The History of cocaine in Benjamin Constant

Abstract

The text deals with the history of cocaine and the genealogy of ecological power. Cocaine becomes a piece of political power when the interest in the Amazonian cocaine raw material was established, it was the moment of isolation of the active principle of cocaine, becoming object of the medical and philosophical knowledge of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, with the decline of rubber production and the entry of cocaine into the mass culture of Western cities, the visibility of the cocaine economy crosses the path of Puritan ethics without further harm because Christian theater, the cocaine is another means of US government life control policy which, by establishing political control of the cocaine market, is simply broadening the domain of sustainability by ecological power to control the natural resources of the Amazon in the form of a large colony of XXI century.