We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire

by Suzanna Reiss

  THE UN COMMISSION OF ENQUIRY ON THE COCA LEAF

  The UN commission published its findings and recommendations in 1950, disseminating only the first of many official UN investigations and publications into the matter. The report’s publication came at the end of three years of organizational effort, fieldwork, and a considerable amount of debate both within and outside of the commission, in the Andes, and in the United States. These debates, to which we now turn, together with the various organizational structures and ties which framed both the issues at hand and the necessary “expert” qualifications for participation, provide a critical perspective on the parameters of drug control within a US sphere of influence in the mid-twentieth century. They show how racial, class, and national hierarchies inflected the work of experts schooled in the arts of policing, medicine, business administration, and the social sciences, shaping both the framing of “problems” and the proffering of solutions. They show how economic concerns relating to the control over international commodity flows and, in particular, a US-dominated vision for hemispheric development and trade, ensured that certain capitalist assumptions underwrote the logic of the drug control apparatus as well as the social and cultural arguments that it partially inspired.

  The disproportionate power of the United States within the hemisphere (and the globe) influenced the leverage of coca growing countries in seemingly international forums like the United Nations, where hemispheric drug control was largely mediated by US actors. Even in the early stages of international efforts to monitor the coca economy, US political and corporate interests exerted pressure for South American compliance. When the League of Nations was having difficulty obtaining statistical information on Peru’s coca economy, Maywood Chemical Works intervened by dangling the possibility of the elimination of Peru’s coca leaf export economy if the information was not forthcoming. In a reply from Peru, forwarded from Maywood to the State Department and on to the League of Nations Secretariat, Maywood’s supplier in Peru, Dr. Alfredo Pinillos, brought the matter to the attention of the Peruvian Minister of Foreign Affairs “in order to forestall the possibility that the exportation of coca leaves may be prohibited—which would be very unjust and unfair, and which would mean the death of one of the most important national industries.” This corporate diplomacy had effect. In response, the Peruvian Minister of Foreign Affairs promised national compliance with the system, issuing export certificates and designating specific ports for the coca leaf and cocaine traffic. While Peru agreed to comply with monitoring the international trade, it sought to preserve the domestic coca leaf economy as a strictly national concern. The foreign minister asserted: “Peru as producer of coca leaves and crude coca will not make any concessions to restrict the cultivation and the production of coca leaves, nor prohibit the use of it for its natives, as it is actually a national problem which is now being studied by the Peruvian government.”23

  This early resistance to the supply-side control paradigm being promulgated by institutions of international drug control continued during the UN era, and US importers and manufacturers continued to exert a disproportionate influence. The impetus behind the CND’s initiative for controlling raw materials may in part have emerged from concerns of US importers with regard to maintaining their coca leaf supply. Merck & Co., Inc. wrote to FBN Commissioner Harry Anslinger in January 1948: “As you know, we have been having trouble in obtaining adequate supplies of Coca Leaves.” Anslinger, who also served as the US representative on the CND, rejected their suggestion of setting up new plantations, emphasizing the drug control imperative of preventing “any further coca leaf plantings.” Yet, he reassured them, “I believe that as soon as the United Nations Commission of Enquiry finishes with its study of the coca leaf chewing there will be a tremendous surplus, because the amounts chewed approximate twenty-five million pounds.”24 The head of the FBN confidently anticipated that the success of the UN commission’s efforts to eliminate Andean coca leaf consumption would produce surpluses for US importers. Anslinger explicitly saw this projected outcome as a necessary precondition for securing ample supplies of raw material for US manufacturers.

  In the context of US pressure and international attention on the coca commodity chain, the immediate pretext for the UN commission’s creation and fieldwork emerged in an official petition from the Andes. Andean businessmen, government officials, and scientists collaborated with the drug control apparatus at mid-century. They were motivated by the economic and political advantages of aligning with the United States, as well as by an interest in retaining a degree of control over national economic development and political power.25 Responding both to an increasingly acrimonious debate among Peruvian scientists as to the relative merits or dangers of customary Indian coca leaf chewing and to the growing international pressure for Peru to enforce and maintain stricter control over their domestic and international coca production and trade, in April 1947 the Peruvian government submitted a proposal that the United Nations conduct a field survey on the coca leaf. Given the prominence of US power in the coca commodity circuit and the CND’s inaugural interest in limiting the production of raw materials in producing countries, Peru approached the United Nations in an attempt to moderate the impact of the coca control apparatus that was already being implemented.26 In a challenge to what many Peruvians and Bolivians believed was the hasty classification of the coca leaf as a dangerous drug, the Peruvian representative Dr. Jorge A. Lazarte explained “his government’s reason for making the request,” noting the difficulty of handling the situation due to the scale of consumption, the fact that the coca shrub grew wild, and the “highly controversial” nature of the issue. He emphasized the need for further investigation:

