We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire

by Suzanna Reiss

  The UN’s report echoed Gutierrez-Noriega’s emphasis on coca’s alleged production of Indian degeneracy, decrying the negative implications this held for national economic development. The commissioners determined, among other things, that coca chewing maintains “a constant state of malnutrition”; it produces, in some cases, “undesirable changes of an intellectual and moral character” and “certainly hinders the chewer’s chances of obtaining a higher social standard.” The report emphasized that coca leaf consumption “reduces the economic yield of productive work, and therefore maintains a low economic standard of life,” before going on to recommend that Peru and Bolivia institute policies geared toward its eventual eradication.68

  These conclusions directly responded to officials in Peru and Bolivia who defended coca consumption as being beneficial to national development. Defenders of the leaf argued that coca’s “vitamin content plays a part in the nutrition of the Indian,” suggesting the leaf was a valuable source of nutrition necessary to sustain Indian economic productivity.69 When the Bolivian government circulated a report backing up this claim, the head of the UN commission privately wrote to Anslinger dismissing the “Bull-ivian vitamin report.”70 Despite this scorn, tests conducted by the US Treasury Department for the commission seemed to verify the Bolivian position. In particular the Treasury Department found that the “vitamin content” within an estimated quantity of coca leaves consumed daily was “remarkably high,” with vitamins B1, C, and riboflavin figuring most prominently. Nevertheless, the commission’s report ultimately concluded: “In spite of this fact, it would by no means be advisable to supply these requirements by coca-leaf chewing because it must be emphasized that the toxicity of coca leaves (due to their cocaine content) would never allow a safe use as a nutrient.”71 It is hard to know if US Merck’s pioneering synthesis of vitamin B1 and its initiation of large-scale vitamin production in 1936 had any direct impact on this recommendation. But, the hegemonic framework of medical science—tied in large part to the production lines and projected consumer markets of major US pharmaceutical companies—obviously influenced the commission’s analysis in this regard.72

  The push for limiting the indigenous coca market focused on stigmatizing Indian consumer habits and asserting coca’s negative physiological impact (due to its cocaine content). Arguments for coca eradication stigmatized Indians while proselytizing the need to help integrate them into a model of “civilization” modeled on liberal visions of land ownership and hard work.73 The UN report explained the “concept of individual ownership is constantly spreading among the native landowning population,” while lamenting that “[m]any Indians, however, possess no land, and work for others.”74 Drug control was presented as a tool for advancing a particular vision of societal progress. Drug control officials also had to contend with the fact that coca leaves were a linchpin in the domestic cash economy. Eighty percent of Bolivian tax revenues were “derived from coca,”75 and according to Gutiérrez-Noriega, the “coca leaf [was] the single most important item of commerce in the Andes.”76 The UN report supported these claims, finding that “except in some cattle markets, business is on a small scale and generally limited to the exchange of products between the Indians. An exception is coca leaf; it is, as a rule, paid for in cash. In such markets coca leaf is sold by the Indian who grows his own crop.”77 Coca eradication thus entailed the radical transformation of the domestic cash economy, including the elimination of many Indians’ primary medium of exchange, subsistence, and access to money, outside of the wage-labor sector. In an effort to accomplish this, a medical discourse of addiction accompanied a positivist narrative of economic development. The final report dismissed indigenous claims that “coca-leaf chewing dispels hunger, thirst, fatigue and sleepiness, or gives strength, courage or energy” as “superstition” and attributed this belief to “the Indian’s poor living conditions” and “his lack of education.”78

  Controlling the consumption of coca was an integral part of the civilizing and nation building project the United Nations (and the United States) hoped to promote in the region, in an effort to control the export market and stabilize the region for foreign investment.79 As the commissioners neatly summed it up, “since there is an intimate bond between the individual and the community, it is also clear that the effects of coca-leaf chewing must be considered as socially and economically prejudicial to the nation.”80 Both in the press and before the CND, representatives of the Peruvian and Bolivian governments questioned the UN recommendations and the conclusions that led to them—nearly a year after the initial publication of the UN report and only one week after the Bolivian representative was provided with a Spanish translation of it.81 Unlike Peru and the United States, Bolivia did not have a representative on the CND and had to respond to the UN report as a guest in the chamber. These national power disparities before the United Nations mirrored the even greater disparities between those made subjects of investigation, the Indian mine workers and peasants whose bodies and lifestyles were the sites of contention in diagnosing the “problem” at hand, and the internationally dispersed medical, military, and political elite the commissioners consulted with and reported back to, during and after their tour. Both Peru and Bolivia, in good diplomatic form, praised the work of the commissioners but suggested that the research had been too hasty and that three months of fieldwork was insufficient to draw conclusions, arguing that more scientific research needed to be undertaken to determine whether or not the practice of coca leaf chewing was in fact harmful.82

