We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire Read online

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  We Sell Drugs

  AMERICAN CROSSROADS

  Edited by Earl Lewis, George Lipsitz, George Sánchez, Dana Takagi, Laura Briggs, and Nikhil Pal Singh

  We Sell Drugs

  The Alchemy of US Empire

  Suzanna Reiss

  UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

  University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

  University of California Press

  Oakland, California

  © 2014 by The Regents of the University of California

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Reiss, Suzanna.

  We sell drugs : the alchemy of US empire / Suzanna Reiss.

  pages cm. — (American crossroads ; 39)

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-520-28077-9 (cloth : alk. paper)—

  ISBN 978-0-520-28078-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)—

  ISBN 978-0-520-95902-6 (ebook)

  1. Drug control—Political aspects—United States—History. 2. Drug abuse—Political aspects—United States—History. 3. Pharmaceutical industry—Political aspects—United States—History. 4. Balance of power. 5. United States—Politics and government. I. Title.

  HV5825.R434 2014

  382’.4561510973—dc23

  2013047208

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

  Cover design: Glynnis Koike

  Cover image: iStock

  Dedicated to my brothers, Justin and Matthew, with love

  Contents

  Illustrations

  Acronyms

  Introduction

  1. “The Drug Arsenal of the Civilized World”: WWII and the Origins of US-Led International Drug Control

  2. “Resources for Freedom”: American Drug Commodities in the Postwar World

  3. Raw Materialism: Exporting Drug Control to the Andes

  4. The Alchemy of Empire: Drugs and Development in the Americas

  5. The Chemical Cold War: Drugs and Policing in the New World Order

  Conclusion

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Works Cited

  Index

  Illustrations

  FIGURES

  1. Nurse vaccinating women and children for smallpox, Havana, 1949

  2. World War II propaganda poster for the construction of a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility

  3. Government “certified non-narcotic” seal for exports of the Coca-Cola Company’s flavoring extract, 1950

  4. Photo and caption from a 1946 Inter-American article presenting coca leaf chewing as causing irrational behaviors by indigenous people

  5. Merck and Co., Inc. Louis Lozowick’s artistic depiction of an aerial view of a Merck chemical manufacturing plant, commissioned by the company for an advertisement.

  6. Graphics from a 1955 Business Week article celebrating the “fantastic growth” of US pharmaceuticals’ foreign market

  7. A Peruvian peasant holding a coca leaf bag, lime dispenser (to dip into while chewing the leaf), and a cigarette, 1952.

  8. Federal Narcotic Farm, Lexington, Kentucky (Photo by Arthur Rothstein)

  9. Cornell graduate student teaching a Vicosino the application of chemical pesticides

  10. Photograph, “General store in Vicos selling alcohol and coca,” 1951

  11. Harry J. Anslinger testifying before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 1954

  12. Federal Bureau of Narcotics chart representing drug addiction statistics for 1953–1956, differentiated by race

  MAP

  1. Coca leaf cultivation and derivative manufacturing, 1946

  TABLES

  1. US coca leaf imports and uses, 1936–1943

  2. Cocaine exports from the United States, 1936–1941

  Acronyms

  AAAS American Association for the Advancement of Science

  AID Agency for International Development

  AmPharMA American Pharmaceutical Manufacturers’ Association

  APRA Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana

  ARC Addiction Research Center

  BDC Bolivian Development Corporation

  BEW Board of Economic Warfare

  CND UN Commission on Narcotics Drugs

  DEA Drug Enforcement Administration

  DSB UN Drug Supervisory Body

  ECLA UN Economic Commission for Latin America

  ECOSOC UN Economic and Social Council

  FBN Federal Bureau of Narcotics

  FSA Federal Security Administration

  NIH National Institutes of Health

  ODM Office of Defense Mobilization

  OSRD Office of Scientific Research and Development

  PASB Pan American Sanitary Bureau

  PCOB UN Permanent Central Opium Board

  PRC People’s Republic of China

  SPY Sociedad de Proprietarios de Yungas

  UN United Nations

  US United States

  USPHS United States Public Health Service

  USSR Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

  WHO World Health Organization

  Introduction

  The United States government has never waged a war on drugs. On the contrary, drugs in general—and so-called “narcotic” drugs such as cocaine in particular—constitute part of a powerful arsenal that the government flexibly deploys to wage war and to demonstrate its capacity to bring health, peace, and economic prosperity. Drugs historically have not been targets but rather tools; the ability to supply, withhold, stockpile, and police drugs, and to influence the public conversation about drugs, has been central to projections of US imperial power since the middle of the twentieth century.

