BOOK REVIEW: Cocaine Nation: How the White Trade Took Over the World
By Thomas Feiling, Pegasus, 2010, Hardcover, 368 pages, $27.95
In 1900, pure cocaine was legal and "had become one of the nation's top five best-selling pharmaceutical products." However, "in the late nineteenth century, there was no drug scene. There were no coke-heads, drug dealers or crack-addicted prostitutes. Drug-taking was not commonly regarded as an escape from day-to-day life, nor was it a rite of passage into the glitterati, the literati or the cognoscenti. It was neither high class, low class or under class."
In "Cocaine Nation: How the White Trade Took over the World," Tom Feiling reframes the discussion about drugs, the drug war, and the illegal trade in drugs, from seeing the problem as drugs and drug addicts to seeing the problem as the use of a criminal justice model to deal with a public health problem.
Since the early 1900s, drug policy in the United States and the rest of the developed world has been as much about social control as it is about keeping people from using drugs. A major element in the campaign to ban cocaine was the racist claim that black men hopped up on cocaine would get out of control and rape white women. But the rise in banning illegal drugs was also linked to a general movement toward prohibition of psychoactive substances, including alcohol. The movement against drugs and alcohol was sold as a moral campaign with strong elements of Puritanism, moral uprightness and, of course, fear of the poor, immigrants and people of color.
Feiling traces the destructive effects of the drug war, from the countries that produce cocaine in Latin America, to the countries that serve as transfer points and supply routes, including the United States, which has by far the highest illegal drug consumption rate per capita in the developed world, as well as the most draconian penalties. As a moral crusade, the policy discussion has little to do with figuring out how to minimize the damage caused by substance abuse; as Feiling puts it, an emphasis on punishing the drug user has the ironic quality of hurting people to stop them from hurting themselves. The moral crusade is tinged with hypocrisy, as the U.S. has generally tolerated the drug trade when used by Third World allies to finance covert operations; hypocrisy also reigns over our nation's drug enforcement policies, which have focused on users rather than sellers, particularly poor users in the inner city even though drug use is just as common in affluent suburbs.
Distinguishing between the attractions of drugs themselves and of the drug trade, the book shows that the latter is enormously profitable because drugs are illegal. It's possible to temporarily or permanently shut down a supply route or a production area; to use overwhelming force to reduce overt street sales; to drive drug users underground. But, because there are billions of dollars to be made, one supply source will be replaced by another and drug sales will simply move to where they can't be monitored. Feiling points to the relatively lower penalties and sanctions in Europe, including the Netherlands, which contains its drug problem by providing treatment for addicts and not penalizing low-level drug use -- and, in spite of the easy availability of illegal drugs, its per capita use remains much lower than in the United States, and at a fraction of the social cost.
The drug war has a terrible negative effect on developing countries, which are caught between the U.S. and the drug producers, who have enough money to corrupt government officials and, in the process, undermine the legitimacy and efficacy of these governments. The results can be seen in the headlines from countries like Mexico and Jamaica, as pitched battles erupt between military and police, on one side, and drug smuggling gangs on the other.
Domestically, the drug war is a political justification for cracking down hard on inner-city neighborhoods and sentencing astonishing proportions of the residents to long prison terms for low-level offenses. The author points out that the "just say no" solution ignores the fact that most recreational drug use is not problematic and that heavy, frequent drug use is a symptom more than a cause of psychological and social problems. Cocaine, according to Feiling, is not physically addictive; people get dependent on it because it makes them feel so good that normal life, especially if normal life involves struggling for survival, seems even worse without it.
Not surprisingly, Feiling argues that legalization and regulation -- for example, making drugs available to addicts by prescription -- would solve most of the social problems associated with drugs. The price would fall; addicts wouldn't need to impoverish themselves, resorting to theft or prostitution to afford drugs; treatment would be easier to get; and the profits would be gone from drug smuggling. However, he also writes, "Legalization will not solve the ongoing crisis of compulsive drug use." To do that would require finding a way to give everyone a stake in society. Maybe then, they wouldn't feel such a need to escape.