Cocacocaine International
When Amerigo Vespucci landed on the coast of what is now Venezuela in 1499, the first thing he saw was a group of native peoples chewing coca leaf. The captain and most of his crew thought the practice disgusting, but it did not take Spanish colonists long to discover that chewing small amounts of coca leaf gave them more energy. In 1559, the Spanish herbalist and physician Nicholas Monardes, who practiced in the port city of Seville, heard stories about coca and saw the plants collected by those returning from the New World, making him one of the first Europeans to learn about coca. He wrote, ''Surely it is a thyung of greate consideration, to see how the Indians are so desirous to be deprived of their wittes, and be without understanding'' (Monardes, 1925). The fact that no one became seriously ill from chewing too many of the leaves suggested that other components of the leaves caused nausea, and indeed those who chewed the plant developed unpleasant side effects long before they had ingested enough to become ill. It is now known that plasma levels never reach very great heights in leaf chewers, or in coca tea drinkers, which explains why few other cocaine-induced effects occurred among the Indi-ans—and why reports of cocaine-related deaths among Indian coca chewers and tea drinkers have remained rare until the present day.
early cultivation of coca
Spanish settlers started arriving in Peru even before Francisco Pizarro's army completely subjugated the Incas in the 1530s. Immigrants were given tracts of land and an allotment of slave laborers. Initially, the occupiers paid relatively little attention to coca, but when they realized how much coca leaf the Indians were chewing, and how badly they wanted cocaine, it didn't take long for coca to become a cash crop. In fact, coca growing became so profitable that the immigrant farmers stopped growing their normal staple crops and devoted all of their acreage to coca cultivation. The situation reached crisis proportions when the colonial government was unable to procure enough hay to feed the horses it had also imported (Gagliano, 1994).
Food shortages became severe, and the second Spanish viceroy was forced to pass legislation requiring crop substitution and prohibiting farmers from devoting more than 10 percent oftheir land to coca growing. The prohibition was largely ignored, however. In 1545, silver was discovered high in the mountains, at Potosi. The Indian slaves refused to work in the abysmal conditions of the mines without their ration of coca. King Phillip badly needed the cash that the silver would bring, and so coca was supplied to the workers. Attempts at crop substitution were abandoned at this time, and the government decided instead to tax coca production. There was so much money to be made selling coca, however, that the taxes proved little disincentive to the growers. This arrangement came to an end when the Spanish lost control ofthe New World, which more or less freed the indigenous peoples from slavery.
Cocaine abuse did not become an issue for Europeans until the late 1800s. For one thing, supplies of coca leaf were scarce. For another, coca travels poorly, and it took up a great amount of room in ships' holds. So, after they had shipped home all the plundered gold and silver, the Spanish made sugar, rather than coca, their export of choice. The exportation of coca leaf to Europe simply made no economic sense, at least not when there were more profitable alternatives, and sugar was in great demand in Europe. Markets evolve, however, and the near simultaneous occurrence of three important technical advances turned the export market on its head and made the exportation of coca into an attractive proposition.
coca comes to europe
All during the time that the Spanish occupied the New World, they took great pains not to let the rest of Europe know what was going on in the New World, and all knowledge of the place was strictly embargoed. When the Spanish embargo ended, coca growers found better ways to preserve coca leaves during transit, and the French discovered a way to make a wine from the coca leaves. The wine proved to be an immensely popular product, and it was soon for sale worldwide. In spite of the wine's popularity, there was never a case of toxicity reported from its use. This was because the natural properties of the coca leaf prevented it from being abused. The process for isolating pure cocaine from coca was not discovered until 1860, but French pharmacists discovered a way to partly extract cocaine from coca, leaving most of the waxes and tannins behind. They added coca leaves to average Bordeaux wines (the Dutch preferred Malaga wine)—in a ratio of roughly ten parts wine to one part dried, ground, coca leaves—let the mixture steep for a few days, and then removed the leaves, thereby creating "coca wine.''
