Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography by Dominic Streatfeild

Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography by Dominic Streatfeild explores the history of cocaine starting with the chewing of coca leaves by the natives of South America. Coca's history, use, misuse, and abuse is a fascinating tale of how humans can take something good and corrupt it with just a little effort. The effects of imperialism on the coca plant and its transition into cocaine and the various forms of cocaine are scary and yet somehow felt unavoidable. I was torn between what I thought I knew and what the facts and evidence show in regards to the coca plant, cocaine use, and cocaine trafficking based on Streatfeild's research. The intersection of political aspirations and cocaine is incredibly disheartening leaving one to wonder just how much those in power drove or at least ignored cocaine trafficking for political benefit. As I reached the latter part of the book, the realization kept coming to me that criminalizing cocaine and other drugs created the prices that made trafficking so tempting to so many. Criminalizing the use of drugs rather than seeing it as a medical issue has created so many problems for so many places all around the world. Using drug trafficking as a control mechanism over countries dooms those countries to poverty and dependence on other countries. While Streatfeild never explicitly lays out a plan to decriminalize drugs, it was easy to imagine how a shift in perspective about the use of the coca plant could lead to viable economies for those countries where coca is easy (and in some places the only real option) to grow to trade with other countries through the interviews he shared. Cocaine showed me how easy it is to fall into a fear trap and how easily those fear traps can be released with a little information. Streatfeild demonstrates how various governments and the media worked together, sometimes wittingly sometimes unwittingly, to scare people into thinking the drug problem was much more pervasive and deadly than it actually was and to point fingers at populations that were easy to punch down at rather than addressing the real issues that lead to drug use in the first place. Cocaine is a fascinating, if sometimes tedious, look into how a harmless plant became the big, bad evil because of human interference.



Check back soon for my thoughts on other books I'm reading including:


Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style by Kurt Vonnegut and Suzanne McConnell
Capitalism Calls Poetry Lazy by Wyatt Welch
The Scenic Route: A Short Story by Christina Baker Kline
Just a Girl by Alyssa Cole
The Woman in Me by Brittany Spears
Words Are My Matter: Writings on Life and Books by Ursula K. Le Guin




Reviews will be posted as I finish these books.


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