Women Drug Traffickers

by Elaine Carey

  Another woman, Sadie Stock, developed a lucrative transnational business in the 1920s by using an emerging seaport in Baja California to traffic opiates from Mexico to the United States.62 By land, limited amounts of heroin and other opiates could be hidden under women’s skirts or strapped to their legs. Stock, a successful businesswoman, demonstrated a technological and entrepreneurial innovation that yielded far greater profits, using Mexican ports to transship contraband to the United States by sea. U.S. federal agents arrested Stock and her chauffer, Oscar Dusel, on August 4, 1924, in San Diego.63 In their search, agents seized large amounts of narcotics, jewelry, and $22,000 (2012: $297,000) in cash. Stock insisted that she planned to use the money to pay her income tax, but to no avail. With Stock’s arrest, agents reported that they had dismantled one of the most successful narcotics syndicates in the United States. She had ties in Europe, Asia, and Mexico, and she received her shipments of opium from Asia through ports in Ensenada, Mexico; she also received shipments of other drugs from Germany.64 From Ensenada, she moved her merchandise into the United States, where she supplied much of the heroin consumed in California and the Pacific Northwest. Immediately after her arrest, Stock posted a $15,000 bond. Her attorney paid Dusel’s $5,000 bond. Later, Stock went to trial, but she was released on a technicality that was not publicly disclosed. Calexico-Mexicali as a central narcotics port was overshadowed by Tijuana–San Diego toward the end of the 1920s, due to the activities of women such as Stock. In the 1930s, Stock had not given up her involvement in drugs. She appeared to still be trafficking, working with a Mexican partner through the Calexico-Mexicali port.65

  Both Silverstein and Stock served to reinforce xenophobic and gendered notions of drug trafficking. As immigrants, they drew suspicion and bolstered preconceptions that certain immigrants were prone to such behavior.66 Furthermore, the fact that women had been heavily involved as either a partner, in the case of Silverstein, or a boss, in the case of Stock, reinforced assumptions that foreign women were apt to behave badly. This further created suppositions about masculinity, that foreign men lacked the ability to control their women or, alternatively, that they forced women into criminal acts that undermined the women’s physical and moral health and also that of their adopted nation. The reference to Silverstein as a “queen” in the drug trade marks a recurring rhetorical device in reference to women in the trade that is now a century in use. Queens like Silverstein used illicit businesses to get rich, simultaneously undermining their adopted nation by poisoning its citizens.

  During the 1920s, California ranked third among the states for convictions for narcotics traffickers under the Harrison Act. Consequently, state officials became increasingly concerned about drug use.67 In 1926, the California legislature estimated that addicts in their state spent $6.00 a day (2012: $78.00) on average on drugs. State officials in California and elsewhere viewed addicts as a criminal and financial drain on state resources. The report from the California legislature proclaimed: “These addicts prey upon the state to the extent of from $4,300,000 to $7,000,000 per year without estimating the indirect cost of crime, the strain on our law enforcement system, our police, our judiciary, our penal institutions, jails, and prisons.”68 Recidivism also reinforced perceptions of addicts as costly criminals in many state and federal reports.69 It seemed to state officials and the public that drug addicts could not be cured.

  Narcotics garnered more and more attention from politicians, public health workers, the police, criminologists, and medical professionals in the 1920s. At international, national, and state meetings in the United States, Mexico, and Canada, attendees searched for a means to treat addicts and to punish traffickers and peddlers. Ideas ranged from complete isolation of addicts, to narcotics farms, to imprisonment. These meetings intersected with an ongoing interest in eugenics in all three countries. Cases like those of Silverstein and Stock fueled xenophobic attitudes and incited attacks in the United States.

  In Mexico, officials echoed American rhetoric and denounced the plague of foreigners, whom they blamed for introducing drugs and trafficking in Mexico. Significantly, the constructions of alleged criminality of certain groups and their alleged association to narcotics flowed across borders just as narcotics and people did. As traffickers and couriers serendipitously moved opiates and cocaine across international boundaries, those battling against narcotics met in various venues to decry this scourge of the modern age and to introduce, exchange, and perpetrate their criminological and racialized ideas.