An average glass of this wine contained only 6 milligrams of cocaine, but this was enough, when combined with the wine, to provide a pleasurable experience. Attempts at raising the cocaine concentration by adding more leaves were doomed to failure, because when too many leaves were added, or if the leaves were allowed to steep too long, the final product contained tannins and wax in far greater concentrations than were contained in the handful of leaves chewed by the Indians, which would have made it undrinkable. Still, even with its low cocaine content, coca wines became extremely popular as relatively harmless stimulant tonics.
the european coca industry
As the New World opened up to explorers, contract botanists working for the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, outside of London, began to send coca seeds back to England. Although many more exist in the wild, there are only four cultivated variations of Erythroxylum taxa: E. coca var. coca, E. novogranatense var. novogranatense, E. coca var. ipadu, and E. novogranatense var. truxillense (Johnson et al., 2005). Some of the species contain a good deal more cocaine than others, however. Seeds from the most popular commercial variety of coca arrived at the Kew Botanical Gardens in 1869. They were collected from the area south of Cuzco, in Peru. Plants from these seeds were continuously cultivated at Kew for 40 years, and they were also sent to other botanical gardens administered by Kew. At one time there were British-owned coca plantations operating in Africa, India (where Darjeeling tea is now grown), and Malaysia. Fortunately for the Dutch planters in Java, their government was not enthused about the prospects of growing coca, for they already had a substantial problem with opium cultivation and addiction. As a consequence of this delay, the Dutch botanical gardens, located outside of Jakarta, entered the cocaine market only after the Kew plants had become widely disseminated to British dependencies. However, the coca plants obtained by the
Dutch growers contained more than twice as much cocaine as the commercial varieties grown in South America, which no doubt explains why, in the early 1900s, sales from Java eclipsed those from South America (Reens, 2003). Unfortunately, not much is known about the origin of the root stock used by the Dutch. The original seedlings were purchased from a Brussels trading company, Herman Linden and Sons, but how that company obtained the plants, or where they obtained the plants, is not known.
medical uses of cocaine In 1860 Albert Von Niemann (1834-1861), a doctoral student at the University of Göttingen, devised a method for extracting cocaine hydro-chloride from coca leaves, and experimentation with medical uses for the new substance soon began. During the 1870s, the work of Dr. Alexander Hughes Bennett in Edinburgh stimulated further investigation. (In their book Opium and the People [1987] Virginia Berridge and Griffith Edwards discuss the competition among British doctors to report on the sustaining properties of the coca leaf during exertion.)
Shortly after Von Neiman's discovery, the German company Merck of Darmstadt began producing minute quantities of cocaine (less than a few ounces a year). Because it was so expensive, there was no commercial market for purified cocaine at the time, and no one in the medical community yet had a clear idea of the benefits of cocaine. Nonetheless, Merck continued to produce small amounts of the drug every year, if for no other reason than to prove they were the world's greatest pharmaceutical chemists. In 1884, however, the company was rewarded for its perseverance. In that year Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) published his famous paper "Über Coca,'' in which he recommended the use of cocaine for the treatment of a variety of unrelated medical conditions—including the treatment of morphine addiction.
Much more important than Freud's discovery was the one made by Carl Koller (1857-1944), Freud's roommate in the dormitory at Vienna General Hospital. Freud and Koller had experimented with cocaine by taking it themselves and observing the effects they experienced. On a weekend visit with his fiancee Martha Bernays (1861-1951),
Freud demonstrated the drug's marvelous effects to her. At the same time, Koller was busy discovering that cocaine was a local anesthetic. Acting on a hunch, he put some drops of cocaine into a guinea pig's eye and discovered that the eye became insensitive to pain. Koller then tried it on himself and confirmed that his discovery was valid (Oeppen, 2003).
Before he made his great discovery, Koller was living in poverty and had to convince a friend (an eye surgeon) to go to the upcoming meeting of the Heidelberg Ophthalmologic Society and present a paper describing his findings. The paper was read on September 19,1884. An American named Henry Noyes was in the audience, and he mailed an account of the meeting back to the editors of the New York Medical Record. Noyes's account was published on October 11,1884, less than one month after the discovery was announced (Noyes, 1884). The discovery of cocaine's local anesthetic properties led to an explosive increase in the demand for the drug, as well as a huge increase in its price. In 1883, Merck had produced only a few ounces ofcocaine in the entire year, but the following year the company's production was measured in tons.
