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About Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Cocaine An Unauthorized BiographyBy Dominic Streatfeild Picador USACopyright © 2003 Dominic Streatfeild All right reserved. ISBN: 9780312422264 Introduction It's going on 4:30 p.m. and the alkaloid has just begun to bite. I am swinging gently from side to side in a hammock, watching a livid orange sun sink into the hills of La Bella Durmiente, headphones on, plugged into a bit of music, thinking about nothing in particular. And suddenly I know--it's working. Now, I know what you're thinking: 'cocaine' because this is a book about cocaine, right? You're not wrong: it is a book about cocaine. And, if you were to take a sample of my blood, it would test positive. But the thing is, I don't use cocaine. So what's going on? The first thing you have to understand is that here in the Andes people don't shove cocaine up their noses like smug advertising executives before dabbing up the excess with a finger and rubbing it onto their gums. They don't do it in the toilet. In fact, they don't use cocaine at all. Not really. If you want to get to the cocaine in the Andes, you chew it. And that's what I am doing--or trying to do. After the best part of a month tooling about South America on the cocaine trail I am in Tingo Maria, Peru, looking for quality product, and I've come to the conclusion that either I am doing something seriously wrong or there is nothing in this chewing thing at all. Could 40 centuries of South American Indians really be wrongs It's possible. All these thoughts go around in my mind as 1 lie in my hammock, listening to this bit of music, swinging gently from left to right, watching the sun go down. Then I realise that the tip of my tongue has gone numb. Not numb like after an injection at the dentist (although this would be entirely appropriate) but numb like I've eaten too many peppermints. Tingly. Although I haven't eaten, I'm not hungry. I haven't drunk anything and it's hot, but I'm not thirsty either. It suddenly occurs to me that sitting here in my hammock is an extremely pleasant way to spend the afternoon. Despite the fact that a dust storm of mosquitoes has mangled my legs and that the palmito salad I ate for dinner last passed through my system like an Exocet, compelling me to spend a large percentage of the day perched on the lavatory, I actually feel pretty good. I don't laugh until I feel sick, or talk as if there's no tomorrow, or get up and dance, or fall asleep, or get the urge to reveal to my mates that the real meaning of life is the colour green. None of that. I just lie here. So here I am lying in my hammock, swinging gently from side to side, and it hits me that this piece of music I'm listening to has exactly the same harmonies as Rain, which happens to be the Beatles' greatest-ever B-side. And I'm swinging and swinging and my tongue is feeling numb and my throat is beginning to head that way too and it hits me: I feel all right. Now I know that it's the cocaine coming through. Because the thing is this: hammocks are great. But not that great. It is wholly appropriate that I should finally get the hang of chewing coca here in the Upper Huallaga Valley just north of Huanuco, Peru. Because it was here, tens of thousands of years ago, that cocaine was invented--not by man but by nature. It was here that the pre-Incan tribes discovered it and where it has been grown ever since. It was here that Peru's plantations fuelled the cocaine industry in the late nineteenth-century, and then the illicit resurgent industry in the late twentieth century. Huanuco is the heart of Peru's cocaine identity. And thus it's here that I have come, after two years in libraries and prison cells and army bases and more libraries and doctors' surgeries and politicians' offices--and still more libraries--on a bare-brained pilgrimage to seek out the cause of cocaine. And it is here that in my dumb gringo way I have finally got the message. Cocaine is a sensatio
