1991 conference paper compendium of the
Washington, D.C. based "Drug Policy Foundation"
Cocaine Prohibition: Water or Gasoline [for treating the flames of drug abuse]
Douglas A. Willinger
I have a funny feeling about this question about this question of legalization. I don’t know whether this is a correct comparison, but it is kind of like putting gasoline on a fire to put it out or giving alcoholics free whiskey wherever they want.
Congressman Dante B. Fascell, House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control, Hearings on the legalization of illicit drugs, September 29, 1988
Introduction
Fascell’s remarks typify the way most people view the question of drug policy. Largely fueled through a legitimate concern over the abuse of certain drugs, “anti-drug” sentiment today against such drugs as cocaine rests comfortably upon the perception that prohibition is not only our wisest move, but our only sane one. For conventional wisdom the matter seems clear. “Make it v difficult, very difficult” to obtain drugs, intoned Reagan drug policy advisor Lois Herrington on a recent “Firing Line” debate. For many, it is a seductively simple idea that simply should work: thwart drug abuse by stopping the drugs, utterly and
Unequivocally as one would put out a fire by dousing it with water. Not surprisingly, alterative approaches to drugs are seen on the contrary as akin to dousing the flames of drug abuse with gasoline.
Are we so sure, though, that this last analogy is not more accurate when applied to drug prohibition? In the face of today’s situation, viewing cocaine prohibition as a bulwark to drug abuse is questionable. From what one would think of a policy meant to work as prohibition is supposed to, today’s reality should be different. Finding cocaine for sale as it is now understood would be difficult, and there would be little if any pf the abuse now common under prohibition.
Obedience to a Dogma: Most Simply, Drugs Are Bad”
In spite of the drug war’s lack of success with controlling drug abuse in a worthwhile manner, keeping cocaine strictly illegal remains popularly perceived as our wisest policy. In light of its failures this may seem strange, especially when even that most vocal and vibrant defender of the drug policy status quo, U.S. Congressman Charles Rangel, Chairman of the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control, admits that drug prohibition is a failure. Nonetheless, illegalizing cocaine is continually called a “good” policy, even though the same can not be said of the situation that has evolved under it.
As with all things, whether rational or irrational, there exist reasons. On the surface these are the beliefs that serve as the war on drug’s justification. The following remarks by former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration director John Lawn and Chairman of the Board of the National District Attorney’s Association, Arthur C. Cappy Eads, given before the same September 29, 1988 House Hearings, provide a glimpse of these basic dogmas:
“Drugs are not bad because they are illegal. They are illegal because they are bad. They are bad for society. They re bad for the user. They are bad for those around the users and for our communities.”
According to this official doctrine, the drugs declared illegal by Congress in 1914 are intrinsically evil. Any use is assumed intolerable. Thus, regardless of any pharmacological realities regarding their form, potency or mode of use [administration] is assumed intolerable, the marketing and buying any of these drugs in any form is strictly illegal. Viewed through this prism, it is not surprising that cocaine is seen this particular way today. Many undesirable features now related to cocaine’s trade and use do appear to buttress the official beliefs about the drug and our social and legal policies toward it.
However, in light of the failures of the approach that assumes itself as good and cocaine as evil, should not we be asking ourselves this question: is the orthodox perspective of cocaine and our social and legal policies toward it that underlay the “war on drugs” the only way to view this matter, let alone the wisest?
Now, this is not to suggest that the current situation with the drug is not on the balance undesirable, or to deny the drug abuse problems now surrounding the drug. Indeed, I think that almost everyone – asides from some of the more prosperous black market dealers in the white powder – would deem our ideal drug policies as those that would eliminate today’s abominable predicament with powder cocaine and crack.
Instead, I would like to draw attention to the influence popular beliefs have upon the nation’s choice of law, and ultimately, because of the law’s effects, the profound influence these beliefs have upon the current situation with cocaine.
