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Policy > General > From Soft Drink to Hard Drug;
COCA
LONDON, 1885. COCAINE IS ON SALE in every high street chemist, in a wide variety of preparations: patent remedies, energy drinks and throat pastilles. The trade is legal, unregulated and unlicensed; products rarely list ingredients or dosage. Cocaine was the great pharmaceutical success story of the 1880s. It arrived in a world where the only available stimulants were caffeine and alcohol, and where modern life was making new demands on working people. Manufacturing and empire were driving an economic boom, and a new class of white collar workers - 'brainworkers', as they were known - were struggling to keep pace with its demands. Coca extracts and mild cocaine solutions immediately found their market as a 'pick-me-up', rather like Red Bull or takeaway espressos today. They also proved popular as a headache and catarrh cure, a gastric remedy for dyspepsia, an appetite suppressant, and a general panacea for the sick and listless. Leaves of the coca plant were steeped in alcohol to make tonics, and small quantities of the recently isolated active ingredient, cocaine, were delivered via inhalers, ointments, even cigars. It was only botanical accident that had prevented cocaine from becoming established in Europe centuries earlier, at the same time as the first wave of 'soft drugs' - coffee, tea, tobacco and chocolate - that arrived from the New World in the 17th century. Coca had been discovered at the same time, and the early Spanish explorers had noticed how the Inca people used it to suppress hunger and fatigue, and derived 'great contentment' from it. But the samples sent back to Europe had deteriorated en route, and most of the coca that arrived proved to be 'as inert as weather-beaten hay'. The effects of coca had been rediscovered in the 1850s by an Italian doctor based in Argentina, Paolo Mantegazza, who chewed prodigious quantities of fresh coca and wrote a book extolling its powerful stimulant and mental effects. His work attracted the attention of the German chemist Albert Niemann, who in 1860 obtained fresh samples of coca leaf and isolated a crystalline white powder which he named 'cocaine'. But Niemann died the next year, and his new substance was largely forgotten. A major study published in the Lancet in the 1870s concluded that coca was inactive and its 'reputed effects on the Indians' of the Andes were no more than primitive superstition. It was several more years before cocaine's effects were scientifically established, notably by a young Viennese neurologist named Sigmund Freud. Injecting himself with doses of a tenth of a gram in a seven percent solution, Freud quickly established that cocaine was a powerful physical stimulant and also a mental euphoriant (his claim that this euphoria was a psychologically healthy phenomenon would later mire his work in controversy). When Freud's colleague, Carl Koller, also demonstrated its efficacy as a local anaesthetic in eye surgery, cocaine was hailed by medical science as a new wonder drug. When it hit the mass market in the 1880s, it was available from two sources: patent and pharmaceutical. Patent preparations were typically mild, and extracted from coca leaf, such as the popular Mariani wine, the inspiration for Coca-Cola. Pharmaceutical products, from companies like Parke-Davis and Burroughs Wellcome, offered cocaine powder dissolved in everything from toothache drops to haemorrhoid plasters to inhalers. The market grew exponentially, and commercial coca plantations were set up far beyond the Andes, for example in the coffee-growing highlands of Java. Although pure cocaine - and hypodermic needles - were also widely available in chemists, the mass market chose to take cocaine in mild forms and doses, as part of their daily working routine. When Conan Doyle created the most famous fictional cocaine-injector, Sherlock Holmes, his intention was to mark his detective out as an eccentric bohemian connoisseur. Like his Meerschaum pipe and his priceless violin, Holmes' cocaine-injecting was a habit that set him apart from common tastes. By the late 1880s doctors in Britain and Europe were beginning to describe occasional cases of 'cocainomania' in the bohemian and criminal underworld (and among doctors themselves), and there were growing concerns about irresponsible claims by Parke-Davis and others that cocaine could cure shyness, improve the singing voice and even substitute for food. But it was in the United States that the backlash against the drug took hold. Cocaine became implicated in the racial panics of the American south; tabloid newspapers ran reports of 'coke niggers' raping white women and turning into maniacs with the strength of ten men, impervious even to police bullets. Cocaine was removed from mass-market products such as Coca-Cola, and was tagged on to the Narcotics Bill for the control of opiates that was currently passing into law. (This is why, despite being a stimulant, it is still labelled a 'narcotic' in US enforcement parlance.) After World War 1, the prohibition was adopted worldwide. The most noticeable effect of the ban to the general public was the disappearance of mild coca-based preparations from the marketplace. From this point onwards, the products that had been most popular with consumers were no longer available. Instead, as the market came to be supplied by criminal sources, cocaine would only be available in chemical form: the most concentrated, the easiest to smuggle, the most lucrative and also the most problematic and dangerous. COCAINE