The demand for cocaine was more than adequately met by the venture capitalists and pharmaceutical houses of the day. Coca plantations sprang up all over the world, and there was soon a predictable glut of cocaine. As a result, prices began to drop and competition for customers began to increase. The Parke-Davis Company and Merck found themselves in a battle for world dominance of the cocaine market. The ParkeDavis product was thought to be of better quality at a lower price, and the company built on that reputation by providing Freud with samples and an honorarium.
addicts, doctors, and quacks
The first American to experiment with cocaine anesthesia was Dr. William Stewart Halsted (1852-1922), a visiting surgeon at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. Within a week after reading of Koller's discovery, Halsted and his associates Richard Hall and Frank Hartley had experimented on themselves, on their surgical colleagues, and on an occasional patient. Halsted built upon Koller's initial work, and he observed that when cocaine was injected into nerves, it blocked the perception of pain within the area supplied by those nerves. Halsted and his group published their first paper on cocaine-induced nerve blocks just six weeks after Koller's announcement. Unfortunately, Koller also became addicted to cocaine, and he remained addicted to the drug even after he was appointed professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins Medical School. His friend, the famous physician William Osler, was a professor of medicine at the same school, and he eventually cured Halsted of his addiction—but only by addicting him to morphine instead. Halsted remained addicted to morphine until his death in 1922 (Colp, 1984).
Surplus cocaine at cheap prices meant that winemakers no longer had to bother soaking coca leaves in wine. Instead, they just added a pound or so of cocaine to a vat of cheap red wine. The final product contained anywhere from 60 to 120 milligrams of cocaine per glass, a considerable increase over the benign 6 milligrams in the old French versions. The practice of spiking inferior product with purified cocaine was not just limited to wine-makers, however. The producers of patent medicines, the ''snake oil'' remedies so popular in the early twentieth century, began adding enormous amounts of cocaine to their wares. Predictably, reports of death and injury soon became a regular feature of medical journals all around the world (Adams, 1905).
In the early 1900s there were literally thousands of these remedies for sale. Their chief ingredient was alcohol, but cocaine and opium were almost always part of the formula. Dr. Fahrney's Teething Syrup, which contained heroin, surely must have been a very effective agent with which to console teething children, while Casebeer's Coca Calisaya was advertised as an ''agreeable and efficient tonic,'' capable of''sustaining the strength under extreme physical exertion,'' not to mention curing those ''enfeebled by sickness or disability.'' This product was composed mainly of alcohol and cocaine, with some cherry flavoring added. Perhaps the most outrageous of the products was Coca-Bola chewing gum. The makers of the gum recommended it be used ''at occasional intervals throughout the day,'' even though each stick of gum contained 710 milligrams of cocaine (Adams, 1905). In order to put this amount in perspective, a modern ''line'' of cocaine weighs in at 50-70
milligrams, and a piece of rock cocaine, or "crack," contains even less. Chewing one stick of the gum would have amounted to "snorting" 10 lines of cocaine at one time. The predictable result was toxicity and addiction.
The end of World War I brought an end to the legitimate German cocaine industry, which comprised a cartel of drug makers who produced cocaine in addition to their other products. Article 295 of the Versailles Peace Treaty incorporated within it all of the previous provisions of the Hague Convention of 1912, which Germany had refused to sign. Manufacturers were prohibited from selling cocaine except for explicitly medical purposes. The clandestine laboratory had yet to be invented, and the antidrug legislation was thus intended to rein in legitimate drug makers. Nonetheless, low-level cocaine consumption continued among the wealthy of Berlin and Paris.
cocaine goes underground
By the 1920s nearly everyone in the civilized world knew someone whose life had been adversely affected by cocaine, and very few were particularly anxious to repeat the experience. This is clearly reflected in the literature of the time. The most famous writer to cash in on the problem of the cocaine craze was Arthur Conan Doyle (18591930). Doyle had trained as an ophthalmologist at the Vienna General Hospital, which was home to Freud and Koller, so it is hardly surprising that his fictional character Sherlock Holmes knew all about the properties of cocaine (Musto, 1989).
