We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire

by Suzanna Reiss

  In the context of postwar expansion, questions concerning the drink’s content (whether it included drug substances that were, or should be, controlled) became a critical terrain for contests over the benefits and hazards of US “resources for freedom.” The leadership of the company seemed to embrace its role as the iconic embodiment of America’s expansion. In response to “widespread hostility toward Coca-Cola in the Communist bloc countries,” the company vice president circulated a memo: “Apparently, some of our friends overseas have difficulty distinguishing between the United States and Coca-Cola. Perhaps we should not complain too much about this.”101 Yet, with Belgian Communists referring to the drink as a “forerunner of Fascism,” the French newspaper Le Monde decrying the “moral landscape of France is at stake!” in support of French winemakers’ opposition to the drink, the Soviets calling it a “brown poison,” and the Viennese publication Der Abend warning “Ten bottles will make the user a helpless slave of Coca-Cola for life,” the drink and its secret properties together came to represent America’s imperial ambitions.102 The company historically was very adept at avoiding sanctions premised on the beverage’s chemical content. During prohibition the company marketed its product as a temperance beverage even while benefiting from its use as a “prime mixer.” Similarly telling, as E.J. Kahn, Jr. described, “the official Coca-Cola line is that Coke should never perform chemical, or alchemical, function, but when it comes to combining the drink with substances that can be swallowed without harm, the company is fairly indulgent.”103 While the company could not control the uses to which people put its product, it did work closely with the government through the drug regulatory apparatus to retain its unusual monopoly over the nonmedicinal use of coca leaves, to conceal beneath government-backed trademark protections the list of its ingredients, and to facilitate its international expansion.

  Coca-Cola occupied a unique place in the growing American empire, as it helped facilitate, in Victoria De Grazia’s succinct formulation, “the rise of a great imperium with the outlook of a great emporium.”104 Commercial, and legal, branding helped US companies retain control and secure profits from the marketing and distribution of manufactured goods overseas. The trademark, executives and government officials believed, advertised the proof of the superiority of the American way of life while capturing the nation’s individualistic democratic ethos with the personalization of branded commodities. It also enshrined within it the enforcement and policing apparatus that accompanied US expansion, ensuring profits continued to flow back to the United States. For example, in an effort to disarm challenges to Coca-Cola’s expansion, company president Ralph Hayes approached the FBN in 1950 to request that the flavoring extract be exported with a stamp bearing US government certification. Together an arrangement was devised whereby officials from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics made regular site visits to Maywood Chemical Works and took samples of Merchandise #5 (containing the coca extract manufactured for Coca-Cola), which was then tested by “Government chemists” who certified that the extract was indeed “non-narcotic.” The certification was then prominently displayed on the “stainless steel drums” of extract that were intended for export. The Coca-Cola Company commissioned “a commercial artist” to draw the “lettering and design” that appeared on the seal.105

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

  Once the design and certification operation had been established, Maywood shipped the government-sealed and -approved Merchandise #5 to Coca-Cola’s “plant at Kearny from which our Export Corporation will have it forwarded overseas as required.”106 Responding to international concerns over drug trafficking (and US imperialism), Coca-Cola’s private marketing initiatives drew upon government resources to brand their product a “legitimate” US commodity of international trade. The “certified non-narcotic” seal that was attached to drums of Merchandise #5 effectively advertised not only the commodities’ content, but also the company’s privileged relationship with the US policing apparatus that had facilitated gaining easier access to drug raw materials and the international consumer market.

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  Drawing from the model that had been implemented on the ground as far as “cultivating” favorable trade and distribution networks in South America during World War II, and in the context of an economy geared toward raw materials stockpiling for defense mobilization, US manufacturers involved in the coca commodity circuit marketed their system of unequal participation in the international drug commodity circuit as a capitalist ethic of democracy and freedom. Thus, for example, the Coca-Cola Company exported a model for economic growth along with its flavoring concentrate; a concentrate whose manufacturing process involved the extraction of cocaine from coca leaves (imported from the Andes), performed by the pharmaceutical house Maywood Chemical Works. Coca-Cola’s use of coca leaves, along with the business interests of the only other authorized importer, Merck & Co., Inc., had produced extensive relations and collaborations between company executives and various agencies of the federal government, including the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. These relations and the economic visions they shared contributed during the war and in the war’s aftermath to the pharmaceutical industry and US economic hegemony’s considerable expansion. The invocation of the wonders of American economic growth was promoted by powerful interests in the government, among corporations, and in the media, as proof of the benefits of participating in the US capitalist system—and as the basis for securing and maintaining national defense. Capitalism, they argued, was democracy. And democracy was their “brand” of capitalism, quite literally. In a presentation in 1952, the president of Coca-Cola explained: “The Coca-Cola business has been compared to a pyramid, with the company and its suppliers taking a small share from the top, the bottlers and their suppliers taking a larger middle share, and the dealers who retail the product taking the largest share at the broad base of the business. We feel this working democracy has contributed immeasurably to acceptance of our product overseas. Because the product is profitable to everybody involved with it, everybody subscribes readily to the methods for selling more of it.”107

