This was particularly true in relation to the international drug trade. The combined private and public efforts to accumulate, distribute, and promote the consumption of American-manufactured drugs and pharmaceuticals in the war’s aftermath entrenched an economic order and ideological superstructure premised on US capitalism’s global dominance. This political economy of US power, in turn, depended on the policing and regulation of the international flow of drug raw materials and finished goods to promote the consumption of American-manufactured drug commodities around the world. In the decade after World War II government efforts to demobilize drugs from the nation’s wartime arsenal quickly transitioned into a concerted focus on remobilizing drugs on behalf of national defense and forging a role for them as material and symbolic ambassadors of the benefits of integration into a US capitalist world system. The reorganization of the drug trade through corporate and government collaborations in the 1940s and 1950s reveals how policing and profit making came together to lay the foundations for a US empire. Michel Foucault’s observation that in the late eighteenth century “the economy of illegalities was restructured with the development of capitalist society,” rings true too for a modified mid-twentieth-century capitalism with the US state and consumer culture at its epicenter.4
DEMARCATING LEGALITY
Postwar efforts aimed at “canning” the power of America’s drug commodities encountered unique challenges, despite, or perhaps because of, the belief in the remarkable rewards. War-wrought distortions in the international drug trade caused concern for US officials in the war’s immediate aftermath. For instance, US policies pursued to consolidate control over drug commodity circuits during the war combined with the sudden drop in military drug consumption in the war’s aftermath to generate government narcotics surpluses. As soldiers were demobilized, the hospitals and medicaments that traveled with them were also packed up and, although sometimes sold overseas, were most often shipped back to the United States. For officials, especially the formidable commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Harry J. Anslinger, who had played such an important role directing drug procurement during the war, these dispersed drug stockpiles generated a postwar policing imperative to control their redistribution. Various agencies of the US government staked out authority over surplus goods reallocation, and Commissioner Anslinger moved quickly to assert his bureau’s jurisdiction over all narcotic drugs. As the war’s end neared the FBN “considered the matter of disposition of surplus narcotic drugs as of the greatest national importance” and quickly secured the authority “to receive and to retain custody of these surplus narcotic drugs for eventual government use.”5 Managing the generation and large-scale redistribution of surplus goods became a structural component of postwar US economic power, and narcotic drugs as both surplus and as controlled substances posed a unique challenge. With fewer troops deployed, the demand for painkillers, especially the potent “narcotic” drugs (which included an array of opiates, cocaine, and a new array of synthetic drugs), diminished and the FBN was anxious to obtain monopoly control over their redistribution and stockpiling. The FBN sought to limit and define the boundaries of the legal flow of drugs through sanctioned circuits and stockpiles and in the process refashion the “surplus” into legitimate, nationally valuable stores of consumable goods once again. In July of 1945, less than a month before the US atomic bombing of Japan hastened the war’s end, Anslinger successfully petitioned to make the FBN the sole agency responsible for “the disposition of surplus narcotics” in the United States.6
As head of the FBN, the commissioner presented a multifaceted argument before obtaining centralized control over US national and overseas stocks of government-designated “surplus” narcotics. “I consider this to be a very desirable arrangement,” Anslinger explained to his superior in the Treasury Department, “as I believe it will eliminate the possibility that narcotic drugs declared surplus by the Army and Navy will find their way into the illicit traffic.” There had been, he noted, “considerable trouble in this respect after the last war.”7 Along with the specter of an imminent rise in illicit drug trafficking, Anslinger included in his argument for FBN monopoly control over narcotic drug surpluses an invocation of America’s international obligations. He maintained that any narcotics transfers for civilian medical use would “violate the spirit, if not the letter” of international drug control conventions that the United States was signatory to. In particular Anslinger mentioned the 1931 Geneva Convention’s proscription against the accumulation of drug stocks in excess of national quotas pegged to legitimate medical and scientific demand (although the United States did not include national security stockpiles in calculating its quota). The FBN believed acquiring sole authority over drug redistribution was necessary to prevent excess drugs from entering the market, guaranteed adequate supplies for national defense stockpiles, and ensured the federal agency’s own dominance over narcotics policy.8 Anslinger had been able to expand the FBN’s influence over national drug policy during the war, and he now successfully maneuvered, through invoking the specter of the illicit trade and drug treaty obligations, to have his and the bureau’s influence continue to grow in the war’s aftermath.
In Anslinger’s eyes, coupled with the threat of illicit trafficking were the dangers posed by the (uncertain) qualities of the drugs themselves and the security of locations where they might be stored. Anslinger emphasized the “dubious quality of most narcotics which become surplus.” Highlighting the uncertain chain of custody of demobilized drugs, the varied origins and inconsistent storage conditions, and the frequent lack of uniformity and purity of samples, Anslinger declared that the sale of such drugs to “civilian agencies for medical use would be unsafe.” The difficulties of surplus drug quality control, he warned, could even “contribute to a disaster in a given hospital.” The FBN’s position was that hospitals should not be storing drugs in any case, given the inadequacy of their security facilities. In an almost obsessive detailing of the security obstacles accompanying the storage of drugs in hospitals, the bureau cautioned that, unlike “[drug] manufacturers [who] are required to have secure masonry vaults or heavy safes, burglar-resistant by Underwriter’s Laboratories’ certification, supplemented by A-1 central station, electrical burglar alarms, the usual hospital is notoriously insecure . . . not one in five hundred has an electrical burglar alarm of any kind. Their so-called ‘safes’ are usually thin metal lockers. Their pharmacies are usually thin tile or plaster walled rooms with common key-locked wooden doors, to which there are several keys.”
