A History of Cocaine: The Mystery of Coca Java and the Kew Plant (review)

Coca and its principal alkaloid, cocaine, have a strange place in global drug history. Most important psychoactive drug crops, like tobacco or opium, were originally grown in one hemisphere, and then became established in two: plants descended from Asian poppies now dot the Colombian Andes; offshoots of American tobacco grow in every inhabited continent. Coca seemed destined for a similar fate. After cocaine's local anesthetic properties were discovered in 1884, demand boomed. The Dutch expanded production in Java, which they had already turned into the world's major supplier of quinine; the Japanese started coca plantations on Taiwan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. Yet declining medical demand, international restrictions, and Japanese competition ruined the Dutch trade by the mid-1920s, and defeat and occupation put an end to the Japanese trade in the mid-1940s. Since World War II, virtually all of the world's coca has been produced (though not necessarily consumed) in South America, where cultivation of the plant originated.

Steven Karch, a forensic toxicologist who specializes in the effects of drug abuse on the heart, has an interest in the vanished Asian cocaine industry. His latest contribution, whose title suggests a narrative account, is actually a source reader. It consists of translations of three European theses: Joseph Nevinný's Das Cocablatt: Eine pharmakognostische Abhandlung (1886), Emma Reens's La Coca de Java: Monographie historique, botanique, chimique et pharmacologique (1919), and Theodor Walger's Die Coca: Ihre Geschichte, geographische Verbreitung und wirtschaftliche Bedeutung (1917). A glossary and three briefer documents on the coca trade round out the collection.

It is useful to have these sources available in English and under one cover; Reens's University of Paris thesis is an especially rich source. Karch does not, however, expound at any length on cocaine's history. He devotes most of his preface and introduction to criticizing the historical myopia of American drug warriors, who, he thinks, could learn by studying previous failures to substitute or suppress drug crops, interdict shipments, and secure international cooperation. Karch makes a historically based variant of the "push-down, pop-up" argument: "Coca will grow anywhere," he writes; "in the early 1900s more coca was grown in Java than in South America. If, for whatever reason, it became impossible to grow coca in Colombia or Peru, business would just move eastward, or perhaps to Africa" (pp. 2–3).

If Karch's Africa prediction comes to pass, then coca's history will have repeated itself: the crop will have been globalized twice, returning to significant bihemispheric cultivation after a six-decade gap. One can, however, imagine alternative scenarios. Cocaine could steadily lose ground to cheap synthetic stimulants. Legal pressure does not always produce push-down, pop-up results—sometimes it is "push down, move over." The switching contingency has grown with the ingenuity of pharmaceutical researchers, who have synthesized hundreds of new psychoactive drugs in the last century.