  In the 1920s, Mexican president Plutarco Calles, a native of Sonora, brought certain racial ideas with him to national office. Sonora had a history of anti-Chinese sentiment that was as long as Chinese immigration to Mexico itself. Since the seventeenth century, Asian men had migrated from the Philippines to Mexico City to conduct commerce.70 In Mexico City, Chinese men developed businesses. After the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in the United States in 1882, many Chinese laborers went south and settled in Baja California and Sonora in Mexico.71 There, immigrant communities developed with transnational links to China but also to the United States, Canada, Cuba, and other parts of the Americas. These communities fostered entrepreneurial partnerships in company towns that served mines and railroads, many owned and operated by Americans.72 Thus, Chinese immigrants operated laundries, restaurants, and other businesses that served miners and railroad workers. Regardless of the contributions of Chinese immigrants to North America, anti-Chinese sentiment traveled across borders, circulated in the press and literature, and was popularized through jokes and caricatures.

  On a global scale, Mexico’s entry under Calles into the diplomacy associated with narcotics control further exacerbated xenophobia and led Mexicans to target nationalities that were consistently mentioned in League of Nations narcotics reports: Chinese, Middle Easterners, and Jews. Negative depictions of immigrants circulated in the press. Moreover, Mexican citizens’, workers’, and women’s groups viewed their foreign-born compatriots with suspicion whether they were German pharmacists, Middle Eastern merchants, or Chinese businesspeople. They would often “report” suspected violations to authorities. Thus, Mexicans of foreign birth increasingly found themselves the subjects of police investigations for narcotics violations and raids whether they were laborers or professionals, including doctors and pharmacists.

  Like in the United States and Canada, Mexican officials demanded that doctors and pharmacists accept greater oversight due to their obvious associations with narcotics and cocaine. Official reports from all three countries demonstrate the vast discrepancies in prescribing practices among medical professionals, even veterinarians. Early debates over addiction and peddling included discussion of medical professionals, who were sometimes characterized as addicts themselves or as unprofessional dope doctors who simply sought to turn a profit at the expense of citizens, thus contributing to the degeneration of the nation, whether in the United States, Canada, or Mexico. Drugs, eugenics, and sexuality combined to create narratives of vice that relied upon racist narratives.

  In the mid-1920s, the laws in Mexico regarding the import and distribution of narcotics changed as they had in the United States and Canada. Like their northern colleagues, doctors and pharmacists in Mexico now had to maintain stricter accounting procedures for opiates and cocaine. Just as in the United States and Canada, Mexican authorities were gravely concerned about the role that professionals played in the distribution of narcotics. In turn, part of the Penal Code, the Código Sanitario y los Reglamentos, was rewritten to abide by many of the demands of the United States and other Western powers.73 Abiding by the changing laws, pharmacist Lamberto Hernández, the proprietor of Droguería Mexicana in Mexico City, listed all the narcotics he had in his pharmacy in 1927, and Emilio Kentler, owner and pharmacist of Droguería y Farmacia Iturbide in Mexico City, also sent a list of his inventory to the Department of Health.74 Both pharmacists listed inventories of over eleven kilos of medicinal opium and less than two kilos of cocaine
.

  Figure 2. Public officials with doctors probably associated with drug trafficking. Serie Mariguana, opio, y drogas, ca. 1935, 142911, Casasola, Mexico City, Fototeca Nacional del Instituto Nacional de Anthropología e Historia (INAH), Pachuca, Hidalgo.

