Feiling, a documentary filmmaker who has done much work in Colombia, turns to the country’s main illegal export. (In the opening chapter, we learn about the original 19th-century coca use: “The modern-day [Coke] can’s red and white livery, taken from the colours of the Peruvian flag, is the only reminder of Coca-Cola’s Andean origins.” Studying the cultivation, distribution, and use of cocaine, he probes the drug’s meteoric rise in sales and traces traffic from Colombian coca fields to Miami, Kingston, Tijuana, London, and New York. He follows consumers, traders, producers, police officers, doctors, and custom officials. Part One analyzes the drug economy: “a lifeline for plenty of jobless Americans. Driving a car loaded with cocaine from El Paso to Chicago can earn the driver $10,000.” Crack cocaine, a cheaper form of the drug, became a booming market in the 1980s, even spreading to rural America. By 1989, Jamaican gangs supplied crack to 47 U.S. cities, while the Bloods and the Crips ran West Coast crack houses. Part Two studies suppliers, smugglers, and law enforcement. Concluding chapters debate drug education, treatment programs, and legalization issues. Packed with facts and figures, this is a well-researched survey of the subject. (July)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