  At no time had the Government of Peru been able to carry out an organized enquiry into the physiological and pathological effects of this habit or to ascertaining whether it was necessary to suppress it. The habit had endured for many centuries and the Indian population which indulged in this practice appeared to be healthy and prosperous, capable of very hard work with little nourishment. Many observers had remarked upon their agreeable disposition and healthy condition. The Peruvian Government was therefore faced with the dilemma whether to suppress it or not.27

  Peru’s representative argued coca leaf chewing was a “habit” whose negative mental and physical effects had yet to be determined, even while it had the proven power to sustain workers on little food. Bringing together elite paternalism and an interest in Indian labor-value, Lazarte suggested coca enhanced the “Indian population’s” capacity to perform “very hard work,” a factor perhaps militating against prohibition. In fact, scientific investigations into Indian pathology and physiology would provide a common ground for proponents in the debate who all saw Indian labor productivity as a measure of coca’s impact on societal health and prosperity, even if they drew different conclusions. The leadership of the UN CND endorsed the project while presuming coca leaf chewing’s detrimental impact necessitated a focus on policing. The chairman of the CND, Colonel C.H.L. Sharman, the Canadian representative and close friend of the US representative, FBN Commissioner Harry J. Anslinger, “suggested broadening the scope of the study” to include “the possibilities of limiting the production and controlling the distribution of coca leaves.”28 This latter point would in fact become the main objective of the UN commissioners dispatched to the Andes. Looking back on these efforts, the Secretary of the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) (and later director of the Narcotics Division), Mr. G.E. Yates, declared that contrary to the Peruvian representative’s initial request, the commission “was not really a technical assistance mission. It was a mission to persuade or encourage these Governments [of Peru and Bolivia] to change their policy by recognizing that the coca problem was a thing to be tackled, and gradually suppressed.”29

  The Peruvian proposal emerged from the United Nations in modified form. The original framework of public health and labor concerns was reconfigured as an initiative to c
ontrol the scale and scope of the coca leaf economy, and eliminate the Indian practice of coca leaf chewing. This transformation ensured that along with two medical experts, the CND would appoint “two persons having experience in the international administration and control of narcotic drugs; one of these two members should preferably be an economist.”30 The final composition of the commission reflected the dominant influence of US capitalism on drug control efforts at mid-century. In particular, it embodied the combined interests of the US government and pharmaceutical industry, as well as the international network of “experts” upon whom it relied for legitimization. The president of the UN commission, Howard Fonda, was a US pharmaceutical executive nominated for the task by the head of the FBN, Harry Anslinger. Among other related institutional roles, Fonda was acting director of the American Pharmaceutical Manufacturers’ Association, director of the National Vitamin Foundation, director of the First National Bank and Trust Company, and the vice president and director of the pharmaceutical house Burroughs Wellcome & Company. Fonda’s directorship embodied the confluence of US financial, pharmaceutical, and manufacturing interests that assumed the helm of UN drug control initiatives in the Andes.

  The extensive correspondence between Fonda and FBN Commissioner Anslinger during the commission’s fieldwork in the Andes reveals the close relations between the pharmaceutical industry and the international policing apparatus, as well as the formidable US influence on the work of the United Nations. In a typical exchange, Anslinger wrote to Fonda imagining the UN mission to be a welcome respite from his labors as a pharmaceutical executive: “I am sure that you are having a very refreshing experience after your many years in the drug industry.” Fonda in turn kept Anslinger informed of the commission’s progress, describing how he dealt with internal divisions and obstacles that emerged during the trip, having “in no uncertain terms let them [the other members of the commission] know I was boss.” In another dispatch, Fonda praised the work of the commission, highlighting his own role with the cocky nationalism and self-assurance of the successful businessman he was: “If I had not put some good old American salesmanship into this job and spread the honey this gang would have had one hell of a time.”31 The “gang” included three other appointees to the commission: the director of the Narcotics Bureau of France, a US-trained Venezuelan doctor and pharmacologist, and a Hungarian physiologist with ties to the UN Nutrition Division. The commission’s work did not proceed without some debate and disagreement, but their approach and conclusions reflected the dominant US influence on the emerging drug control apparatus.