  Like in the United States and Canada, Mexico’s Department of Health compiled lists of doctors arrested for distribution of opiates and cocaine. In all three countries, health professionals felt attacked by people who were not part of the medical profession even as debates regarding maintenance programs for addicts flowed across borders. What has been less frequently addressed in the historiography is interprofessional squabbling over drugs. Foreign medical professionals in Mexico came under attack from their native colleagues. Medical colleagues and associates wrote letters of complaint about each other, as in 1929, when Julio M. González testified that Hugo Schroeder engaged in the drug trade in Mexico City. He stated:

  Dr. Hugo Schroeder is dedicated to prescribing narcotics to addicts. . . . He gives recipes in which he prescribes morphine sulfate accompanied by various other substances to be taken in the form of pomade or spoons, but he also gives them [addicts] prescriptions written in German and typed on a typewriter, signed by himself and directed to Herr Markenson, owner of the pharmacy on Avenida Juárez. The message written in German recommends the pharmacist to fill the recipes that include morphine or heroin.75

  González’s letter embraced xenophobia but also questioned other aspects of Schroeder’s professional standards. Schroeder’s use of technology and language drew criticism. The use of German ensured that the pharmacist who filled the prescriptions would have to be literate in German as well as Spanish. Thus, the pharmacist who filled the prescription was most likely another German speaker. Rather than believing that the doctor was merely offering economic support to another business within the German immigrant community, from one professional to another, González saw Schroeder’s actions as potentially criminal. Schroeder used a typewriter rather than handwriting to give specific directions on how to mix the concoction, and gave directives on how to avoid detection by public health, police, and medical authorities, González charged. According to González, Schroeder and the pharmacist Markenson were conspiring to sell illegal drugs. For authorities to detect the crime, they would have to be literate in German and have a highly sophisticated knowledge of chemistry or pharmacology. Cases like this, in which medical professionals reported on each other to the authorities, were commonplace in this dense atmosphere of suspicion.

  In another case in 1931, Dr. A. Perales Vega demanded that the Health Department investigate Dr. C. L. H. Medici de Birón for the illegal distribution of morphine. Perales attached an example of one of Medici’s prescriptions to prove that he was a notorious dope doctor. Perales also enclosed a signed statement from one Señora Sara Valdívar stating that Medici had given her a papelito of morphine. Perales alleged that Medici not only distributed morphine and heroin but was an addict himself. Perales, like other citizens, used the charge of addiction to bolster his call for action against those—especially foreigners—who drugged not only themselves but vulnerable women who were seeking medical help.76 Perales’s letter to the Health Department captured the fear that fellow doctors could taint the entire profession with their scandalous acts.

  In both cases, observations of doctors’ prescription pads, their office technology, their chosen pharmacists, and their patients suggested that the authors of these letters may actually have been competitors who, out of envy perhaps, used a language of exceptionalism and nationalism to sully the reputations of other doctors. The construct “dope doctor” relied on a subtext: foreign doctors intoxicating a population that struggled to throw off one form of oppression (a dictatorship) only to be bound by another, addiction, which also would retard national progress and modernity.77

  The association of foreign men with diverse technologies and in positions of authority or in jobs associated with modernity was repeated in the official text and likewise marked by suspicion. For example, in 1925 the newly formed Department of Health arrested a man named Felice Bonaudo. Investigators found Bonaudo in possession of 1.5 kilos of cocaine. The fact that he had that much cocaine was cause for alarm, but public officials expressed greater concern that this Italian immigrant was an airplane mechanic for Mexico’s Secretariat of War and Navy.78 Through his employment, Bonaudo had access to airplanes, which he could potentially utilize to distribute cocaine. Airplanes, a technological innovation and symbol of modernity, were being put into use for illicit means. Bonaudo’s arrest may be interpreted in one of two ways. First, he personally used a lot of cocaine. Or second, in a country that had yet to harness aviation to a significant degree in the private sector, Bonaudo was, per se, a narcopioneer, demonstrating an early use of airplanes to traffic cocaine into and throughout Mexico.

  Women, too, found themselves targets of the Department of Health, but their association at this point had little to do with technology and modernity. Domestically, the emergence of the Department of Health and the professionalization of public welfare led to internal questions about health that targeted women and their traditional work as antithetical to the concepts of modernity. As in the United States, traditional female healers and midwives had to be regulated out of existence in order to professionalize the practice of medicine.79 Of course, women mobilized to work in public health campaigns to promote hygiene and better health; they became nurses and social workers.80 Yet, curanderas (female traditional healers) remained figures of suspicion. They came under scrutiny not only from public health officials but also from their neighbors. As foreign men were marginalized within their chosen professions, women in the healing arts also encountered new roadblocks with the greater professionalization of medicine in Mexico.

