Drugs and Society: Cocaine

CJ Trowbridge

2020-06-23

Drugs and Society

Section 8 – Reading Response: Cocaine

• coke: the history and truth of cocaine
  • Cocaine is snorted, smoked, or injected
  • Coocaine is addictive
  • Cocaine is often cut with many other things
  • Biopharmacology
    • Reuptake inhibitor for serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine
  • Second most popular drug in the world after marijuana
  • Natural substance found in the coca plant
  • South American cultures have used cocaine since ancient times
  • Conquistadors used taxes on cocaine to fund their conquests
  • Cocaine was isolated and synthesized in the nineteenth century in Germany
  • Vin Mariani was a wine sold with cocaine mixed in
  • Coca cola started as a cocaine syrup
  • Companies sold needles full of cocaine in drug stores, ready to inject into your veins
  • Sherlock holmes did a lot of cocaine in the stories
  • Initially white people thought cocaine could improve black neighborhoods and marketed it there for that purpose.
  • Later white people decided it would make black people “worse” and banned it, mass incarcerating the people they had just pushed it on.
• uber cocaine
  • Freud describes his experience of using cocaine
  • He recommends what we would today call a point (0.1g) as an effective dose.
  • He concludes that it is not harmful to the body if used in moderation.
  • He says alcohol is far more harmful than cocaine
  • He goes on to recommend cocaine as a possible cure to several medical problems, and as an aphrodisiac.
• what the crack baby epidemic tells us about the opioid epidemic
  • The racist claim that black people are more likely to be addicted to crack was used to justify eugenics arguments and the sterilization of black women.
  • Babies can be born with chemical addiction if their mothers use drugs while pregnant.
    • With treatment, they can go on to live happy and healthy lives
  • “Crack Baby” is a racist term used to dehumanize black children by implying they are somehow more likely to be born with chemical addiction and then go untreated, and live hopeless lives of addiction.
  • It builds on the false idea that once someone uses a drug, they will always be addicted and incapable of personal growth. Therefore, the argument goes, babies born with chemical addiction can not become functional members of society.
  • These claims have been thoroughly debunked, but they are still commonly used and assumed as true in racist arguments.
• Crack Babies: Twenty years later
  • Children exposed to crack during the epidemic were demeaned and dehumanized
  • Many racist people used this idea to argue that black children could never become healthy and functioning members of society.
  • The reality is that these children are growing up to lead normal lives.
  • The same things are never said of nicotine which kills far more people.
    • Alcohol, etc.
  • Many false claims were made about inevitable future problems with children born to parents who had addiction.
    • These false claims were based on facts about fetal alcohol syndrome.
    • The evidence shows that while cocaine use by pregnant mothers does not cause brain damage in children; alcohol and nicotine by contrast cause extreme brain damage in children.
  • Alcoholic parents have more responsible rearing practices than crack addicts, but children born to alcoholics have extreme brain damage while children born to crack addicts have normal brains.
    • This leads to better outcomes for children born to crack addicts versus alcoholics.
  • The Rational Choices of Crack Users
    • Like other scientists, [Carl Hart] hoped to find a neurological cure to addiction, some mechanism for blocking that dopamine activity in the brain so that people wouldn’t succumb to the otherwise irresistible craving for cocaine, heroin and other powerfully addictive drugs.
    • “Eighty to 90 percent of people who use crack and methamphetamine don’t get addicted,” said Dr. Hart. “And the small number who do become addicted are nothing like the popular caricatures.”
    • At the start of each day, as researchers watched behind a one-way mirror, a nurse would place a certain amount of crack in a pipe — the dose varied daily — and light it. While smoking, the participant was blindfolded so he couldn’t see the size of that day’s dose.
      • Then, after that sample of crack to start the day, each participant would be offered more opportunities during the day to smoke the same dose of crack. But each time the offer was made, the participants could also opt for a different reward that they could collect when they eventually left the hospital. Sometimes the reward was $5 in cash, and sometimes it was a $5 voucher for merchandise at a store.