Drugs Per Se, or Prohibition
In recent years, the ever-growing problems now surrounding cocaine’s trade and use outside the protection of the law has inspired a general questioning of cocaine prohibition. Presenting a different perspective of the drug war then the official one, advocates of drug policy reform make a number of observations that suggest that the unquestioning admiration of the war on drugs routinely found in such conventional publications as Reader’s Digest is not merited. Accordingly, prohibition is not the answer to fighting “drug related” problems, but to an extent the cause. As noted by several of these advocates, criminalizing popular drugs has not only failed to stop their flow into the country, but has worsened the situation: crime, corruption, the erosion of liberty, and, as Richard Cowan and Ethan Nadelmann have noted, the shift to the relatively dangerous contraband drugs have been the liabilities not of drugs per se, but of illegalizing them.
Because of the nature of any debate about cause and effect, prohibitionists and anit0prohibitionists can argue endlessly as to whether the drug war is beneficial or deleterious. Like the proverbial fable about which came first, the chicken or the egg, the simultaneous escalation of the drug war and the drug problem during the 1980s can be seen two ways. The cause is either crack or prohibition, as the effect is either prohibition or crack- all depending upon one’s perspective. While drug abuse may be what is on our minds, prohibitionists perceive rte situation in a way that calls for targeting certain drugs. Perhaps thinking about this may provide some insight as to why our current policies are useless at targeting abuse.
Breaking the Stalemate
Breaking this intellectual stalemate requires an approach that can ultimately determine the correct way of looking at the drug issue. Because today’s situation
With drugs involves the meshing of drugs and prohibition, harping upon either an illicit drug as cocaine or the policies that made it illegal will not answer our fears about drugs or laws. Instead, it has only presented the two clashing interpretations typified below. With all due credit to the rhetoric of one particular devote of this century’s 80-year crusade against “drugs”, I present a portion of Congressman Soloman P. Ortiz’s opening statement before the September 29, House Narcotics Committee Hearings on Drug Legalization, among with a re-write from an alternative point of view.
Those who bravely wage this war will also know what illegal drugs are doing to our children, our communities and our nation as a whole.
Those that bravely resist the war also know what making certain drugs illegal is doing to our children, our communities and our nation as a whole.
More then we realize, conceptions do set our perceptions. Revealing which of these outlooks is correct requires that abstract look be taken with both points of blame: cocaine or its criminalization (1914-) Only by divorcing and separating the two can each be seen for what it is, thus answering the question whether either is intrinsically good or evil.
Child of Conception
If there where ever a story where conception played a greater role in the history of anything, that was of cocaine.
Although characterized in similar terms by North and South American colloquialisms as the “Lady” of drugs, cocaine has been seen in many different ways for so many things to so many people. Perhaps no other drug in history has been so widely praised – or damned – as the source of so much joy or misery.
For a certain young Viennese doctor more then a century ago, cocaine was a “good” drug. The tonic which dispelled his depression, cocaine or coca – terms he used much as coffee and caffeine are today – was Sigmund Freud’s elixir of life in the form of 50 milligrams of cocaine hydrochloride dissolved in a glass of water. To others though cocaine was something else: a Lady of an altogether different nature. M medication that enslaved its victims, cocaine was a seductively habit-forming toxin that could lead to psychosis, fornication, paranoid delusions and death. For a prominent group pf physicians using cocaine injections upon themselves as a nerve block notably the famous American surgeon William Halsted, cocaine soon became a psychosis inducing problem drug of compulsive abuse as it did for Freud’s friend, Dr. Fleischl-Marxow, who was addicted to morphine.
In light of the many pharmacological factors that would explain such discrepancies, not to mention our current drug abuse problems, it would seem advisable to study cocaine’s history carefully. More specifically, the times when cocaine was popularly viewed as a wonder drug, or as a “benign, useful tonic.” If the drug had once been widely used and praised, it would seem that the problems now encountered with it could be avoided. Indeed, if true, then such a study of such benign and beneficial uses would suggest ways to mitigate or eliminate our drug abuse problems. Given cocaine’s reoccurring indeed inevitable popularity, this approach would be more sensible then current ones.