In 1919 Sax Rohmer (born Arthur Henry Ward, 1883-1959), the creator of the Fu Manchu stories, wrote a novel titled Dope: A Story of Chinatown and the Drug Traffic. The book was a thinly veiled retelling of the events surrounding the cocaine-related death of an East End actress named Billie Carleton (nee Florence Stewart, 1896-1918). In 1926 another British novelist, Aleister Crowley (18751947) wrote Diary of a Drug Fiend-, in which the hero, Peter Pendragon, is introduced to cocaine and heroin by his girlfriend. The story was set in London's Mayfair district and it, too, seemed to be based on the Billie Carleton story.
In less than 50 years from the time it was first purified in 1860, cocaine had gone from a wonder drug to a scourge. Cocaine users were looked upon as deviant losers, although cocaine abuse continued in Europe at a low level until the beginning of World War II. Most of the cocaine sold in Europe came from sources in Southeast Asia and traveled via supply lines that remained intact for much longer than those that served the United States. At the time, cultivation in South America was in decline, which affected the U.S. market, but production in Southeast Asia persisted unabated until the war in the Pacific finally disrupted that supply.
One of the lesser-known chapters of history involves Japan's adventures in the cocaine trade. Japan bought much of Indonesia's coca output and maintained its own coca plantations in Taiwan (then the Japanese possession called Formosa) and Iwo Jima. Coca leaves were shipped to Tokyo for refining, and the cocaine was sold on the black market, both by drug smugglers and by the Japanese government itself. The government had a competitive advantage because it owned a major interest in Japan's major shipping line. In fact, Japan partly financed the occupation of China by selling cocaine and heroin to the Chinese (Karch, 1998). At the Tokyo War Crimes Trials that followed World War II, Japan was charged with crimes against humanity not only for the Nanking Massacre, but also for drug dealing. One of the exhibits used at the trials was a copy of a Japanese war bond, for which payment was guaranteed by sales of narcotics in occupied China.
cocaine's resurgence
Cocaine reemerged as a major drug of abuse and an illegal commodity on world markets in the mid-1970s. This could never have occurred were it not for a waning of both individual and social memories of the negative effects of cocaine. Readers of the popular press in the early 1980s would never have guessed that cocaine was toxic, or that there had ever been any previous problems with the drug. At the time, cocaine had almost disappeared from world markets, and prices were so high that only the very rich, and particularly entertainment and fashion celebrities, could afford the drug. In his autobiography, the great jazz musician Miles Davis (1926-1991) wrote that in 1972 he was earning more than half a million dollars a year, and that he was spending most of this money on cocaine.
In November 1983, the British medical journal the Lancet editorialized about cocaine, writing that it ''may thus be reasonably safe when used in a socially well-integrated fashion by people living in a stable community,'' and at the same time insisting that ''its dangers must be overrated.'' This view confirmed the opinions espoused by many experts in the United States. That the Lancet could make such a statement in 1983 indicates that: (1) the authors of the editorial had had little exposure to chronic cocaine users, (2) they knew even less about the history of the drug, and (3) not much cocaine was available in the country at that time.
In 1989, the Reuters News Service reported, with some concern, that cocaine seizures in the United Kingdom had reached 227 kilograms in that year, amounting to an increase of 27 percent from the previous year (Philadelphia Inquirer, January 19, 1989). As late as May 2008, the British press still considered the seizure of a mere 140 kilograms of cocaine as worthy of mention. By way of comparison, at roughly the same time, the U.S. Coast Guard reported it had interdicted 21 tons of cocaine sitting in plain sight on the deck of a tramp steamer (Washington Post, March 21, 2007).
Even though the extraction process used today is not very different from the process used in the 1870s, the coca plants grown in the early twenty-first century are somewhat different from those of the nineteenth century. For one thing, they contain more cocaine, though whether this is a result of old-fashioned cross breeding or genetic engineering is hard to say. DNA analysis done in the early twenty-first century showed that modern coca leaves contain far more cocaine than those from the first decade of the twenty-first century (Johnson, 2003).
