Swan fell, after an extraordinary two years, when the law moved during celebrations for yet another successful shipment north from Colombia. Zachary Swan got careless and unlucky. Before that, however, the stuff flowed north like cheap tourist souvenirs; one side of what Robert Sabbag points out is a very simple equation: coke equals mucho dollars. Its popularity in North America, he suggests, comes from reinforcing of "all those character qualities that have come to be admired as truly American: initiative drive optimism, the need for achievement and the embrace of power."

In the introduction to this valuable reprint (it was first published in 1976), the inevitable Howard Marks brands Snowblind the Bible of drug smuggling. Certainly, if you know nothing of the niceties of either the merchandise or its transcontinental movement, Sabbag's book is fascinating. We learn of its history, the complexities of cutting stock according to market, how to test supplies, even the finer points of use. "Coke," the book explains, "is to acid what jazz is to rock. You have to appreciate it. It does not come to you."

Not that Snowblind is especially a celebration of the illegal. The tone is not so much immoral as amoral: Swan was "a smuggler by profession rather than by inclination." And if you do sometimes wonder at the author's all-seeing eye - this is biography, not autobiography - it remains a smart, fascinating and dryly witty guidebook to the classier end of the chemical underground.