  Despite these apparently irreconcilable differences, however, there were in fact a number of shared assumptions and underlying concerns that seemed to animate all of the various participants. Officials sought to define the parameters of legitimate drug consumption while creating a logical framework for policing its boundaries. Scientific investigation seemed to represent the ultimate authority for determining policies relating to the control, distribution, and consumption of coca commodities. “Experts” in the fields of physiology, pharmacology, business management, policing, and medicine were the privileged participants in these debates. Those people most directly affected and concerned by the practice and the public and political response to it, Aymara and Quechua Indians, were excluded. This was forcefully apparent in a 1949 progress report from US Public Health Service scientists who were in the Andes studying coca chewing under the auspices of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). They constituted just one of an array of missions in South America at the time that collaborated with the United Nations and that together embodied the prominence of scientific investigators’ involvement in constructing visions for Latin American development—and in delineating the boundaries of legitimate participation in the coca market. This vision paired the valorization of scientific “objectivity” and “truth” while denying the possibility that the Indian point of view mattered. The NIH’s fieldwork at the Volcan Mines at Ticklio, Peru, involved analyzing blood and urine samples obtained from Indian workers to track cocaine absorption in the body. They noted their findings were ongoing and inconclusive, yet one thing was clear: “The statements in regard to the coca leaf habit given by the workers are not reliable.”83 This easy dismissal of the Indian perspective was also evident in the UN commissioners’ primary reliance on testimony provided by members of the Peruvian and Bolivian elite: government officials, military authorities, medical professionals, pharmacists, and academics. For the Andean elite and international regulators, the “Indian” embodied the hazards and promise of Andean economic development.

  THE INDIAN QUESTION

  This silencing of the Indian voice was in sharp contrast to the centrality of the Indian body as a primary object of investigation into the “problem of the coca leaf.” As drug control gained momentum, the physical and symbolic body of the Indian became central to the debate. Regulators studied the “Indian” in their attempt to convey the dangers of consuming the raw material coca leaf in its unprocessed form and implement a sys
tem of controls gearing all coca leaf production toward the export market. In this context “Indians” were both objects of science and policing and, increasingly, part of a North American popular imaginary about the Andes. Consequently in the effort to delineate new boundaries of legality, Gutiérrez-Noriega, the US public health scientists, and the investigators helping advance the work of the UN Coca Commission performed numerous tests aimed at exploring Indian bodies and minds.

  Approaching Indians as almost natural components of the environment, researchers swooped down on mines, into the countryside, or even utilized the captive populations in penitentiaries and asylums, to study the absorption of cocaine alkaloids in the body—drawing blood, testing urine and excrement, and administering numerous IQ and other mental evaluative tests. An entire section of the commission’s report entitled “The Chewing of Coca Leaf” was devoted to analyzing what happens to an Indian body upon consumption of coca leaves. Investigators reframed the Indian cultural practice of chewing coca leaves as a process of cocaine ingestion that needed to be eliminated.84 This scientific faith in finding answers by probing into blood, stomachs, digestive tracks, and brains paralleled the easy objectification of Indians in popular literature, where Indians repeatedly were likened to animals, an eerie echo, perhaps, of the lab rats and dogs upon which Gutierrez-Noriega performed his first cocaine experiments. The provocatively entitled article “The Curse of Coca,” published in the Inter-American in 1946, exemplifies this contemporary mix of fascination and disdain for the Indian body in the context of criminalizing indigenous coca consumption in the name of drug control. A Swiss naturalist is cited describing a sixty-two-year-old man as walking “as fast as a mule could go, solely on coca,” and the coca fields “look too steep to climb, but barefooted men and women scramble up the steps like mountain goats.”85 An article in Natural History the following year described how coca leaves in the mouth “reminds one of a chipmunk with packed cheek pouches.”86 Objectification of the Indian body provided common ground for scientists, drug control officials, and a popular imagination that sustained policy initiatives of the time.

  FIGURE 4. Photo and caption from a 1946 Inter-American article presenting coca leaf chewing as causing irrational behaviors by indigenous people.

