We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire
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THE TURN TO COCA LEAF LIMITATION
Of the various problems facing the Commission in regard to the control of the international traffic in narcotic drugs, that of limiting the production of raw materials needed for the manufacture of such drugs is the most urgent and important.
—UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs, 27 January 19475
At the CND’s very first session a reinvigorated focus on international trade was paired with “the most urgent and important” effort to limit and control a particular sector of the drug commodity chain: the production of raw materials. In practice this meant targeting the production of raw materials in the Southern Hemisphere: securing the access of European and American manufacturing countries to these raw materials while locking developing countries into the bottom rungs of global economic production. And to this end, one of the first major initiatives pursued by the United Nations was a push to control the production of the coca leaf—the one of two primary categories of narcotics (the other being opium) that resided firmly within a US sphere of influence. By July 1947, as part of the preparatory work for a conference to deal with “the possibility of limiting and controlling cultivation and harvesting of the coca leaf,” the CND noted that while the international trade in coca leaves fell under earlier drug control treaties, “the existing conventions did not attempt to limit the cultivation and harvesting of coca leaves in producing countries.” To that end, restricting coca cropping in the Andes to that destined for export became one of the first major projects launched by the CND.6 The official reliance by drug control advocates on a legal framework of limiting the international drug trade according to regulators’ definition of “legitimate needs” entailed recasting the largest legal market for coca leaves in the world as undesirable and illegal, namely the indigenous consumer market for the plant in the region where it originated.
In 1947 the world supply of coca leaves grew primarily on the Andean cordillera in Peru and Bolivia. Of those leaves not consumed locally, coca from the Andes was exported primarily to manufacturers in the United States, ensuring that any effort to limit and control the international coca commodity circuit was fundamentally structured by power inequities within and between nation-states of the Western Hemisphere.7 As described in the previous chapter, the United States refashioned itself in the name of Cold War national security as the primary supplier of global “resources for freedom,” and controlling the flow of raw materials into North American stockpiles became a policy priority. In the pursuit of this objective US government officials recognized that the new global order augured new roles to be played by institutions of international governance. In the drug field, US leadership guided priorities as the United Nations became a vehicle for assessing and then controlling the scale, scope, and context of “legitimate” distribution of the coca commodities (which included coca leaf, crude cocaine, cocaine hydrochloride, and coca flavoring extracts). The US unilateral drug control initiatives during the war, which linked control over the drug economy to the military, public health, and political priorities of wartime national security, found a prominent place in a Cold War expansionist vision. A concerted effort, both unilateral and through multinational forums like the United Nations, to extend the reach of narcotics control into countries that supplied the raw material imports for pharmaceutical manufacturing and national stockpiling became a key aspect of the system.
The United Nations may have been viewed by some as a forum for moderating US power—as a place for both weak and powerful countries to assert national interests within a new, rapidly evolving, international order. It was nevertheless structured by the convergence of US capitalism and the colonial legacy of Great Power diplomacy. The CND’s attempts to delineate a “legal” coca leaf market by limiting production to selectively defined “legitimate needs” was part of a North–South global dialectic whereby the industrial powers continued to lay claim to the natural resources of the “developing” world, often by means of direct social, economic, and political intervention. The United States independently and through its influence at the United Nations sought to define the “legitimate” market for a natural resource, coca leaves, as exclusively one premised on the leaves being characterized as “raw material” for the manufacturing of other things. This entailed delegitimizing the widespread consumption of coca in its natural state, whether chewed, steeped as maté, or put to other cultural, spiritual, and ritual uses for which the plant was valued among indigenous communities in the Andes. In the process, the United Nations became a mechanism for pursuing US national security policy by extending the international policing of drug flows beyond national borders and into the domestic sphere of countries where coca leaves were grown.8 Coca leaves and cocaine were not illegal themselves; they—and other substances that came to be regulated and culturally characterized as “dangerous drugs”—straddled the licit/illicit divide, their legal status being dependent on their circulation within the marketplace, that is, on who grew, manufactured, sold, and consumed them. As the multinational reach of the US pharmaceutical industry grew, so too did the international reach of a renewed drug control regime to police participation within it.