This emphatic enumeration of security conditions contrasted the supposedly paltry situation at publicly accessible hospitals with the advantages of pharmaceutical manufacturers’ private facilities. The FBN asserted that only its own vaults, the government stockpile, and the storage facilities of private drug manufacturers were the most secure locales for drug stockpiling. This hierarchy was indicative of the high-level collaboration between drug companies and the US government that was increasingly central to profitability within the drug market and in the regulatory apparatus designed to sustain it. In this vision, private capital and police agencies of the US government working together were best equipped to overcome the public menace of the potential illicit lurking everywhere: “Orderlies, delivery men, other hospital personnel, and even visitors, pass to and fro about them at all hours. Numerous building entrances stand open or remain unlocked, many times day and night, for the ingress and egress of doctors, nurses, hospital employees, delivery men, visitors, or passers-by. In other words, hospitals are not prepared to take care of dangerous drugs except for small stocks on a current, rapid turnover basis.”9
The shadow of the illicit functioned as a powerful stimulus for a government-corporate drug regulatory alliance. The FBN argued the only way to ensure that drugs were safely handled, storage vaults were secure, drugs were pure, the United States was fulfilling diplomatic obligations, and it (the FBN) was able to combat the illicit traffic, was
to establish its own monopoly within the government, within the nation, and within US-controlled portions of the world over the disposition of narcotic drugs deemed “surplus” to immediate government needs, in close collaboration with the pharmaceutical industry. It also further consolidated the FBN’s influence more generally since the bureau was the agency responsible for granting licenses to pharmaceutical firms desiring a role in the narcotics trade. The bureau’s arguments were taken seriously, and by 1946 directives went out informing the military that all narcotics deemed surplus to divisions in foreign theaters as well as on domestic soil were to be delivered to the “Drugs Disposal Committee” of the Treasury Department’s Federal Bureau of Narcotics.
Anslinger’s obsession with security attested to the difficulty of neatly delineating and enforcing boundaries of legality where slippage from licit to illicit drug circuits (and back) was pervasive, and where the regulatory innovations themselves often generated confusion over where the line between legal and illegal lay. The illicit market in a very real way was the productive consequence of government efforts to delineate the boundaries of legality. As a consequence, the history of the emergence of a robust regulatory apparatus is also the history of the identification and targeting of the illicit drug trade, the former the definitional precondition for the latter. As Itty Abraham and Willem van Schendel have observed, “both law and crime emerge from historical and ongoing struggles over legitimacy, in the course of which powerful groups succeed in delegitimizing and criminalizing certain practices.” This study takes their counsel to heart: “Students of illicitness must start from the assumptions that states cannot simply be equated with law and order, and that illicit practices are necessarily part of any state.”10
While the FBN sought to capitalize on the dynamic interplay between the legal and illegal, it frequently found itself challenged by the instability of the boundary separating the two. Take for instance an incident that happened according to one official account, “on or about” July 1, 1947, when a sick prisoner was taken from the Utah State Prison in Salt Lake City and transported to a hospital, where he died. This event, which might otherwise have passed relatively unnoticed, received a considerable amount of attention after the autopsy determined that the prisoner, Henry Spencer McLeece, had “died from the injection of an unknown narcotic drug.” The local FBN agent and his district supervisor based in Denver joined the warden and other prison officials in conducting the subsequent investigation. The source of the hypodermic syringe and the drugs fatally consumed by the prisoner, it turned out, had been the Naval Supply Depot in nearby Clearfield.11 In fact, the district supervisor reported to his boss, FBN Commissioner Anslinger, that the drugs responsible for the prisoner’s demise had been procured from stores of government military surplus. Specifically, they had been part of a lot, “a hospital unit sold by the Navy Department through the War Assets Administration to the Utah State Hospital for Poliomyelitis and other Crippling Diseases,” a hospital that was being built at the time.12
But how had the drugs come to be in the prison? The year prior to this incident the Utah State Hospital had purchased from the Navy a “100-bed naval hospital unit” that had been designated surplus to military needs. With the Navy wanting to deliver the unit and the hospital still being under construction, the hospital’s board of directors managed to have the equipment stored in the interim in “an uncompleted cell-block in the new prison on the outskirts of Salt Lake City.” In the process of unloading the Naval Supply Depot delivery trucks, about two weeks before prisoner McLeece died, prisoners laboring at the Utah State Prison discovered a crate marked “Bourbon Whiskey 100-proof.” They hid the crate under the loading platform and later smuggled it away through “a tunnel under the cell-block.” When the prisoners opened the crate, along with whiskey, they found an array of narcotics including 1250 morphine syrettes (disposable injection devices), opium, and opium derivatives in other forms, an eighth of an ounce and 1000 packaged tabloids of cocaine hydrochloride, along with various other synthetic drug preparations, according to an inventory list drawn up by the prison warden.
