Cocaine: An Unauthorised Biography

From South American coca in the fifth century BC, to Queen Victoria’s endorsement of cocaine wine and Freud’s use of cocaine in his discoveries, to the discovery of “crack” in 1983, cocaine has played a very important political, economic and social role. In the US, in one year alone, cocaine-related business costs the best part of $125 cocaine as a commodity has an economic importance that far outweighs its intrinsic value. And now there’s a new strand to this story – the possible discovery of a vaccine. Is this the end of the line for cocaine? In “Cocaine”, Dominic Streatfeild sets out to discover not the history of organized drug crime, but the story of the drug itself. His research takes him from the arcane reaches of the British Library to the isolation cells of America’s most secure prisons; from the crack houses of New York to the jungles of Bolivia and Colombia.