The source of controversy was Article 8 of the proposed UN protocol, which delegated to imperial powers, including the United States and United Kingdom, autonomous determination over whether the protocol’s rules would extend to territories under their nations’ control. The Soviet delegates challenged the proposal on a number of grounds. They argued it was a mechanism for metropolitan powers to bypass oversight and it exemplified a negligent lack of concern for “unhealthy conditions prevalent in those Territories.” What followed was a back-and-forth verbal exchange in response to this assertion that Article 8 rendered drug control imperially selective and self-serving. British officials defended the clause as protecting the right to representative government in its territories (which could choose to sign on or not), challenged Soviet depictions of it as “an escape clause” (that would allow the United States and United Kingdom to have unregulated drug markets in regions under their control), and explained, “the United Kingdom did not wish and was not able to impose its own point of view on the territories placed under its trusteeship.” US representatives supported the British; however, they emphasized the distinctiveness of their colonial administration whereby “in accordance with their usual practice,” the protocol would automatically apply “to all territories for the foreign relations of which they were responsible.” The Soviets persisted in their opposition, exhibiting their own paternalist ambitions as they accused the United States and United Kingdom of malicious colonial neglect: “The abolition of such colonial clauses would convince the Native peoples that the metropolitan authorities were seeking to improve their administration; their retention, on the other hand, indicated a lack of desire to promote the real interests of colonial peoples.”
As the exchange heated up, the fault lines of postwar diplomacy were clearly on display. The symbolic jostling around the concern of superpowers for the peoples of colonial territories reflected a geopolitical division whereby the United States defended its own and England’s imperial administration while the Soviet Union postured as an ally of “colonial peoples.” All three presumed the superiority of industrial world power and expounded the benevolent possibilities of exporting their own visions of progress to other parts of the world. It was not the system of control being contested, all sides agreeing that drug control “would be of such obvious benefit to them [colonial peoples],” but rather the political principles delineating its effective domain. Symbolic posturing became central to negotiations over drug control. The USSR proposed eliminating Article 8 “based on a desire for equality for all peoples,” and the British argued the “steady advance towards independence for non-self-governing peoples” meant they “should be allowed to decide whether they wished the protocol to be applicable to them.”42
The balance of power at the United Nations ensured that the interests of colonial powers carried the day; the protocol was adopted, including Article 8, despite Soviet reservations. In the midst of postwar reconstruction, colonial readjustments, Cold War tensions, and the political challenge posed by a growing number of newly independent states, drug control efforts provided one way for industrial countries, particularly the United States, to secure international dominance through a selective regulatory apparatus portrayed as an act of international benevolence. The delegate from India remarked on the unprecedented embrace of drug control, comparing it to burgeoning efforts to control atomic power:
It was easy to imagine the sensation it would cause if the First Committee were to adopt unanimously, after a single day’s discussion, a convention for the control of atomic energy. Yet the difference between the two problems was not so great. Both were the result of progress achieved through science, progress which might be put to either good or bad uses. The destruction which the atomic bomb could wreak, though more limited in its extent, was more spectacular, whereas synthetic drugs were able to do great damage insidiously and continuously, on a larger scale. They destroyed the mind before they destroyed the body.43
Political, economic, and cultural factors influenced which drugs under what circumstances would fall under the system of control, something implicitly acknowledged in this declaration that scientific “progress” could be put to both “good and bad uses.” It was the drug control regime itself that delineated the boundaries of legality—when an individual, official, institution, or government was putting drugs to “good” or “bad” uses—and officials administering the system based these determinations on the authority of Western scientists, inevitably and profoundly shaped by power hierarchies and cultural bias. Arguments over colonial authority exhibited this tendency. So too did the language and categories of enforcement enshrined in the 1948 Protocol, particularly the assignation of the label “addictive.” The idea that opium and cocaine were “addictive” provided the foundational justification for the entire drug control regime. The deployment of this term in negotiations over the 1948 Protocol showed the ongoing manipulation of the concept to augment the capacity of industrial countries to influence the lives of people and communities around the world in very concrete ways.