  This “working democracy” depended on the structural inequalities within distribution (and of course, unmentioned by the president, production) of the commodities themselves. This depiction of the divergent and unequal roles to be played by different sectors of the commodity distribution chain was presented as natural and desirable, even as the method for generating democracy through capitalism. Coca-Cola marketed its corporate model of decentralization of distribution—local bottlers and distributors—as a participatory democracy. It was in fact a “working democracy” working for Coca-Cola, an internationally derived, stamped, and packaged “American” commodity. To a certain extent the commodities themselves did the work of enforcing and transmitting not only the material but ideological powers of empire. “Profits” were depicted as the new measure of democratic access and inclusion. An illusion of democratic distribution, Coca-Cola’s vision of the popular pyramid buttressing its business success was in fact simply a model of unequal development. This underdevelopment was maintained not only through a trade and regulatory apparatus premised on extracting raw materials for the manufacturing of US goods and a national defense policy premised on the power of stockpiling, but also on the attendant integration of other nations into this system—which included policing of “legitimacy” within it—to service American capital, working as the distributors and consumers of US commodities.

  Yet simply producing the consumer goods did not guarantee people would consume them. Coca-Cola executives, for example, had confronted this obstacle for decades. Coca-Cola had been available in the Andes since the first decades of the twentieth century. As the company began to expand more aggressively, bottling plants were established in Peru and Bolivia in 1936 and 1941, respectively.108 The success of this expansion depended on transforming the consuming
habits of local populations. When the US Board of Economic Warfare tracked the coca leaf export market during World War II, they determined that there were “three types of beverages containing Bolivian coca . . . sold under the trade marks of ‘Coca Cocktail,’ . . . ‘Crema de Coca’ . . . and ‘Coca Kiln,’” in Brazil. The market, however, for such drinks among the indigenous population of Bolivia was initially small in a context where traditional forms of coca consumption persisted: “Coca is consumed by Indians, who chew it, and by people of all classes, in a tea or infusion.”109 The bureau’s agents went on to report just two years after the bottling plant had been established: “It is understood that Coca Cola (which is bottled locally on a fairly large scale, employing extracts imported from the United States) contains none of the narcotic element of coca, but it is widely believed among Bolivians who consume it that it does.”110

  Whether Bolivians’ alleged belief that Coca-Cola contained “narcotic elements” was due to the soft drink’s name or its “legitimate” energizing properties (caffeine and sugar) is hard to know. But the racial and class composition of the potential consumer market—the Indians being the ones that “chew it” whereas “all classes” drink it—was important to the company and reveals a lot about the mechanisms and stages of US consumer capitalism’s expansion. As the Coca-Cola Company studied the world for the most lucrative consumer markets, it divided up nations into their constituent racial and national groups. Categories such as “White,” “Foreigner,” “Indian,” “Mestizo,” “half caste,” “European,” “East Indian,” and “Maori” were tabulated in a prewar “Expansion Plan” of 1936 to help guide decisions regarding the current regional prospects for successful market penetration. The race of the prospective consumer not only affected estimates of whether they would “have money enough to buy Coca Cola,” but also, in countries such as Peru and Bolivia, helped gauge the degree to which the population had been incorporated into a consumer market for imported, mass-produced goods.111 The plan conveyed Peru’s population demographic as “Peru (6,2000,000—600,000 White)” and the country was identified as an earlier candidate than Bolivia for the establishment of a bottling plant, perhaps because of Bolivia’s relatively small white population and large percentage of indigenous peoples. Even so, the company believed that the existence of a large Indian population in Peru at that time still cautioned against rapid large-scale expansion: “The colonial influence seems to persist more in Peru than elsewhere in the South American countries. A large part of the population is of pure Indian blood. Coca-Cola can be successfully marketed in Peru, but I think the potential market is comparatively small . . . it would be necessary for us to assign a member of our staff to remain in Lima for two or three months to initiate our method of aggressive marketing and to build up an adequate showing of advertising.”112

  As raw materials were extracted from the world, transformed and stockpiled, these commodity surpluses were “reworked” much as the pharmaceutical industry could rework military surplus narcotics to be sold as new once again. These drug commodities—and the system of control that traveled with them—were repackaged as national “American” commodities. The international raw material and labor power and energy that these commodities stored within them were transfigured into exemplars of American business acumen and ingenuity and as necessities for securing US security and global dominance. The national stockpiles of US-controlled—and -sold—drug commodities, helped lay the foundations for a new American empire, bolstered by a policing apparatus built to enforce its hegemony. Linking US capitalism’s successful expansion to the organic health of the globe, US officials enshrined the US economy—and its privileged position in relation to resource extraction, stockpiling, and goods distribution—as a promise of freedom for the rest of the world. As Resources for Freedom declared, “The size of future demand, and the adequacy of supplies, will depend upon the rate at which the United States economy and that of the whole free world expands.”113 Yet, as Coca-Cola’s fears over market penetration in the Andes foreshadowed, debates about race, class, consuming habits, and colonial conflict consistently accompanied US efforts to dictate participation within the international coca commodity circuit and the pharmaceutical market more broadly, a process described in more detail in the following chapters.

