individual freedom rests. ‘To this day, I still believe that drugs are bad,’ Rusty, the former Arizona Department of Corrections narcotics officer, told me. ‘But that’s my personal opinion, and I don’t have the right to force you to live by my beliefs. What about “mind your own business”? That works real good for me.’ Shortly before meeting Rusty, I had heard an ominous definition of freedom from former Mayor of New York City Rudy Giuliani. ‘Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.’ When I asked Rusty what he made of this mind-bending oxymoron, Rusty said that ‘if that was true, we’d still be speaking the Queen’s English. I’m an old American, I guess. I believe in freedom and I refuse to live in fear. Nor will I have my laws based on fear.’54

  The right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness precede whatever obligations Americans might have vis-à-vis the state. Those rights have to include the right to ingest whatever substances we like. When governments tell us what drugs we can and cannot take, they intrude on an interior affair. When the state takes the lead in questions of public morality or public health, it implicitly asserts our weakness and the need to protect us from ourselves. As Gabrielle said, ‘the government doesn’t trust us to buy a cup of coffee without having to be told on the side of the cup that it might be hot. There are a lot of things that we’re not trusted to do, and it has created a generation of people who can’t be trusted, because “somebody should have stopped me”.’

  Mountaineering, scuba diving and rugby are all dangerous activities, but because they only harm consenting adults, their practitioners are left to climb, dive and jump head-first into scrums, whatever the risks to their safety. The danger associated with illegal drugs, however, is tied to the ultimate human fear: of madness and the end of reality, from which we are gratefully rescued by our law-makers. Mike Jay has written that ‘just as the pioneering journeys of nineteenth-century explorers have become today’s popular travel destinations, so the inner worlds first colonized in the nineteenth century are now visited by more people than ever before’.55 The wide expanse of the oceans, the distant peaks of mountains and the remotest peoples have all inspired fear in the past, but through enlightened exploration we have transformed our relationship to the world around us. ‘Who’s to say you can go up Mount Everest, but not have a line of charlie?’ Steve asked. ‘It’s pushing at the boundaries of human experience a
nd who’s to restrain you from doing that?’

  Kenneth, founder of the Ordinary People Society, in Dothan, Alabama, pastor and former crack dealer, warned me that ‘we have to be very careful not to be judgemental when we consider what is holy and what is not. Only God can do that, and we all fall short of the Glory. In Jesus’ time, he was speaking to drunkards, but in our time, it may be crack cocaine users. He invited everybody to come into the Kingdom, to come and get cleaned up. Jesus didn’t do a criminal background check on nobody. Jesus said “drink wine for the stomach’s sake”. If you start drinking to get drunk, that’s a sin. If you overeat to the point of gluttony, that’s a sin too. Are we going to say that food is bad? No! We’re going to say that over-eating is bad.’ The pastor’s words carry the same staunch morality and duty of care as those of the most hard-line prohibitionist, but he made no mention of banning anything. The closest he came to censure was in his parting words. ‘But crack cocaine? I ain’t seen nothing good come from it.’

  11

  Prospects

  The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be. Try to make people moral, and you lay the groundwork for vice.

  Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

  One of the few legal buyers of coca leaves outside the Andes is the Coca-Cola Company.1 The world’s most popular soft drink is the last vestige of an age in which coca-infused tonics were both legal and popular. When first marketed, ‘the pause that refreshes’ owed its potency to the 60 mg of cocaine in every eight-ounce bottle.2 These days, coca is used only as flavouring. The company’s annual consignment of coca leaves is shipped to New Jersey under armed guard, where it is de-cocainized for use by Coca-Cola bottlers around the world. In recent years, the makers of ‘the real thing’ have taken umbrage at Bolivian companies’ marketing of coca-infused soft drinks, and forced the real ‘real thing’ off the market in the name of copyright infringement. In March 2007, Bolivian bottlers struck back, demanding that Coca-Cola drop the word ‘coca’ from its name, on the grounds that the stuff doesn’t have enough coca in it to warrant the name.3

  While I was in Bogotá, I spoke to a young Colombian called David Curtidor. He had started marketing a coca-based carbonated energy drink called Coca-Sek and was keen to tell me about the campaign to restore the good name of coca. ‘When I was a kid, if I had an upset stomach, my mum would prepare some tea with coca, rosemary and camomile. In Cali, you used to find coca bushes growing at the side of the road and people used to grow them in their front gardens. Coca is a very beautiful plant, but as it became demonized, people pulled up their coca bushes. These days, when you have a stomach ache, you reach for the paracetamol or the anadin. Fabiola Pinaque was the first to get things moving. She told me that at her university she was taught that coca was the root of all Colombia’s problems. It offended her that coca should be seen as a poison, so she started brewing up coca tea for her classmates. We clubbed together $100 and started a little company, making and selling coca teas. We started producing Coca-Sek two years ago, and we were soon selling 40,000 cans a month in Popayán. In September 2006, we registered the trademark of Coca-Sek at the government patent office but Coca-Cola opposed us, saying that we couldn’t use the word “coca” in a soft drink. We won the case, but the Colombian government says that commerce is not culture, and that once you bottle coca as a drink, or make teabags out of it, it’s no longer traditional or cultural. But what is the difference between coca in a gourd, and coca in a can? It’s the same plant, and the same custom. They’re such fascists. They’ll be prosecuting indigenous people for wearing shoes next, or for travelling in buses and aeroplanes, saying that they are not cultures traditional to indigenous people!’

