Gootenberg, Coca & Cocaine

            Gootenberg’s excellent analysis of the rise, fall, and rebirth of cocaine fits wonderfully into this courses overall themes and discussion, leading us to consider what counts as a commodity.  Thus far, we have primarily dealt with commodities that have faced resistance from the powers-that-be but ultimately landed upon the legal side of the market.  In cocaine we are presented with a different story.  While the coca leaf and its cultivation have call backs to cochineal and cocoa, in that they were primarily used by native populations and initially ignored by European conquerors and settlers, in cocaine we find a commodity that exploded in popularity among the learned elite before being thrown back down due to becoming illegal.  And after all that it is as “an illict commodity[] did cocaine attain its status as a major consumption good” (19). 

Gootenberg’s Andean Cocaine provides us with a different picture than the ones we’ve experienced thus far, but one that still adds to the discussion.  How does the cultivation and expansion of a product affect the native population?  Does a commodity necessarily have to change to be more acceptable to a wider global system?  And through this change does a commodity become something wholly unrelated to what it once was?  Gootenberg’s analysis leads us toward the answers to these questions but also asks us to consider them in the context of cocaine, a substance which Karl Marx and “his compatriots were celebrating as a new ‘miracle drug’” (15) which now, contrary to its initial aim has “spawned horrifying violence and human rights degradations at home and abroad” (324), a far cry from what a ‘miracle’ is expected to do.