Unfortunately though, the search for an alternative approaches for ultimately doing away with today’s deplorable situation surrounding cocaine is stymied by the orthodox stance against certain drugs. If something contradicts today’s favored definitions of cocaine as a problem, and its use as a “disease” called drug addiction, then it simply is not recognized. A good example of this approach to the drug is provided by the preface of the 1st edition of Mark S. Gold’s tome “800 COCAINE, widely promoted during the 1980s as “the book that answers all your questions about today’s fastest-growing drug problem,” and named for the U.S.A.’s 1st nationally promoted hotline for individuals who feel or were told that they had a drug abuse problem. The reader will discover that certain ideas are repeated throughout this book. This is deliberate. It is done to emphasize what I consider the key issues concerning cocaine. That it should not be regarded as a benign recreational drug. That it’s use can exact a terrible toll. That it can cause addiction. That there is no “cure” for cocaine addiction except permanent and total abstinence from its use. That it is better to say a firm “NO” to the drug than to have to deal with its destructiveness once it takes hold.
With little questioning, this line of thought has been widely repeated as the all encompassing view of “cocaine.” Regardless of how authoritative it may sound, this belief should not be seen, properly, as one that enshrines from drug researchers. More properly, they’re the products of drug abuse researchers whom base their opinions upon only what they look at: drug abuse. This distinction may seem unimportant, because its so rarely discussed, but it is vital.
Drug researchers, like the type usually reserved for legal drugs like caffeine or aspirin, generally stud drugs with the attitude that they have legitimate uses, even if taken on a regular basis. For such uses, the drug is studied so that the beneficial uses may be cataloged. Indeed, as this is the point of much drug research, such substances like aspirin and caffeine are tested under conditions that minimize their bad effects and maximize their good ones.
In contrast, drug abuse researchers, as their name suggest, pursue a different line of research operating on a different premise. Accordingly, the drugs are by definition substances of abuse, without legitimate uses. Consequently, this sort of research often seeks to prove any possible harms that may result from abusing the drug, though laboratory experiments designed to maximize these harms, often through massive overdoses of intravenous administered refined drugs.
Given the reality that not all illicit drug users are abusers, defining cocaine strictly as a substance of abuse is questionable. As a paper by the pharmacologist Dr. Ronald K. Siegel of UCLA on contemporary cocaine use concludes,
“the hypothesis that long term use of cocaine is inevitably associated with escalating dependency marked by more frequent patterns of use is not supported by these findings.”
From the standpoint of those who usually focus exclusively upon the worst segments of a bad situation though, it is certainly understandable how some do become conditioned into seeing things the way they do. As 800-COCAINE’s Mark S. Gold presents the perspective not of those who study drugs broadly, but rather the hard core abusers whom form a minority of the total population of illegal drug users.