The geographic home of coca leaf cultivation, the semitropical slopes of the Andes Mountains, grounded the international routes through which coca-derived commodities flowed. While exact statistics are not available, the vast majority of coca leaves grown in Peru and Bolivia were cultivated for domestic consumption, where the leaf was particularly valued by the Aymara and Quechua communities. In 1946 the United Nations estimated that at minimum 17.5 million pounds of coca were cultivated in Peru and an additional 11 million pounds in Bolivia. This only accounted for coca that was taxed by the respective governments, vastly underestimating the actual amount grown since much coca grown domestically was not tracked or taxed. Of this low-estimated 28.5 million pounds of coca leaves cultivated in the Andes that year, only roughly 4 percent was destined for export to manufacturing countries (all from Peru).9 The bulk of coca grown in Bolivia was consumed domestically or exported regionally, primarily to northern Argentina and to a lesser extent Chile (along with Bolivian agricultural workers).10 With the drug control regime now targeting “raw materials” and, in particular, seeking to eliminate the market for all coca that was not being exported to the North American market, Bolivia’s position as a producer exclusively for a domestic and regional market of largely coca leaf chewers meant its international leverage was negligible. This was in contrast to Peru, which was the primary cultivator of coca leaf for the international market constructed to meet North American and European demand for coca-infused beverages and pharmaceutical-grade cocaine since the turn of the twentieth century. Chewing and consuming the coca leaf in its raw state were practices limited to the Andes. Once exported from the region, industrial chemical manufacturers invariably transformed coca leaves when they used them as building blocks for other commodities, most notably Coca-Cola and cocaine hydrochloride.11 Setting aside the regional economy for the moment, the vast majority of coca leaves exported from Peru were imported by manufacturers in the United States.
The United States was the destination for 85 percent of Peru’s coca leaves export market in 1946.12 The United States dominated this market not only because of regional ties but also more importantly because of US narcotics law, which fell under the jurisdiction of the Treasury Department and operated through the taxation of trade. Coca, as a legally designated “narcotic,” could only be imported in its raw material state; all finished controlled substances in circulation within the country (or for export) had to be manufactured within the United States. Peru did manufacture small quantities of refined and crude cocaine for export to Europe; however, Peruvian-manufactured cocaine was barred from entry into the dominant US market. The Jones-Miller Narcotics Import Act of 1922 entrenched this system, banning all cocaine imports into the country. Thus national law within the United States already ensured that South American countries could only be suppliers of th
e raw material (coca leaves) to the largest world manufacturer of coca-derived commodities, despite failed efforts before and during World War II by Peruvian government and businessmen to challenge these limitations.13
The pharmaceutical manufacturers Merck & Co., Inc. and Maywood Chemical Works held exclusive government-issued licenses to import coca leaves. Merck imported the leaves for the purpose of manufacturing cocaine hydrochloride to be used by the pharmaceutical industry as a local anesthetic and for research. Maywood extracted cocaine from the coca leaves in the process of manufacturing a “nonnarcotic flavoring extract,” otherwise known as “Merchandise #5,” a component of the famous soft drink Coca-Cola.14 While today the illegal cocaine market’s scale dwarfs quantities produced for the pharmaceutical industry, in the postwar period the reverse was true. The legal industry’s production vastly exceeded quantities of illegal drugs seized, while all drug production appeared minuscule beside the quantities of cocaine destroyed or sold to the pharmaceutical industry as a by-product of processing the coca leaves as a flavoring extract for Coca-Cola. As early as 1931, even before Coca-Cola’s international operations expanded during and after World War II, Coca-Cola was using more than 200,000 pounds of coca leaves annually to manufacture some 10,000 gallons of “nonnarcotic flavoring extract.”15 As laboratories worked their magic, these internationally derived commodities were repackaged and sold as “national” American products, celebrated even as embodiments of the medical and entrepreneurial benefits of US capitalism.
The policing of South American coca cultivation worked in tandem with securing raw materials for manufacturing “American” drug products. The North–South hierarchy of national participation within the international coca economy—South America as the producers of raw materials, the United States as the producer of manufactured goods—filtered through power disparities within Peru and Bolivia. This was abundantly clear in the first postwar effort to limit Andean coca cultivation to those leaves destined for export that unfolded under the auspices of the specially convened UN Commission of Enquiry on the Coca Leaf. The CND sent a group of international delegates, chaired by the United States, on a fact-finding mission to the Andes in 1949 to investigate the “problem” of the coca leaf. The UN mission sought to study and ultimately control the Andean landscape of coca leaf production and consumption and in the process was intervening in local conflicts over the terms of national economic development, political participation, labor and land rights, and in particular, the place of the “Indian” in modern society.
Efforts to control and limit the coca trade exposed and in part depended on political, racial, and economic hierarchies in the Andes. In 1946, coca represented 90 percent of the revenue for La Paz’s Excise Office, and though of lesser significance in the more diversified Peruvian economy, the coca market was also formidable there.16 In both Peru and Bolivia the majority of coca was grown by small peasant farmers, the majority of consumers were indigenous communities in both agricultural and mining regions, and a politically powerful landowning elite dominated the export market.17 The UN investigators themselves struggled to comprehend the complex internal dynamics in both countries, although their goal of regulating the international market entailed collaborating primarily with a local “white” oligarchy. The UN study focused on the supposed nefarious practice of Indian coca leaf consumption: “No study can be made of the sections of the population in Peru and Bolivia which chew the coca leaf without specific reference to the various groups constituting the populations of those countries. These groups are ordinarily designated ‘white’, mestizo, and ‘Indian’ . . . almost all coca-leaf chewers are ‘Indians’, though this does not mean that all Indians are coca-leaf chewers. Moreover, the term ‘Indian’ is not a sharply defined one. The distinction between ‘Indian’ and mestizo is normally based on cultural, social, economic, and linguistic considerations.”18
Careful to recognize the cultural specificity of racial and ethnic designations, the United Nations nevertheless oriented their drug control initiatives toward the study of “Indian” culture through social scientific method. In the topics covered by investigators, including whole sections of their final report devoted to “geographical considerations,” “medical considerations,” “methods of consumption,” “race degeneration,” “effects of chewing,” “medico-biological research,” “coca-leaf chewing as a characteristic of the Indian’s life,” “the legal regulation of labor,” and the “economic value of coca-leaf production,” there was not a single mention that the region was in the midst of experiencing one of the most profound challenges to the centuries-long subjugation, exploitation, and political disenfranchisement of the Andean Indian majority.
