|
Robin Williams once said that cocaine “is God’s way of telling you that you make too much money.” Of course, Mr. Williams was speaking during a time when coke was nearly three times as expensive as it is today, going for about $277 a gram in 1980, compared to an average $100 a gram in 2004. As prices fell, partially due to our own CIA’s help in importing the drug to the States, cocaine use stopped being a privilege of naughty lawyers and devious stockbrokers, and became something that any schmoe with $40 in their pocket could acquire.
In fact, according to the 2002 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, approximately 33.9 million Americans ages 12 and older had tried cocaine at least once in their lifetimes, representing 14.4% of the population ages 12 and up. Around 5.9 million (2.5%) had used cocaine in the past year and two million (0.9%) had used cocaine within the past month. Chances are that someone you know is chalking it up in a bathroom right now, inciting an angry pee dance from an unfortunate bystander.
So how did this all come about? Well, just like every other American tradition and pastime did: by co-opting the rituals and practices of indigenous cultures and exploiting them for profit.
For nearly 4,000 years, the cultivation and consumption of the coca plant amongst the indigenous tribes of the Andes has been not only a sacred tradition and religious practice, but a symbol of resistance to colonization and the imposition of the West. Colonial settlers recognized that the coca plant, being used by the tribes in offerings to the sun and moon, served as a hindrance to converting the natives to Christianity and therefore sought out its eradication.
Pure cocaine was first synthesized in 1855, and for the next 50 years, it was marketed to the public in the form of elixirs, wines and tonics that were laced with opium as well. Celebrities such as Thomas Edison publicly endorsed the drug, and for a while a fairly large portion of working Americans were chasing the dragon on a regular basis. Cocaine was being marketed as a “cure-all” drug, and manufacturers were rushing to put it in anything that could be used medicinally. In 1884, when a Czech-born surgeon named Carl Koller introduced cocaine as a surface anesthetic for eye surgery, cocaine had its first truly legitimate introduction as a mild anesthetic and painkiller.
Sigmund Freud, an associate of Koller, wrote a few hokey essays on the benefits of cocaine as a method to wean oneself away from morphine, to which a large population of medical practitioners, including Freud, were hopelessly addicted. Freud envied the recognition Koller received, experimented with the drug himself and urged others to do so before realizing it could be addictive. Freud’s papers were quickly discredited as reports of cocaine poisoning and dependencies began to surface among users. In 1886 John Pemberton included cocaine as the main ingredient in his new soft drink, Coca-Cola (perhaps you’ve heard of it). It was cocaine’s euphoric and energizing effects on the consumer that was mostly responsible for skyrocketing Coca-Cola into its place as the most popular soft drink in history.
As the public grew more and more aware of the helpless cycle of addiction they were becoming accustomed to, the public outcry against cocaine began, and in 1903 John Pemberton was forced to remove it from Coca-Cola altogether. Oddly enough, there is no mention of any of this on the Coca-Cola website, or in any literature distributed by the company.
Cocaine was first federally regulated in December 1914 with the passage of the Harrison Act, which imposed the same criminal penalties for cocaine users as for opium, morphine and heroin users; and required a strict accounting of medical prescriptions for cocaine. As a result of the Harrison Act and the emergence of cheaper, legal substances such as amphetamines, cocaine’s legitimacy as a medicine began to wane and it slowly became scarce in the United States. In the 1960s cocaine made a comeback to end all comebacks, and hasn’t stopped coming back since.
Which brings us to crack, the dark underbelly of modern day culture that no one likes to talk about, and hopes will just vanish from the streets someday. The smoking of cocaine rocks began in the late 1960s, and once dealers and users discovered the magical world of freebasing, one of the most highly addictive substances known to man hit the streets and completely took over poor neighborhoods all across America.
A series of somewhat sensationalized, yet informative articles from the “San Jose Mercury News” in 1996 revealed a disturbing relationship between the CIA and street gangs in Los Angeles, a city that has become notorious for being the “crack capital of the world.” The author, Gary Webb, made the assertion that the CIA had opened up trade between Colombian drug cartels and inner city street gangs in LA, using the millions of dollars in profits to fund Nicaraguan rebels attempting to overthrow the Sandinista government in the ’80s. In 1988, the Senate’s subcommittee on terrorism and narcotics, chaired by John Kerry, released an in-depth report that indicted the CIA for cocaine trafficking with the Contras. But media coverage was fleeting and the story was largely buried.
Today there are millions of addicts roaming the streets, trying to pick up crack rocks from the ground that aren’t really there, in a desperate and endless quest for an eight-minute high. Attempts to eradicate the coca plant in Colombia exist today, although bio-agents designed to kill the leaves have been banned due to their particularly harmful side effects on humans. The FBI reports that there is cocaine residue on nearly every dollar bill in circulation, meaning that a large portion of Americans are handling the drug every day. As much as we’d like to deny it, cocaine is part of American history, it helped create one of the largest corporations on Earth (Coca-Cola, Inc.) and will remain an intrinsic function of our culture, whether socially accepted or not.
So, you got any?
|
