A Brief History of Cocaine: From Inca Monarchs to Cali Cartels: 500 Years of Cocaine Dealing (review)

This new edition of Steven B. Karch's A Brief History of Cocaine is notable for the quality and extent of the revisions from the first edition, which appeared in 1998. Karch has added several wholly new chapters and extensively revised most of the others. Indeed, the second edition is notable for the almost line-by-line edit of the first edition, which vastly improves the clarity of the work. The limited illustrations of the first edition have been replaced by a more extensive and well-chosen series of photographs, maps, and drawings. This is precisely the sort of comprehensive treatment that justifies a new edition.

A Brief History of Cocaine offers a very solid introduction to the early scientific and medical explorations of cocaine. Karch lays out in extensive detail the early history of coca use, its "discovery" by the West, and the patterns of medical and scientific inquiry into the coca leaf and its alkaloid, cocaine. In doing so, Karch tells a story that remains one of great interest not only to those interested in cocaine but also to all students of botanical investigations and the intersections of traditional drug-taking cultures and modern drug development and production.

As with the first edition, the emphasis remains on the individual scientists, doctors, and traders who built the modern cocaine enterprise. All the well-known figures linked to cocaine's history appear here. The figures most closely associated with the explosion of medical interest in cocaine in the mid-1880s—Sigmund Freud, Carl Koller, William Halsted—are well covered here. Karch's own medical background almost surely contributes to the thoughtful and insightful discussion of their work. The chapters on the early development and growth of coca cultivation for cocaine production are outstanding and, again, include fascinating discussions of notable figures like the chemist/adventurer Henry H. Rusby, who went to South America in 1885 at the behest of the Parke, Davis Company. The material on Dutch coca production on the island of Java, and on the Japanese cocaine trade, remains the best in print.

What Karch is not able to do is explain the social contexts that created the enormous consumer markets that cocaine has enjoyed for over a century. There is little space in this work devoted to explaining just how physicians in Europe and the United States rushed so quickly to embrace cocaine following the announcement of Koller's discovery of its utility as a topical anesthetic. There is even less attention paid to the consumer. Karch notes that the number of users at the end of the nineteenth century was growing, but there is precious little in the way of explanation. How did so many come to value cocaine and its effects, and how did they acquire and employ the drug? Other than the growth of supply, there is little explanation of demand here.

One unwelcome change to the new edition is the elimination of the endnotes. Without specific references, the reader is left to wonder just where to turn for documentation. There is an updated "further reading" section that incorporates some important recent scholarship, but it does not make an attempt at a comprehensive review.

The second edition boasts a subtitle not found in the first—"From Inca Monarchs to Cali Cartels: 500 Years of Cocaine Dealing"—that highlights the author's interest in the process and organization of cocaine production. The new preface reveals an interest in contemporary policy, but the book itself still does not cover cocaine's modern history. The Cali Cartels rate just two paragraphs in a new final chapter that devotes a mere eight pages to developments since World War II. Given Karch's eye for detail and knack for storytelling, this is something of a disappointment, and in view...