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<\/p>\nMattha Busby is a freelance journalist and author who has written widely on health policy, drugs, society and culture.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
I was never<\/span> that into cocaine \u2014 preferring the euphoria promised by MDMA or the relaxation offered by cannabis \u2014 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> for Vice<\/a> from the lively dusk-till-dawn session went viral, I feared that I perhaps shouldn\u2019t have glorified the use of a moreish drug that typically leaves a trail of violent destruction in its wake.<\/p>\n As the years passed, however \u2014 with cocaine becoming both unprecedentedly popular<\/a> and increasingly affordable<\/a> despite the billions spent on the war on drugs to avoid these exact outcomes \u2014 I\u2019ve 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\u2019s first cocaine bar<\/a>, might just represent a more enlightened, peaceful future for us all.<\/p>\n After all, U.S.-led authorities around the world have tried everything else, and to great human cost<\/a>. Coca fields across the Andes, where cocaine\u2019s main ingredient grows, have been sprayed with harmful herbicides like glyphosate<\/a>, 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\u2013industrial complex which serves as a university of crime for its incarcerated and a fertile recruitment ground for armed drug gangs.<\/p>\n The war on drugs is not just a political metaphor \u2014 in many places, it\u2019s a full-blown, militarized conflict with vast numbers of casualties<\/a>. It has fueled unparalleled bloodbaths in which hundreds of thousands of people have been killed across the world, notably in Colombia<\/a>, Mexico<\/a>, 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. \u201cThis was a slaughter, not an operation,\u201d one bereaved mother told The Guardian<\/a>. \u201cThey came here to kill.\u201d<\/p>\n In the international waters around the U.S., the \u201clegally indefensible<\/a>\u201d and \u201cbarbarian<\/a>\u201d campaign the Trump administration is waging against boats suspected of trafficking drugs from Latin America has killed at least 83 people<\/a> in 21 extrajudicial airstrikes<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> before becoming a politician, legalizing drugs is the only way to end the war on drugs. After all, people want to sniff cocaine. \u201cYou have to legalize drugs to win that war,\u201d Trump said in 1990<\/a>.<\/p>\n Cocaine was first<\/span> 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 \u201cnerve food\u201d wonder drug<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n Pope Leo XIII was such a fan of one cocaine-infused tonic wine as a mental fortifier, \u201cwhen prayer was insufficient,\u201d that he awarded its creator<\/a> a Vatican gold medal. President Ulysses S. Grant, Thomas Edison, and Queen Victoria were also partial.<\/p>\n In 1886, Coca-Cola launched<\/a> as a \u201cbrain tonic and intellectual beverage\u201d flavored by the cocaine-containing coca leaves. <\/p>\n But as the invigorating drug\u2019s 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<\/a> over coca imports to the U.S.).<\/p>\n Next, in 1914, the U.S. passed the <\/strong>Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, which heavily regulated cocaine and stymied its use outside of medicine \u2014 where it had become long essential for ear, throat, and, perhaps ironically, nose surgery.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n The U.S. then set about creating a sprawling drug control regime<\/a> 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 \u2014 along with heroin and cannabis \u2014 and required governments to criminalize nonmedical use.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen cocaine came to town, it was so ridiculously profitable,\u201d Roben Farzad, author of \u201cHotel Scarface: Where Cocaine Cowboys Partied and Plotted to Control Miami,\u201d told PBS<\/a>. \u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n