      • When the dose of crack was fairly high, the subject would typically choose to keep smoking crack during the day. But when the dose was smaller, he was more likely to pass it up for the $5 in cash or voucher.
    • “They didn’t fit the caricature of the drug addict who can’t stop once he gets a taste,” Dr. Hart said. “When they were given an alternative to crack, they made rational economic decisions.”
    • When methamphetamine replaced crack as the great drug scourge in the United States, Dr. Hart brought meth addicts into his laboratory for similar experiments — and the results showed similarly rational decisions. He also found that when he raised the alternative reward to $20, every single addict, of meth and crack alike, chose the cash. They knew they wouldn’t receive it until the experiment ended weeks later, but they were still willing to pass up an immediate high.
    • “The key factor is the environment, whether you’re talking about humans or rats,” Dr. Hart said. “The rats that keep pressing the lever for cocaine are the ones who are stressed out because they’ve been raised in solitary conditions and have no other options. But when you enrich their environment, and give them access to sweets and let them play with other rats, they stop pressing the lever.”
    • So why do we keep focusing so much on specific drugs? One reason is convenience: It’s much simpler for politicians and journalists to focus on the evils of a drug than to grapple with the underlying social problems.
    • Hart also puts some of the blame on scientists. “Eighty to 90 percent of people are not negatively affected by drugs, but in the scientific literature nearly 100 percent of the reports are negative,” Dr. Hart said. “There’s a skewed focus on pathology. We scientists know that we get more money if we keep telling Congress that we’re solving this terrible problem. We’ve played a less than honorable role in the war on drugs.”
  • prison and the poverty trap
    • Why are so many American families trapped in poverty?
    • For most of their daughters’ childhood, Mr. Harris didn’t come close to making the minimum wage. His most lucrative job, as a crack dealer, ended at the age of 24, when he left Washington to serve two decades in prison, leaving his wife to raise their two young girls while trying to hold their long distance marriage together.
    • “Basically, I was locked up with him,” she said. “My mind was locked up. My life was locked up. Our daughters grew up without their father.”
    • Among African-Americans who have grown up during the era of mass incarceration, one in four has had a parent locked up at some point during childhood. For black men in their 20s and early 30s without a high school diploma, the incarceration rate is so high — nearly 40 percent nationwide — that they’re more likely to be behind bars than to have a job.
    • No one denies that some people belong in prison. Mr. Harris, now 47, and his wife, 45, agree that in his early 20s he deserved to be there. But they don’t see what good was accomplished by keeping him there for two decades, and neither do most of the researchers who have been analyzing the prison boom.
    • The number of Americans in state and federal prisons has quintupled since 1980, and a major reason is that prisoners serve longer terms than before. They remain inmates into middle age and old age, well beyond the peak age for crime, which is in the late teenage years — just when Mr. Harris first got into trouble.
    • After dropping out of high school, Mr. Harris ended up working at a carwash and envying the imports driven by drug dealers. One day in 1983, at the age of 18, while walking with his girlfriend on a sidewalk in Washington where drugs were being sold, he watched a high-level dealer pull up in a Mercedes-Benz and demand money from an underling.
      • “I’m watching the way he carries himself, and I’m standing there looking like Raggedy Ann. My girl’s looking like Raggedy Ann. I said to myself, ‘That’s what I want to do.’ ”
    • Within two years, he was convicted
      • He says he went into the apartment, in the Shaw neighborhood, to retrieve $4,000 worth of crack stolen by one of his customers, and discovered it was already being smoked by a dozen people in the room. “I just lost my cool,” he said. “I grabbed a lamp and chair lying around there and started smacking people. Nobody was hospitalized, but I broke someone’s arm and cut another one in the leg.”
