About Cocaine, Part One

a cultural and historical ramble between source countries and consumer countries

Cocaine is back in the news again. Subsumed by the cloudier label “drugs”, as a way for the Trump administration to justify rocket strikes in that beta testing frontier zone known as “international waters.” Strikes against motor skiffs in the Caribbean Sea, carrying the illicit stimulant cocaine. Trump’s Tonkin Gulf incident, perhaps. Along with intending to prove via fait accomplit that the US portion of the Illicit Market, possibly to achieve the side benefit of providing the pretext for invoking domestic military action, martial law, and suspending civil liberties in the US.

At one time, i thought that cocaine might possibly have a low enough risk profile to be worth legalizing, i.e., no worse than hard liquor (i.e. pretty bad, but borderline).

But then I thought about the needles, and that baking soda chemistry process.

The problem being that there’s no way to remove that as an option.

And the shooters and speedballers and crack vapers always eventually show up. Always. Potentially accounting for 90% of the quantity demand, devoting themselves to self-destruction. Fiends. No joke. And eventually drawing more curious naive experimenters, some of whom will go on to repeat the experiment, and after that there’s no end to it.

So, cocaine has to stay illegal. Gangster market notwithstanding. The main thing is to deprive the clandestine of market control over less hazardous substances, like cannabis. The fewer the substances that can act as gateways to hard drugs, the better.

Cocaine is a hard drug, as I’ve made it clear above. That said, much of its worst harms depend on the mode of ingestion. Nasally inhaled or on the tongue, its stimulant effect is deceptively mild, and unlike amphetamines, snorted cocaine wears off within an hour or two. Many people who enjoy stimulants prefer cocaine because it wears off faster than other stimulants, like coffee or amphetamines. Many of them prefer the subtlety of the stimulation in comparison with the more jittery stimulants. And there are also some intranasal cocaine user who find cocaine stimulation to be a unique and exquisitely pleasurable experience.

I’m with the people who have experienced sniffing cocaine powder and found it to be overrated, with much of the value being the Statement. The Monetary Statement. The Status Messaging. Cocaine never did much for me. Which I suppose made my decision to abstain from using it or buying it an easy one, in July 1981. The reason I quit was an article in High Times magazine. The article was entitled “How The Cocaine Fascists Took Over Bolivia.” It was about the Cocaine Coup in Bolivia. By a neofascist military junta, in July 1980. The article recommended “boycotting Bolivian.” I didn’t have the income or the status entree to make any reliable discernment in that regard, so I took the suggestion one step further and boycotted the product. They’re all a bunch of crooks anyway- Peru, Chile, Argentina, Colombia. Overwhelmingly aligned with the extreme far right, although there were also Soviet Bloc-aligned cocaine labs in Chile and Peru in the 1970s and 1980s, and eventually Shining Path showed up, some Maoist crisis cult. All that money makes such a succulent sound. It’s all just one big ugly business.*

So I quit.

Like I said, I never could figure out what was so special about cocaine in the first place. I used it repeatedly but not frequently, much less constantly. There are people who really enjoy binging on cocaine who snort more coke in a long weekend than I have in my entire lifetime consumption, which took place over the course of 6-7 years. I quit over 44 years ago. My ultimate take on the cocaine experience was the same as Terence McKenna: “it doesn’t even get you as wired as a double espresso.” At least, that’s true in his case and mine. Other people think inhaling cocaine is special and awesome. I’ve known such people, and I know of such people. All I can think is, beware. And whatever you do, don’t start injection use or vaping cocaine base.

Intranasal users can get into plenty of trouble through that gradual mode of ingestion. I once knew someone who snorted multiple grams daily until they broke in serious hives. At which point a warning bell went off, and they dropped using it. Other people are slightly more controlled, and other less so. My limited observations have gotten me to consider sniffing cocaine as a binge habit, approximately equal to a night of drinking shots of whiskey. Anyone who has gotten into an evening of serious binge drinking is aware of the rules up front: after the second shot, you either walk away, of you drink until the end of the night. It’s out of the question to simply switch to water, four shots and three hours in. You just getting started. It’s that way with sniffing coke. You’re a new man, and within a half hour the new man wants a couple more lines. And so on. One the train gets rolling, you’re on a binge. Often further complicated by alcohol. It becomes continuous. This is barely tolerable foolishness, as long as you’re healthy and single, and you have a brake pedal for at least 4 days a week, although 25 days out of 30 is better. The sooner you get out the better, before it turns into a net loss. Most people lose some before they get out. Money. It’s an expensive game, and as empty as Gatsby’s friends. Some people use it for work, even though most of them would work better without it. Then there are the Rich, who are typically so backstopped by their money that even when they lose, they’re cushioned. So they can go for decades in that everyday habit zone. Snorting, I don’t know, half a gram a day, maybe. Drinking champagne, smoking a little this and that. They’re Rich, and they have their buzz finely crafted. For many years longer than strangers might suspect. Sometimes remaining in surprisingly good health.

