To ensure profitability—by supplying coca extract to fuel Coca-Cola’s global expansion—Maywood was building a Federal Bureau of Narcotics’ sanctioned reserve store of coca leaves. Maywood needed the stockpile, the company suggested, to avoid seasonal fluctuations in coca leaf supply or “uncertain” Peruvian facilities that might adversely affect the company’s access to raw materials. South America figured as the “uncertain” aspect of the commodity circuit that stockpiling was intended to overcome. Maywood invoked Coca-Cola’s expanding production as an almost naturalized, if not explicitly valorized, aspect of the equation. As stockpiling became increasingly central to national defense, the definition of “defense” came to include policies designed to protect select corporations invested in the US drug market.
As this correspondence suggests, the federal government intervened in the drug market to police the boundaries of legality regarding raw material production, distribution, and manufacturing. This was implemented primarily through limiting the scale and scope of participation within the market—while ensuring an adequate flow of raw materials to authorized manufacturers. The advantages of these collaborations for select private companies extended to other areas of operations. When Commissioner Anslinger received data on the Peruvian coca industry, he forwarded it to Maywood executives. The company’s president responded with an expression of his appreciation for the “map showing the coca growing areas and the location of crude cocaine factories in Peru. Because of our connections with Peru these maps are especially interesting to us and I deeply appreciate your having sent them.”82 Mutually advantageous ties were forged between licensed drug manufacturers and the government agencies charged with policing the drug market. This model of drug control produced a convergence of interests that helped establish a relative monopoly over aspects of drug manufacturing, and corporate beneficiaries could invoke their cooperation as justification for maintaining privileged access to the market not merely with regard to raw materials, but also in relation to the worldwide circulation of finished goods.
EXPORTING RESOURCES FOR FREEDOM
The close collaboration between the FBN, Maywood, and Coca-Cola extended into the realm of exporting and marketing America’s “resources for freedom,” the canned (or bottled) consumer products deemed essential to maintaining and extending US power. Pharmaceutical companies like Merck and Maywood occupied critical roles in economic defense mobilization as processors and reworkers of drug commodities for government and private stockpiles. The third company centrally involved in the coca trade, Coca-Cola (a primary purchaser of chemically reworked coca leaves), assumed the role of reworking labor, marketing, and consumer habits to meet the needs of the company—and American capitalism more generally as it expanded into the world. Fittingly, for the first time in the magazine’s history, on May 15, 1950, Time featured a branded product on its cover: a giant smiling Coca-Cola logo personified, cradling the head of a thirsty world as it suckled on a Coke bottle. Echoing the message of the feature article contained inside the issue, the cover image caption read “World And Friend,” and its subtitle emphasized the monetary and cultural profit to be made from Coca-Cola’s overseas operations: “Love that piaster, that lira, that tickey, and that American way of life.”
The company had been aggressively pursuing international markets since the 1920s and by World War II, with the help of the Coca-Cola Export Corporation established in 1930, the company had bottling plants in Europe, Asia, and South America. However, it was wartime collaboration with the government to ensure adequate supplies of Coca-Cola for the nation’s military that laid the groundwork for the company’s subsequent unprecedented international expansion. The company’s official biographer described the convergence of patriotism and profit making in her assessment of this history: “The war was history’s ultimate drama of good against evil. . . . And when men like [then Coca-Cola President Robert W.] Woodruff at the head of large companies spoke of helping the war effort, of abetting the fighting forces, they can, in the context of the time, be credited with speaking as much out of patriotic as profit motivation.” The company was very conscious of the ways in which this dual motivation might be received as an imperial imposition and worked hard to cast its bottling franchise system as a means to “avoid the appearance of the ‘ugly American’ in foreign countries and to offset American intellectuals’ denunciation of ‘exploitative,’ giant multinational corporations.”83 To this end, in order to feed a thirsty world, the company promoted its commitment to cultivate local ground troops of distribution. Time celebrated the company’s elaborate training program for future overseas bottlers and distributors that it flew in to be schooled at a training session in New York, where they went on to various US plants and spent time at Coca-Cola’s “central Production School” in Atlanta. Time promoted Coca-Cola’s trainee education as “one of the miracles of organization” that had made the company so successful. In a vision suggesting the hegemonic force and benefits of US capitalism Time declared: “Coca-Cola coolly takes hold of Japanese capitalists, German bureaucrats and Bolivian laborers and trains them to do a series of specific jobs in every move and thought the way they are done in America. What’s more, the trainees like it.”84
