HELLO ... MY NAME IS COCAINE

'Unauthorized Biography' Provides Irreverent Look At the Geopolitics
of the High Life

The Book: Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography, by Dominic Streatfeild; St.
Martin's Press; 449 pages; $41.95

Cocaine is God's way of telling you that you've got too much money.

Robin Williams said that shortly after his friend and fellow comedian John
Belushi slumped ignominiously into the hereafter following a drug binge in
the spring of 1982.

This is what Sigmund Freud said when he wrote to his beloved Martha in the
spring of 1884: "I have been reading about cocaine, the essential
constituent of cocoa leaves which some Indian tribes chew to enable them to
resist privations and hardships ... I am procuring some myself."

And with that, the chronically depressive Freud bounded off to his local
pharmacy -- ominously called Angels -- bought a gram and blew a chunk of
his meagre salary in the process. He snorted a little and had an epiphany.
The magic powder also took the edge off his hunger, so not only had he
found the panacea for his own melancholy but no longer would his patients
have to suffer nagging, minor stomach ailments. Take two snorts and call me
in the morning.

There is evidence that Freud's breakthrough work on psychoanalysis, and
related research into dreams, was cocaine induced. It is clear, however,
that the great thinker's enthusiasm for the drug exceeded medicinal
purposes. He converted many colleagues, who embraced its efficacy and began
dosing patients who complained of depression, backache, chest pains and
even heartburn.

The nose became a target for fanciful medical theories. Ear, nose and
throat specialist Wilhelm Fliess, a contemporary of Freud's, got carried
away with his not-quite seminal paper on "nasal reflex neurosis," which he
titled "The Relationship Between the Nose and Female Sexual Organs."

These medical geniuses were all simply stoned out of their minds, of
course, but it would take some dramatic plunges into their own dungeons of
depression, and many perforated nasal septums, before that dawned on them.

Dominic Streatfeild's Cocaine, which he cheekily calls an "unauthorized
biography," is an entertaining piece of journalism packed with history,
original interviews, analysis and conjecture. He writes with an irreverence
and makes a sound, if not especially original case, that cocaine is more
than just an addictive drug and the stuff of blues songs but, in the modern
sense at least, a formidable, socially disruptive, geo-political force.
It's a fun and informative read.

He starts from a premise best summed up by a quote he cites from Aldous
Huxley's 1951 Treatise on Drugs: "Everywhere and at all times, men and
women have sought, and duly found, the means of taking a holiday from the
reality of their generally dull and often acutely unpleasant existence."

Cocaine is a "sensational drug,"admits Streatfeild, but it's also a
political football favoured by politicians when they need an easy,
vote-generating target to kick. The War on Drugs is more a rhetorical myth
than an effective reality and, above all, people who use cocaine are on the
slippery slope to physical, financial and family ruin. The scales of
Streatfeild's argument are well balanced.

The writer is swinging on a hammock in the Andes when the book opens. He is
chewing coca leaves and describing the sensation. " ... The tip of my
tongue has gone numb. Not numb like after an injection at the dentist, but
numb like I've eaten too many peppermints. Tingly. Although I haven't
eaten, I'm not hungry. I haven't drunk anything and it's hot, but I'm not
thirsty either. It suddenly occurs to me that sitting here in my hammock is
an extremely pleasant way to spend the afternoon."

South American Indians, he adds, have been happily chewing coca leaves for
centuries but wouldn't be seen dead shoving it up their noses "like smug
advertising executives."

The book hits full stride after about 200 pages when Streatfeild fully
emerges from the history and takes himself to Central America and the
U.S.-Mexico border states. In two especially entertaining passages, he
visits a drug lord-turned-religious fanatic in a luxurious Bolivian jail
and a "cocaine family" in Colombia.

It is in the Colombia chapter that Streatfeild tells the remarkable story
of the legendary Pablo Escobar, the brutal killer, social activist and drug
lord who, at the height of his industry in the mid-1980s, was making at
least $1 million a day.

Mass cocaine use had petered out by the early 20th century but re-generated
with greater force from the late 1960s when a new drug culture emerged
among the young and affluent in North America and Europe.

Sex, drugs and rock and roll was the credo and while it was fun for most,
it was ruinous for many. Belushi remains a poster boy for the downside.
Streatfeild relates a couple of observations from those two cocaine
generations that sum things up nicely: "I have seen, among men of science,
frightful symptoms due to the craving for cocaine," observed one essayist
in 1924. "Those who believe they can enter the temple of happiness thought
the gate of pleasure purchase their momentary delights at the cost of body
and soul."

Colourful former drug dealer/user George Jung, a major character in
Cocaine, has a more prosaic view: "... when you're coming down, you need
more to get up. It rips your system to pieces. It will destroy you. If it
doesn't drive you nuts, it'll kill you ... It's really dangerous. F---ing evil."