    • An assault like that would have landed Mr. Harris behind bars in many countries, but not for nearly so long. Prisoners serve significantly more time in the United States than in most industrialized countries. Sentences for drug-related offenses and other crimes have gotten stiffer in recent decades, and prosecutors have become more aggressive in seeking longer terms — as Mr. Harris discovered when he saw the multiple charges against him.
    • Eleven years after her husband went to prison, Ms. Hamilton followed his advice to divorce, but she didn’t remarry. Like other women in communities with high rates of incarceration, she faced a shortage of potential mates. Because more than 90 percent of prisoners are men, their absence skews the gender ratio. In some neighborhoods in Washington, there are 6 men for every 10 women.
      • “With so many men locked up, the ones left think they can do whatever they want,” Ms. Hamilton said. “A man will have three mistresses, and they’ll each put up with it because there are no other men around.”
      • Epidemiologists have found that when the incarceration rate rises in a county, there tends to be a subsequent increase in the rates of sexually transmitted diseases and teenage pregnancy, possibly because women have less power to require their partners to practice protected sex or remain monogamous. When researchers try to explain why AIDS is much more prevalent among blacks than whites, they point to the consequences of incarceration, which disrupts steady relationships and can lead to high-risk sexual behavior. When sociologists look for causes of child poverty and juvenile delinquency, they link these problems to the incarceration of parents and the resulting economic and emotional strains on families.
      • Some families, of course, benefit after an abusive parent or spouse is locked up. But Christopher Wildeman, a Yale sociologist, has found that children are generally more likely to suffer academically and socially after the incarceration of a parent. Boys left fatherless become more physically aggressive. Spouses of prisoners become more prone to depression and other mental and physical problems.
      • “Education, income, housing, health — incarceration affects everyone and everything in the nation’s low-income neighborhoods,” said Megan Comfort, a sociologist at the nonprofit research organization RTI International who has analyzed what she calls the “secondary prisonization” of women with partners serving time in San Quentin State Prison.
    • This social disorder may ultimately have the perverse effect of raising the crime rate in some communities, Dr. Clear and some other scholars say. Robert DeFina and Lance Hannon, both at Villanova University, have found that while crime may initially decline in places that lock up more people, within a few years the rate rebounds and is even higher than before.
    • The benefits of incarceration are especially questionable for men serving long sentences into middle age. The likelihood of committing a crime drops steeply once a man enters his 30s.
    • “A lot of the men have been away so long that they’re been crippled by incarceration,” she said. “They don’t how to survive in the community anymore, and they figure it’s too late for someone in their 40s to start life over.”
    • “People who go to prison would have very low wages even without incarceration,” said Dr. Western, the Harvard sociologist and author of “Punishment and Inequality in America.” “They have very little education, on average, and they live in communities with poor job opportunities, and so on. For all this, the balance of the social science evidence shows that prison makes things worse.”
    • Western and Becky Pettit, a sociologist at the University of Washington, estimate, after controlling for various socioeconomic factors, that incarceration typically reduces annual earnings by 40 percent for the typical male former prisoner.
    • DeFina and Hannon, the Villanova sociologists, calculate that if the mass incarceration trend had not occurred in recent decades, the poverty rate would be 20 percent lower today, and that five million fewer people would have fallen below the poverty line.
  • the new drug highway
    • there has been an explosion in the number of boats, sometimes carrying more than a tonne of cocaine, making the journey across the Pacific Ocean to feed Australia’s growing and very lucrative drug habit.
    • Hundreds of kilograms of cocaine have washed up on remote Pacific beaches, ships laden with drugs have run aground on far-flung coral reefs, and locals have discovered huge caches of drugs stored in underwater nets attached to GPS beacons.
    • “Draw a direct line between Bogotá and Canberra and it goes straight through the islands,” says Dr Andreas Schloenhardt, professor of criminal law at the University of Queensland.
      • Caught in the middle are countries such as Fiji, which the Guardian visited as part of a series investigating the Pacific drug highway. Other countries affected include Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, Tonga and New Caledonia, whose waters and beaches are being used as storage grounds for billions of dollars worth of illicit drugs.
