Cocaine Nation

by Thomas Feiling

Overview

Cutting through the myths about the white trade, this is the story of cocaine as it's never been told before.

Cocaine is big business and getting bigger. Governments spend millions on a losing war against it, yet it’s still the drug of choice in the West.

In Cocaine Nation, Tom Feiling travels the trade routes from Colombia via Miami, Kingston, and Tijuana to London and New York. Cutting through the myths about the white trade, this is the story of cocaine as it’s never been told before.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781605987569
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	02/15/2012
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	356
File size:	582 KB

About the Author

Tom Feiling is an award-winning documentary filmmaker. He spent a year working in South America where he made Resistencia: Hip-Hop in Colombia, which won numerous awards at film festivals around the world. He now lives in London where he is a director for ‘Justice for Colombia,’ which defends human rights in Colombia. Cocaine Nation is his first book.

Editorial Reviews

An impassioned and wide-ranging if occasionally jumbled survey of "the white trade" and its enemies…This domestic tale of destruction has been well chronicled by journalists, social scientists and addicts-turned-memoirists. What sets Feiling's book apart is his analysis of how America's insatiable appetite for narcotics and its zealous determination to quash those cravings have spread misery and violence across the globe.
—The New York Times

Robert Perkinson

Impassioned and wide-ranging.... Feiling vividly describes the supply side of the cocaine business.... he argues convincingly that the remedy promoted most aggressively by the United States has proved far worse than the disease.

The New York Times Book Review

A very addictive book.

Metro [London]

Tom Feiling may well be the new Paul Theroux. He has written a vivid, argumentative, and arresting book. He marshals his evidence with a calm, elegant clarity.

The Observer (London)

Tom Feiling may well be the new Paul Theroux. He has written a vivid, argumentative, and arresting book. He marshals his evidence with a calm, elegant clarity. The power of Feiling’s book is to show that this appalling situation has been created by a century of United States-led errors.

The Observer [London]

An important study of the cultivation, usage, and suppression of cocaine. The book reads like a dramatic dispatch from the front line of a battle that can never be won.

Financial Times

An important study of the cultivation, usage, and suppression of cocaine. The book reads like a dramatic dispatch from the front line of a battle that can never be won.

Financial Times

Documentary filmmaker Feiling delivers a harrowing treatise on the seemingly invincible cocaine industry. The author makes an important contribution to the general understanding of this popular stimulant by dispensing the history and lore surrounding the mythical coca leaf and addressing abuse, transport and policy issues alongside hopeful solutions. Cocaine's ascent to popularity is accentuated by the mention of Abraham Lincoln's purchase of a coca wine product called "Cocoaine" in 1860, along with the rise of the euphorically addictive "Mariani wine." Surprisingly, writes Feiling, it was alcohol consumption that worried officials most as it widely surpassed cocaine in becoming the No. 1 "terrible threat" to the general public. The emergence and attractiveness of smoking crack cocaine is attributed to the drug's triple threat of availability, affordability and "the most intense sense of being alive the user will ever enjoy." Feiling scrutinizes drug policies, anti-drug initiatives, stringent sanctions and prohibition tactics with crisp, insightful rhetoric, commenting that while the "primordial conflict between good and evil" waged between police and drug traffickers is honorable and necessary, its efficacy remains questionable. The author notes that the countless American agencies charged with curtailing the drug's interchange have created "institutionalized buck-passing on a global scale." The drug's infiltration into schools and workplaces poses a threat, as well, to an emerging generation, damaging economic stability as much, Feiling contends, as the legalization mentality does. The author's travels to Colombia, Mexico, America and Jamaica provide a panoramic view of the many locales where cocaine is processed, shipped and negotiated. Feiling also includes interviews with drug dealers, cocaine addicts, traffickers and law-enforcement officials, all of whom have varying opinions on cocaine's effect on the national psyche. An arresting, fact-laden crash course on one of America's recreational drugs of choice. Agent: Broo Doherty/Wade & Doherty Literary Agency

Kirkus Reviews