Specifically, according to H.B. Nicholson, the company’s president in 1952, Coca-Cola was training this global labor force “in production and sales promotion.” Echoing Time’s presumption of the benefits such training brought to the world’s laborers, capitalists, and bureaucrats, Nicholson explained, “[T]he basic attraction for Coca-Cola salesmen is the sense of dignity they are given to feel in their jobs. People everywhere are proud, especially in the depressed areas of the world.” Becoming the distributors of American goods represented, in this formulation, an opportunity for gaining self-respect through work; it became a mechanism for spreading the American dream to modernize and develop the “depressed” parts of the world. Nicholson explained that this transformation entailed “[a] full-scale industrial education, for there is no telling what stages of development [trainees] will encounter in the various parts of the world. It becomes us to remember that races not knowing anything about refrigeration, for example, may have cradled the world’s religions, or art treasures immemorial, or the tradition of freedom, or the pulsating rhythms of primitive song and story. In so small a world, we need all these people as friends.”85
Describing the Coca-Cola’s New York headquarters as “a miniature United Nations,” Nicholson preached the advantages of molding those who would help distribute and bottle the company’s merchandise into effective capitalist entrepreneurs—so that US products might be appropriately refrigerated overseas. He did not want his audience, the New York Herald Tribune Forum, to overlook the exploitable possibilities of labor everywhere. Coca-Cola’s president wanted them to “remember” the value of other “races” of the world, even those at lower “stages of development” (“primitive,” “pulsating,” “immemorial”). For Coca-Cola, they embodied value both as providers of the world’s cultural “treasures”—an expression of paternalistic commodification—as well as, and no doubt more importantly, the raw material for manufacturing Coca-Cola salesmen.
Training salesmen was critical to ensuring the company’s successful expansion and built off of an operating structure that Coca-Cola already had implemented in the United States. The company’s domestic decentralized operations were mimicked in its overseas operations, although it acknowledged, “not all bottling franchises are in indigenous hands, particularly in underdeveloped countries.”86 As the company president described, “The company manufactured the syrup or concentrate, that goes to make the finished product. With few exceptions, both at home and abroad, the bottling operation is the business of locally owned and locally operated enterprises.” Thus decentralization was seen as an effective route toward market penetration, benefiting from the advantages of local participation in distribution. The trainees who staffed these “locally owned” operations were “governed only by an
agreement that protects the use of the trademark and the quality of the finished product for the ultimate consumer. Thus it is possible to advertise Coca-Cola as the same drink everywhere in the world.”87 Coca-Cola was branded as a definitively American commodity, but others, the company asserted, benefited from bringing it to market.
The local nature of participation meant that the company advertised its operations as contributing to the economic development of other nations: “In local countries that aren’t too highly industrialized, the local bottlers encourage the development of the supplying industries. . . . Since 1945 in Columbia [sic], for example, factories have been established for making CO2 gas, bottles, crowns, cases, coolers, and outdoor signs. Colombian bottlers can now buy these business requirements in Colombia. What’s more, these supplying industries have developed other customers in the Colombian market. When Coke goes on sale anywhere, the business contributes fairly and squarely to the economic welfare of the people there.”88
The Coca-Cola Company benefited from presenting itself as a motor for other nations’ economic development—or “welfare”—while being able to devolve the company of responsibility for those local operations. Thus, Nicholson argued that decentralization had political value as well, particularly in countering challenges to American influence. He described the valuable “national” identities of local operatives: “During the recent events in Egypt, we encountered no difficulties because Coke is an Egyptian business giving permanent employment to 3,000 Egyptians.” Aside from the implicit valorization of American capitalism as “giving” employment (rather than, say, extracting profits), Nicholson’s comments reveal another critical formation that was exported with US capital. The decentralization of operations helped the US government and US private capital avoid political responsibility for local operations—one consequence of decentralization that is still being hotly contested today.
