Why was cocaine so widely used in the 70s and 80s?

So, let’s get into it, shall we. The 80s were the time when cocaine certainly peaked in its glamour in American culture, but also (as happens when you come off a cultural high), quickly lost it with the rise of freebasing and added racial and socio-economical aspects. To see how this drug got to the top, we will have to turn to the 1970s and 3 key places, which affected the rise of the white powder: Peruvian Huallaga Valley, Colombian Medellín and Washington D.C. (dun dun dun!). Btw, I suspect you got these fascinating ads from this gallery, which has plenty of great pieces in it. I honestly can’t tell you much that you don’t know about it. It seems that putting out something like this is perfectly legal, barring few specific state legislations and there was demand for these products, so…

Peruvian coca leaves were the main source of cocaine in its first international boom, roughly begining in 1880s and ending sometime after the WWI. It started as a perfectly legal, lauded substance and the main demand on the growers of coca was by emerging pharmaceutical giants like German company Merck. This supply line was mostly cut when the The 1912 Hague International Opium Convention included cocaine in the proceedings and made the drug trade illicit. And while the drug certainly had its heyday in the 1920s, not long after that it basically went into a prolonged stasis, nearly being forgotten (talking about the U.S. now). This meant that the supply of it, if someone wished to feed this particular vice, was short and extremely pricy. 50s and 60s cocaine was very expensive and there wasn’t much of it. In 1968, the overall seizure of cocaine across the U.S could be measured at roughly 14kg.

The change started to occur when failed agricultural reforms and unstable governance led to a renewed interest of Peruvian farmers in growing of coca. Peru always provided crude coca products, either leaves or a basic paste, which was then refined and transported elsewhere through various routes. Bolivia was important at the beginng and so was Chile, which constituted the main vein through which coca products became refined into cocaine and then sold into the U.S. However, with the help of the U.S., Pinochet began cracking down (no pun intended, but what it’s there) on cocaine pretty hard, eventually effectively dismantling this important route of the black market.

The new opportunity came in the form of “entrepreneurs” in the Colombian Meddelín. The particular details of these operations are kind of hazy, since it’s not exactly the safest re of research, but the basic version is, that emerging Colombian cartels had several advantages over anyone else. Besides the well known ruthlessness, infiltration of governmental organizations and so on, at the beginning, the Peruvian supply of crude materials could have been refined and put through the “pipeline”, which Colombians were using for a long time to smuggle marijuana into U.S. (“Colombian Gold”).

This gets us to my second favourite Milhouse, Richard M. Nixon and his anti-drug policies. His starting of the war on drugs, often quite misguided in its aims, helped immensely in cocaine’s rise in popularity. Marijuana and heroin were the main culprits, blamed at the start of this campaign, even though many experts even then proclaimed its relative harmlessness. Here’s the thing, they did the same about cocaine, but unlike the (one can argue ollogicaly) targeted marijuana, the stance helped cocaine to slip under the radar and into the noses. Recreational use of cocaine was slightly moving upwards since the 60s in the U.S, thanks to Cuban exiles. But marijuana remained the number one into the 1970s, until the Nixon approved crackdown, which led to shortages and looking for a different source of relatively harmless high. Which is how cocaine was often introduced, by dealers who switched from marijuana to cocaine. Furthermore, since the governmental campaign was painting marijuana as what many could perceive rather hyperbolic type of evil, it was easy to dismiss any official warnings about the drug.

Administrations after Nixon didn’t exactly stem cocaine’s rise either. White House and related official organizations really underestimated the drug’s growth and gave it a low priority in their assessments of the wider drug problem. One official even proclaimed in an interview that if one would make a case for legalizing marijuana, it would be just as easy to do so for cocaine. To quote one of the examples of this from Paul Gootenberg’s fantastic book

A presidential “White Paper on Drug Abuse” in 1975 awarded cocaine a “low priority”— below every other drug except then-tolerated marijuana — because, it averred, “cocaine does not result in serious consequences such as crime, hospital emergency room admissions, or death.”

There’s a theory of drug epidemics by prof. David Musto, from Yale, which basically boils down to a loss of societal memory affecting the re-emergence of a certain drug. Cocaine was a big problem and something of a scourge in the first decades of the 20th century in U.S and Europe, but because its trade, official and illicit was suppressed, the subsequent generations lost touch with the negative effects of cocaine abuse. When it was introduced again, it became associated with cultural and economic elites, as opposed to the counter-cultural conotations of marijuana and substances with psychedelic effects. New Hollywood and Wall Street high rollers embraced it and sometimes very openly talked about it in positive light.

So, to attempt a concise (and very basic) answer, the 80s cocaine boom was a result of a “drought” of other types of drugs, thanks to U.S. policy in the late 60s and 70s, the fact that the Peruvian farmers embraced coca as a valuable crop in the face of economic crisis and the quickly expanding Colombian cartels, which were both cruel and imaginative in its economic practices. This resulted in great supply, low prices and when the cultural elites decided this was the drug of their choice, it helped it to slip into the mainstream.

Most of this can be read in much greater details in

Steven B. Karch - A Brief History of Cocaine, Second Edition (CRC Press, 2005)

Paul Gootenberg - Cocaine: Global Histories (Routledge, 1999)

Paul Gootenberg: Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug (The University of North Carolina Press, 2008) - most highly recommended if you really want to dig into specifics

Dominic Streatfeild: Cocaine: A Definitive History (Virgin Books, 2002) - probably the easiest to read, but very well researched OK then, if you managed to read all the way to here, let’s get weird, here’s a kind of creepy Czech song about cocaine smuggling,w hich was super popular when I was a teen Lucie - Medvídek. Unfortunately, I can’t find the original music video, which was banned I believe.