THE SCOURGE THAT SEEMS SO PLEASANT

COCAINE : An Unauthorized Biography. By Dominic Streatfeild. St. Martin's
Press, $27.95; 498 pp.

IT has been said there is no greater sensation on earth than a cocaine
high. In very short order, a snort of the glimmering white powder produces
an overwhelming feeling of well-being, mental clarity and boundless energy
- - not to mention a sort of post-orgasmic glow in the solar plexus. Smoking
it only intensifies the feeling. Injecting it, well, that defies description.

Given a limitless supply of the stuff in their water, laboratory animals
will abandon food, sleep, sex, grooming and all other drugs, dosing
themselves until they literally die of exhaustion.

In the great Pandora's box of scourges, cocaine is peculiarly suited to
destroy the human race, precisely because it feels so damn good.
Legislating against it is pointless, as the painful experience of 4,000
years has shown. Indeed, it is an immutable historical fact that
prohibition has only made matters worse - over and over and over again.

Those who doubt it, particularly those who write and enforce the nation's
drug laws, should read this startling book. Because even the most ardent
drug policy zealots will not be able to walk away with their basic
arguments intact.

Released last year in the United Kingdom, which is only now grappling with
the crack epidemic that has laid waste to much of urban poor America, the
book has been a "popular history" best seller there for months.

It is not a polemic. Rather it is a sane and sober review of a vast body of
accumulated knowledge dislodged from forgotten archives, obscure texts,
government records, definitive histories and human sources with impeccable
credentials.

These include drug smugglers, cartel barons, psychiatrists, disillusioned
federal agents, teenage hit men, policy experts, addiction researchers and
chemists. Among them is an Amazonian peasant who extracts an intoxicating
paste worth many times its weight in gold from bundles of green coca leaves
with a caustic soup of battery acid and gasoline.

No less an authority than Milton Friedman, architect of modern
"supply-and-demand" theory and a top economic adviser to Presidents Reagan
and Nixon, is read to conclude that cocaine as a global commodity is
impervious to eradication efforts.

Worse, prohibition succeeds only in making dangerous men richer by
artificially inflating prices for a desirable and plentiful product that is
effectively exempt from taxation. And so it has been since forever.

From the ancient pre-Incan civilizations of South America, which employed
cocaine 's anesthetic properties to pioneer invasive surgical procedures as
early as 2,500 B.C., to the blood-vengeance drug syndicates of modern
Colombia and Mexico, cocaine has always been in demand. And no government
on earth has ever been able to stamp it out.

Perhaps not surprisingly, it took Western capitalism to produce so perfect
a product.

As Dominic Streatfeild amply demonstrates, it was U.S. and European drug
companies that perfected the chemical process that took a humble leaf that
had been safely chewed by Andean peasants for centuries to relieve hunger,
altitude sickness and menstrual cramps and concentrated it into the potent
euphoric that now plagues the world.

By the early 1900s, the drug companies had marketed cocaine as a feel-good
additive and cure-all in cough drops, nasal sprays, snuffs, teas, wines and
a wide array of patent medicines endorsed by the likes of Sigmund Freud.

Coca-Cola swiftly came to be associated with vigor - promising to enhance
even sexual potency - and remained the world's best-selling thirst quencher
long after the drug was removed from the soda under the first of many
Draconian prohibition movements to sweep the nation's legislatures.

Streatfeild passes no judgments on these early regulations. Something had
to be done, because the country was by then crawling with hopeless addicts,
including one of the founders of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

But the regulations set in motion the by now familiar pattern of
criminalization, political demagoguery, racially biased prosecution and
fantastical profiteering that places $92 billion a year in the hands of
megalomaniacs, giving them the means to unleash military adventures that
topple tall buildings and governments alike.

It is the breadth, ambition and importance of Streatfeild's work that will
make its one flaw all but unbearable to serious readers. Inexcusable in a
work of history, the book lacks footnotes. For this, the publisher should
be flogged.

While the text is replete with source citations, its value to posterity may
be short-lived because none but the most determined scholar will have the
patience to plow through 500 pages in search of the book's many buried jewels.