The economic model espoused by Coca-Cola executives offers a striking example of the way contemporary modernization and development theory genuinely influenced US self-perception and the belief in the benevolent impact of the nation’s global market penetration. Their ideological vision seemed to embody the ideas famously advanced in Walt Rostow’s The Stages of Economic Growth. Rostow depicted a model of economic development that presumed the world’s societies passed through identifiable stages of economic development where the highest stage, “the age of high-mass consumption,” was incarnate in postwar US society. This economic vision was conducive to US imperialism since it cast the majority of the world’s people as inhabiting nations that existed at lower evolutionary stages of economic development and presumed the United States, as the most advanced, had an important role to play in helping them “modernize.” Premised on hierarchical national comparisons, advocates of this vision did not acknowledge, as many US policymakers did at the time, that this economic vision relied on other countries’ perpetual provisioning of raw materials along with the imposition of sets of legal controls that limited the accumulation of profits to people living on the peripheries of the capitalist world system. Often, the actual historical impact and workings of integration into a US-centered capitalist system might more accurately be characterized, as scholars who challenged modernization theory pointed out, as producing “dependency” and “underdevelopment.” The natural resources, cheap labor, and consumer markets that Coca-Cola officials celebrated cultivating overseas, in the context of marketing a product derived in part from the international drug trade, actively integrated those countries into a global political economy and its accompanying regulatory apparatus that bolstered US power and fostered economic vulnerability and dependency in many regions of the world.89
Coca-Cola was able to capitalize on decentralizing operations while, importantly for both the company’s and the nation’s power, firmly retaining ownership over the finished product. This was accomplished in part, as Time enthused, by having distributors perform “specific jobs in every move and thought the way they are done in America.” More significantly, the company also retained trademark rights over the Coca-Cola drink wherever it was manufactured. Local bottlers and distributors were subject to a contract that controlled the substance in the finished product as well as directing and providing materials for advertising campaigns that indelibly linked the soft drink to the company and American capitalism. The enforced branding of commodities as “American” was one way of securing and promoting US interests abroad. As Coca-Cola executive James A. Farley explained to other business representatives at the annual “Brand Names Day” dinner in New York in April 1952:
When we speak to a man in another country of democracy, he may or may not understand us. The idea may be beyond his comprehension; or perhaps a poor brand of democracy has been sold to him by somebody else before. But when you give him a ride in your Jeep or offer him a Chesterfield, a package of Chiclets (or even a soft beverage of some kind), this is something he can easily judge for himself. We are therefore in a position where the things that we manufacture—American brand name products—are perhaps the best proof of what we are and the best ambassadors of our country.90
Farley described American commodities themselves as the best tools for overcoming cultural difference and representing the wonders of US democracy overseas. Conflating US democracy and capitalism, in contrast to the “poor brand of democracy” on sale elsewhere, US-branded goods embodied “proof of what we are.” Thus, American-manufactured commodities—capitalists argued—not only brought good business practices for fueling local economic development, but beyond that, they acted as material “ambassadors” for the US political system.
These ambassadors often traveled under the authority of the US policing apparatus, particularly as they moved into geographies where they were not always welcomed, and especially when they involved controlled substances. For instance, in the aftermath of World War II, there were particular resentments to the dominating US presence in Europe. Sometimes the challenge to this presence took the form of invoking the drug control regulatory apparatus to challenge the legitimacy of US commodities. Thus, in 1946 Portuguese authorities refused to authorize the construction of a Coca-Cola bottling plant until the US government provided certification that all narcotic alkaloids (cocaine) had been removed from the “extracts sold by Maywood Chemical Works” destined for inclusion in the drink.91 When Ralph Hayes of Coca-Cola brought this to the FBN’s attention, Commissioner Anslinger responded with an “official communication” to the Inspector of the Pharmaceutical Division of the Office of the Director-General of Public Health of Portugal providing the necessary verifications, in wording proposed by the company.92 The FBN worked closely with the Coca-Cola Company—and as a mediator with foreign governments—to help expand the latter’s business operations. Along with overseas resistance to US corporate penetration, the very success of American marketing techniques often inspired local opposition. Thus in January 1951, the Narcotics Control Officer for the Office of the US High Commission for Germany contacted the bureau, reporting that: “Beverage manufacturers in most Western European countries have reacted strongly to the competition of Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola. The aggressive advertising campaigns to further sales of American coca drinks in Europe are particularly resented.”
