We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire

by Suzanna Reiss

  Private and public collaborations to secure Andean production of coca leaves for US manufacturers were ongoing even as the commission pursued limitations on the cultivation of coca for the Andean market. While it is difficult to assess what, if any, direct influence Merck had on the UN’s work, it is clear that drug control priorities and the valorization of Western scientific inquiry that they depended on shaped an international economic order conducive to the profitability of Merck and other pharmaceutical companies.

  Merck’s research division cultivated close ties to Carlos Monge, the prominent scientist whose work was central to debates about coca and who was also headed the Peruvian National Committee on Coca established to study the issue in tandem with the United Nations. A few months before the UN commission published its findings, Monge on Merck’s behalf successfully petitioned the Peruvian Minister of Work and Indigenous Matters to obtain special coca leaf export authorizations for the company and ensured his government’s support for research in US laboratories that might translate or be replicated in a high-altitude environment in Peru.95 In an interesting exchange in 1951 between Monge and Hans Moliter of Merck’s Institute for Therapeutic Research, it is clear how the drug control regime itself provided foundations for a “legitimate” realm of international scientific and profit-oriented collaboration in the drug field. Monge’s efforts to secure special coca leaf exports to Merck’s laboratories were rewarded when Merck in turn shared with him a supply of cortisone, a new drug with varied therapeutic possibilities the company was studying at the time. In subsequent correspondence Moliter asked Monge for an update on his research with the drug and asked whether he had “had any opportunity to try the administration of cortisone to people who are not acclimatized to high altitude.” In addition to these research exchanges, Moliter expressed a noteworthy concern over controlling the drug’s circulation: “In this country, there is a very bad black market situation with regard to cortisone and in spite of all our efforts to control it, it is getting worse. I should be very interested to learn from you whether a similar situation has also developed in Peru. I am afraid that your answer will be in the affirmative; indeed your country would be a unique and blessed exception from this ugly picture if it were not the case.”96

  Thus, even the most prominent Peruvian proponent of protecting the indigenous practice of coca leaf chewing, Carlos Monge, might be approached by American scientists working on drug development as a presumed adherent to the notion and logical structure of drug control, even if—perhaps especially if—he argued publicly at the time that coca leaves should not be included on the prohibited list.

  The Coca-Cola Company similarly sought to ensure drug control efforts would not impinge on their capacity to profit from their famous product. After reading the FBN’s Annual Report for 1949, that among other things celebrated Peruvian General Odría’s collaboration with the FBN to crack down on cocaine, a concerned Ralph Hayes of Coca-Cola wrote to Anslinger. Hayes highlighted a particular part of the report that referred to “the marvelous co-operation of the present Peruvian Government in enacting legal deterrents and eliminating the illicit ‘coke’ sources . . . [and the] elimination of illegal ‘coke’ traffic.” He requested that future reports avoid the unfortunate conflation of names (“coke”) that might jeopardize the reputation of the company’s drink. Complimenting the report drafters as no doubt “above criticism,” Hayes suggested to the FBN that the “use of the term ‘cocaine’ when that substance is meant might be preferable, inasmuch as ‘coke’ is a trade mark registered by the Federal Government and having a distinctive meaning.”97

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  The profits accrued from controlling the coca commodity circuit went to governments and political, intellectual, and economic elites. In the Andes, the burdens of the new drug control regime fell most heavily on Indian communities. As an international network of “experts” squared off, they all grounded their recommendations in a determined application of science to study an objectified indigenous body. These efforts did not seek to understand or take seriously autonomous indigenous cultural beliefs or political and economic concerns, even as their ultimate recommendations attempted to criminalize customary practices. The ensuing social stigmatization and legal assault on select participants within the coca economy, and drug production and consumption more generally, laid the foundation for a next half century of struggle over the terms of drug control and a starkly delineated licit and illicit divide.

  The UN Commission of Enquiry on the Coca Leaf echoed both the FBN’s vision for drug control and the approach of earlier international drug control agreements, when it defined the terms of “limitation” that framed its investigative approach according to the coca leaves’ commodity state and the associated consumer market. However, with the US government leading the call for a reinvigorated drug control regime, and a US pharmaceutical executive at the helm of UN investigations into the coca “problem” in Peru and Bolivia, these drug control efforts took on a new character. Drug control officials directly intervened to structure and police national and regional coca markets in the Andes, the plants’ original geographic and cultural home, and sought to restrict coca cultivation to “raw material” for export. Suppression of coca use was never a total objective but rather an effort to structure the Bolivian and Peruvian economy by eliminating the regional coca leaf market—dominated by Aymara and Quechua coca leaf chewers—while securing adequate supplies for export to primarily US manufacturers. This effort was propelled by the collaborative efforts of the US government, the United Nations, police and military officials in the United States and the Andes, scientific experts, and corporate executives with ties to both North and South America. Dictating limitations on the circulation of raw coca leaves was far more than an effort to corner an international market; it reflected the deep-seated political, cultural, and social forces that legitimized and sustained the inequities of US-directed hemispheric economic development and drug control. The United States and United Nations together determined that coca leaf—as produced and consumed in the Andes—was not a legitimate consumer commodity, but rather exclusively “raw material” for the industrial manufacturing of other goods.