In official correspondence relating to the investigation, no one at the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the Utah State Prison, the Naval Supply Depot, the War Assets Administration, which had facilitated the sale, nor the Utah State Hospital seemed surprised by the fact that a “100-bed naval hospital unit” might have narcotics as part of its inventory. Narcotics—which were defined by national and international drug conventions of the times as opium and coca, their derivatives (and a growing list of synthetic substitutes)—were, after all, routinely used as painkillers in general medical practice; the government considered them essential materials in the recently concluded war. Regardless, all of those involved in this particular transaction professed ignorance of narcotics having been included in the lot of surplus military property sold to the state hospital. Perhaps this was connected to the odd packaging. A crate marked “Bourbon Whiskey 100-proof” filled with narcotics might easily be, or appear to be, contraband, not least since official acknowledgment of the narcotics’ existence was only provided after a prisoner’s death. At what point the drugs had in fact crossed the line and become technically contraband—whether before the crate ever made it into the surplus naval hospital unit, or only once it was removed from the unit by prisoners locked in the Utah State Prison—was not a question any of the government authorities or institutions involved seemed particularly eager to explore. The narcotics had remained in state custody throughout, after all; from the Naval Supply Depot to the state prison, as they were dispersed through the inmates’ prison cells and bodies and, finally, at least for a portion of the drugs, coming to rest at the state hospital morgue.
All parties to the business claimed no prior knowledge of the drugs’ inclusion in the sale. Yet, in a gesture which calls into question many of the official reported details, the FBN agent submitted a list to headquarters detailing the drugs that had yet to be recovered. The listing was based on an initial inventory inexplicably dated after the drugs had first been delivered to the prison. How an accurate inventory could be compiled after the narcotics’ dispersal (and presumed at least partial consumption) within the prison did not seem to matter. The warden confidently claimed he had recovered all the drugs except “those hidden by the dead man” and expressed his willingness to “plow up whole fields” to find the missing stocks. The Narcotics District Supervisor was impressed by what he described as the warden’s “energetic investigation,” in particular, “that this matter was kept a secret by the Warden and other prison officials as long as possible” in order that the hunt for the last portion of unrecovered drugs be the most effective. With a majority of the “inventoried” stocks recovered and an explanation for how the drugs wound up in prisoners’ hands, the district supervisor ultimately concluded, “It is difficult to place the blame for this unfortunate incident.”13
The contradictions and unanswered questions in the agent’s report may have been less important than the fact of presenting some accounting of the “surplus” commodities involved, providing the documentary evidence for the bureau’s files (and any further investigations) of having regained a sort of control over the situation. And this control, as embodied by the official actions taken, meant redistributing the recovered narcotics into channels deemed legitimate once again. The drugs seized in the prison were turned over to the FBN. The supervisor of medical supplies at the Naval Supply Depot assured the investigators that any additional narcotics present in the remaining twenty-nine hospital units they had in their custody would be removed “without too much trouble and expense” in the course of a planned transfer of the units to another warehouse. To avoid a similar scenario, the Navy assured the FBN that the remaining units would not be sold, but rather “held in reserve for a possible future war.” The only punishments meted out, not surprisingly, were against the prisoner-consumers. In the course of an undocumented number of interrogations by prison officials,
at least a few prisoners were threatened with delayed parole. And, two weeks after Henry Spencer McLeece passed away, the FBN district supervisor reported five prisoners “are now in solitary confinement, and their punishment will be decided upon at a later date by the Warden and the Board of Corrections.”14
The need to reassert some sort of control over the “illicit” narcotics themselves was one thing—accomplished ultimately through the punishment of those with the least amount of control over the drug commodities’ circulation. Why the Navy had sold narcotic drugs to a civilian hospital was quite another. Both concerns centered on defining the parameters of legitimate participation in the drug market: who could store, consume, and provide narcotic drugs to whom. While answers to the first matter reverberated primarily in the lives of those incarcerated or who worked in the prison, the second touched on structural questions of authority and control over the legitimate circulation of drug commodities amid national and international economic and political restructurings in the war’s aftermath. Working from the assumption that the narcotics had been pilfered from “legitimate” stocks, the FBN wanted to know why narcotic drugs had been transferred—sold—from military to civilian stores, against federal policy directives granting the FBN sole authority and forbidding such transactions. The War Assets Administration claimed the hospital unit was sold before they had received instructions not to “accept declarations for or including narcotic drugs.”15 The Navy Supply Depot, similarly, “had no explanation as to why the narcotic drugs had not been removed,” despite having seen the directive. No mention was made—in either case—of the crate’s “100-proof whiskey” labeling that gave no indication, in any case, of the box’s actual content, which would have made foreknowledge of the narcotics’ inclusion by either agency highly suspect. Nevertheless, the FBN seemed satisfied with these explanations for this particular incident. The drugs were accounted for, punishments doled out, and the drugs’ circulation was once again in the legitimate realm.
We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire Page 8