We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire Read online

  The ideological distinction between the licit and illicit drug economies was cemented during the next decade within the structures of an international drug control regime fashioned through the global reordering of political and economic forces of the early Cold War. The third article gracing Time’s “Hemisphere” page conveyed this context; the Canadian Parliament voted overwhelming to approve the North Atlantic Treaty to create a “bulwark against Communism.” The mutual defense pact, which helped solidify the military fault lines of Cold War rivalries, went into effect later that year. While in 1949 the FBN welcomed Cuban collaboration in the regional policing of the narcotics trade, only a decade later, following the Cuban Revolution, political tensions between the United States and Cuba transformed drug control discourse and policies. After the revolution Cuba joined China as a favorite target of accusations (inaccurate yet symbolically powerful) by US officials—that each was a Communist dope smuggling nation. By 1959 the tactics, policies, and symbolic politics surrounding drug control had become firmly entrenched as pillars of US power. Exercising power over the drug market had evolved into a material weapon for waging war—an essential resource in what might be termed a US “chemical Cold War.”

  Economic and political interests have historically exerted a commanding influence with regard to establishing the dividing line between legal and illegal, and in this case quite literally created the legal and illegal drug markets. Yet, in the scholarship on the history of pharmaceuticals and drug trafficking, legal and illegal drug markets are rarely considered to be part of one cohesive economic and political system. This book examines the historical evolution of this interconnection. This approach provides an alternative perspective from standard histories and popular debates about drug control that tend to focus on the illicit market. National governments, police officials, scientists, and business executives all hoped to embrace the productive power of drugs—and drug control—to consolidate their political authority and secure their interests within an increasingly integrated global political economy. They sought to monopolize the licit. The drug control regime that emerged in the 1940s and 1950s was just that—a system of controls, not actual prohibition. Cocaine and other controlled substances straddled the licit–illicit divide, their legal status being dependent on their circulation within the marketplace and on who grew, manufactured, sold, and consumed them. This account illustrates the ongoing existence of both legal and illegal coca markets and presents the issue of legality as a political and historical construction rather than a neutral, descriptive category.

  There has been a new wave of scholarship attentive to the history of the legal drug industry, with critical studies of cocaine leading the charge. Paul Gootenberg’s important 1999 edited collection, Cocaine: Global Histories, and his more recent Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug, Joseph F. Spillane’s Cocaine: From Medical Marvel to Modern Menace in the United States, 1884–1920, along with Michael M. Cohen’s work on Jim Crow, Coca-Cola, and cocaine prohibition, all recount the role played by modern pharmaceutical science and European and US-based commercial industries in producing an international market for coca leaves (to be used in the manufacturing of tonic beverages and medicinal cocaine).9 They provide valuable evidence of the pharmaceutical industry’s influence on defining the parameters of a drug control regime, both through direct collaborations with government officials and indirectly through the production and marketing of products, such as cocaine, which in turn ultimately became entangled with cultural panics that backed calls for prohibitions. In all of these accounts the history of cocaine tends to be narrated from its early popular legality to its emergence as an illegal commodity. This book draws upon this research but attempts to overcome the persistent absence of investigation into the ongoing tension around designations of legality. In fact to this day, while the United States spends billions of dollars attacking “illegal” cocaine, the country remains both the largest importer of coca leaves in the world and the largest stockpiler of “legal” cocaine.10

  This study is attentive to insights gained from historians working on drug control and culture who have shown the force of cultural prejudice in historically determining which drugs are targeted for control or prohibition. A wide range of drug history scholars including Wayne Morgan, David F. Musto, David T. Courtwright, Doris Marie Provine, and Curtiz Marez have pointed out the central role of race and racism in the evolution of cultural attitudes, laws, and the emergence of a carceral state.11 David L. Herzberg encourages us to recognize the “constructed division between licit and illicit drugs” in his study of feminists’ cultural demonization of valium in the 1970s, a drug he sees as a “boundary case” that exposes “the historical and cultural connections between medicine-cabinet and ‘street’ drug cultures.”12 Charles O. Jackson describes the relationship between law, medicinal abuse, and popular culture, pointing out that drug panics historically have been “fashioned by fear and nurtured by atypical horror stories.”13 Lee V. Cassanelli usefully explores the status of a “quasi-legal commodity,” focusing on the changing patterns of production, consumption, and political symbolism in relation to the qat economy of northeast Africa in the last half century. He points out how the perceived political threat among a subculture of qat consumers was “construed by outsiders to be anti-social in a larger sense” and drove government drug crackdowns.14