This is one of the weird things about “hard drugs”: they aren’t strictly “poison.” Or at least, none of the staples of the illicit market in forbidden substances were poison until the superstrong opioids showed up. If the drugs were poison, they would have killed the user population off decades ago, in droves. But they aren’t safe, either. Some of them are lethal. Some people have hypersensitivities and allergies, and under usual Street conditions fast response to a crisis is not assured. But most people find that a given illegal drug will not kill them, at least not on its own.

I know most of this by reading. I recommend reading the biography of Chet Baker, Deep In A Dream, and you’ll get some idea of how much coke and heroin a skinny middle-aged human male can process in a 12-hour period without dying. And your jaw will drop.

That brings us to the issue of injecting cocaine. In my opinion, the only deal-breaker needed to keep the cocaine trade illegal, even given the criminal monopoly.

The effect of injected cocaine is not the same as intranasal cocaine. You can taste in through your nose as the concentrated cocaine bolus goes through your nasal tissues, and then you swoon. And then light up like a pinball machine. And there isn’t anything else, just your nerve endings, lit up like a lucite sculpture. That bell, ringing in your ears that subdivides and subdivides, and echoes and echoes and echoes, until it can’t be beat. And then it’s over.

Yeah. I tried it. Once. Never since. But I’ve seen needle users who injected themselves every seven minutes for seven hours, welts and bruises running over both of their arms like sewing machines at the end of the binge. And they still want more. And this really is the horror of cocaine. This is what took William Halstead, pioneer in neurosurgery and inventor of surgical devices that are still critically important today. Halstead only managed to get off cocaine by substituting morphine. A drug addiction that he found less demanding.

Many years later, the superb writer and physician Abraham Verghese wrote an amazingly affecting and troubling book, The Tennis Partner, about a gifted young surgeon he had gotten to know professionally and on the court. The two men became very close and lasting friends. And, as Verghese eventually learned, the man had nearly lost his medical license due to being caught with cocaine. He was a binge user, and his preferred way of enjoying cocaine was to inject it into his veins.

It’s been a few years, so I should re-read the book. But from what I can recall, Dr. Verghese marveled at how high functioning he was, during his time of occupational probation and forced abstention. There’s a lot of material about the young man’s positive character attributes. Until one day he just couldn’t suppress his craving to shoot cocaine any longer, and he went off into the junkie no-man’s land of the addicted to shoot his limit of cocaine. And eventually, he’s cornered by all of the consequences of his pariah status and his single-minded obsession with shooting coke, and the police get involved, and it all ends very tragically. Leaving Abraham Verghese, and those of us who have read the book, with some terribly thorny dilemmas, and an enormous sadness. Because what can you do? Ensure that the guy isn’t backed into a corner to be poked at with sticks, perhaps. Perhaps so that he can instead poke himself with needles on a monomaniacal quest for dopamine cascade euphoria, to the point of exhaustion? Or stroke, or heart attack, or death. Although, as I’ve said, some cocaine addicts can run through grams of the stuff on end for years on end. They will appear haunted, not happy or healthy. But they’ll survive enough to keep feeding their craving when they can.

The other deal-breaker of cocaine is freebase: rock, crack. The most sinister property of crack is that it gives an effect close to injection without the need for a hypodermic needle. Freebase cocaine is called freebase because that’s what it is: the free base form of cocaine, minus the hydrochloride that makes refined powder cocaine a salt. Get it? cocaine labs use cocaine sulfate paste—basuco—and refine it into an end product that’s purified as a salt, cocaine hydrochloride. That’s the usual from of cocaine that’s smuggled—uncut, up to 94% pure, compact and easy to divide and weigh for retail. It’s the compound used in medicine, as pharmaceutical cocaine.

Cocaine hydrochloride dissolves easily in water for injection, and it’s absorbed readily in mucosal tissues like the nasal passages. However, when cocaine HCl is heated, it burns. The melt point is too high for it to vaporize. At some point—perhaps as early as the 1970s—someone got the idea to do a simple chemical reaction to remove the hydrochloride radical. And when they did, the yield was freebase cocaine, with a melt point that made it easy to vaporize when heat was applied. Thereby making it possible to get a high as bell-ringingly intense as mainlining it just be putting it into a glass pipe or pipette. And that’s when cocaine for the masses became a retail market.