    • In 2004, police seized 120kg of cocaine on a beach in Vanuatu, a bust the AFP heralded as “the biggest such haul in the Pacific nation’s history”. Nine years later, police made a bust involving more than six times this amount.
    • Australia and New Zealand have the highest rates of per capita cocaine use of any in the world
      • Australians and New Zealanders also pay more for the drug (about AU$300 or £180 per gram) than those anywhere else in the world, making it a lucrative market.
    • There is no data collected in Fiji about drug use or addiction. There is no rehab centre in Fiji, no methadone clinic, no addiction health specialists, not even a Narcotics Anonymous meeting to be found. Collingwood says there is also no understanding of addiction as an illness.
      • “No one has recovered here, there’s no such thing,” Collingwood says. “I know heaps of people here who want to do it, they just don’t know what to do.”
    • “We cover one-third of the world’s mass,” says Tevita Tupou from the Oceanic Customs Organisation, waving toward the map. Tupou checks off challenges on his fingers. “Porous borders, maritime borders, geographical spread, limited resources. That’s our operating environment.” He laughs. “Where do you start?”
    • “You cannot eradicate the issue of drugs, because there will always be a demand, there’s always money to be made out of it, but we can make it hard for them,” he says. “That’s our endgame … the only thing we can do is just make crime random.”
  • Mexico’s Drug War
    • Mexican authorities have been waging a bloody war against drug trafficking organizations for more than a decade with limited success.
    • Over the last decade, the U.S. government has committed more than $2 billion in funding and intelligence resources to supplement Mexico’s counternarcotics efforts, but Washington’s primary focus has been stanching the flow of drugs into the United States and bolstering domestic law enforcement.
      • Meanwhile, gradual moves have been made at the U.S. state level toward legalization and decriminalization of marijuana, one of the primary substances involved in the drug war.
    • Mexican drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) are the largest foreign suppliers of heroin, methamphetamines, and cocaine to the United States, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
      • Mexican suppliers are responsible for most heroin and methamphetamine production, while cocaine is largely produced in Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru, and then transported through Mexico.
      • Mexican cartels are also leading manufacturers and suppliers of Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid many times more potent than heroin. U.S. seizures of the drug have soared in the last five years.
    • The cartels also produce and smuggle vast quantities of marijuana into the United States, but legalization of the drug in some U.S. jurisdictions has diminished cartel profits. As a result, experts note that DTOs are shifting their focus to harder drugs like heroin.
    • Calderon declared war on the cartels shortly after taking office in 2006. Over the course of his six-year term, he deployed tens of thousands of military personnel to supplement and, in many cases, replace local police forces. Under his leadership, the Mexican military, with U.S. assistance, captured or killed twenty-five of the top thirty-seven most wanted drug kingpins in Mexico.
      • This strategy splintered the small number of large organizations into a huge number of small organizations. Now instead of twenty or thirty kingpins, there are a hundred or more, and the smaller groups are resorting to more aggressive and violent tactics like assassinations and kidnappings to grow their revenue and influence.
      • Since this strategy began, homicides in Mexico have doubled.
    • The next president continued the policy, and tens of thousands of civilians have disappeared or been murdered since he took office.
    • Mass protests erupted across the country in 2014 after forty-three students disappeared in the town of Iguala, in the state of Guerrero, following deadly clashes with local police. Mexican investigators found that the police handed the students over to a local drug gang at the behest of the mayor, who had ties to the gang.
    • Through the Merida Initiative, the United States has committed to providing approximately $2.5 billion in funding, technical assistance, and intelligence over more than a decade to increase Mexico’s institutional capacity to address drug trafficking. The United States has provided information and equipment that has helped Mexican authorities capture several high-profile traffickers, including Guzman.
    • Trump has shifted focus to tactics we already know don’t work like building walls.