  The importance of culture in shaping drug crackdowns must also be studied in light of the evolving system of cultural values, economic priorities, and political hierarchies that fueled the growth of US capitalist power. As cultural critic Curtis Marez observes, “Historically, drug traffic has fueled imperial expansion and global capitalism,” and as such the politics of legality was firmly mediated through ideologies of the market.15 Taking this insight to heart, this study considers legal pharmaceutical markets as forms of drug trafficking legitimized through the historical emergence of selective policing of participation in the drug trade. The consolidation of an international drug control regime happened alongside the development of US capitalist power. By tracking participation and control over the flow of drug commodities (and the social and political narratives that accompanied them), this book grounds the history of the rise of US imperialism within the international sphere from which it sought raw materials, consumer markets, and political and economic collaborators. From World War II through the early 1960s, the strategic deployment of science, medicine, and technology on behalf of US economic and political expansion ensured that drugs emerged as critical weapons for both the waging of war and the encouragement of particular models of economic development prioritized by US policymakers for maintaining peace. A drive to promote mass consumption of US-manufactured goods, including drugs, became one basis for securing international dominance, and it depended on a parallel effort to designate and police mass addiction. Certain habits and certain people—soldiers, the poor, ethnic and racial minorities—were policed and prodded as the raw material for controlled development, which included testing out new drugs and transforming consumer habits.

  The drug control regime advanced by US officials locked South American countries into an economic relationship whereby their participation in the international market was as providers of raw materials and consumer-importers of US-manufactured goods. The economic dependency and vulnerability this produced in Latin America extended an ongoing process of “underdevelopment” as these nations became further tethered to the global capitalist system. As Andre Gunder Frank pointed out in 1970, with the growth of US power “not only is there now a greater degree of economic dependency, but the entire social and political structure of these ‘sovereign’ states is tied to metropolitan needs and prevents economic and social development or political freedom for Asia, Africa and Latin America.”16 Drug control further institutionalized inequalities between nations, which refracted through inequalities among peoples within nations. The emergent system of drug control differentially affected various groups of people connected to
sites of drug production, distribution, and consumption. While the fruits of drug control accrued to powerful economic and political elites centered in the United States, the burdens of the system fell disproportionately on indigenous communities of the coca growing regions in Peru and Bolivia and on poor communities and racialized minorities living in the United States. Studying drug control efforts reveals more than the evolution of unequal integration into a global capitalist system; drug control depended on the historical and cultural construction of ideas about physiological and social “danger” that came to be associated with drugs like cocaine and filtered through and perpetuated social, economic, and racial inequalities.

  From the 1940s through the early 1960s, the scope of this investigation, the United States was the largest importer of coca leaves in the world and the largest legal retailer of coca-derived goods. Coca commodities flowed through circuits oriented toward the manufacture of an array of drug products. The definition of a “drug,” and more particularly a “narcotic drug” like cocaine, was mediated by cultural politics, economic regulations, and the power of pharmaceutical laboratories to alchemically alter drug raw materials (coca leaves) into a variety of controlled substances (cocaine), and other products that conveniently exited the regulatory gaze (Coca-Cola). In medical science the category “narcotic” attaches to opiates or synthetic drugs that mimic opium’s psychoactive properties. The historical deployment of the term “narcotic,” however, has been attached to the legal status of a given drug. Thus, opium and coca leaves were integrated into national drug legislation in 1914 as the two primary categories of controlled “narcotics.” By 1937, with the passage of the Marijuana Tax Act, cannabis attained that status. While this books charts efforts to regulate the flow of coca commodities as they moved through national and international markets across the Andes and the United States, this story is necessarily situated within a larger context of the production, regulation, and consumption of an array of pharmaceuticals. The historical labeling of a given substance as a “dangerous drug” was rooted not in scientific objectivity but in the political economy and cultural politics of US drug control—as the growing contemporary embrace of “medical marijuana” usefully illustrates.

  This study is anchored by the geographic circuits through which coca commodities flowed, but it situates regulatory efforts to control coca within the larger context of a burgeoning drug control apparatus that was guided by the economic and political priorities of the US government and pharmaceutical industry writ large. For instance, during World War II, US efforts to limit Andean exports of coca to Axis powers were paired with a broader campaign to monopolize drug raw material exports and drug distribution networks in the region for the benefit of US corporations and government war mobilization. The determining influence of the US government and pharmaceutical industry was similarly evident in postwar efforts to stamp out indigenous Andean chewing of coca leaves while seeking to create new consumer markets for an array of US-manufactured drugs. Following the trail of coca, and the various drug markets that historically intersected with it, offers an exceptional window onto US-led efforts to determine the parameters of legal and illegal participation within a burgeoning international drug economy. Coca constituted one of only two raw material targeted by drug control campaigners (the other being opium) that was situated squarely in a US sphere of geopolitical influence—what some US politicians continue to derisively refer to as “America’s backyard.”

  The history of efforts to control the flow of coca commodities forces us to contend with the physical production of valued drugs and how efforts to police and regulate their circulation were subsidized and contested by various public and private players. These material conflicts were often refracted through and reinforced by cultural narratives that recast social and political conflict in terms of scientific and legal assessments of the dangers accompanying the twentieth century’s therapeutic revolution; the rhetoric of drug control easily reconfigured social, economic, and political dissent as disease, social dysfunction, and criminality.17 Studying the history of drug control entails tracking the incredible power of drugs’ symbolic currency. Beyond the ascribed physical impact of drugs, drug control proponents trumpeted the seemingly transcendental impact of drugs on human subjectivity, wherein their power to harm or heal extended into the social and cultural life of the community and often provided the evidentiary basis for discrediting (or glorifying) people, states, cultural practices, political movements, and alternative systems of value.

