INTRODUCTION

This book is actually a re-edition of Cocaine: In Search of Paradise Lost, a work that I published in 1987 and which originally contained a first outline of Dialectic Psychiatry, an issue which has now been excluded to place more emphasis on the coca/cocaine theme. Therefore, the reader will find references to that work during the analysis of drug dependence. I have modified the text somewhat to compensate for its absence. Included in this edition are the statistical results on treatment through coca chewing conducted from 1984 to 1992, when I started to endeavor in another treatment practice, at the Treatment and Rehabilitation Center for drug dependence of the Ministry of Health, then headed by Dr. Carlos Jordan V.

I have also deleted all the parts pertaining to the analysis of the Coca Legend, an element from which I departed to understand the problems at hand and which made foremost contributions to elucidate the "Cocaine Legend", the name by which that study is now presented. This is mainly for the English version directed towards the Northern Hemisphere public who is more familiar with the coca derivative than with the leaf itself.   In this respect I must state that from the psychological perspective, a legend is to human society what dreams are to individuals. Legends are dreams dreamt by collective beings. Their analysis, same as our individual dreams, allow us to penetrate the unconscious collective mind. The results are astonishing: the Coca Legend forewarned, almost with mathematical precision and many years of anticipation, the problems to be expected from the coca/cocaine duality. In this book, I limited myself to reproduce that legend and extend an invitation to the reader to arrive at his/her own conclusions, based on the information that I have collected during the analysis of that legend.