An excellent history of the drug that has affected every aspect of the conflict in Colombia. Streatfeild, a witty and often ironic British author, takes you through the coca plant´s history all the way back to the Incas and explains how enmeshed it is in South American culture. He takes the reader from the initial contact between Spanish colonizers and the traditional use of the coca leaf into its popularized form in Paris and London, with chapters dedicated to famous users and abusers such as Freud and many of his intellectual contemporaries. He then explains the difference between coca and it's refined cousins cocaine and eventually crack. Streatfeild sets the scene for the cocaine battle in its many forms in the Americas and explains why we will never eradicate this drug. Each chapter in the last half of the book is dedicated to the drug´s effects in different countries in the Americas: Peru, Bolivia, Mexico, South Central Los Angeles and certainly Colombia. He interviews everyone from rural coca farmers to corrupt politicians to leftist guerrillas to top druglords themselves, and the reader comes away with a pretty comprehensive understanding of the multiple complexities surrounding cocaine and drug trafficking in the Americas.
