In Their Own Words

This book illuminates a hidden chapter in the history of globalization: the rise of one of the most spectacular and now illegal of Latin American exports: cocaine. Armed with an array of new evidence from international archives, Gootenberg traces cocaine's history, from its origins as a medical commodity in the 19th century to its repression during the early 20th century and to its dramatic reemergence as an illicit good after World War II. The book closely connects the drug's cultural, scientific, and political history in Europe and the United States to its unknown commercial and political story in the Andes. Andean Cocaine is an indispenable tool for understanding one of the vexing social dilemmas of the late 20th century Americas: the cocaine epidemic of the 1980s, and in its wake, the seemingly endless U.S. drug war in the Andes.