LONDON, 1985. COCAINE IS ON SALE, to those in the know, in bars, clubs, offices in the media and the City, through networks of friends and street dealers. It is available as gram wraps of powder - typically 50% cocaine, the rest adulterants like caffeine and amphetamine and inert fillers such as lactose. Cocaine made its first major appearance in modern culture in the 1969 film Easy Rider, whose story is set in motion by the protagonists stuffing large bags of it into their motorcycle gas tanks. But like Sherlock Holmes, this was not a fiction that was intended to reflect reality. The writers felt that bags of marijuana would not be sufficiently dramatic or valuable, and bags of heroin would be morally inappropriate. Cocaine was chosen because it was unfamiliar and exotic-sounding. But as the drug counterculture spread, life rapidly began to imitate art. Since its prohibition, the non-medical demand for cocaine had been limited to small bohemian subcultures in Europe, South America and the US. Now, in 1970s America, recreational drugs had become big business, and other stimulants like amphetamines were available in the same underground milieu as cannabis and psychedelics. Cocaine arrived in this market as a luxury: an expensive, upmarket product available only to the wealthy few. As the drug culture grew, drug use spread across the economic spectrum, and cocaine became a marker of its upper echelons of sophistication, taste and disposable income. The cultures where it first took hold included Hollywood and the music business, whose operators were typically young, highly paid, hedonistic and often obliged to work for long hours in pampered but high-pressure environments. Cocaine became an adjunct to both work and leisure, and at the same time a marker of success and status. The increasingly obvious presence of cocaine in these cultures created its modern image for the rest of consumer society. Coke began to be associated with particular musical styles: the slick rock of Fleetwood Mac or Steely Dan, the extravagant soul of James Brown or Rick James, the cool theatrics of David Bowie. Across the US, Britain and Europe, the use of cocaine expanded to a growing class of young consumers able to combine spending and leisure in new ways. There was more than enough supply to meet this new demand. Coca was still grown in the Andes, as it had been for thousands of years, to meet the local needs of several million coca-leaf chewers. Now large-scale criminal cartels began to move in, processing and exporting cocaine to the new overseas markets. By the late 1970s cocaine was being produced at sufficient volumes to start bringing the export price down and stimulate Western demand still further. The outcome was not so much that a whole generation became lifetime cocaine users, but rather that new subcultures continually emerged, using cocaine for a few years and then moving on. Epidemiologists began to note that the typical career of a cocaine user was around 3-5 years, with many fewer lifetime users than opiates or alcohol. The supply of cocaine stabilised at a level that has altered little from the late 1970s to the present. The global cocaine market is supplied by around 200,000 hectares of coca cultivation, and sold at prices that have remained remarkably stable for decades. Attempts at supply-side control and interdiction have made little difference to the overall picture; the challenge for producers has been to identify and supply new markets to replace those moving on from their period of cocaine use. Although cocaine had been available to a small and moneyed British market throughout the 1970s, it was in the 1980s that it began to reach an expanding drug culture in the throes of an economic boomtime. Cocaine use spread to high-earning, high-pressure professions like the media and City banking, and to a new class of consumers discovering new drugs like ecstasy as part of an expanding spectrum of leisured lifestyles. As designer fashion, foreign travel and exotic food became increasingly democratised, cocaine became the new champagne: a social gesture of extravagance, sophistication and conspicuous consumption. CRACK