Fortunately we are under no moral or spiritual obligation to limit ourselves to the orthodox perspective that views cocaine solely as a substance of abuse. Even if God gave them a list of every ingredient in all the plants in
The Hidden Essence of the Lady
Today’s virulent rhetoric asides, cocaine is an alkaloid – a nitrogen bearing molecule often containing a carbon ring that is synthesized from amino acids within living organisms – found within the leaves of the South American plant erythroxylon coca. A powerful central nervous stimulant and an anesthetic for people, cocaine is a Schedule II controlled substance by
Amongst these are a number of medical applications with an interesting twist upon one of the drug’s popular uses and forms under prohibition. For elderly people suffering from rheumatic arthritis who invariably lost much of their ability to move, intranasally administered Esterene worked where any of the conventional treatments failed. It gave them an increased range of motion, improving the consumer’s muscle, joint functions and strength, a situation all of the physicians present agreed was due to Esterene – sniffed freebase crack cocaine. Words that usually conjure up the image of the self destructive crack addict, their appearance here reminds us that words often have more then one meaning. A non-addictive medication that greatly improved the quality of life for patients, indeed freeing the patient discussed of her need to perpetually consume 12 aspirin a day, this type of medical cocaine did not induce excessive use because of the drug’s relatively slow rate of absorption. 3
Such positive uses may be surprising to those accustomed to the drug’s infamous reputation. The fact that cocaine is of the same family of drugs as caffeine and nicotine though may come as an even greater surprise given how differently they are popularly perceived. All are alkaloids found naturally occurring in plants. All serve as potent central nervous system stimulants, constrict the blood vessels, and act upon that part of the brain governing heartbeat, blood pressure and mood. Like any drug, their range of effects is no less broad than that of dosage. All three are psychoactive.
Judging by the ways these drugs are commonly spoken of, one would never know this. {Or, if they knew it, they still probably would not realize it]. Caffeine and nicotine innocuously, either as good or bad, caffeine for instance being an U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) allowable food additive, “generally regarded as safe up to six milligrams per fluid ounce.” 6 Cocaine, though is only addressed as a manifestation of evil. While good things are said about caffeine or nicotine, no one hears anything said good about cocaine.
Now
Popularly consumed through coffee, tea, kola and chocolate products, caffeine is taken by mouth and in the potency as found in each of its parent substances. Appearing in concentrations of around one percent within these substances, caffeine is diluted further through the popular use of the oral infusion; this is the practice of soaking these plant products in water, beverages such as coffee, tea and Kola beverages such as Coca-Cola that deliver roughly 50 to 100 milligrams of caffein per dose are overwhelmingly the popular mode of caffein use – aside from a relatively small minority that sometimes take caffeine in tablet form. Nicotine on the other hand is consumed differently. Sometimes it is absorbed through the mucous membrane through Tobacco chewing, or more directly through the lungs by smokers of cigarettes containing 0.1-1.0 milligrams of nicotine. Like caffein though, it is only taken more or less in its natural potency through tobacco products where tobacco is bred and processed to minimize the amount of the drug due to the toxicity of nicotine and tobacco’s other components.
In contrast, cocaine outside of
The Original Formula for the 90s
With few exceptions, today’s drugs and drug abuse researchers make little to no mention of the pharmacological variables concerning use and misuse of stimulant drugs. Instead, so as not to dare challenge the dominant attitudes of the day, cocaine is condemned time and time again. Yet one almost never heard a condemnation of the practice of putting refined stimulants up one’s nose.
Following the pretense of the prohibitionists undeniably requires us to either accept some interesting things about drugs, or the way they are comparatively perceived. By taking the notion that cocaine is the “bad” drug to its logical conclusion, this currently infamous stimulant would be “bad” even if only consumed in the manner we’re now accustomed to for caffeine or nicotine. Under this quantitative model perspective of an United States of America aghast at the prospect of 100 million cocaine users within its borders, chewing coca leaves or drinking infusions of coca including teas and soft drinks like the original 1890s formula (“90s Formula”) Coca-Cola would be viewed differently then the widespread legal consumption of tobacco leaf snuff (i.e. Skoals), coffee, tea and other caffeinated beverages like the “New Coke” as well as the aptly misnamed “Original Formula” variety. A preference for coca over tobacco or coffee cold be defined as “drug addiction”, as would the “need” to place imbibers of coca leaf based beverages or smokers of non tobacco coca leaf cigarettes into “drug treatment” centers. Unlike these caffeine and nicotine containing products, coca leaf products would be viewed as a serious “drug problem” as many would infer from cocaine’s strict definition as a problem drug. [This sort of “understanding” underlies the Coca-Cola corporation’s attitude to attempt to forget that the beverage ever included the cocaine alkaloid, never minding that the amounts included were never shown harmful.]