Both Peru and Bolivia had large Aymara and Quechua populations, although Bolivia’s indigenous majority was unique in the Americas. The United Nations estimated that about half of Peru’s eight million population was Indian, and of Bolivia’s population of four million more than 50 percent were Indian, 13 percent white, and the remainder mestizo.19 In both countries Indians were denied basic voting rights and political protections and were subject to onerous land tenancy and domestic servitude obligations to a small and powerful landholding oligarchy. As historian Laura Gotkowitz documents, indigenous struggles for land and justice in Bolivia that stretched back to at least the nineteenth century culminated in 1947 in a number of both urban and rural rebellions at the very moment UN drug regulators focused their attention on the region. These indigenous rebellions challenged a political and economic order that produced conditions of extreme subjugation, which many observers and peasant rebels readily decried as slavery.20 While similar mobilizations for rights would occur later in Peru, it is striking that no mention was made of these upheavals in Bolivia by the commission, especially considering investigators traveled through key regions that had experienced the most violence and turmoil as peasants and mine workers organized to challenge severe labor conditions and profound inequalities in land ownership, where 6 percent of the nation’s landowners controlled 92 percent of all developed land. It is not clear how coca and the effort to control it may or may not have figured in to these regional challenges to the status quo, but the characteristics of the assault against Indian coca consumption were definitely embedded in this larger political context. “Between 1944 and 1946, the region witnessed processes of democratization, radical labor movements, and the rise of the Left. This political opening closed down quickly with the shift to cold war containment.”21 The effort to extend drug control was just one component of the reaction against mobilizations for agrarian reform, political rights, and trade union power that oriented attention away from Indian economic grievances and political demands and toward social scientific assessments of presumed cultural practices in need of transformation. Drug control in the Andes began as the province of international “experts” and national economic elites who accrued the greatest profits from coca leaf processing and export. Indians, on the other hand, dominated the cultivation and consumer side of the national economy and as such became objects of study and control. A complicated landscape of cultural, social, and political struggle was reduced to factoring select human lives as national resources, and more particularly labor power, effectively rendering them the raw material for debate about regulating the coca market in the name of the public good. Ostensible medical concerns, “the harmful or harmless” effect on the “human body,” in particular the bodies of Andean Indians, were recast as questions for business management and control over commodity flows; that is, as questions tied to “production” and “distribution” of the coca leaf, to the presumed need to modernize and civilize a backward population, and to the policing of new definitions of legality.
The discursive terrain of the UN commission, and its US leadership, reframed an effort to impose an economic and political order as a social scientific “enquiry” that mapped easily onto the deeply embedded racial and class hierarchies which structured Andean society at mid-century. Warwic
k Anderson and other scholars of US colonialism in the early twentieth century have noted how a new science of public health easily lent itself to a broader effort to refashion the “bodies and social life” of colonized people in a “civilizing process,” which was “also an uneven and shallow process of Americanization.”22 After World War II, drug control in particular, and the discourse that traveled with it, similarly became a “scientific” tool for extending US power by targeting the minds and bodies of populations deemed “uncivilized,” and promoting an economic order premised on the supremacy of US capitalism, even while these efforts depended on local collaboration and an embrace of a technocratic discourse of social science and public health. It was undoubtedly more palatable for national elites to participate in international initiatives if the most economically vulnerable and politically repressed populations were identified as the site of the “social problem.” Still, the UN commission became a battleground among political and economic interests in Peru and Bolivia over the terms of national incorporation into international markets and systems of regulation. While a degree of lip service was paid to coca’s historic cultural importance in the Andes, where it had been chewed for at least two thousand years, the commission’s prime objective was to bring about its limitation and control. The international emphasis on raw materials as the necessary locus of this control meant that the UN initiative and the Andean response to it consisted of a debate about the coca leaf and, in particular, the land, life, labors, and consumption habits of Andean Indians. Deploying a language of well-being grounded in Western scientific explanations and tools—whether policing strategies, laboratory techniques, models of economic development, or medical assessments—experts in the field of international drug control sought to direct the flow of coca leaves within an international commodities circuit defined and oriented by US priorities.