It’s like this. If someone snorts 40mg of the best uncut cocaine- 1/25 of a gram— that’s just about the bare minimum to feel anything at all. The nose and throat passages absorb cocaine, but slowly. But if someone vapes 40mg of freebase, gongs start going off. There’s a coast, and a rush, and a delicious tickle. And then it’s over, faster than shooting. And then you want to do it again.

I don’t really know what vaping cocaine (aka “smoking crack”) feels like. I’ve never used it—voluntarily. I’ve had it passed to me in a pipe. When I tasted it, I exhaled right away. I got just enough of a taste to get the beginning of a hair-raising skin sensation and an auditory tingle that resembles nitrous oxide. And then it was over. I didn’t seek after it. But I’ve been around people who did. It’s a habit-forming drug. Even moreso than a night of snorting cocaine every half-hour. The thing about crack is that powder cocaine is convivial. But with crack, the internal boom of the rush is the central attraction. As a result, an evening of crack often narrows down to the experiential contours of participating in a lab experiment. And both smoking crack and shooting coke have a way of turning into solitary pursuits. I once read about someone who got so obsessed with getting the perfect coke rush that they weren’t satisfied until they went into a seizure, like a petit mal epileptic seizure, jerking on the floor in sensory ecstasy. Eventually, they bought a full-length mirror. So they could take a massive vape hit of cocaine, blast off—and then, just to be sure it was happening, to know for sure that they were properly getting off, they’d look into the mirror while they were twitching and spasming, and register visual confirmation that they were, in fact, getting that high.

Do you hear what I’m saying? Cocaine is no longer a high-strung purebred puppy with high maintenance expectations, when it goes that far. It’s a devouring wolf. It’s a howling fiend.

Despite that scary precipice, despite the massive drop from running out of crack, the wired hours of cocaine after effect that isn’t the least bit enjoyable, despite all of the depression and letdown, as long as a crack user can sleep, they have a chance to allow the craving to fade. Some people keep it down to a weekly or a monthly binge. But eventually, you either have to give it up or go all in. And that’s an abusive drug. Not the fault of the dealers, though. Every drug addict likes a good reliable plug. I’ve never met anyone who cursed their dealer’s existence. Retail dealers are like other freelance businessmen, some of them get good reputations and are known for their being honest and playing true to their game, living by a code. They’re criminals, okay? They know it. Few of them are outright heartless, especially not to their customers. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a sad, wrong scene, for the most dysfunctional and habituated. But it isn’t a terror plot. It’s a big ugly business, is all.

Because of the horrible Mr. Hyde side of cocaine—the injection use and the crack—I’m wary of legalizing cocaine. But it isn’t as easy a call as it might appear. Because criminally prohibiting the market comes with costs, too. Costs that can’t be avoided.

The most obvious cost is that criminal profiteers are granted a de facto monopoly over the trade. The illicit drug game can be quite lucrative, and vice also has its status privileges and advantages. It’s a dangerous game and an unscrupulous one. But some people view it as a calculated risk—understanding the liability of being convicted and doing time—up to life behind bars, eventually—and deciding that it’s worth it anyway. Prohibit a drug like cocaine, and it turns into one of the chief attractions of the demimonde. And the decadent rich, for many of them it’s the icing on the cake of their sybaritic lifestyles.

In the oh-so-naive American 1970s, much of the attraction of cocaine had to do with the chase- the hunt for the purest product. Cocaine in the 1950s and 1960s was so rare of a mass market item that annual Customs seizures were measured in ounces. From my reading, I’d venture that quite a bit more made it on to the street. But it was a very cloak-and-dagger business. Only the elites— of show business, decadent wealth, and the vice trade—got the uncut goods, or anything close to them. For the common custom, when cocaine was available at all, its purity in the 1960s illicit street markets—the same ones that retailed heroin—was only around 10%. But it was taken for granted that it would be used intravenously. Then, toward the end of the 1960s, cocaine broke out of its niche markets, and began to be found in the rock musician scene and as an item in the buffet of substances available in the the era of Baby Boomer substances exploration. The supply began showing up in increasing quantities, in fits and starts. At the outset, street cocaine was often diluted, and access to high quality cocaine was a ticket to easy money and high status. It was mostly a freebooter trade for most of the 1970s—relatively small quantities, kilos, often smuggled brazenly, in an era when American law enforcement was simply outflanked, and often unaware. Still, the American drug counterculture between 1967 and 1973 was almost entirely about pot. Cannabis sativa. Marijuana and hashish was the staple, occasionally with some occasional availability of psychedelics and pills, uppers and downers. A mycelial proliferation of retail drug outlets, connecting, disconnecting, reconnecting, interconnecting. Very opportune for the introduction of other illicit products. Cocaine.

