Mattha Busby is a freelance journalist and author who has written widely on health policy, drugs, society and culture.
I was never that into cocaine — preferring the euphoria promised by MDMA or the relaxation offered by cannabis — but back in 2015, a cocaine-serving lounge bar, Route 36, in La Paz, Bolivia, was the talk of the backpacking circuit, and the scarcely-believable novelty of the place was alluring.
At Route 36, bags of cocaine are served on silver platters, and a friend and I got incredibly high that night. Too high, perhaps, though it was all undeniably good fun. But as soon as my first-person dispatch for Vice from the lively dusk-till-dawn session went viral, I feared that I perhaps shouldn’t have glorified the use of a moreish drug that typically leaves a trail of violent destruction in its wake.
As the years passed, however — with cocaine becoming both unprecedentedly popular and increasingly affordable despite the billions spent on the war on drugs to avoid these exact outcomes — I’ve come to realize that accepting that adults take cocaine, and legally regulating the drug, is the only sensible path forward. Establishments like Route 36, the world’s first cocaine bar, might just represent a more enlightened, peaceful future for us all.
After all, U.S.-led authorities around the world have tried everything else, and to great human cost. Coca fields across the Andes, where cocaine’s main ingredient grows, have been sprayed with harmful herbicides like glyphosate, harming the local Indigenous people for whom coca holds unique spiritual and nutritional value, and killing anything that tries to grow in the contaminated soil. Consumers and traffickers of cocaine have been imprisoned en masse, helping to create a prison–industrial complex which serves as a university of crime for its incarcerated and a fertile recruitment ground for armed drug gangs.
The war on drugs is not just a political metaphor — in many places, it’s a full-blown, militarized conflict with vast numbers of casualties. It has fueled unparalleled bloodbaths in which hundreds of thousands of people have been killed across the world, notably in Colombia, Mexico, and most recently Brazil, where a police raid on a cartel-controlled favela in Rio led to more than 130 deaths in one night in late October. “This was a slaughter, not an operation,” one bereaved mother told The Guardian. “They came here to kill.”
In the international waters around the U.S., the “legally indefensible” and “barbarian” campaign the Trump administration is waging against boats suspected of trafficking drugs from Latin America has killed at least 83 people in 21 extrajudicial airstrikes.
Such boats, if some of them are indeed carrying drugs, would mostly be ferrying a popular white powder which many people appear to have an insatiable appetite for. As President Donald Trump acknowledged in 1990 before becoming a politician, legalizing drugs is the only way to end the war on drugs. After all, people want to sniff cocaine. “You have to legalize drugs to win that war,” Trump said in 1990.
Cocaine was first extracted from the coca leaf in 1855 by a young German chemist, Friedrich Gaedcke. A few decades later, it was identified as a highly effective local anesthetic. Cocaine was then vaunted as a “nerve food” wonder drug by pharmaceutical companies and psychologist Sigmund Freud, who initially claimed it was a panacea for depression. Then, it was widely used as both a medicine and as a recreational drug.
Pope Leo XIII was such a fan of one cocaine-infused tonic wine as a mental fortifier, “when prayer was insufficient,” that he awarded its creator a Vatican gold medal. President Ulysses S. Grant, Thomas Edison, and Queen Victoria were also partial.
In 1886, Coca-Cola launched as a “brain tonic and intellectual beverage” flavored by the cocaine-containing coca leaves.
But as the invigorating drug’s addictive nature became impossible to ignore, there was a backlash. Coca-Cola removed the cocaine from its recipe in 1903, though it still derives its distinctive taste from the bitter leaves (thanks to its ongoing effective monopoly over coca imports to the U.S.).
Next, in 1914, the U.S. passed the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, which heavily regulated cocaine and stymied its use outside of medicine — where it had become long essential for ear, throat, and, perhaps ironically, nose surgery.
The U.S. then set about creating a sprawling drug control regime to assert its geopolitical control in Latin America, protect pharmaceutical interests, and promote a heathen culture in which alcohol and cigarettes are OK, but every other drug is bad. In 1961, the United Nations placed cocaine and coca under strict international control — along with heroin and cannabis — and required governments to criminalize nonmedical use.
Prohibition ironically coincided with increased interest in cocaine. After decades of negligible use, it was rediscovered by countercultural elites in the late 1960s, just as Colombian traffickers were perfecting their methods. Cocaine hit Miami in the early-1970s, and the rest is history.