    • The future is uncertain, but there is no indication that things will get better.
  • why is coca production on the rise in Columbia
    • Early March, 2017: The United States government and the United Nations announce large increases in the amount of coca being cultivated in Colombia.
    • the Colombian Minister of Foreign Affairs blames the growth on the machinations of drug trafficking gangs and greedy peasants
    • According to the text of the peace agreement the government should be weaning campesinos (peasant farmers) off growing coca by first offering incentives to grow alternative crops. Nevertheless, forced manual eradication takes place across the country, and the Colombian government has announced the largest cultivation target in its history: 100,000 hectares.
    • In the first few months of the year more than 40 “blockades” are recorded: eradication teams are prevented from working by communities who demand the assistance they have been promised. The government responds with the specialised police force, the ESMAD, who disperse the protesters with tear gas and rubber bullets. In one case the police arrest protesting farmers and the community responds by detaining 15 officers for 24 hours.
    • The government’s own comptroller general recognises that “after almost 200 years of reforms and counter-reforms, and many billions of pesos invested, the same crisis reigns in agriculture”(pdf). The “agricultural policy crisis”, noted the comptroller general’s report, is the result of “the lack of political will on the part of the state to make viable the campesino economy”.
    • President Juan Manuel Santos and his administration have adopted reforms that officials say will lead to a more equitable distribution of land. But these policies “in reality display the contrary”, notes the report. Like his predecessors, Santos is committed to the promotion of “exclusive trading strategies, based in ‘mega-projects’ which don’t solve the underlying problem”. Instead, they could “consolidate and deepen even further both displacement and concentration of land”.
    • The result of such policies? Rural poverty and backwardness are by every measure a national scandal. Today in the countryside one in ten people cannot read or write. One in five children between five and 16 years of age do not attend school. Three quarters of people aged between 17 and 24 are without access to an educational institution. In some regions four out of every five people live below the poverty line
    • The Free Trade Agreement with the United States correlates closely with the beginning of the rise in cultivation. This directly caused around 1.8 million farmers to suffer a significant drop in their income, leaving them with few options except migration, joining the FARC, or growing coca. “As was entirely predictable,” reported the Colombian press one year after the treaty came into effect, “the initial damage is occurring in agriculture, where the country’s tariffs have been relinquished and US subsidised goods accepted.”
    • The government publicly attributes coca cultivation to the machinations of peasants, the guerrilla and criminal groups, and Santos has even felt comfortable enough to claim that the demobilisation of the FARC will mean Colombia can finally become drug-free.
    • Inside Colombia, political activists, community leaders and human rights defenders recognise the source of the problem and call for fundamental changes in the nature of the society. They are currently being murdered at a rate of around eleven a month. A political party that includes a new economic model in its charter has had more than 120 of its members murdered in the past five years.
    • What is called “counter-narcotics funding” has in fact been funding for the Colombian military and police, which are now both modernised and enormous. Around 70 percent of Plan Colombia’s “counter-narcotics” funding actually never leaves the United States because it used to purchase arms and equipment.
  • Africa’s Drug Problem
    • In recent years, Guinea-Bissau has emerged as a nodal point in three-way cocaine-trafficking operations linking producers in South America with users in Europe; the value of the cocaine that transits this small and heartbreakingly impoverished country dwarfs its gross national product. The Gulfstream arrived unexpectedly from Venezuela on July 12, 2008, and taxied to a hangar at the adjacent military airbase — where soldiers formed a line and unloaded its contents. The contents, reportedly more than a half-ton of cocaine, vanished. The crew was arrested and released. The army permitted the government to impound the plane only after several days. Since then, the plane has sat in the harsh sun, a reminder of Guinea-Bissau’s helplessness before forces far more powerful than itself.
      • The high-ranking military officials who coordinated the arrival and unloading of the Gulfstream in 2008 were never charged, and the case was closed for lack of evidence.
