Re: WWW/article/FYI: _BETWEEN COCA AND COCAINE: A Century or

Revolution in Colombia, part three: guerrillas and cocaine

The New York Times reported on Saturday August 7th, 1999 that the wife of
the American officer in charge of anti-drug operations in Colombia was not
only a cocaine addict, but had shipped nearly a quarter of a million
dollars worth of the drug using diplomatic mailing privileges. Given the
symbiotic relationship between the USA as a major customer of nervous
system intoxicants and Colombia as its number one supplier for the past
century, this should have come as no surprise. That the Times failed to
explore these connections or point out the hypocrisy of a looming armed
intervention in Colombia based on the excuse of eradicating drugs should
also come as no surprise. This post shall try to make sense out of what the
bourgeois press mystifies.

In my first post, I pointed out how America's coffee habit served to both
fuel the expansion of the Colombian economy and distort it from the late
1800s through the mid-20th century. The same thing has happened more
recently with respect to cocaine, even though one drug is illegal and the
other is not. This was not always the case. When cocaine was first
introduced, it was considered some kind of wonder drug and available with a
doctor's prescription and over-the-counter in patent medicines.

Dr. David F. Musto, a psychiatric clinician and medical historian at Yale
University, and author of ''The American Disease,'' points out that among
the most prominent early promoters of cocaine for medicinal purposes was
Sigmund Freud, who used it and prescribed it to try to cure his friend and
colleague Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow of opium addiction. In his famous essay
''On Coca'' in 1884, Freud wrote that cocaine ''wards off hunger, sleep and
fatigue and steels one to intellectual effort.'' Freud wrote that in dozens
of tests on himself, he had experienced no adverse side effects and that
even with repeated doses cocaine was not habit-forming. In "Why Freud Was
Wrong," author and physician Richard Webster speculates that many of
Freud's key "discoveries" were made when he was loaded on cocaine since
they demonstrate the typical grandiosity of someone who has had one blow
too many.

Other cocaine devotees included Pope Leo XIII, Thomas Edison, Sarah
Bernhardt, Emile Zola, Henrik Ibsen and the Prince of Wales, later to
become Edward VII. Cocaine became popular as the methadone of its day: a
supposedly harmless, non-addictive drug that could be substituted to
satisfy the cravings for the opium derivatives such as morphine. 

One of the most notable attempts to use cocaine in this way led directly to
the formation of the Coca-Cola company, which to this day uses
non-intoxicating residues of the coca leaf for flavor. John Smith
Pemberton, the Civil War veteran and morphine addict who invented the drink
in Atlanta in 1886, thought that the soft drink was the answer for
old-fashioned American malaise, as well as being a good substitute for
opium addiction, including his own. It was also intended to be a substitute
for alcohol, which was under attack from the temperance movement. As his
home town Atlanta was threatening to soon go dry, he saw the need for a
soft drink which might prove as a substitute for beer, wine and whiskey.
His solution, a fruit-flavored sugar syrup which combined the caffeine kick
of the kola nut and the narcotic buzz of the coca leaf, was initially
designed to be mixed with plain water. Only when it was diluted with
seltzer did it become the monstrously successful drink that eventually
dominated world markets. It can also be used to remove rust from automobile
radiators reputedly.

Later on, when cocaine became popular in black and working-class
communities, it became stigmatized and forced off the pharmacy shelves.
This was analogous to the shift in attitudes when cocaine, especially crack
cocaine, began to be seen as déclassé in the 1990s. Middle-class white
people stopped sharing cocaine at discos since it was now perceived as a
drug for "losers". A new drug took its place, namely Prozac. Once again in
the zigzag patterns that typify American white Anglo-Saxon Protestant
attitudes toward intoxicants, as long as a drug is sanctioned by the
medical profession, it is considered okay even if it is habit-forming.
Elvis Presley used to keep a copy of the Physician's Handbook of
Pharmaceuticals next to his bed and order painkillers from his doctor.
Because they were prescribed, he considered them to be medication rather
than dope.

A December 5, 1993 Washington Post article by Jackson Lears, professor of
history at Rutgers University, points out the analogies between Prozac use
today and the craze for "feel good" patent medicines earlier in American
history:

"By the early 1900s, some patent medicines had expanded their promises to
encompass the demands of the managerial culture. They promised not merely
relief from pain and restoration of lost health but a more general
rejuvenation -- in keeping with the developing equation of success with
youthful energy. 'To feel young again,' announced an ad for MOSKO silver
pills in 1900, 'to realize the joyous sparkle of nerve life as it infuses
the body with its growing vitality; to feel the magnetic enthusiasm of
youthful ambition ... to be free from spells of despondency, from brain
wandering, from the dull stupid feeling; to have confidence, self-esteem,
the admiration of men and women' -- all of these revitalizations and
liberations could be yours through MOSKO. Never mind that MOSKO pills
probably contained a good dose of cocaine, their alleged properties sound
remarkably like those experienced today by the more satisfied users of
Prozac."

Colombia did not start out with cocaine production, but actually was a
major producer of marijuana in the 1970s especially along the Atlantic
Coast. The USA pressured Colombia to make war on the pot growers and was
largely successful. By 1980, according to Jenny Pearce, more than 40
percent of marijuana was grown in the USA and Jamaica was supplying the
remainder. The consequences for the Atlantic Coast of Colombia bereft of
the marijuana trade income were devastating, as crime, unemployment and
economic insecurity increased dramatically.

Relief came in the form of cocaine traffic, however. Coca grown in Peru and
Bolivia was processed in Colombia to supply the new demand in North
America. The cocaine trade eventually replaced coffee as the number one
supplier of foreign revenue. In 1984 it is estimated that between 10 and 12
billion dollars was flowing into the Colombian economy due to the cocaine
trade.

Full article:
http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/state_and_revolution/Revolution_in_Colo
mbia_part3.htm


Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/