The history and medical use of cocaine in andean cocaine the making of a global drug by paul gootenb
Official Colombian figures estimate that the total hectares of eradication exceed U. The new commodity was highly desired, not by German pharmaceutical firms, but by Chilean and Cuban gangsters. Reviews Editorial reviews Publisher Synopsis This excellent book adds a definitive archive-based history of cocaine.
Gootenberg has written a history that will make history. As Paul Gootenberg shows in his rich, rewarding history of the Peruvian, and broader Andean, cocaine industry, the roots of this conflict go back much further.
Highly recommended. Meanwhile, the creation of alternative anesthetics, like eucaine and procaine, allowed medical professionals to prescribe safer substitutes for their patients.
Cuba emerged as an important transshipment point and processing center during this period.
As Gootenberg points out, the rise of repressive military regimes in Argentina and Brazil during the s had the ancillary effect of curtailing cocaine trafficking in both countries, providing opportunities for illicit entrepreneurs elsewhere, including Chile, which emerged as a major cocaine smuggling corridor during the s and early s.
With a keen eye for documenting the socio-economic, political, and cultural structures triggering the reformulation of cocaine into an illicit commodity.
If the past is prologue, this past, strikingly revealed by Gootenberg, is essential to comprehending the limitations, even futility, of the never-ending war on drugs.
The history and medical use of cocaine in andean cocaine the making of a global drug by paul gootenb
The impressive array of sources and new interpretations of the role of cocaine in Peruvian and global histories make this a must-read for scholars in a number of fields, including Latin American history and politics, global and comparative histories, and cultural and economic studies. Deserves a very wide audience, and will hopefully spark similar efforts in the drug and alcohol field. However, she said, the United States should implement a long-term solution centered on a development- and market-oriented approach to alternative crop production. This huge work untangles the multiple mechanisms of cocaine's social, local, and global construction, which transmuted a medical drug and commodity into a world menace with a war declared against it. In another favorable trend, the percentage of the cocaine industry's share of Colombia's GDP has gone down; as licit industries take over, illicit industries' influence on national politics declines. Between and , coca growers from Bolivia, cocaine processors from Chile and Cuba, and smugglers from all three countries, as well as Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, created a black market commodity chain. Bignon saw that cocaine sulfate produced in sufficient quantities in Peru could alleviate existing shortages in medicinal cocaine, a sought after global commodity. Preoccupied with heroin-addicted American soldiers returning from Vietnam and middle class hippies smoking pot, the Nixon administration failed to realize that this disruption would provide a critical opportunity for Colombian middlemen, already collaborating with Chilean traffickers as couriers, to expand their involvement in the trade dramatically. An exceptionally strong piece of scholarship.Such propaganda was music to the ears of Washington officials, eager as they were to prevent likeminded revolutions in neighboring countries, and willing to back anti-Communist military regimes that deposed democratic governments and violently suppressed civilian discontent.
Indispensable reading for graduate seminars on economic, cultural, and social history, and shall appeal not only to experts on Latin America but also to world historians and those interested in comparative history. Over the last 30 years, the central front in the U.