    • Just as the efficient marketplaces of the world’s financial capitals serve as the nexus for global trade, so ungoverned or remote places offer an indispensable service for global criminals. And West Africa includes 10 of the 20 lowest scorers on the United Nations’ index of development; governments are correspondingly brittle and corrupt.
    • According to U.N. reports, as well as American law-enforcement and intelligence officials, cocaine crosses the Atlantic from South America either in small planes, including Cessna turboprops outfitted with an extra bladder of fuel, or in commercial fishing vessels or cargo ships.
      • The drugs are then transported in bulk along one of several routes. Some are taken to the international airports in Dakar, Senegal and Accra, Ghana or elsewhere, where they are generally swallowed in relatively small amounts by couriers and flown to European cities. Other shipments are transported northward by truck or carried overland across ancient smuggling routes before crossing the Mediterranean into southern Europe. The African couriers and crime syndicates are often paid in “product,” which has the additional effect of creating a local market for cocaine.
    • In November, an old Boeing 727, which had taken off in Colombia, crossed West African airspace and touched down on an airstrip controlled by terrorist groups in the desert of Mali. The plane was almost certainly carrying cocaine and perhaps guns as well; no one knows, since the cargo was unloaded before the plane was burned.
    • Guinea-Bissau offered proximity to Europe, a purchasable state structure, a desperate citizenry and a hopelessly overmatched police force.
      • Guinea-Bissau sold narcotraffickers access to several islands in the Bijagós; the country’s minister of justice at that time suggested to him that the international community secure islands of its own as a counterstrategy.
      • The Judiciary Police numbered a few dozen and had no vehicles and few weapons, handcuffs, flashlights — a serious problem in a capital with no streetlights — or even shoes.
      • Their prison consisted of a few locked rooms with barred windows in their headquarters on the road leading out of the capital.
      • Corruption was rife. And yet they made some spectacular arrests. Jorge Djata, the deputy chief of the drug squad, told me that in September 2006, he received word of a shipment of drugs coming into Bissau from a town to the northwest. He and several colleagues jumped into one of the rattletrap Mercedes taxis that ply the city’s streets, followed the car to a house rented by Colombians and took them by surprise. The haul was 674 kilograms, or nearly 1,500 pounds, of cocaine with a street value of about $50 million.
      • What happened next, however, defines the problems of law enforcement in countries like Guinea-Bissau even more than does the lack of shoes and guns and cars. Djata and his colleagues took the three Colombians and the drugs to their headquarters. Then, Djata says: “We got a call from the prime minister’s office saying that we must yield up the drugs to the civil authorities. They said the drugs would not be secure in police headquarters, and they must be taken to the public treasury.” A squad of heavily armed Interior Ministry police surrounded the building. Djata said his boss replied, “We will bring the drugs ourselves, and then we will burn them.” Government officials refused. Djata and his men relented, and the drugs were taken to the public treasury. And soon, of course, they disappeared — as did the Colombians.
    • Everybody wants to help West Africa with its drug problem: the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime and other U.N. bodies, Interpol, the European Union, the West African regional organization known as Ecowas, individual European states and the United States. The United Nations, Interpol and Ecowas are spending $50 million in four countries partly to build “transnational crime units,” interagency bodies that will gather information, conduct investigations and turn over their findings to prosecutorial authorities. An agency of Ecowas monitors money laundering throughout the region. A group of European countries deploys ships and narcotics officers to interdict boats carrying drugs from West Africa to Europe. A multitude of U.S. government agencies, coordinated by the new African Command, provide equipment to law-enforcement groups, as well as training for those groups and naval and coastal officers. But those who know the problems best tend to be the least confident.
    • what to do with the Gulfstream jet: Sell it and invest the proceeds in social programs. Converting drug contraband into clinics would send just the right message. Unfortunately, other officials told me that the plane has been sitting in the tropical sun so long that it might have to be sold off in pieces.
  • the new drug highway
    • (This was on the list twice)