Paul Gootenberg has produced a truly fascinating and important book. Cocaine is given a history, which is also a history of the Andes and in particular Peru. But more than this, Gootenberg brings us the social construction of cocaine the commodity. We are taken on its extraordinary meaning-laden and meaning-shifting journey, from its nineteenth-century embrace in varied global markets to its mid-twentieth-century vilification, when the United States finally succeeded in outlawing it. We come to understand the contingent possibilities in this history, and ultimately to grasp much more clearly the process by which this truly Latin American product became a source of both extraordinary wealth accumulation and shockingly violent destabilisation in the region. The latter is not the main topic of Gootenberg's book, and is a subject that has been covered so much elsewhere. Instead, the book offers a rich, scholarly treatment of cocaine's history that opens up an original lens on the topic, one which should enable us to debate its past and especially its future more intelligently.

The role of coca and cocaine in Andean development is given a treatment which it is rarely accorded – we see very clearly the differentiated character of these commodities and how the rise of the latter has complicated the potential that coca leaf might have had for the region's economy and which only now is being championed on the global stage, with great difficulty, by Evo Morales. The way both commodities were prized in the nineteenth century stands in great contrast with the present. The rise of a veritable coca mania in Europe and the United States is much more than the recognition of the medicinal virtues of cocaine. There is the wonderful story, for instance, of the coca-based Bordeaux wine, Vin Mariani, which took Europe and then the United States by storm in the last four decades of the nineteenth century, along with coca tea, pâté and pastilles produced in France by the same Angelo Mariani. This was a very distinct commodity trail to that of the German pharmaceutical companies that began to exploit commercially the drug's medical, particularly anaesthetic potential, importing crude cocaine from Peru itself. Across the Atlantic, it was not cocaine but the herbal leaf which took off. US imports of the leaf from Peru were, as is well known, to lead to the creation of Coca-Cola, that country's most iconic national and then global beverage. Coca-Cola went on to play a continuing role in the saga of cocaine when the US prohibition mania took hold in the early twentieth century. While the drink was de-cocainised, and the extraction of the mysterious ‘merchandise no. 5′ flavour was hived off to another company, ongoing imports of coca leaf still needed to be guaranteed, even after imports of this as well as cocaine were banned by the US government. The company ensured its supply of the leaf by its active collaboration with the prohibition agenda; in return for this, its ‘flavouring’ gained exemption from the import ban.

The book is full of such significant side stories, but manages to sustain the thread of the argument. This begins back in Peru, where a French-born Peruvian pharmacist named Bignon first invented the formula for making cocaine in 1885. That is year zero of this commodity's own history, distinct from that of the leaf with its deep socio-cultural roots amongst Andean indigenous peoples. Bignon's crude but effective method enabled Peru to aspire to build its own cocaine industry, and this national project was born as an elite modernising impetus to convert backward indigenous customs into something wealth-creating. No such impetus took place in Bolivia, and this thread proves fundamental to understanding why in the 1960s, Peru's Upper Huallaga Valley, built on decades of legal cocaine production in the Eastern Andes, spearheaded cocaine's illegal expansion.

Gootenberg offers a nuanced and careful analysis of whether the legal industry might have offered a basis for cocaine to realise the modernising dream and, what really matters to the world, an alternative to the ultimately devastating impact of illegal cocaine. The contingent factors which ensured that in the end the world rallied to the US campaign to ban the commodity entirely included the collapse of the German and Japanese markets for legal cocaine, which had maintained the crude cocaine production of Peru, during the Second World War. Nevertheless, Peruvian local entrepreneurs and chemists continued to resist the tide of anti-cocaine sentiment that the United States promoted after the war, as did the Bolivians, who had never industrialised the leaf. The rise of Cold War political polarisations helped the United States in its efforts to wipe out the crop. The Odría military regime in Peru, for instance, used the conflation of narcotics and communism to discredit the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, APRA) party and project, through a reputed and unproven link between Haya de la Torre's brother in New York and a drug-trafficking suspect. Odría was able to clamp down on APRA and left-wing oppositionists and at the same time brought Peru into the US camp on cocaine prohibition. Something similar happened in Bolivia some years later. The expansion of illegal cocaine smuggling from the 1950s to the 1970s is a history of the interfaces between politics and narcotics in the Andean region and culminates with the Chilean coup of 1973, when Pinochet clamped down on the Chilean cocaine connection; afterwards the trade gradually fell into the hands of Colombians. Simultaneously, a post-1968 generation in the United States discovered the thrills of the drug and the market potential began its meteoric expansion.

A short review cannot do justice to the historical scholarship, the mining of archives – some very recently opened up – and the analytical clarity of this volume. The book does not quite take us to the expansion of cocaine wars in contemporary Mexico and Central America, but it explains a great deal about the logic which unfolded as Peru and then Bolivia fell into line behind US policy and the now pariah drug was taken up by Cuban and Chilean traffickers, and subsequently the Colombian and, today, Mexican cartels. Gootenberg makes us think in particular about the contingencies in this history through his social constructionist approach to the commodity. The logic of the book is to urge a serious review of drug policy and in particular the war on drugs, and to show how the complete failure of this approach derives from numerous other failures. These include that of agrarian policies in the Andean countries, which opened up frontiers for peasant colonisation while offering no infrastructural or other support for the peasant economy. Cocaine's history is a history also of peasant survival strategies drawn into the rise of mutating illegal commodity chains. It has been a century since the United States began its prohibitionist campaign against coca and cocaine, and half a century since it achieved a global consensus. The outcome is the rise of a phenomenon which today seriously threatens the democratic potential of Latin America and blights the lives of thousands.