LONDON, 2005. COCAINE IS ON SALE as rocks of crack, its pure and smokeable form, supplied in streets and estates by users and dealers. They run their business via mobile phones, and their control of their turf is often enforced with guns and violence. The sale of cocaine in the form of crack began in America's black inner cities in the mid-1980s. Essentially, it was a marketing strategy, part of the cartels' ongoing development of increasingly downmarket consumer sectors. Sold by the single-dose rock rather than by the gram, it brought cocaine within the price range of a large drug-using population to whom it had long been part of the aspirational culture, but who had traditionally been unable to afford it. But crack proved to be more than just a marketing phenomenon: it changed the rules of the game in significant ways. First, it delivered the drug in a form more powerful than powder cocaine, but with a much more fleeting and short-lived high. Second, it changed the structure of dealing: more low-level dealers could thrive on the streets, selling small quantities of rocks to passing trade rather than larger quantities through pre-established networks. Third, it produced a subculture associated almost exclusively with the black urban 'underclass'. The response of the US justice system to these innovations was to set penalty tariffs for crack far higher than for powder cocaine. This accelerated the perception of crack as a drug with an identity separate from cocaine, and it rapidly established its trademark subcultural styles of hip-hop music and fashion. These incorporated the gun culture that had intensified with crack's new business structure, as an increased number of dealers took more aggressive measures to defend their turf. The emergence of crack had several knock-on effects for the mainstream cocaine market. One was to push the price down, as the cartels continued to seek out sectors that had not yet been exploited. Another was to push purity levels up: crack rocks are typically baked up from powder cocaine, a process that eliminates fillers and residue, setting a 'gold standard' that makes it easier to recognise good quality. The arrival of crack in Britain over the last few years has simultaneously seen powder cocaine, of higher quality and at lower prices, spreading into previously unsupplied provincial areas and economic sectors. Like the mobile phones that are commonly used to supply it, cocaine has migrated from its 1980s status as an upmarket symbol to become a familiar product across the economic spectrum. The spread of crack to Britain was predicted for many years before it happened: the social and economic conditions that had driven the US crack boom were less highly developed in the UK. When crack did arrive, in the late 1990s, it found its initial market among the heroin-using population, where 'brown-and-white' combined deals of crack and heroin became widely available. Recent research indicates that crack is currently making further inroads into a second and potentially larger market: recreational poly-drug users, adding occasional use of both crack and heroin to their previous mix of cannabis, ecstasy and cocaine. But crack's downmarket image, and its chaotic effects on its heavy users, may be a limiting factor in its spread. In American hip-hop culture, it has become less conspicuous in recent years. Its image is no longer aspirational, and its users are widely characterised as losers: the new generation of ghetto stars are more likely to praise cognac than crack. Recent research suggests that in some areas of the US crack prices are falling, and markets ebbing away. Among London teenagers today, 'crackhead' is a common and generic term of abuse. Cocaine is a substance that has radically different effects in different forms. Coca, typically eaten or drunk, is a mild stimulant comparable to tea or coffee; crack, typically smoked, is a powerful and instantaneous chemical high. The cultures and habits of use that form around cocaine are largely determined by the form in which it is available. In the 120 years since it arrived in Britain, cocaine's trajectory has been from soft drink to hard drug: away from mild and legally available forms, and towards the ever stronger forms dictated by the economics of the criminal marketplace.
FURTHER READING
Andrews, George and Solomon, David [ed.]: The Coca Leaf and Cocaine Papers (Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch 1975) Courtwright, David T.: Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World (Harvard University Press 2001) Gootenberg, Paul [ed.]: Cocaine: Global Histories (Routledge 1999) Jay, Mike: Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century (Dedalus Press 2000/2005) Kohn, Marek: Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground (Granta Books 1992/2001) Levine, Harry G. and Reinarman, Craig [eds.]: Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice (University of California Press 1997) Shapiro, Harry: Shooting Stars: Drugs, Hollywood and the Movies (Serpent's Tail 2003)
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