Given the focus of today’s discussions of drug abuse upon a drug’s identity, but never the way it is used, one apparently could consume either caffeine or nicotine as cocaine under prohibition without any fear of toxicity, psychosis, depressive rebound, compulsion or addiction. One cannot really know if these are the true beliefs of today’s medical orthodoxy. One can wonder, though, if that “government-appointed panel of experts” Vivarin claims declared its tiny 200 milligram caffein pills “as safe as coffee” would concern themselves with the supposed need to completely outlaw these currently licit alkaloid if sniffing or smoking NoDoz or Vivarin caffein tablets – let alone nicotine sulfate – ever became popular.
Of course either of these conclusions can be checked out by doing at least one of two things: forsake one’s favorite caffeinated beverage or cigarette in favor of purified caffein or nicotine – sniffed, smoked or injected; or check out the story and reality of coca. Whatever you do though, please don’t try caffeine or nicotine in forms comparable to those known for cocaine under prohibition. [Or, if so, use extreme caution, particularly with nicotine]. Few may view stimulants other than cocaine and the synthetic amphetamines as dangerous, indeed largely due to the interesting tendency of the prohibitionists to down play or overlook the potential hazards of licit drugs. However, any stimulant can be potent, habit forming poisons in sufficiently concentrated form, with history upon careful study, not necessarily indict the indirect, dilute ways of taking drugs, but rather the direct methods of using and abusing concentrated drugs.
If anything can be learned from the widespread use of products based upon coca leaf throughout the 50 years leading up to prohibition in 1914, consumer substances that presented the cocaine alkaloid comparably to the way the caffeine and nicotine alkaloids are carried in coffee or cigarettes were not the harmful substances today’s unequivocal stance against illicit drugs may lead one to believe. Like the universal practice of the oral infusion of coffee or tea, coca was most popularly taken in beverage form – or tonics as they were often called.
At the time, one man was generally recognized as perfecting this mode of coca use: Angelo Francois Mariani, with his wine of Coca Vin Tonique Mariani ala Coca de la Perou. Introduced to the enthusiastic approval of the vocal performers and their vocal instructors of the nearby Opera in 1863, Angelo Mariani and Vin Mariani ultimately became popular around the world. A one pint bottle of red wine from the south of France along the Garonne river, blended with an extract of two ounces of Mariani’s select blend of coca leaves, Vin Mariani not only enjoyed a spectacular sales success through the latter 1800s and into the early 1900s, but was highly regarded by the doctors who employed it. Indeed, for more then 30 years, Vin Mariani was the most widely prescribed medical preparation in the world. Soon followed by a host of imitators, including what later became today’s – albeit decocainized – Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola products. Coca products, most notably Vin Mariani, enjoyed perhaps their greatest sales growth in the
“more controllable, hence safer … least likely to produce toxicity or dependence than all the other plants or synthetics in … [its] category.”
Reckoning with Perception
If cocaine itself – as opposed to its white powder/rock manifestation today is a “bad” drug that must be strictly illegal, then why does it appear that conventional wisdom is wrong whenever we look at the drug in contexts similar drugs are accepted? Likewise, if prohibition’s main aim is to thwart or at least discourage drug abuse, then why does this appear to be a non-truth when we look at history prior to prohibition? Such are the contradictions that the prohibitionists can no longer ignore.
According to the prohibitionists, cocaine must be strictly illegal regardless of the form mainly because people are naturally inclined to favor concentrated white powers over natural plants. [!] According to Gabriel Nahas, man has always extracted from medicinal plants the biologically active molecules they contain, because they are easier to standardize, to store, to transport, and to apply for their specific and pharmacological properties. When it comes to plants which contain substances having an abuse potential, such as cocaine, the desire and power of man to extract the [targeted] psychoactive ingredient of the plant is considerably reinforced. Cocaine, which is contained in the coca leaf, affords the best example of the natural propensity of man to use and abuse any medicine containing this alkaloid. 8
Nonetheless, like Dr. Nahas’s assurances that tobacco and caffeine do not possess neuropsycho-toxicity, 9 none of this is borne out by the drug’s history.