  In 1995, a World Health Organization study of coca and cocaine concluded that the coca leaf has practically no adverse effects on human health. The study was pulled after the United States’ ambassador to the United Nations threatened to withdraw all funding for the WHO if its findings were published. David Lewis was one of the authors of the study. He told me that while the report’s findings were not news, ‘there was great concern that we were not pointing out all the dangers involved in cocaine use, and that the WHO would be seen as permissive. They said that we had no business comparing cocaine to alcohol or tobacco. The discussion that I heard was that you couldn’t say anything good about chewing coca leaf because it’s a source of crack cocaine. I thought “Are you people stupid?”’

  Ironically, tests have suggested that coca tea can be an effective substitute for those weaning themselves off habitual use of cocaine, heroin, tobacco or alcohol.4 The many coca products to be had in the marketplaces of La Paz, Bolivia, have also been shown to be effective in treating arthritis, diabetes, asthma, stomach ulcers and period pain. Among Bolivians, coca leaves, coca chewing gum and coca tea are more popular than cocaine. This may be because they are cheaper or it may be down to Bolivians’ suspicion of new-fangled tinkering with ancient plants. But plenty of urbane Peruvians take cocaine at the weekend and stick to coca tea during the week. In the last ten years, mild coca products have become popular in Buenos Aires, a city with no history of coca consumption, which shows that milder variants of the coca high can take hold outside Andean countries.

  Unfortunately, coca was swept up in the same wave of prohibitionist zeal that confined all the products of the coca bush to the margins of society. Plenty of people in the Andes, indigenous and otherwise, say that Western cocaine consumers are missing out on the true value of the coca plant and that Western governments are wilfully ignorant of the plant’s potential. Stigmatized coca growers began to find a voice on the international stage after 1988, when a revision of the Single Convention made some allowance for traditional use of coca by the indigenous peoples of the Andes. Many Andeans would like to go a step further and commercialize coca production as a way of providing coca farmers with outlets other than the cocaine market for their crop. Coca products, say the farmers, could become a globally recognized health product along the lines of Korean ginseng.

  Emboldened, Bolivian President Jaime Paz Zamora started on a round of ‘coca diplomacy’ in the early 1990s, chewing coca leaves in public and shipping coca leaves to the Bolivian pavilion at Expo ’92 in Seville, where Spanish customs agents, in compliance with the Single Convention, promptly impounded the shipment. A wave of national outrage swept through Bolivia, assuaged only when Queen Sofia of Spain made an official visit to La Paz to apologize and drink coca tea for Bolivian television cameras. This ‘Andean fundamentalism’ proved to be a vote-winner in La Paz, but before long, the American ambassador started making threatening noises about debt repayments and aid. Sensing a need to backtrack, the Bolivian press began running stories of corruption in the presidential palace. Paz Zamora was forced to back down, and a series of more conservative governments took over for the remainder of the 1990s.

  Bolivia’s coca farmers came back with a vengeance when the leader of the coca farmers’ union, Evo Morales, was elected president in 2005. Morales had made the commercialization of coca products for export a key part of his manifesto, but once in power, Morales too found it very difficult to mount an international lobbying campaign to challenge the Single Convention. Even if the International Narcotics Control Board, the World Health Organization and the United Nations Economic and Social Council were amenable to the revision, it would take at least three years to negotiate the labyrinthine bureaucracy, by which time any politician backing the revision would most likely be out of office. So Morales has chosen to ‘save his breath to cool his porridge’. He knows that his rhetoric is what wins votes at home, and the United States knows that his rhetoric, however discomforting, is ultimately harmless.5

  Were coca derivatives to become globally recognized health products, they would doubtless appeal to western consumers. Once introduced, they might be shorn of their exotic cultural connotations and assimilated into daily life. Legalization and regulation would be the first steps in making people more aware of the milder,
less harmful forms of those products, how to use them and the potential dangers of their most concentrated versions. As the Colombian psychiatrist Luis Carlos Restrepo has said, ‘Colombia has a cultural heritage that goes back thousands of years, which you can see today in the socialized consumption of psychoactive substances by its indigenous peoples. I’m not suggesting that we try to return to indigenous rituals, but we should look at their experiences and draw conclusions that can be applied to modern, market-based societies, so we can find alternatives to compulsive consumption. Drugs are a mirror: they reflect back our inner conflicts. What we have to do is not break the mirror, but face up to those conflicts wisely.’6

  Over the past twenty years, the financier George Soros has spent almost £1 billion in support of the many organizations that are encouraging the former Soviet Union’s transition from a closed to an open society. Soros has also funded drug reform movements in the United States, because he sees in the war on drugs a resurgence of the very traits that he opposed in the ex-Stalinist bloc: political indoctrination that passes for education, a self-serving bureaucracy that twists scientific advances to suit its own ends and thousands of state and police agents employing thousands of informants in ever more intrusive ways. ‘Drug warriors’ create ‘enemies within’ and build vast prisons to house them. Certain lifestyles are criminalized, along with the free market that supplies them.