As someone who is unimpressed and indifferent to the effects of cocaine, I admit to puzzlement for how it caught on so fast in the 1970s. Of course, I wasn’t anywhere near the haut monde of the era, either. And in the world of high rollers, rock stars, rock band tours, counterculture magazines, cocaine took off like a rocket. I remain puzzled, yet and still. Part of it still seems like a social mania to me- like, “cocaine is the ultimate high, because everyone says so.” Yeah. And if you found the real top-shelf product, it was $100/gram. At those prices, isn’t there some extra motivation to view it as extra awesome? It’s a statement, like caviar.I enjoy the taste of good caviar, but it’s basically salty fish eggs. I’ve had more delicious food in my life, in greater amounts, for less money. But, Consumerism. Which is another reason why so many original true to the game hippies disdained it. As ethical antimaterialists, they were on to the hype. That said, other original hippies who found themselves dealing with windfall cash money in their pocket went after cocaine like the elixir of immortality. Rock musicians got, well, whatever they got out of it. Some of the music played under the influence in that era was pretty doggone good. They probably could have played it almost as well if they hadn’t been coked up, but that’s an untestable counterfactual. I’m just considering what went on. What happened. I also know that in the 1970s, Willie Nelson would banish anyone on his tour found to be using or selling cocaine. Willie Nelson is a wise man. But Willie’s Ethos did not prevail in most of the rest of the grand era of buzzed craftiness of the 1970s. And there had been some shifts in the conditions of the supply side of the market.

Specifically, Mexico—originally the source for the overwhelming percentage of marijuana supplied to US markets—had been subjected to the first really intrusive crackdown in the countryside, ever. Both the Federales and the military devastated the highland marijuana patches. This led the expanding industry of smugglers supplying US markets to look further afield. First to Jamaica, although the US global War on Drugs crusade followed up its Mexican eradication efforts with Operation Buccaneer, directed at shutting down the marijuana trade. The smugglers- by now thinking larger and larger scale, multiton loads of marijuana shipped on freighters--were undeterred. They had discovered a mota bonanza in the South American nation of Colombia. And coincidentally, conveniently, or however, Colombia also unlocked the gateway to shipping out another illicit substance that was gaining increasing consumer interest in the States: cocaine. Extracted, reduced, refined and purified from the leaves of the coca bush,a hollylike plant native to the altiplano of the Andes.

Marijuana was not the only commodity that had gone through some shifts in terms of the host territories for the supply source, and the scale of the amounts exported. Cocaine—formerly a boutique item—was on track to go mass market to north American consumers. The key to expanding the supply was in expanding the plantings. And as it happened, coca bushes proved to be quite adaptable to geography and altitudes outside of its traditional habitat in the highland Andes. In fact, they grew even better and more lush in lowland areas, even in cleared jungles. The first massive expansion in the plantings of the coca crops required to produce the raw material for pure cocaine occurred in Bolivia, in the lowland Chapare province. Chapare was the eastern Bolivian home of the “agricultural elite” of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, large landowners and planters. Very right-wing; Nazi fugitives Klaus Barbie- onetime head of the SS in Marseilles— and Fritz Schwend, a wily and elusive Nazi scammer and counterfeiter, had made their home in Santa Cruz. Also very allied with the right-wing leader Hugo Banzer Suarez, who had seized power in a military coup in 1971.

Stay tuned for part 2

(elided with the synthetic opioid “fentanyl” that is lethal in 0.2 milligram doses, as compared with a lethal overdose amount of over 1 gram, for cocaine. there are several kinds of fentanyl, including at least one, carfentanil, 100 times as potent as fentanyl itself. Lethan dose measured as 2 one-hundredths of a milligram.)

(I don’t recall the byline, but some years later, in the 1990s, I realized that the source of many of the informational details had to be DEA agent Michael Levine. A fact that was confirmed when I read James Dunkerley’s excellent history of Bolivia, Rebellion In The Veins.)

(okay, I took two or three freebies, to the usual so-what effect.)

(And heaven help the fool who can hold their liquor, because that means that they have a tolerance.)

(Purified cocaine is also sensitive to chemical degradation is not stored in a cool, dry place.)

(40mg of injected pure cocaine is also a real roller coaster, but it all stays in the bloodstream, so it doesn’t wear off quite as fast.)

If anyone wants to read a heavily romanticized account of the incredible weightless cocaine-fueled sensory hedonism and fast money of the 1970s, read Snowblind, by Bill Clinton’s old college roommate, Robert Sabbag.

(Until they found themselves with tens of thousands of dollars in profits from their sinsemilla patches, and no way to save or invest it.)

I’m sure he knows that once coke makes its presence known, it’s only a matter of time before the needles show up.