Cocaine Nation: How the White Trade Took Over the World - Tapa dura

A very addictive book.

An important study of the cultivation, usage, and suppression of cocaine. The book reads like a dramatic dispatch from the front line of a battle that can never be won.

Impassioned and wide-ranging.... Feiling vividly describes the supply side of the cocaine business.... he argues convincingly that the remedy promoted most aggressively by the United States has proved far worse than the disease.

Tom Feiling may well be the new Paul Theroux. He has written a vivid, argumentative, and arresting book. He marshals his evidence with a calm, elegant clarity. The power of Feiling's book is to show that this appalling situation has been created by a century of United States-led errors.

Cocaine is big business and getting bigger. Governments spendmillions on a losing war against it, yet it's still the drug of choicein the West. How did the cocaine economy become so massive?Who keeps it running behind the scenes?

In Cocaine Nation, Tom Feiling travels the trade routes from Colombia via Miami, Kingston and Tijuana to London and Newyork. he meets Medellin hitmen, U.S. kingpins, Brazilian traffickers, and talks to soldiers and narcotics officers who fight the gangsand cartels. He traces cocaine's progress from legal 'pick-me-up'to luxury product to global commodity, looks at legalization programs in countries such as Switzerland, and shows how America'santi-drugs crusade is actually increasing demand. Cutting throughthe myths about the white trade, this is the story of cocaine as it'snever been told before.