In addition, the production and sale of cocaine increased dramatically in the 1970s. In the mid-1970s, sales of cocaine by the Medellin cartel of Colombia amounted to, at most, 40 kilograms of cocaine a week. By the end of the 1970s, however, that amount had grown to several hundred kilograms, and by the early 1980s the cartel's output was measured in tons per week. By the start of the 1990s, Boeing 727s containing 5 to 7 tons of cocaine made weekly trips across Mexico to the United States. Further, as had been the case 100 years earlier, cocaine prices began to fall. In
Medellin in 1982, one kilogram of pure cocaine sold for $20,000, but by early 1984 the wholesale delivery price had dropped to only $4,000 per kilogram. This occurred partly because Bolivia had also gone into the cocaine refining business, and partly because production had expanded in all of Colombia's neighboring countries as well (Office of National Drug Control Policy, 1996).
crack cocaine
The technical advance that really drove the new wave of cocaine abuse was the advent of crack. This was, in fact, exactly the same drug that had been responsible for so much misery a century earlier, but it was now in a different, more dangerous, form. The first crack smokers began to appear at psychiatric clinics in 1986 in the Bahamas, which in the mid-1980s was an important part of the transshipment route for cocaine from South America. Smoking crack enables more cocaine to get into the body more quickly, thereby achieving higher blood concentrations—and thus higher "highs." In the process, all the natural safeguards provided by using coca leaf, either by chewing or by drinking coca-wine, were bypassed. Crack was an irresistible force, and with so much cocaine available, the only difference between 1884 and 1984 was the magnitude of the problem.
When crack made its debut in Europe, it was considered just one of many drugs being abused, and it was therefore accorded no special status. Yet the press, both in the United Kingdom and the United States, had unfairly conflated the ''desperate state of America's inner cities, whose problems crack had worsened but not created'' with the effects of the drug itself (Royal College of Psychiatrists, 2000). A study of South London drug addicts published in the British Journal of Addiction in 1990 found that only 1 percent of the study subjects smoked cocaine in the absence of other drugs, while the majority of other attendees combined their crack with methadone or heroin (Strang, Griffiths, & Gossop, 1990). The study also found that the number of crack smokers had increased from 13 percent to 29 percent in just over a decade.
cocaine in the twenty-first century
Traditionally, coca is grown high in the Andes. In 2008, however, drug and plant seizures suggested that coca cultivators had managed to hybridize (or perhaps even genetically engineer) a new strain of coca that grows very well in the Amazon jungle (Carroll, 2008). In spite of intense efforts and great expenditures on the part of the United States, coca supplies do not appear to have decreased significantly during the first years of the twenty-first century. According to the United Nations, in 2005, slight production decreases in Bolivia and Peru were more than offset by increases in Colombia. In 2006, meanwhile, just the reverse occurred, with decreased Colombia production offset by increases elsewhere in the Andes (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2008).
The most recent data suggest that, if anything, the situation has deteriorated further. On June 18, 2008, the United Nations Office on Drug and Crime (UNDOC) released its yearly Andean coca production survey, showing a marked increase in coca cultivation. According to the most recent data, the total area of land under coca cultivation in Bolivia, Columbia, and Peru in 2007 was thought to be 181,600 hectares, amounting to a 16 percent increase over 2006 and the highest level since 2001. The increase was driven by a 27 percent rise in Columbia (for a total of 99,000 hectares), and smaller increases of 5 and 4 percent, respectively, in Bolivia and Peru.
Surprisingly, even though coca cultivation has increased, the actual amount of cocaine produced was unchanged. In 2007, global potential production of cocaine was estimated at 994 metric tons, essentially the same as the 984 tons reported in the 2006 survey. The UNODC coca survey shows that almost half of Columbia's cocaine production, 288 tons, and one-third of the cultivation (35,000 hectares) came from just 10 of Columbia's 195 municipalities (5%).
