I am watching Narcos, which has an air of accracy to it. It suggests that cocaine wasn't present outside South America before 1979. ...as a recreational drug anyway. I know about how it was considered medicinal (though oft-abused) at the turn if the century.
So what about all those rock stars of the 70s? I am thinking about Mick Jagger's aquarium of coke when recording Exile on Main Street in 1972, David Bowie's Columbian flu on the Dick Cavet show in 1974, and Neil Young's nose residue on The Last Waltz.
Wikipedia's article on the history of cocaine has a big gap between 1922 and the 90s... Was cocaine perhaps just for the rich and famous before it hit the mainstream in the 80s?
You're right to question this. By the 1950s, legal and semi-legal sources of cocaine and cocaine paste had been closed down by international action. Cocaine remained a very rare drug in the US and the UK through the 50s and early 60s. Even William Burroughs had trouble sourcing it.
However it had become popular in Cuba. When the Batista regime fell and lots of Cubans and Americans left for the US, they brought cocaine habits and smuggling networks with them. Cuban-American networks increased the volume of cocaine coming into the country. It helped that many of these people had training from the CIA, making them sophisticated operators.
The story of distribution in the UK is a little stranger. Some of the sources of early cocaine are obscure, but one was the psychiatrist Lady Isabella Frankau. "Maintenance" prescriptions for addicts were not uncommon at the time, but Frankau was more generous and better connected than most. As well as giving out heroin, she also dispensed cocaine. So the drug was available, but not easily or in large quantities.
On the demand side, the US had run an effective campaign against speed in the 60s ("let's face it, when Frank Zappa tells you a drug is dangerous, it's probably seriously bad news"). As an 'upper', cocaine could fit into a similar niche. The drug started getting attention in popular culture. Paul McCartney is said to have taken it in 1968 and introduced the Beatles to it, which is a good guarantee of cool. The most important example in popular culture is Easy Rider (1969), where the main characters are transporting a consignment of coke. The mainstream media had picked up on the drug by the early 70s, and were giving it good PR, describing its potency and lack of negative effects.
However cocaine did remain a drug concentrated among the rich and the famous, or at least the relatively wealthy. It didn't (as yet) have the connotations of class, race or moral degeneracy that go with a good drug panic, and it wasn't a major priority for law enforcement (in the US I think they were still primarily concerned with marijuana). It took Escobar and Jung to massively increase the supply to change this situation, and probably the development of crack and its popularity among black/poorer people to kick of a proper moral panic.
(Most information here from Cocaine by Dominic Streatfield.)