This initial cocaine craze petered out in the first half of the 20th century, in the wake of pharmacy regulation, drug control protocols and consumers’ second thoughts. But another, larger wave rose in the 1970s, as hedonists from Hollywood to Wall Street turned cocaine into “the Champagne of drugs,” as The New York Times declared in 1974. Because most users of the stimulant never became addicted, and because they had “upper-class cachet,” Feiling notes, its resurgence was at first greeted with a shrug by government. Gerald Ford’s White House observed that cocaine “does not usually result in serious social consequences, such as crime, hospital emergency room admissions or death.”

But when suppliers introduced a down-market product, crack cocaine, in the 1980s — “cocaine for poor people,” as one dealer described it to Feiling — social panic ensued. Crack is pharmacologically identical to powder cocaine, but its smokable rocks produce quicker, more intense highs (and harder falls). Attracting legions of users in decaying urban centers, it contributed to property crime, child neglect, homicidal turf battles and, not least, political reaction. Brandishing a bag of crack in the Oval Office, the first President Bush called illegal drugs “the gravest domestic threat facing our nation.” No-knock police raids and mandatory minimum sentencing followed. The drug war became total war, overstuffing jails and exacerbating racial inequality but failing to create a “drug-free America.”

This domestic tale of destruction has been well chronicled by journalists, social scientists and addicts-turned-memoirists. What sets Feiling’s book apart is his analysis of how America’s insatiable appetite for narcotics and its zealous determination to quash those cravings have spread misery and violence across the globe.

During cocaine’s postwar renaissance, mafiosi based in Cuba met demand in the United States, the world’s largest cocaine market. But after the revolution, coca capitalists dispersed, chartering new organizations, establishing new labs and supply lines, and demonstrating remarkable adaptability in response to law-enforcement pressure. Production shifted from Peru to Bolivia to Colombia, and is now shifting back to Peru. Snuffed out in one area, cocaine surges in another.

Feiling vividly describes the supply side of the cocaine business, which, he argues, “thrives on the poverty not just of individuals and communities, but of governments.” In Colombia, which remains the world’s leading producer of cocaine despite the $5 billion in anti-narcotics and counterinsurgency aid the United States has fed into the country since 2000, Feiling profiles campesinos in the rural Putumayo district whose primary source of income is coca, although they receive relatively little for their crops. In a region where markets are distant, roads are poor and the prices for legal produce like yucca and plantains are low, the coca farmers “become slaves of the mafia,” a Colombian congressman tells Feiling — the rural correlates of low-level street dealers in America who risk death and imprisonment to earn “roughly the federal minimum wage.” At the top of the cocaine hierarchy, drug barons make millions, but their careers tend to be short, their fortunes soaked with blood. Because of the violence perpetrated by traffickers and insurgents, and the more pervasive violence committed by right-wing paramilitaries and the government, Colombia’s population of internally displaced people ranks second only to Sudan’s.