15 October 2026
Words: Josefina Salomón – Illustration: Sergio Ortíz Borbolla
1.”Magic” plant. The history of cocaine as we know it today begins with its main ingredient, the coca leaf, a South American plant that has been grown mostly in the heights of the Andean mountains of what is now Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia for at least 3,500 years. The word “coca” comes from Aymara, a pre-Inca language, and played a very important role in maintaining the Inca empire, the most powerful in South America before the Spanish invasion.
2.Indigenous Peoples. They chewed the deep green leaves in religious ceremonies and used them as an analgesic, to increase energy, control hunger, and cope with high altitudes, where oxygen is limited. The plant was so important to these peoples that it is believed to have helped in the construction of many of the long roads that contributed to sustaining the Inca empire for so long.
3.”Devil’s Agent”. This is how the Spanish invadors described the plant when they arrived in the area that is now Peru in the 16th century. But things took a quick turn when Europeans realized that, without it, locals struggled to work the fields and mines, and they went from prohibiting to regulating its consumption. They started paying indigenous workers with coca and even tax it. American crops were very popular in Europe, but coca took a while to become one of them, probably because they were reluctant to the idea of chewing leaves.
1.Laboratory technology. Everything changed in the 19th century, when European scientists managed to isolate alkaloids from plants that offered enormous medical, and commercial, opportunities. First it was morphine, which was extracted from opium in 1803; later, quinine and caffeine around 1829 and nicotine in 1833. In 1855, the German chemist Friedrich Gaedcke managed to isolate the alkaloid responsible for the main properties of coca leaves. A few years later, Albert Niemann, a 26-year-old student of Gaedcke, perfected the method as part of his doctoral thesis and called the substance “cocaine”. But it wasn’t until 1883 when the German military doctor Theodor Aschenbrandt began using it on soldiers, claiming it gave them more strength, that cocaine was truly born.
2.Über Coca. This is the name of the first of several articles published by the then-young doctor Sigmund Freud in 1884, after trying cocaine as a treatment for the chronic fatigue and depression that afflicted him.
He wrote that cocaine produces “lasting euphoria, which in no way differs from the normal euphoria of a healthy person…” A year later, in 1885, the chemist Henry Hurd Rusby formalized a method of manufacturing cocaine paste in Latin America, which made it cheaper and easier to transport.
3.Miracle medicine? Things took off, big time. Doctors began prescribing cocaine to combat almost any condition, from asthma, to pain, syphilis and, incredibly, to treat opium addiction. A Bordeaux wine infused with coca leaf invented by a French chemist was an instant success, with admirers reportedly including Thomas Edison and the Tsar of Russia. It is believed that the wine served as an inspiration for the original Coca Cola, which contained nine milligrams of cocaine per glass as one of its ingredients until 1928.
4.Free for all. Back then many artists praised the white powder. It is believed that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” after consuming cocaine for six days straight. In 1916, the British store Harrods sold a kit called “A Welcome Present for Friends at the Front” that included cocaine, morphine, and needles. The potential business around cocaine was so good that, at the end of the 19th century, the Dutch took the plant to the island of Java (then a colony, today Indonesia), and to Ceylon (Sri Lanka), as well as to Formosa (then a Japanese protectorate, today Taiwan). The idea worked. Java became one of the largest coca growers in the world in the 1920s. The Dutch were forced to stop growing the plant due to global controls.
1.What goes up … Over the years, the addictive, and destructive, properties of cocaine became evident. In the first two decades of the 20th century, medical associations started to turn their backs on it, and the list of products containing cocaine dropped drastically. The United States led an early version of the war on drugs, with Dr. Hamilton Wright spearheading the often racist campaign. Experts say this toxic rhetoric, which still has a huge impact, struck a chord with the white population. From 1920 onwards, many countries began to impose laws restricting the availability of cocaine, and thus an omnipresent informal market was born.
2.Big screen debut. Cocaine consumption dropped drastically in the decades that followed, while marijuana and LSD became favorites among the youth of the sixties. In fact, in 1957, the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in the United States and father of punitive policies, Harry Anslinger, stated that his country did not have a cocaine problem. It didn’t last long. Things changed again in the 60s, when the white powder took center stage once more. Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper brought it to the big screen in “Easy Rider“, while the New York Times, Newsweek, and Rolling Stone described cocaine as harmless and glamorous.
3.War on drugs. It was the strategy adopted in 1971 by then-President Richard Nixon to deal with what he called “public enemy number one,” and it changed history forever. It translated into greater investment in law enforcement and a rapid increase in incarceration rates, and yes, you guessed it, especially targeted at ethnic minorities. It was only the beginning. A decade after Nixon, Ronald Reagan took the campaign to the next level, promoting the militarization and mass incarceration of low-level dealers and users.
4.The white decade. Cocaine defined the 1980s. It was cheap, high quality, and easy to get. It was the social glue that defined a decade of nightclubs and hunger for money, when capitalism was the almost undisputed king. The United States backed its policies with money and power. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was flush with cash. But this was also the era of the massification of crack, a cheap (and extremely destructive) type of cocaine. It was then that attention and opinion shifted. The American media began to warn about the impact of the crack epidemic and the especially harmful effect on marginalized communities. Newsweek even compared it to the “Vietnam War”.
1.The South. The 80s were also the beginning of the golden age of criminal organizations. The Medellín Cartel (yes, the one led by Pablo Escobar) saw the massive business opportunity of controlling cocaine production and distribution (through organizations in Mexico) and grabbed it with both hands, growing in money and power using brutal violence. When Escobar was killed in 1993, the adaptability and resilience of criminal markets were exposed.
2.Cali. It turned out that while the world (the United States) focused all its money, military power, and attention on hunting down Escobar, its rival, the Cali Cartel, was evolving into a much stronger and more resilient organization. They forged alliances with the police, governments, and the military—essential agreements for carrying out any illicit business. Learning from their Medellín counterparts, they dispensed with charismatic individual leaders and opted instead to network, with small independent cells covering the most strategic territories and markets.
3.Mexico. When the United States government increased pressure on Colombia with asset seizures and extraditions of high-profile drug lords, Mexican criminal organizations, which had spent years transporting cocaine across their extensive border with the US, saw an opportunity to control the business. The history of criminal organizations in Mexico is intertwined with the history of the country and its complex relationship with the United States. It is a story marked by deep-rooted corruption in the government and security forces, petty rivalries among criminals, a lot of blood, and an absence of justice for the hundreds of thousands of people caught in the crossfire. Over time, the Mexican organizations, each on their own, managed to take command in the global criminal underworld.
4.Adaptability. It is the main characteristic of today’s criminal organizations, which allows them to survive and continue growing in the face of any government strategy. The fact that some very high-profile arrests barely make a dent in the production, supply, and use of drugs, and the violence mainly in Latin America, is a testament to the power of these organizations to adapt and survive.
This explainer is an updated version of the one published in In.Visibles in September 2023.