“When cocaine came to town, it was so ridiculously profitable,” Roben Farzad, author of “Hotel Scarface: Where Cocaine Cowboys Partied and Plotted to Control Miami,” told PBS. “It made people do such crazy things in the name of money and power and blood lust that you had something approximating a failed state by 1981 in Miami.”
Today, cocaine is one of the world’s most reliable commodities. It’s a multibillion-dollar market serving around 50 million global consumers. Production in the Andes is at a record high. Purity is the highest it’s ever been. Cocaine is cheaper, stronger, and more accessible than at any point in history. From bankers to bricklayers, everyone is at it — and the interests of cartels all over the world are enmeshed with the legal economies.
This state of affairs represents a totemic, catastrophic policy failure. It’s high time for a grown-up conversation which acknowledges that the drug laws — by funneling untold riches to violent criminals — are more harmful than the drugs themselves, as research increasingly shows.
“We’re losing badly the war on drugs,” Trump said more than three decades ago. “You have to legalize drugs to win that war. You have to take the profit away from these drug czars.” Instead, taxes on legal profits on the sales of drugs like cocaine could be spent to educate the public on the dangers of drug misuse, the future president recommended. “What I’d like to do maybe by bringing it up is cause enough controversy that you get into a dialogue on the issue of drugs so people will start to realize that this is the only answer; there is no other answer,” he added.
It’s high time for a grown-up conversation which acknowledges that the drug laws are more harmful than the drugs themselves.
Fast forward 35 years, and Trump is waging his illegal, extrajudicial campaign on boats carrying suspected drug traffickers. If history tells us anything, the cartels will simply switch to other methods — over air or land — to get the lucrative cocaine into the U.S., after the Coast Guard seized a record 510,000 pounds over the last fiscal year.
That means that 2 million pounds of cocaine likely made it into the country by sea hidden in shipments of bananas and corn, or in stealthy narco-subs, since it has been estimated that interdiction efforts only capture a fraction of illegal drugs imported. Port staff, border guards, and law enforcement officers are no doubt being corrupted to an extent we will never be able to comprehend. The tentacles of the illegal drug trade will always penetrate the legal economy because there’s just so much money at stake — more than any other illegal commodity industry.
That’s why the cocaine business continues to infect even quaint corners of the world, as cartels continually shift their operations away from enforcement hotspots to evade detection. Spare a thought for Saõ Miguel in the Azores, a tropical paradise that suffered an explosion in problematic cocaine use when half a ton washed up on its shores in 2001; or the degeneration of Cape Verde into a narco-state thanks to gangs seeking new smuggling routes.
In the Amazon, land defenders who object to the razing of their land for secret coca plantations are killed. Ecuador, once one of South America’s safest countries, is the latest state to be rocked by an explosion of prison massacres, political assassinations, and street bombings; the homicide rate has increased sixfold in just five years. Even Scandinavian gangs are killing over the cocaine trade, in the once peaceful countries of northern Europe.
So what would happen if cocaine was legalized? Organized crime groups would be deprived of a uniquely profitable income stream. The purity of the drug would also not be at the whims of these criminal groups, as batches contaminated with fentanyl regularly kill people who use cocaine. Others may celebrate that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, which has 93 offices across 69 countries, would lose much of their raison d’être. And, depending on whether there would be an amnesty and reconciliation process for the criminal groups who control the cocaine trade, there would be a new class of legal cocaine merchants.
Undoubtedly, there will be concerns that cocaine legalization could increase use. But it is already available for delivery faster than a pizza in many major cities across the world, and regulation — as even Trump noted — would help bring people who are addicted into closer contact with essential health services. This policy overhaul could also potentially reduce the thousands of deaths from cocaine misuse each year. There would be controls over public usage, as outlined in nonprofit Transform Drug Policy Foundation’s book “How to Regulate Stimulants,” as well as plain packaging, and a huge remit for drug education and harm reduction services.
Legalization is the only way to change the story of cocaine, from field to nose, being written in other people’s blood.
At Route 36 — which under any regulated system would not be permitted to serve cocktails, since cocaine enables one to drink extraordinary amounts of alcohol — I was already asking myself about the morality of taking cocaine. I resolved in 2018 never to take it again, at least until I could ensure it was from an ethical source, but the reality is that the growing market is not going to magically disappear. Legalization is the only way to change the story of cocaine, from field to nose, being written in other people’s blood. The real immorality would be the continuation of the failed status quo.