  Even as the regional and international circulation of drug raw materials such as coca leaves became subject to increasing restrictions and regulations, the end drug products that might be derived from them along with a vast and growing array of manufactured synthetic substitutes created to mimic their therapeutic potential contributed to a veritable revolution in the drug field both in terms of the scale and variety of drugs being produced. US pharmaceutical companies led this transformation with the help of the US government and a national and international policing apparatus. US involvement in policing the drug trade was not merely about implementing limitations and controls. It also had a productive impact and goal: to sustain the growth and expansion of US power based on the pharmaceutical industry’s economic and medical advancement and the corresponding expansion of the nation’s global power and influence. The next chapter turns to this convergence to focus on how policing was crucial for maintaining and expanding the US drug industry and national power in a new economic, legal, and technological landscape influencing the parameters of drug control.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Alchemy of Empire

  Drugs and Development in the Americas

  In July 1941, a United States Treasury officer checked out a pamphlet entitled “Coca: A Plant of the Andes” from the department’s library. Originally published in 1928 as part of the Pan-American Union’s “Commodities of Commerce Series,” the pamphlet described the coca leaf market with the intent of facilitating US international trade. In 1941, however, the government’s interest in the coca leaf had more to do with military applications than trade. The officer had gone to the library at the request of investigators in the US Army, and he returned the pamphlet to the librarian, having penned this lighthearted message: “I suppose the future will find each soldier ch
ewing a wad of coca leaves as he repulses the attack of the invading hordes.”

  The US Army was interested in exploring the stimulating properties of the coca leaf for potential use by its soldiers. In particular, the Treasury officer explained, “It seems that they have been discussing the stimulating effect produced by eating the leaves, as well as boiling them and drinking the tea.”1 Military researchers on all sides of the conflict during World War II sought to derive from plants or manufacture in laboratories an array of substances to heal, minimize pain from injury, and stimulate soldiers to make them more efficient fighters. Coca was just one of many such promising entities, although it seems that at least in leaf form it never gained a foothold in US military barracks.

  The officer’s mirth over the humorous incongruity of coca-chewers filling the ranks of the world’s most powerful army was indicative of the growing cultural belief in the power of technology to transform raw materials (like coca leaves) into superior, and often more potent, products (like cocaine) and the presumed backwardness of older and simpler practices. This faith in “Man’s Synthetic Future” was on display at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in a 1951 speech of that title delivered by the organization’s departing president: “Until half a century ago, medicinal products for treatment of disease were confined chiefly to plant or animal extracts or principles discovered originally through the cut-and-dry methods of the physicians of earlier ages. The chemist has now synthesized many of these principles and on the basis of this knowledge has been able to produce other products superior to the natural.”

  This evolutionary vision portrayed the industrial world’s chemical laboratories as the utopian realization of human triumph over nature and, by extension, the inevitably dominant role the US nation itself must play as the engine behind the creation of “products superior to the natural.” Dividing the world into “smaller nations” and “greater powers,” AAAS President Roger Adams described a global order where the chemical sophisticate survived: countries “technologically unsuited to a future in a strictly chemical world” must be “grouped” with nations “which through two centuries have shown an innate ability to advance against all opposition.”2 Adams’s geopolitical hierarchy was shaped by a faith that the capacity to chemically alter raw materials was a marker of national superiority, and the ideal relationship between powerful and weak nations was one that ensured a steady flow of raw materials into US industrial laboratories.

  In the aftermath of World War II, US importation and stockpiling of raw materials was pursued in the name of national security, accompanied by the promise of protection and benefits that US “resources for freedom” offered the rest of the world. The previous chapter described the solidification of the international drug control regime around efforts to limit the production and flow of coca leaves, one such raw material, channeling them into an export market geared towards US pharmaceutical stockpiles. Here the focus is on the “synthetic futures” of these raw materials: upon arrival in North American laboratories, drug control officials sought to channel and contain the productive power of these substances, even as they were chemically altered and synthesized into an array of other products. This chapter describes how the process of chemical transformation itself both extended and to a certain extent transformed policing practices; synthetic manipulations might catapult substances in either direction—legality or illegality—and government and corporate officials sought to capitalize on the need for scientific expertise to certify the “legitimacy” of the end product. It shows how narcotics control brought together efforts to manage the production of new drugs with scientific and government-backed efforts to cultivate the production of new types of people. A faith in the power of alchemy to transform the natural world into superior products linked chemical laboratories to experiments in human engineering as people and communities stretching from the United States to the Andes were drawn into grand projects that linked the testing of new drugs with efforts to transform peoples’ laboring and consuming habits as the basis for securing and expanding US hegemony.

