Sean Hocking – Cocaine
Welcome to our newest column at Cannabis Law Report
Simply entitled Cocaine you may think it is a strange topic for us to engage with.
At CLR we started reporting on the issue of cannabis and the law back in 2015 in the very early days of regulation.
About 18 months ago it became apparent that there was a desire to push for some form of regulation for psychedelic compounds. First in Canada and then in the USA. That movement is now spreading around the world as elements of the health sector, the pharmaceutical industry and some legislators, each for their own reasons, desire a path toward a regulated environment.
As far as we are aware there is no free daily information point dealing with the nexus where cocaine, law, crime and regulation meet.
There are a host of government, intergovernmental bodies, academic institutions, publishers, associations, bodies and, of course, the media that publish write & report on cocaine issues daily but mostly on an ad hoc basis.
As we have done with cannabis and psychedelics over the past few years we shall now start to create a free access library of articles and information pertinent to cocaine and the law to prepare for the day when discussion of regulation comes around.
The value of the U.S. cocaine market is estimated at $37 billion per year, while other markets are growing with the transatlantic cocaine market nearly reaching parity estimated at $23.7 to $33.6 billion in 2017
Journal of Illicit Economies & Development – Comparative Analysis of Illicit Supply Network Structure and Operations: Cocaine, Wildlife, and Sand
The reality is that we may have to wait 5 even 20 years before there’s any discussion, but come around it will.
Cocaine (albeit not the product we see today) was at the latter end of the 19th century and the early 20th century a traded commodity used in both as a pharmaceutical and as we all know in a very well known beverage invented by a certain John Pemberton in 1885, also, in the first six months of the same year over 60 articles on cocaine appeared in the pages of the British Medical Journal.
Let’s not forget that celebrated cocaine users of the period included amongst others, Ibsen, Zola, Jules Verne, Alexander Dumas, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Queen Victoria, King George of Greece, King Alphonse XIII of Spain, the Shah of Persia and yes even US presidents William McKinley and Ulysses S. Grant.
From CLR’s point of view the sooner regulation comes around the better, if only to stop the environmental degradation of huge swathes of the Americas never mind the abject misery an illegal trade brings to millions around the world affected by the criminality and violence that no regulation engenders.