Throughout 3,000 years of use in a climate where coca leaves were in great supply, no one was inclined to refine the leaves into pure cocaine base, let alone putting such a substance up their noses or into their veins. 10 This only occurred a little more then a century ago when some doctors and pharmacologists, in the mistaken belief that cocaine represented the entire range of coca’s desired effects, ignored the leaves [and the orally consumed whole leaf liquid extracts] in favor of that modern, shiny white powder, cocaine hydrochloride, that would be widely promoted during the 1880s in both intranasal and injectable forms respectively as a hay fever remedy or to calm hysterical women. As indicated by the various sales records, the problematic practices of sniffing, injecting, or smoking isolated cocaine was the choice of only a small minority of people before the coming of what is now called the regulatory era [of the post 1914 “war on [some] drugs”.
Indeed, there can be no doubt what brought about the changeover. Because it occurred against the backdrop of prohibition, some can attempt to argue that the crack epidemic was not spurred by prohibition, but rather contained by it. However because of the break between the time when the drug was legal and the time that it was not, it is plainly clear that the policies of the U.S. federal government were the crucial factor during the early 1900s responsible for switching over the bulk of cocaine use from harmless products as Vin Mariani and true original formula Coca-Cola to the concentrated hard drug. Perhaps nothing else better illustrates the before and after effects of Uncle Sam’s bureaucratic intervention. This started with the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 which illegalized the interstate shipment of many coca products under a clause prohibiting food and beverages containing any amount of the cocaine alkaloid, through the efforts of the American Medical Association and Harvey Wiley of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Under the frame work of the “model legislation” these groups proposed, laws were enacted in many states further restricting if not prohibiting the availability of coca products. At the time, such products were still legal medicinally. However this as a situation which was soon to change. Within the first year of the government crack down on coca, during which the USDA claimed the leaf to be a “menace to [the] public welfare,” coca leaf imports into the
So why is cocaine illegal? Combating drug abuse is supposedly the goal of drug prohibition, and is indeed the main reason the many support it. But since doing so replaced coca with crack, can such a policy by any stretch of the imagination be deemed as discouraging drug abuse? Nonetheless, while things do not work a they are supposed to in theory, people still act is if it does. Like a still committed communist, drug war proponents continue to call for the masses support, exhorting us to remain faithful to their faith. All we had to do, according to this popular 20th century mythology, was to let the state intervene in the natural affairs of people, all for everyone’s benefit- supposedly. However, such ventures were destined to fail because of their very nature. Given the broad view of cocaine’s history from coca to crack, is there really any valid reason why the beloved dogmas of Jack Lawn, Mark S. Gold, Gabriel Nahas and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency should remain so sacred and unchallenged?
Endnotes
1 Transcripts of the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control Hearings on Drug Legalization, September 28-29, 1988, p. 13
2 ibid, p. 149
3 Insight, “How
4 Gold, Mark S. 800 COCAINE, 1984, pp. ix-x
5 Ronald K. Siegel, Intoxication: Life in Pursuit of Artificial
6
7 Intoxication, p. 299-300
8 Cocaine: The Great White Plague, Nahas, Gabiel G., p. 282
9 Ibid, p.277
10 Reid, William A., Pan American Bulletin, “Coca – The Wonder Plant of the
See also by the same author published by the Drug Policy Foundation:
The Ever Changing Ever Confused Popular Conception of Cocaine
Cocaine Conversion: Onwards to Coca!
1 comment:
Congressman Dante B. Fascell, House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control, Hearings on the legalization of illicit drugs, September 29, 1988.But until now they can't control drugs dealing.
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