  COCA’S SYNTHETIC FUTURE

  The most formidable obstacle standing between US soldiers and the wad of coca leaves that could keep them active on long missions was the drug control and regulatory framework being effectively institutionalized at that time by the Treasury Department’s own Federal Bureau of Narcotics. The US Army’s laboratory-driven experimentation with chewing the leaves and making tea infusions reproduced the most common forms of indigenous Andean coca consumption—where the majority Aymara and Quechua communities had consumed coca leaves for centuries as sources of nutrition and energy, as a market medium of exchange, and also as an entity valued as a component of healing, religion, and ritual. And in simulating such activity the Army researchers threatened to undermine one of the central tenets of the emerging drug control regime: that there was no medical value, but rather numerous dangers, attached to the consumption of coca leaves in their natural state. The legal assault on raw materials consumption—the chewing of coca leaves—was a combination of the effects of US narcotics law and its determining influence on UN drug control initiatives. In relation to the legal narcotic drug trade, the US government allowed only the importation of raw materials; all controlled substances in domestic circulation (or for export) had to be manufactured within the country. The UN Commission of Enquiry on the Coca Leaf traveled through the Andes in 1949 and called for the elimination of indigenous consumption of the coca leaf in its raw material state. The “supply-side” control orientation of the increasingly powerful drug regulatory regime meant policing officials sought to confine the circulation of raw materials to internationally designated “legitimate channels.” UN and US experts defined legitimacy in this context according to the industrial world’s determination of “scientific and medicinal need,” entrenching a North–South global order where the industrial powers continued to lay claim to the raw materials of the “smaller nations.”

  These considerations informed FBN Commissioner Harry Anslinger’s opposition to a planned 1950 study on coca leaves and fatigue led by scientists working for the US Office of Naval Research. Dr. Robert S. Schwab was directing the study at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and when he turned to Merck and Co., Inc. to supply him with coca leaves from their stocks, Anslinger intervened to halt the shipment. Anslinger was worried the research would undermine Andean acceptance of the regulatory framework being promoted at that time by the United States and the United Nations (where he presided as the US representative), and wanted to reassert the FBN’s influence over national drug policy. He explained his objection by highlighting “the primary aim of our government . . . has been to secure control of these drugs at the botanical source.” A series of exchanges between Commissioner Anslinger, Dr. Schwab, and Commander J.W. Macmillan of the Office of Naval Research provide perspective on contemporary debate over the promise of scientific research to American power, the definition of “legitimate” medical and scientific use of narcotics, the imperatives of international drug control, and the dangers of certain sites and forms of consumption. The incident reveals much about the nature and direction of US involvement in the coca commodity circuit and the intersection of science and drug control at that time. As Anslinger explained:

  The fact that a domestic scientific project was in progress in the United States, involving the study of the effect of chewing of coca leaves on fatigue, would have a most unfortunate effect on our efforts to achieve international agreement on limitation of production of the leaves to medical and scientific needs. Accomplishments in this direction have been based on the tentative assumption that the use of coca leaves for chewing is neither medical nor scientific. Without knowledge of the official findings of the Commission of Inquiry, I nevertheless feel strongly that the practice of chewing coca leaves should never be recognized as legal.3

  His insistence that coca leaf chewing “should never be recognized as legal
” sought to shut down that line of scientific inquiry, and despite his use of the word “tentative,” due to his friendship with the head of the UN commission which had traveled through Peru and Bolivia in 1949, Anslinger in fact already knew the United Nations planned to recommend eliminating indigenous consumption of coca leaves in their 1950 report. And with this knowledge he argued that the principle of limitation was defined according to select medical and scientific ends, and that the coca leaf in its raw material state, “for chewing,” could not be—within the framework established by the drug control regime—a legitimate consumer commodity. Anslinger cautioned that the planned research might be used by proponents of coca leaf chewing to bolster their position: “It seems to me that those disposed to challenge such findings and to seek legal recognition and acceptance of the habit of chewing the coca leaf, would attempt to use your findings if successful, as an argument for their position.”4 Invoking international obligations—and a system of controls the United States did so much to influence—Anslinger argued that chewing the coca leaf undermined the tenets of the international system by appearing to validate claims of the unreworked raw material’s potential benefits.