DRUG OF CHOICE

COCAINE NATION

How the White Trade Took Over the World

By Tom Feiling

351 pp. Pegasus Books. $27.95.

The Drug Enforcement Administration Museum and Visitors Center may be
America's most uninspiring attempt at war commemoration. Its
low-budget displays, stuffed into a sterile building near the
Pentagon, strive for a good-versus-evil story line but exude
uncertainty. Snapshots of officers atop piles of impounded narcotics
fail to convey the urgency of battle. Confiscated drug paraphernalia
showcase wily ingenuity as much as social menace. But across the
Potomac, next to Congressional Cemetery, rises a more fitting tribute
to the "war on drugs": Washington's city jail, through which 18,000
inmates pass each year, 89 percent of them black and three-quarters
of them incarcerated for nonviolent of-fenses. With its X-shaped
towers surrounded by razor wire, the sprawling complex devours
resources but, most criminologists agree, does comparably little to
protect the public. It stands as a monument to punitive government bloat.

Now four decades old, America's drug war, initiated in its modern
form by Richard Nixon, has burned through $1 trillion and helped make
the United States the most locked-down country on earth. Yet victory
still recedes from view. In 1970, some 20 million Americans had
experimented with illegal drugs; by 2007, 138 million had. While drug
purity has increased, street prices over the long term have dropped
- -- precisely the opposite trajectory promised by drug warriors. Small
wonder that a growing number of skeptics, from George Will to George
Soros, have called for a serious change of course.

With a new regime in Washington, led by a president who admits to
having used cocaine in his youth and a drug czar who rejects martial
metaphors, this is a good time to look back on America's first "war
without end" and its pre-eminent target, as the documentary filmmaker
Tom Feiling does in "Cocaine Nation."

An impassioned and wide-ranging if occasionally jumbled survey of
"the white trade" and its enemies, Feiling's book (published last
year in Britain as "The Candy Machine") begins with the extraction of
the ancient coca leaf's most potent alkaloid, cocaine, in the
mid-19th century. Possessing wondrous qualities -- a pharmaceutical
company boasted that cocaine could "make the coward brave, the silent
eloquent, and render the sufferer insensitive to pain" -- the product
swept the globe as an additive to medicine, wine (Ulysses S. Grant
was an early quaffer) and, of course, Coca-Cola, whose red and white
colors, Feiling writes, pay homage to the Peruvian flag.

This initial cocaine craze petered out in the first half of the 20th
century, in the wake of pharmacy regulation, drug control protocols
and consumers' second thoughts. But another, larger wave rose in the
1970s, as hedonists from Hollywood to Wall Street turned cocaine into
"the Champagne of drugs," as The New York Times declared in 1974.
Because most users of the stimulant never became addicted, and
because they had "upper-class cachet," Feiling notes, its resurgence
was at first greeted with a shrug by government. Gerald Ford's White
House observed that cocaine "does not usually result in serious
social consequences, such as crime, hospital emergency room
admissions or death."

But when suppliers introduced a down-market product, crack cocaine,
in the 1980s -- "cocaine for poor people," as one dealer described it
to Feiling -- social panic ensued. Crack is pharmacologically
identical to powder cocaine, but its smokable rocks produce quicker,
more intense highs (and harder falls). Attracting legions of users in
decaying urban centers, it contributed to property crime, child
neglect, homicidal turf battles and, not least, political reaction.
Brandishing a bag of crack in the Oval Office, the first President
Bush called illegal drugs "the gravest domestic threat facing our
nation." No-knock police raids and mandatory minimum sentencing
followed. The drug war became total war, overstuffing jails and
exacerbating racial inequality but failing to create a "drug-free America."

This domestic tale of destruction has been well chronicled by
journalists, social scientists and addicts-turned-memoirists. What
sets Feiling's book apart is his analysis of how America's insatiable
appetite for narcotics and its zealous determination to quash those
cravings have spread misery and violence across the globe.

During cocaine's postwar renaissance, mafiosi based in Cuba met
demand in the United States, the world's largest cocaine market. But
after the revolution, coca capitalists dispersed, chartering new
organizations, establishing new labs and supply lines, and
demonstrating remarkable adaptability in response to law-enforcement
pressure. Production shifted from Peru to Bolivia to Colombia, and is
now shifting back to Peru. Snuffed out in one area, cocaine surges in another.

Feiling vividly describes the supply side of the cocaine business,
which, he argues, "thrives on the poverty not just of individuals and
communities, but of governments." In Colombia, which remains the
world's leading producer of cocaine despite the $5 billion in
anti-narcotics and counterinsurgency aid the United States has fed
into the country since 2000, Feiling profiles campesinos in the rural
Putumayo district whose primary source of income is coca, although
they receive relatively little for their crops. In a region where
markets are distant, roads are poor and the prices for legal produce
like yucca and plantains are low, the coca farmers "become slaves of
the mafia," a Colombian congressman tells Feiling -- the rural
correlates of low-level street dealers in America who risk death and
imprisonment to earn "roughly the federal minimum wage." At the top
of the cocaine hierarchy, drug barons make millions, but their
careers tend to be short, their fortunes soaked with blood. Because
of the violence perpetrated by traffickers and insurgents, and the
more pervasive violence committed by right-wing paramilitaries and
the government, Colombia's population of internally displaced people
ranks second only to Sudan's.

As radar surveillance has pushed smuggling routes from the sky and
sea to the land, the drug war's front lines have moved to Mexico,
where trafficking--related violence has claimed more than 22,000
lives since 2007. Although the Mexican government's latest offensive
may yet constrict supply, curtail corruption and reduce rather than
provoke carnage, the length and complexity of the United
States-Mexico border (and the money to be made breaching it) presents
a daunting challenge. "Americans consume roughly 290 metric tons of
cocaine a year," Feiling writes, a load that "could be carried across
the U.S.-Mexican border in just 13 trucks. Instead, it seeps in in
thousands of ingenious disguises."

Although Feiling doesn't soft-pedal the harm of drug dependence -- to
addicts, mainly, but also to their families and communities -- he
argues convincingly that the remedy promoted most aggressively by the
United States has proved far worse than the disease. As an
alternative, he develops a lengthy brief for a solution he admits
stands little chance of implementation: legalization. There would be
costs, he acknowledges, including, perhaps, wider experimentation and
addiction, but he contends that restrictions on marketing, elevated
vice taxes and a proliferation of treatment beds instead of jail
cells could hardly fail more spectacularly than has prohibition. Hard
as it is to imagine, the least ruinous solution to the white scourge
may be the white flag of surrender.