These advertising campaigns had sparked efforts in both France and Germany to have legal prohibitions to limit sales of these drinks. The US High Commission anticipated that “interested European groups will try to protect themselves against the onerous competition of American coca drinks by manufacturing similar beverages themselves.”93 In correspondence responding to these developments, Anslinger downplayed the ability of national or international competitors to effectively replicate Coca-Cola’s manufacturing process—explaining that the FBN had been “pestered with numerous attempts,” but none had had success in their effort to “develop a coca flavor resembling Coca Cola.” Anslinger added, “We suggest that for enforcement reasons also you discourage the import of coca leaves for the
purpose as much as possible.”94 Thus once again, US officials sought to undermine US manufacturers’ competition by invoking the necessities of drug control in order to limit others’ access to valuable raw materials.
In a revealing moment, Anslinger went on to argue that the quantities of coca leaf in Coca-Cola were relatively insignificant: “comparing the limited quantities of coca extract manufactured with the huge volume of finished coca cola extract sold and exported, we are convinced that the contribution of the former to the ultimate flavor to be insignificant, and suspect it continues to be used merely to enable the Company to retain the word ‘Coca’ in the name which it has spent millions to advertise.”95
The FBN suggested the importance of the leaf to the company was primarily in retaining the word “Coca” as part of its famous brand name. The elaborate policing of the raw materials—and government certification of the finished goods—was constructed around a substance deemed (in this perhaps self-serving formulation) as materially insignificant, but symbolically fundamental to the success of the business operation. The emphasis on marketing as the explanation for Coca-Cola’s success echoed the alchemical sleight of hand in Anslinger’s disavowal of the “insignificant” coca leaf. While undoubtedly Coca-Cola’s international business model was astronomically profitable, questions over the contents of the drink itself deserve more scrutiny as they reveal murky dividing lines between drug foods, controlled substances, and the selective policing of the market to the advantage of US corporations. Coca-Cola, since its invention as a temperance beverage in the 1890s, was marketed “first and foremost—[as] a medicine.” Sold initially as a patent medicine, nicknames for the drink inspired a drug lingo still resonant today (“coke,” “dope,” “cold dope,” a “shot,” or a “shot in the arm”).96 The company responded to an early 1900s cultural panic fueled by racist fears of the dangers of African American cocaine consumption by having a pharmaceutical firm extract the cocaine alkaloid before utilizing the spent leaves.97 Nevertheless, the company continued (and continues to the present day) to be hounded by questions over the drink’s addictive properties and potentially nefarious health impact. This included weathering criminal charges brought against the company in 1911 by the Chief of the Bureau of Chemistry for the US Department of Agriculture for “marketing and selling an adulterated beverage that was injurious to health because it contained a deleterious ingredient, namely, caffeine.”98 By World War II, keenly aware of the dangers of marketing their beverage as a drug, company officials both hinted at its rejuvenating properties while insisting “Coca-Cola is a nonessential product, if ever there was one.” The statement seems ironic since General Dwight D. Eisenhower himself personally intervened to have Coca-Cola plants set up as near as possible to the fighting front of the war in the interest of maintaining the morale of America’s GIs,” suggesting it was far from “nonessential.”99 Moreover, the company frequently advertised the drink’s energizing properties in its sales literature, including a 1942 pamphlet entitled “Importance of the Rest-Pause in Maximum War Effort,” which “reproduced a batch of letters from civilian war workers hinting that they could hardly survive without Coke.”100
We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire Page 12