  This book explores the relationship between drugs and war from World War II through the early Cold War and, in particular, how policing and profiting from their intersection has propelled the consolidation of US economic and political power on a global scale. It is an historical account of the international geography and regulatory sinews attached to one group of commodities that was foundational to international drug control: coca leaves and the various substances and consumer products derived from them. Throughout the time period of this study—the 1940s through the early 1960s—and still to the present day, those commodities included pharmaceutical-grade cocaine and the beverage Coca-Cola. The story reveals the importance of the pharmaceuti
cal industry and drug control to US national power by examining the implementation of regulatory controls, cultural narratives, and economic hierarchies that accompanied the delineation of legal and illegal participation within the coca commodities marketplace. This history provides an important perspective on the origins of ongoing global and domestic economic hierarchies that influence the access of people and communities to vital medicines. It also illuminates the profound limitations and biases that currently shape national and international drug control policy and debate.

  The “war on drugs” has inspired public and political debate for decades. Its origins are commonly attributed to the administration of President Richard Nixon, who in a special message to Congress in 1969 warned the American public that drugs were a “growing menace to the general welfare.” By 1971, drug abuse was “public enemy number one” and Nixon called upon the country to “wage an all-out offensive against that deadly enemy.”1 This was not the beginning of the purported war on drugs, but rather the culmination of transformations over the previous three decades that had established the material and symbolic foundations for this assault. This book argues that to understand the modern war on drugs, one must examine an often overlooked but critical period for the emergence of a US-led international drug control regime: World War II and the early Cold War. Scholars have demonstrated that Nixon’s drug war dovetailed with a 1970s backlash against the civil rights movement that witnessed the rise in prominence of “law and order”–based political campaigns, as well as the public’s overreaction to accounts of drug use among soldiers in Vietnam; yet it relied on institutions, beliefs, and regulatory principles established much earlier.2

  Historians who have studied US national and international drug control initiatives have shown that concerted efforts to police the flow of drug commodities began earlier than is frequently recognized. Such initiatives date back at least to the beginning of the twentieth century, when US reformers joined with British officials in an attempt to regulate the opium trade.3 Since the 1914 passage of the national Harrison Narcotics Act, drug control became an integral aspect of federal government power. But even scholars who have studied this longer history of drug control initiatives tend to emphasize, as is evident in the pioneering work of David F. Musto, that “the current drug problem arose in the mid-1960s.”4 Moreover, World War II is largely addressed as an interruption rather than as a critical formative moment when drug control was refashioned in the midst of the unprecedented consolidation of US superpower.5 In contrast this study suggests the 1940s through the 1960s marked a watershed moment for the reworking of an international system of drug control. The “drug problem” was not a sociological or scientific fact, but rather an historical construction rooted in beliefs and practices that changed over time and in context. Fundamental to this process was US policy during World War II and the early Cold War, which dramatically solidified the contours of a national and international drug control regime structured according to the geopolitical and strategic interests of the US state and private capital. The US government and the US pharmaceutical industry were the driving force behind the establishment of international drug control during this time period, culminating in the creation of the United Nations’ Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs in 1961. Locating the origins of late twentieth-century drug control in this mid-century moment sheds light on the interconnection between the growth of domestic and international policing apparatuses on the one hand and the historic rise of US economic hegemony on the other.

  This study aims to change the way we conceive of the “drug problem.” Our popular understanding of the “war on drugs” is derived from the selectivity of our focus. Contemporary debate over whether excessive and dangerous drug consumption should be approached as an issue of criminal justice or medical disease obscures the fact that drug control for the first five decades of its implementation in the United States was pursued under the authority of the Department of the Treasury’s Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN). Drug control was institutionalized through market regulations to secure adequate supplies of drugs while limiting and delineating the legal boundaries of their circulation. The domestic 1914 Harrison Narcotics Act and both major international drug conventions that encompass the scope of this project, the 1931 Convention for the Limiting the Manufacture and Regulating the Distribution of Narcotic Drugs and the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, used market controls and monitoring as enforcement measures. They selectively authorized participation in cultivating, manufacturing, and distributing drugs that effectively advanced US geopolitical and economic dominance. While genuine concerns over public health and social well-being have inspired some to embrace the “war on drugs,” drug control has also always been about economic power.