  Moving from US economic warfare policies during World War II through Cold War “defense mobilization,” this book examines the rise to global dominance of the American pharmaceutical industry, the extension of markets for US drug commodities overseas, and the selective criminalization of drug production and consumption within an international capitalist economic system where the aggressive marketing of some drugs, to some people, was encouraged. In the name of public health, national security, economic development, and collective defense, the government has played a crucial role in establishing access to foreign raw materials and markets for the major US-based pharmaceutical manufacturers. Through state-to-state collaboration among national police and military personnel, scientists and corporate executives, through international organizations such as the United Nations, the World Health Organization (WHO), and the Pan American Sanitary Bureau (PASB), the US government has been deeply involved in regulating, subsidizing, and promoting the US-based pharmaceutical industry as a critical pillar of the nation’s global power.

  The book begins with an examination of the impact of World War II on the international flow of drugs. The success of US economic warfare initiatives helped position the country as the preeminent global producer of pharmaceuticals and as the major advocate of international drug control by war’s end. Chapter 2 explores the ways in which drugs were demobilized after the war and rapidly remobilized as essential for national security and for maintaining a permanent state of war readiness. It looks at government efforts in conjunction with the private pharmaceutical industry to define and police the legitimate flow of drug commodities, to ensure adequate stockpiles for national defense, and to facilitate the export of US-manufactured drugs as diplomatic and economic emissaries of the benefits of allying with the US capitalist system. Chapter 3 examines the subsequent US-led effort, both independently and through the United Nations, to police all of coca’s circulation outside of the political economy envisioned by the designers of the drug control regime. This entailed a prohibitive assault on indigenous coca leaf chewing in the Andes, accompanied by a determination to secure adequate supplies of the plant for export to the United States. The chapter describes a US-chaired UN commission sent to the Andes in 1949 to study the “coca leaf problem,” how its mission was received, and how the regulatory recommendations it made constituted an attack on indigenous traditions while promoting models of modernization and development premised on integration into a global capitalist marketplace. Chapter 4 examines the seeming contradiction in American capitalist consumer culture that depends in part on cultivating drug consumption while aggressively policing drug “addiction” as a socially and historically constituted crime. The testing and marketing of new drugs became vehicles for both the pharmaceutical industry and the US government to augment their power, police wayward populations, and encourage select consuming habits and economic practices in both the Andes and the United States. These efforts simultaneously sought to cultivate cultural practices and beliefs that would supply and sustain a market for US-manufactured goods. The final chapter considers US and international drug policy and drug control rhetoric as they became tools for confronting economic and political challenges to a US capitalist hegemony in the context of the civil rights movement, global anticolonial struggles, and the Cold War.

  It is the dialectical power of drugs to harm or to heal that makes them enormously valuable in varied and historically changing ways. The productive power of drugs includes their ver
y real capacity to physiologically impact the human body, along with their symbolic capacity to mobilize people’s deepest prejudices, fears, dreams, and desires. Drugs in this sense might be both “destructive” and “productive” depending on what cultural, economic, and political metrics provide the basis for judgment. The US government has considered the productive value of drugs as both a threat and an opportunity. The power of drugs to cure, alleviate pain, stimulate action, fire the imagination, and dull or amplify the senses has been the subject of spiritual, scientific, and social inquiry for millennia. The material capacity of drugs to make someone wealthy or make someone feel good, their power to mend and to injure, are all part of this story—so too is their symbolic currency for historically constructed beliefs about the body politic and the economy of survival.

  The drug industry emerged from World War II as one of the most profitable industries in the United States. The (North) American people have been (and remain) the largest consumers, producers, and exporters of drugs in the world. At the same time, the selective policing of drug production and consumption became an integral objective of US domestic and foreign policy. This history and the ongoing war on drugs it produced has filled domestic prisons with nonviolent drug offenders and contributed to human and environmental devastation, particularly for poor and indigenous communities across the Americas. President Barack Obama’s administration continues to escalate the drug wars of previous administrations, despite a rhetorical shift eschewing that terminology, and US-led militarized drug control initiatives continue to fuel national and regional conflicts.18 The last national election cycle in the United States witnessed the unprecedented legalization of marijuana for recreational, not the more narrowly construed medical, uses in two states, signifying a groundswell of support for alternatives to the current drug control regime. At the same time there is a growing challenge both from within and outside the nation. In 2012 the leaders of Guatemala, Mexico, and Colombia issued a “Joint Declaration” to the United Nations calling for a “new paradigm” for drug control in light of the many failures of current policy—which they identify as an escalation rather than a reduction in drug abuse, an escalation in violence and criminal activities, and the attendant corruption of police forces and governments.19