  The paired silencing of Indian voices and overproduction of Indian bodies in debates about coca provide a unique window onto contemporary ideas about national economic development and the selective policing of drugs. Discussions about coca drew upon long-standing ideological controversies over how best to integrate indigenous people on behalf of Latin American modernization and development. Linking coca chewing, “moral character,” and economic growth, drug control advocates drew upon a long colonial tradition of targeting Indians for cultural transformation, while providing a racially inflected social and economic rationale. At the second Inter-American Congress of Indian Affairs, held in Peru the same year as the UN commission’s visit, “the topic that raised more debate than any other related to the supposed physical degeneracy of the Indians,” an idea dismissed overwhelmingly by the attendees, although the question of the harmfulness of coca “was left undecided.”87 At the moment of this push for drug control, the notion of Indian racial degeneracy was becoming increasingly unpalatable. However, a new scientific language rooted in concepts like “addiction” supplanted more explicitly racialized debates, while re-embedding social, economic, and racial hierarchies through discourses of criminality and social dysfunction. The UN commission explained that it resisted the term racial degeneracy, which it linked to “the continuous outcry, heard all over Peru from the enemies of Coca chewing,” and rather suggested that their “analysis did not lead to the result that the Indian is degenerating; rather that mainly as a result of malnutrition, these valuable people addict themselves to coca chewing.”88

  Finally, this recasting of the Indian problem, as a social rather than genetic issue, also was tied to US principles regarding hemispheric trade and economic development. The phrase “These valuable people” was as much an invocation of the commissioner’s “respect” for the Indians (as opposed to a caricatured Peruvian racial disdain), as it was an acknowledgment of Indians’ critical capacity as laborers and consumers within the postwar global economic order. Along with its other conclusions, the UN report argued that coca consumption “reduces the economic yield of productive work, and therefore maintains a low economic standard of life.”89 Drug control was presented as a means of overcoming economic backwardness. More specifically, the model of drug control advocated by the United States and United Nations tied the Andes into a hemispheric commodity chain in which coca leaves would ideally be grown exclusively for export (primarily to the United States). The Andes, then as the source of raw materials for North American manufacturers, ultimately might be further incorporated into a new international economic order as consumers of manufactured “American” goods. A member of the UN Secretariat overseeing the commission’s work articulated this larger economic vision when he suggested the fundamental issue underlying the investigators’ work had to do with the “main problem” of creating “a mass of consumers capable of supporting the new envisaged industrial and administrative developments.”90

  MANUFACTURING CONSENT

  Among these “industrial and administrative developments” was the increasing presence of US companies and products in the Andes. This was especially true for US manufacturers operating within the newly delineated licit borders of the coca economy that directly influenced the work of the UN commission. At the same time that the commission sought to control the production, trade, and local consumption of the coca leaf, American companies very carefully sought to ensure their field of research and economic interests remained “licit” aspects of the coca trade. The Coca-Cola Company closely watched the progress of the commission‘s work. In the late 1940s, Coca-Cola executives were wary of the impact that international drug control might have on their own operations and sought to retain a degree of influence on the parameters of new policing efforts. In response to a preliminary presentation made by the UN commission before embarking on its field research, the vice president of Coca-Cola, Ralph Hayes, wrote to the FBN’s Anslinger, highlighting the long record of corporate and government cooperation with regard to coca: “It enables everyone concerned to say that, so far as the writ of the United States runs, the movement and processing of coca leaf and the disposition of all products therefrom is under complete control and that the unity of purpose between Government and industry is, in this respect, unqualified.”91

  Hayes believed the United States provided the United Nations with a model of collaboration for ensuring both policing and manufacturing imperatives within the drug economy, exhibiting an exemplary “unity of purpose between Government and industry.” Policing and manufacturing priorities might easily come into conflict, however, as the Coca-Cola executives well knew. In the course of the commission‘s investigations Hayes maintained contact with Anslinger, receiving regular updates and making suggestions to ensure the company’s unqualified access to the coca leaf market. For instance, having received and reviewed an early draft of the commission‘s report, Hayes successfully turned to Anslinger to modify the report so as to include an explicit mention of the licit use of coca for “the production of the coca leaf for a nonnarcotic flavoring extract.” After the issue was addressed in the UN chamber, Anslinger reported back to Hayes that the intervention had been successful and that in order to accomplish this end he had “used some of the excellent wording expressed in your letter.”92

  In less direct ways, select US pharmaceutical companies benefited from the work of the UN commission. When Coca-Cola’s vice president took note of the commission’s finding that the coca leaf contained large quantities of valuable vitamins, he passed this information on in correspondence with Maywood Chemical Works, the company that processed coca leaves for manufacturing the famous soft drink. He stressed the “remarkably high” vitamin content of coca leaves, reit
erating the UN findings to a company well equipped to profitably extract and package the nutrients in pill form, even while mentioning the United Nations wisely had rejected the leaves as a source of nourishment for indigenous consumers “due to their cocaine content.”93 Merck & Co., Inc., the other major US importer of coca leaves beside Maywood, also began focusing more attention on the Andes. While before the war Merck had imported coca leaves primarily from Java, by 1948 the company was, according to FBN documentation, interested in developing “in Peru a source of coca leaves with high alkaloid content, similar to those produced in Java. Apparently Merck & Company contemplates sending a technician to Peru and Bolivia to study present strains and growing conditions, to solicit assistance from local growers and research workers, and to distribute small quantities of selected seed.”94