  Following the Peruvian representative’s petition and the subsequent convening of the commission, the United Nations resolved to send delegates to Peru, as well as to “other countries concerned as may request such an enquiry.” Bolivia, the second largest cultivator of coca leaves in the Andes, was the only other country to participate in the UN field survey.32 Colombia, the one other acknowledged cultivator of coca—exclusively for a small domestic market (reporting some 400,000 pounds compared to the almost 30 million grown in Peru and Bolivia)—had already implemented decrees to abolish the practice, while regional consumption in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Venezuela, and Ecuador depended on small-scale cultivation or importations from Bolivia and Peru. Bolivia had been wary of international drug control initiatives since ratifying a 1925 International Opium Convention to be administered by the League of Nations, with the explicit disclaimer that “Bolivia does not undertake to restrict home cultivation of coca or to prohibit the use of coca leaves by the native population.”33 When word of the planned UN commission reached Bolivia, the politically powerful organization of coca plantation owners in the Yungas, the Sociedad de Proprietarios de Yungas (SPY), suggested Bolivia participate to prevent the control apparatus from undermining their influence. Across the Andes small peasant farmers grew the majority of coca, yet landowning elites dominated the export market. The SPY sought to ensure “that Bolivian coca not be included in the catalog of narcotic drugs and that, consequently, no restrictions be established regarding its consumption, production and exportation.” The SPY’s interest in pursuing the industrialization of coca products led the Bolivian government to seek inclusion in the UN enquiry, mistakenly believing the UN work might lead to the elimination of coca from the list of internationally controlled substances, opening up a new international market for Bolivian-manufactured goods.34

  The head of the UN Division of Narcotic Drugs (which oversaw the CND), Leon Steinig, an American citizen of Austrian birth, revealed a different perspective when he appraised the Andean export economy in light of the pending field survey, indicating an apparent unwillingness to take Bolivia’s vision for industrial development seriously. “Bolivia,” Steinig declared, “was the only country exporting large amounts to other countries for consumption by addicts . . . all of the [coca] exported by Bolivia had gone to countries where the habit of chewing coca leaves prevailed.” Peru, on the other hand, was more favorably assessed, inasmuch as “half of the total [coca exported] went to the cocaine manufacturing countries and most of the remainder to countries manufacturing non-narcotic substances.”35 Thus in a context where international efforts sought to limit both Peru and Bolivia’s participation within the international coca commodity circuit to the production of raw materials for export to manufacturers (primarily in the United States), Bolivia as a producer only of “addiction” did not figure into the “legitimate” export vision of the UN commission at all.

  The Bolivian government responded by accepting the technical assistance they believed would accompany the enquiry, while echoing Peru’s invocation of health and labor concerns: “Coca leaf chewing is not a vice in Bolivia, and no biological defects have been observed amongst chewers. . . . The loss of the coca plant would create a real problem in Bolivia . . . since it is an indispensable element in the subsistence of the agricultural and mine workers.”36

  Reaffirming these concerns, the Peruvian delegate before the United Nations questioned the tendency to equate coca leaves with cocaine, an assimilation that produced the designation of Indians as “addicts” by “stress[ing] the fact that most of the research had been done on the harmful effects of cocaine and very little was known of the effects of chewing coca leaves.”37 National elites may well have been wary of attacking indigenous cultural practices at a time when exploited agricultural and mine workers were mobilizing for greater rights and in the process contributing to political instability; however, they couched their appeals to the United Nations in more moderate terms. Peruvian and Bolivian government officials contested the terms of their incorporation into the drug control regime by challenging whether coca should be regulated as a “vice” and instead emphasized both its potential to fuel national industrialization and its ongoing role in sustaining labor productivity in the fields and the mines. Debates about the harmful effects of the leaf, its role in local and international economies, and the quantities and dangers attributed to the ingestion of the cocaine alkaloid swirled around the commission and became central to the investigators’ work. The UN Commission of Enquiry on the Coca Leaf became a battleground for national elites over the terms of incorporation into international economic and control networks. Both Peru and Bolivia argued before the United Nations that coca might propel national economic development and modernization and claimed further study was needed. These debates unfolded for more than two years before, in 1949, the UN Commission of Enquiry on the Coca Leaf traveled through Peru and Bolivia, visiting regions tied to the cultivation, distribution, and consumption of the coca leaf.

  FIRST STEPS: CONTROLLING COCAINE

  The impact of the UN initiative—and the drug control framework it grew out of and extended—was felt even before the commissioners journeyed through the Andes and compiled their report. A division of labor was built into the hemispheric policing apparatus. The work of UN experts and scientists on the coca leaf “problem” unfolded in tandem with international police collaboration
designed to “suppress” and “tackle” cocaine. Cocaine as a commodity—whose dangers, by the 1940s, were less disputed than those of the coca leaf—was quickly regulated in the Andes through the collaboration of Peruvian and US authorities, even while representatives continued to debate the appropriate mechanisms for dealing with the raw material, the coca leaf, on the floor of the United Nations.