The War on Drugs, Tea, Coca-Cola
The War on Drugs, Regional Drugs
The Ganjia Complex
Coca and Cocaine
It was in fact a shortcoming in transportation technology that delayed the globalization of coca and its principal psychoactive alkaloid, cocaine. Ar chaeological evidence of coca chewing dates back as far as 3000 b.c.
The ªrst human use probably occurred thousands of years earlier, when hunter-gath erers in the eastern Andes sampled the plant’s tender new leaves as famine food, discovering their stimulating and medicinal properties.
In any event, coca was one of the ªrst plants domesticated in the western hemisphere. Coca leaves, mixed with alkalis such as vegetable ash or lime, which ease co caine absorption, were used by natives for both sacred and secular purposes; they chewed the leaves to cope with the effects of altitude, hunger, and fa tigue.
#Alcohol makes you feel good, explained one old coca chewer, but coca puts strength in your limbs. In the sixteenth century the Spanish debated the merits of toleration and suppression.
Toleration prevailed on practical grounds: coca sustained labor in the silver mines.
Though a lively coca trade developed in New Spain, transatlantic commerce failed to take root. Ineffectively packaged for long sea voyages, the few leaves shipped to Europe lost potency. Weak and uncer tain effects contributed to scientiªc confusion and therapeutic skepticism about the drug.
Therapeutic interest in cocaine initially outstripped the drug’s supply. It was very expensive, “an obstacle to all further experiments,” as Freud com plained in early 1885. The situation triggered a kind of coca gold rush.
Parke, Davis, the leading American manufacturer, dispatched Henry Rusby to the jungles of Bolivia to ªnd coca leaves and to investigate other potentially proªtable plant drugs. Brilliant, energetic, stubborn, self-promoting, and rac ist to the bone, Rusby was the Theodore Roosevelt of bio-imperialism.
On this, the ªrst of his seven expeditions to South and Central America, he rounded up 20,000 pounds of coca leaves, only to have his shipment delayed by a revolution.
The shipment spoiled while waiting to cross the Colombian isthmus. Assembling a crew of soldiers of fortune, he nevertheless kept on, somehow making his way across the Amazon and gathering 35,000 to 45,000 botanical specimens—the number increased in the retelling—before reach ing Pará half dead. Cheap cocaine fed a global epid
emic that lasted from the 1890s to the mid 1920s, with peaks in different nations at different times. It began in the United States and India.
The ªrst American cases of cocaine poisoning and addiction were medical in character, involving patients and, not infre quently, doctors who had used too much of the drug or used it too often.
By the mid-1890s cocaine snifªng and injecting had also spread to the under world, where drinking and opium smoking were already well established.
In India many users of cocaine were already heavy consumers of opium, ganja, or alcohol. Cocaine was essentially another drug in their repertoire, although Indian users generally swallowed the powder or chewed it with betel leaves and lime.
Then, in the late 1920s, the epidemic subsided and world exports began a sustained decline. Japan had become a cocaine producer and was soon di verting an unknown percentage of its production to India and China. But this was strictly a sideline to its opiate trade.
Cocaine was little in evidence in Europe by World War II (though the Danish resistance ingeniously used co caine mixed with dried rabbit’s blood to foil Gestapo bloodhounds trying to sniff out escaping Jews).
The drug was also scarce in the United States. “We rarely hear of cocaine being used,” one Bureau of Narcotics supervisor re ported in 1940—this from New York City, easily the largest illicit drug market in the country.
The Ganja Complex
Mexican papers seldom mentioned cocaine trafªcking; sei zures throughout the country remained quite modest until the 1970s.
Cannabis originated in central Asia and was first extensively cultivated in China 6,000 or more years ago. It was a valuable, multipurpose crop, yielding a potent drug as well as cooking oil, edible seeds, animal fodder, and hempen fibres.
Hemp was the source of rope, fishing nets, and textiles for the Chinese masses, silk being reserved for the clothing of the rich.
The many uses sand remarkable hardiness of cannabis—it flourishes in a variety of climates and at altitudes from sea level to more than 10,000 feet— assured its widespread diffusion. Of the many societies in which the plant’s psychoactive properties came to be prized, the most important was India.
The earliest written reference to bhang appears in the Atharva Veda, dating to ca. 2000–1400 b.c. Bhang consists of dried cannabis leaves, seeds, and stems from male and female plants, wild or cultivated. Often mixed with sugar, black pepper, and water or milk, it is the mildest of the three traditional Indian cannabis preparations.
Ganja, made from the dried flowering tops of cultivated female plants rich in delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), is two to three times stronger in effect. Ganja is smoked as well as ingested; when Ganja smoking first emerged in India is uncertain.
Cannabis was controversial in the Islamic world, owing in part to its association with the Sufis, who used it for mystical purposes that orthodox author ties regarded with suspicion. Sporadic attempts to suppress cultivation failed, and by the fourteenth century hashish production was well established, particularly in the Nile Delta.
By then Arab traders had succeeded in spreading cannabis down the east coast of Africa, whence it spread to the central and southern regions of the continent.
The smoking of cannabis, in contrast to that of tobacco, flourished among the Khoikhoi, San, and other peoples of southern Africa well before European contact. The Spanish cultivated cannabis in their colonies from the sixteenth until the early nineteenth centuries, when hemp farming enjoyed a brief efflorescence in California.
The French and the British did likewise, with plantings at Port Royal in 1606, Virginia in 1611, and Plymouth in 1632. Their concern was for fibre, particularly for the manufacture of naval rigging. In no instance were European colonizers primarily motivated by the plant’s medicinal and psychoactive properties.
Their imported labourers thought otherwise. Angolan slaves (paid for, in part, with rum and low-grade tobacco) brought cannabis with them to the sugar plantations of northeastern Brazil, where cultivation was established sometime after 1549. One story has it that the slaves carried the seeds in cloth dolls tied to their ragtag clothing.
The planters permitted slaves to grow their Manocha—the word, like other Brazilian terms for cannabis, is of Angolan extraction—between the rows of cane, and to smoke and dream during the periods of inactivity between harvests.
The planters stuck to their perfumed cigars The Old-World Ganja complex replicated itself in Brazil, where cannabis came to be regarded as the opium of the poor. Yet no such pattern emerged in colonial North America, although hemp was more widely and successfully cultivated there than in South America.
The most likely explanation is that the slaves shipped to the British colonies came from farther up the West Afri can coast, where cannabis had not yet taken root—that, and the fact that European settlers were culturally primed to seek release in alcohol and, beginning in the seventeenth century, tobacco.