  In 1931, in a list of arrested medical doctors involved in illegal narcotics distribution, a curandera, Felipa Castillo, was also included. Originally from Texas, the thirty-eight-year-old lived in Villa Acuña, Coahuila. She was arrested for possessing 1.64 kilos of marijuana. Her neighbors submitted signed statements to the authorities attesting that Castillo grew and distributed marijuana, providing it to those who suffered from illness and injury.81 Like many female healers in Mexico who used marijuana to treat a host of illnesses, Castillo provided it for oral ingestion, smoking, or application as a salve, often used to treat arthritis and rheumatism. These aliments called for a tincture or salve, which the healer prepared by soaking marijuana in alcohol and then rubbing it onto the afflicted areas, relieving the pain.82 For women like Castillo, the fact that their traditional healing methods were now seen as illegal caused difficulties. Healers competed with medical doctors, who sought to regulate and control other kinds of practitioners. Significantly, women healers appeared to be the antithesis of modernity and progress. They cared for people in their homes rather than in hospitals or clinics, and they used herbs and plants rather than narcotics or analogous substances. For a nation trying desperately to be accepted as part of the modern world, Mexican public health officials wanted to do away with its traditional medicines, particularly in the cities.

  While medical professionals and pharmacists of foreign birth were targets of the authorities, many defended themselves by following Mexican laws and keeping meticulous records of the narcotics they dispensed. Native female healers did not have this option because their trade was unregulated and unrecognized by a broader agency. In turn, a two-front battle was waged. On one hand, medical and public health officials sought to modernize the nation by questioning Mexican traditional medicine and practitioners who undermined their goals. On the other hand, organized citizens’ and professional groups protested the presence of foreign nationals in the medical and pharmaceutical fields who were seen as contributing to the degeneration of the race and undermining the nation. Doctors, particularly of foreign birth, in Mexico, the United States, and Canada drew considerable condemnation as peddlers of dope. Although some doctors were legitimately arrested for violatin
g the laws, others came under attack due to economic competition rather than their being involved in the illegal distribution of narcotics or cocaine.

  CREATING AN ENEMY: THE ANTI-CHINO MOVEMENT

  In part, commercial competition fed the anti-Chinese movement in Mexico as it simultaneously fed suspicions about foreign-born doctors and pharmacists. In 1925, anti-Chinese sentiment intensified with citizens’ groups, newspapers, and zealous governors leading the attacks in public debate, police action, and violent assaults, despite the fact that U.S. officials questioned the involvement of Chinese in large-scale drug peddling and smuggling.83 In 1927, U.S. consul Henry C. A. Damm wrote: “The large Chinese population on the Mexican West Coast would undoubtedly offer a market for a large quantity of opium produced, but this consulate has not heard of any attempts to smuggle the drug of Sonora origin into the United States directly across the border.”84

  Despite U.S. perceptions that Chinese immigrants in Mexico engaged in drug trafficking only infrequently, the evidence suggests that some did in fact smuggle drugs across the border, as did native Mexicans. However, the anti-Chino movement associated all Chinese with narcotics and blamed this small community for trafficking, addiction, and crime. Diplomatic correspondence contrasted greatly with internal policies. Initially, Mexican leaders actively recruited Chinese laborers to the country’s “hot zones” because they were perceived as able to withstand the climate, which was similar to that of parts of China.85 Later, beginning in the early 1900s, Mexican officials sought to control immigration from China.86 At that time the Chinese, who were not well represented in the medical profession in Mexico, had a difficult time defending themselves and their families against allegations that they were dope peddlers. This situation led to numerous attacks on the Chinese in Mexico, which continued through the 1920s and into the 1930s with Mexican nationals publicly denouncing Chinese businesspeople as dealers, pushers, and traffickers. In turn, the state investigated Chinese businesses and in some cases moved toward deporting business owners. Moreover, the anti-Chinese movement created a fervor over police corruption and racial tainting through intermarriage.