  From World War II through the early 1960s the process of consolidating US influence over the international flow of select drug commodities, and the systems of domestic policing that emerged in concert, established foundational principles, relationships, institutional structures, and an ideological framing of the “drug problem,” which together continue to shape the implementation and discussions of drug policy to the present day. To understand subsequent policies it is key to contemplate the silences and limits of acceptable debate at the moment when the United States emerged as an unparalleled global superpower and led a campaign to extend the reach of a drug control regime. For it was in the 1940s and 1950s that the United States independently, and by means of FBN Commissioner Harry J. Anslinger’s powerful position on the UN Commission on Narcotics Drugs (CND), worked to define the parameters of legal—and hence illegal—drug trafficking as a central component of strengthening national political power and extending its global economic reach. In the process drugs and drug control assumed a privileged place in the structures of policing and profit making that animated US capital’s expansion and shaped the terms of debate for decades to come.

  •••

  In April 1949, “The White Goddess” provocatively headlined the “Hemisphere” page of Time magazine. This exposé on the cocaine trade described international police coordination between agents of the US Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Peruvian officials that culminated in the dramatic bust of a smuggling ring stretching from Peru, through Cuba, to the United States. Readers were informed “that the US was swamped with the biggest influx of cocaine in 20 years” and that the source “was unquestionably Peru.” The article identified Peruvians as “the No. 1 producers of crude cocaine, and also among its foremost users.” Cuba, on the other hand, a stopover point on the illicit drug trade, reappears in a second feature directly beneath the first. One’s eye is drawn to a picture of smiling women (a visual counterpoint to the first article’s seductive title) “cheerfully” lining up like “eager beavers” behind a young girl receiving a drug vaccination after the “scary discovery” of a different kind of influx: “the first case of smallpox in 20 years.” The US Navy had hastily flown in the inoculations to prevent an epidemic, and to “atone for the recent unpleasantness when three tipsy US sailors befouled the statue of Cuban Hero José Martí.”6

  The parallel narrative conventions in these stories mirror the profound interconnectedness of drugs, economic power, and diplomacy on the one hand, and the extension of US power in the hemisphere during and after World War II on the other. These news reports in 1949 already did not question the parameters of legality as enforced through the collaborative efforts of the FBN, the US military, national police, and public health officials. The illicit drug trade in “cocaine”—represented as the “white goddess,” a seductive and dangerous temptress—is invoked to justify US policing powers: a spectacle of drug raids, detectives, undercover agents, and cooperative local officials. Meanwhile, the licit drug economy—“smallpox inoculations”—provided the soothing antidote for an actual US military presence in an effort to avoid inflaming resentment toward Yankee imperialism (nationalist Martí had been one of its most famous critics).

  FIGURE 1. Nurse vaccina
ting women and children for smallpox, Havana, 1949 (reproduced on the “Hemisphere” page of Time, April 1949) [© Bettmann/CORBIS].

  Implicit in Time’s coverage was the contrasting valorization of American-supplied medicines (in this case smallpox vaccinations) and the easy demonization of cocaine and the alleged Peruvian consumers whose indulgence in the “vice [was] out in the open.” This does not negate the public health benefits of vaccination campaigns, but it does reveal the way US access to drugs and its capacity to deploy them as diplomatic carrots (and withhold them to carry a big stick) was the result of the historical emergence at that time of a particular international drug control regime. The depiction of women and children happily lining up in Havana for vaccinations glossed over the element of coercion: some two weeks earlier, when a Cuban traveler returned from Mexico with smallpox, the government made vaccination mandatory and the Cuban minister of health, Dr. Alberto Oteiza, warned “that any person not submitting to vaccination for smallpox would be tried by the courts under the penal code.”7 Oteiza then reportedly “urgently” appealed to the United States for additional supplies of the vaccine.8 US power distorted the market and shaped government pronouncements and public perception about drugs and efforts to police them. The elision of state compulsion in US media accounts of the Cuban vaccination campaign complemented the misleading focus on policing and cocaine in the Andes. Cocaine was not in fact widely consumed in Peru, although the coca leaves that grew on the semitropical slopes of the Andes Mountains provided the raw material for manufacturing cocaine and had been consumed in their natural state in the region for millennia. Unmentioned was the fact that the major consumer (and manufacturing) market for both legal and illegal cocaine at that time was the United States. These accounts collapsed the distinction between coca leaves and cocaine and privileged manufacturing nations’ relationship to and beliefs about coca commodities. Drug control was becoming a potent vehicle for institutionalizing an economic order that privileged US pharmaceutical companies’ drug production—and by extension, US national power.