The head of UNODC Costa was quoted as saying "Just like in Afghanistan, where most opium is grown in provinces with a heavy Taliban presence, in Columbia most coca is grown in areas controlled by insurgents.'' Even so, Columbian cocaine production remained almost unchanged in 2007 at 600 tons.
Citizens of the United States continue to be the world's main cocaine consumers, but the amount consumed elsewhere in the world is rising steadily. In the early twenty-first century, 90 percent of the cocaine smuggled into the United States originated in Colombia and passed through the Mexico-Central America corridor. Drug trafficking in all of North America during this period has been controlled by powerful, well-funded criminal organizations. These organizations have waged war against the Mexican authorities in an attempt to keep Mexico the main transit route for cocaine shipments to the United States. Criminal organizations in Mexico have also continued to profit from the sale of heroin, methamphetamine, and cannabis in the United States (International Narcotics Control Board, 2008).
Europe is the second largest market for cocaine, and seizures have risen significantly in Finland, Germany, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Switzerland. Outside of the United States, the highest rates of cocaine abuse are in Spain, the United Kingdom, and Italy. In 2004 in the United Kingdom, 5.2 percent of 16- to 19-year-olds and 14.1 percent of 20- to 24-year-olds reported having cocaine in the previous year (Reuter & Stevens, 2007). Interpol estimates that 200 to 300 tons of cocaine make their way into Europe every year. Just five years ago most British cocaine seizures were measured in kilograms. Now they are measured in tons (Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, 1999).
John Walters, the head of the White House Office of Narcotics and Drug Control Program, said at a 2007 press conference in Haiti that cocaine production had risen to 1,400 metric tons in that year (Schneider, 2008). If correct, this figure represents a 40 percent increase over yearly production for each of the previous five years of ''Plan Colombia,'' a multibillion dollar aid package designed to eradicate coca production in South America. (According to the International Narcotics Control Board [2008] South American production stood at 1,008 metric tons in 2004, 980 metric tons in 2005, and 984 metric tons in 2006.) The supply side of the cocaine market has proven to be adaptable and resistant to eradication efforts, in spite of the vast tracts of land that have been deforested. Instead, the use of fertilizers and pesticides, as well as better production technologies, has improved coca yields.
U.S. demand is easily met by a fraction of the amount that is actually produced in South America, and the remainder is now being diverted to the United Kingdom and Europe, via the coast of Portugal and Africa. In its 2008 annual report, the International Narcotics Control Board drew attention to the fact that West Africa is rapidly developing into a major smuggling route for cocaine from Latin America on its way to Europe. (The African country of Guinea Bissau may now be the world's first true narco-state, where all government officials are the employ of various Colombian cartels, and the only reliable source of income is drug trafficking.) One troubling side effect of this phenomenon is that in the countries of western Africa, cocaine use has also increased by the people who live there—and who now derive much of their income from cocaine sales. Rising levels of seizures in Africa, especially along the Gulf of Guinea and off the coast of Cape Verde, show that Africa's role as a transshipment point is rapidly increasing.
Efforts at interdiction appear to have been more successful than eradication. The United Nations believes that as much as 42 percent of all the cocaine produced in 2006 was interdicted, largely as a result of improved cooperation among law enforcement bodies around the world. Nearly 60 percent of all global cocaine seizures in 2005 took place in South America, the Caribbean, and Central America, while North America accounted for 28 percent, and Europe for about 14 percent.
The only remaining legitimate use of cocaine is for head and neck surgery. Unlike any other local anesthetic, cocaine causes blood vessels to contract. By injecting an area with cocaine, the surgeon not only eliminates the pain of surgery, but also greatly reduces blood loss, a goal in all surgical procedures. At the end of World War II, a League of Nations committee estimated that total, worldwide medical consumption amounted to less than 10 tons per year (Atzenwiler, 1944). In 2007, estimated production approached 1,000 tons per year (National Drug Intelligence Center, 2007). However, the amount needed for legitimate medicinal cocaine use remains at only 10 tons.
See also Cocaine; Freud and Cocaine; International Drug
Supply Systems.
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