The Candy Machine

Title: The Candy Machine – How Cocaine Took Over The World

Author: Tom Feiling

Publisher: Penguin 2009 (First)

ISBN: 978-0-141-03446-1

Pages: 283

Tom Feiling is a television producer-turned-social worker who initially struggled to make documentaries. He visited Colombia to start a hotel business but soon returned to London. His social group defends trade union rights of Colombians. This is his first book dedicated to detail how cocaine rose as a potential psychedelic drug extracted from seemingly innocuous leaves of the coca plant. He travelled the trade routes from Colombia to the U.S., Jamaica and Mexico. He traces cocain’s progress from legal drug to a luxury product to mass global commodity and attempts to show how America’s anti-drug crusade is actually increasing its demand.

Cocaine is the concentrated chemical extracted from coca leaves growing natively in South America. The conquistadores found the indigenous population chewing to relieve hunger, exhaustion and boredom and effectively used it to employ them in forced labour in mines, paying them nothing but coca leaves. The leaf contains B-vitamins and more iron and calcium than any other food crop indigenous to high Andes. It relaxes the bronchial air passages in the lungs, which make it easier to breathe at high altitudes where oxygen is scarce. About 0.5 per cent of the chemical content of coca leaves is cocaine. A person chewing 30g of leaves in a day get the equivalent of 150 mg, an average-sized line of cocaine. Chewing continued till around 1950s when it was outlawed.

Cocaine was artificially extracted from leaves in 1859 in its purest form for the first time. Coca was not a menace in the 19^th century, when several foodstuffs were eagerly gulped by the public containing traces of it. Coca Cola contained it until it was removed from their secret 7X formula in 1914 pursuant to the first drug act passed in the U.S. The law became harsher and harsher as time went, but it couldn’t swell the tide in the numbers of drug dealers and users. The convenient fact that Blacks and Hispanics outnumbered other classes in drug trade steeled the resolve of White, Conservative politicians to strike harder at the problem. Even with convictions and incarceration increasing several times, the basic problem remains unresolved.

U.S. is the world’s largest consumer of illegal cocaine, much of it cultivated in Colombia, aided and abetted by that country’s unique combination of lawlessness, crime syndicates, left-wing guerillas and all-round poverty. Feiling produces a fine narrative of what is happening in Colombia and the routes it takes through Mexico and Jamaica to its final destinations in America and Europe. In an apparently lawless state where the strong goes on flouting laws with private armies and rebels fighting against the government. FARC, a prominent left-wing militant group controls the drugs trade in order to use the money to procure arms and manpower. The country’s politicians are hands in glove with traffickers. Street violence has peaked, the gangs even challenging law enforcement agencies. Extradition of traffickers to U.S. to stand trial and meet punishment there has not dented the clout those drug barons manage to wield among the local public.

The harshest laws against distribution and use of drugs in the democratic world can be found in the U.S. Punishment is severe, with federal government increasing its budget to intercept the supply side of cocaine. Efforts to control the demand side, in terms of providing medical attention to compulsive drug users are not picking up momentum. Author advocates decriminalization and legalization of cocaine for personal use. Such a regime offers transparency, control and reduction in street crime among rival dealers and gangs. The 50-times profit margin in the sale of cocaine is what is driving the traffickers to resort to violence to sell the drug. There are two types of users at present – recreational and problematic. The former use the drug occasionally and may use it more frequently if it is legalized. But the habit is under the control of individuals who decides what is best for them. Therapy is required for the latter class, which can be more easily administered in a legal setup where the needed individuals can be more openly identified. Powerful vested interests and the blind appeal of populism prevent politicians taking this path.

The book is convincingly written with first-hand experience asserting itself in descriptions of how drug cartels operate in Latin America. He has widely travelled in the region and conducted interviews with people from both sides of the divide. Feiling’s free approach to the problem wraps it up in a new package on which both law enforcers and drug dealers find equal mention, whose perspectives honoured in a balanced way. He goes to the root of the problem in Colombia which is making the immediate solution difficult. Such sharp insights are equally matched by caustic remarks about the costly, but ineffective-in-the-end solutions attempted by enforcement agencies in U.S. and U.K. He lauds Netherlands, which has at last realized the futility of harsh suppression and is turning towards gradual legalization.

Trivialization of third-world polities like Colombia is a characteristic which should not have been present in a book such as this. Whatever little the Latin Americans do in the economically and politically strained circumstances are outright deemed ineffectual. Alvaro Uribe Velez, the Colombian president who aligned strongly with the Americans in their war against drugs is projected to be without legitimacy as he says, “In 2006, Velez was re-elected to the presidency with 53 per cent of the popular vote (notwithstanding the fact that only 54 per cent of the electorate felt inspired to vote at all)” (p.195-6). Perhaps Feiling would be kind enough to count the percentage of votes polled in British and American elections? The author’s strong leaning to the Left of the political spectrum is troubling and makes the passages biased. Also, his vehement opposition to all forms of drug-enforcement laws are defeatist in style.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 2 Star