  CHAPTER 3

  Raw Materialism

  Exporting Drug Control to the Andes1

  The unequal position in which nations found themselves with regard to access and participation in the international drug trade in the aftermath of World War II depended on more than the promotion of an ideology and economic model to advance and justify US global preeminence. It entailed the rigorous design and enforcement of an international policing apparatus. The US government sought to ensure the access of pharmaceutical manufacturers to the raw materials flowing from the global South into US pharmaceutical laboratories, and to promote the consumption and reexport of US mass-produced drugs. This required a concerted effort to implement an effective international drug control regime, including an often contested determination to revise laws and cultural practices in those nations where valuable drug agricultural crops were cultivated. While over the subsequent decades marijuana and an array of synthetic drugs came under the purview of drug control officials, initially the two primary raw materials targeted by regulators included the poppy plant and the coca leaf, used for manufacturing opiates, cocaine, and Coca-Cola. The production of opium involved an international network of economic, military, and political interests invested in a commodity chain spreading raw material from Southeast Asia and the Middle East into Europe and the United States (where it was transformed into pharmaceutical painkillers). The coca commodity chain, on the other hand, was more exclusively situated within a US imperial domain due to the fact that the principal geographic location of coca leaf cultivation was the Andes Mountain slopes of South America; a part of the hemisphere that US interventionists have long enjoyed proprietarily depicting as “America’s backyard.” Looking at postwar efforts to police the international coca trade offers a unique window onto the workings of US power through its considerable influence in shaping the principles governing international drug control. Advocates of drug control, led by US officials, focused their attention on limiting the cultivation of drug crops according to parameters established by the combined interests of the pharmaceutical industry and US national ambition.

  Efforts to police the international drug trade were not new, but the novel balance of power in the postwar world, characterized by the US’s unprecedented position of global dominance, ensured that international drug control took on a new character. The determined effort to regulate the international flow of drug commodities was a twentieth-century invention. It was a structure that had been modeled on US domestic policy and it sought to establish regulatory oversight through a system of licensing and taxation to monitor the international trade. Until mid-century, global participation and reporting was haphazard and the drug control regime had relatively limited authority. By the onset of World War II, only in the early stages of implementation, international efforts to maintain the drug control apparatus effectively went into hibernation. At war’s end, the drug control functions that had previously fallen under the authority of the League of Nations were transferred to the United Nations, which established the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) to oversee its implementation. The internationally renowned Harry J. Anslinger, the commissioner of the US Federal Bureau of Narcotics who had played a pivotal role in mobilizing and organizing the international drug trade to advance US interests in both war and peacetime, immediately assumed an influential position on the newly constituted CND as the official US delegate to that body. Anslinger’s impact on the CND’s work cannot be overstated, as he was the most prominent advocate for drug control of the most powerful nation working to steer the new commission’s agenda toward US priorities. As World War II transitioned into the Cold War, and with US officials exerting a disproportionate influenc
e on international drug control, pressure grew for Andean countries, especially Peru and Bolivia, to limit coca leaf cultivation according to definitions of legality and illegality being established by powerful interests invested in the drug trade.2

  The United States and the United Nations were the main architects of the drug control regime that sought to eliminate all production of coca in excess of those leaves grown and processed for what international drug conventions of 1925 and 1931 had designated as “legitimate needs.”3 The conventions defined “legitimate needs” narrowly to include exclusively those leaves destined for “medical and scientific” purposes. US national narcotics law since its inception in the 1914 Harrison Narcotics Act included an additional “legitimate” allowance that Anslinger successfully lobbied for inclusion in international regulations: “special coca leaves” destined for use in the manufacture of a “nonnarcotic flavoring extract”; in other words, for the manufacturing of Coca-Cola (illustrating the already formidable influence on the tenets of international drug control by US private companies and the state). Under the drug control system, first coordinated through the League of Nations, signatory countries submitted annual estimates of their “legitimate need” for narcotics to a board that monitored the trade by overseeing a system of nationally administered import and export certificates. Governments were responsible for granting authorizations to importers and exporters as a way of monitoring the volume of trade to prevent domestic stocks of controlled substances from exceeding a given country’s annual estimates. There had been a long history of US unilateral efforts to gain South American compliance with US priorities for the flow of coca commodities, relying particularly on what historian Paul Gootenberg refers to as “coca diplomacy,” whereby private corporations with investments in the trade manipulated purchases in collusion with the FBN’s efforts to pressure countries like Peru to “adopt US-style drug policies.”4 After the war, these private and national efforts became institutionalized internationally in the policies and priorities pursued by the CND.