The CND drafted the 1948 Protocol, which introduced regulations to limit the manufacture of and monitor the trade in certain synthetic drugs to be overseen by the Drug Supervisory Body (DSB). It delegated to the WHO the authority to determine which substances should be controlled based on whether “the drug in question is capable of producing addiction or of conversion into a product capable of producing addiction.”44 National governments adhering to the treaty had to report to the UN secretary general the discoveries of synthetic drugs that might prove “liable to the same kind of abuse and productive of the same kind of harmful effects” as those attributed to coca and opium, and the secretary general in turn would notify the CND and the WHO. The WHO made a scientific determination of a substance’s potential danger and the CND launched regulation when necessary. The Preamble to the 1948 Protocol summarized the treaty’s origin and function: “Considering that the progress of modern pharmacology and chemistry has resulted in the discovery of drugs, particularly synthetic drugs, capable of producing addiction,” the treaty placed these drugs “under control in order to limit by international agreement their manufacture to the world’s legitimate requirements for medical and scientific purposes and to regulate their distribution.” The 1948 Protocol did not apply to all synthetic drugs, but exclusively to drugs deemed to have addictive properties similar to opium and cocaine. The two original “narcotic drugs” subject to international control, the poppy plant and coca leaves and their valued derivatives (opium and cocaine), remained entrenched as the benchmark for all other drugs in determining whether they should be deemed addictive and regulated as “narcotics.”
Drug control officials identified “addiction” as the object of their regulatory and policing endeavors, and defining the concept became an important aspect of establishing the regime’s effective domain. Determining the “addictive” properties of synthetic drugs became the designated responsibility of the WHO’s Expert Committee on Drugs Liable to Produce Addiction, which in 1949 defined its task as follows: “The Expert Committee . . . is to investigate the extremely complicated situation created by the production of a whole group of new synthetic products whose analgesic properties produce an effect analogous to that of morphine and are habit-forming or which lend themselves readily to conversion into drugs capable of producing addiction.”45
Synthetic opiates were the largest category of drug leaking into illicit channels at that time. Drug control authorities, particularly in the United States, also worried about the illicit circulation of synthetic versions of cocaine. As early as the 1930s, studies were done to help “government chemists . . . identify both cocaine and novocaine separately.” This grew out of police anxiety that “illegal cocaine seized by the Narcotics Bureau . . . had been adulterated with novocaine,” or even completely substituted by it.46 In 1945 the FBN failed to secure a conviction for illicit novocaine seized at the border when the defense attorney successfully ar
gued the drug was not a derivative of the coca leaf and consequently did “not come within the purview” of federal narcotic law.47 Anslinger raised alarm and, concurrent with international efforts to control synthetics, the United States amended its narcotic law to “redefine the term ‘Narcotic Drugs’ to include synthetic substances which are chemically identical with a drug derived from opium or coca leaves.” As an FBN circular described the adjustment to its agents, “it was decided to amend the law so that such distinction [whether synthetic drugs were ‘narcotics’] would be unnecessary.”48 According to the FBN, the time for policing synthetically manufactured drugs as “narcotics” had arrived.
Drug control now targeted synthetic drugs believed to mimic the presumed addictive qualities of opium and cocaine. The international drug control regime’s emphasis on “drugs capable of producing addiction” bolstered international efforts to limit the circulation of particular substances, like coca, and in the process justified policing people deemed threatening to the social, political, and economic status quo. This was evident when the CND investigated the “problem” of coca leaf chewing in 1949 and turned to the WHO Expert Committee for help. The CND asked to be furnished with “definitions of the terms ‘drug addiction,’ ‘addiction forming drugs,’ and ‘fundamental structure of addiction-forming drug’ . . . to illustrate such definitions by references to appropriate drugs.” In response to this request, the Expert Committee explained that essential to defining the notion of “addiction” was distinguishing it from the term “habit-forming.” The head of the Expert Committee elaborated this point in an exchange with its US delegate: “In the Paris Protocol of November 1948, and even as early as in the 1931 Convention, the word ‘addiction’ has been used in preference to ‘habit.’ In my opinion, ‘addiction’ corresponds better than ‘habit’ to the meaning. There are many habits which have nothing to do with addiction. Therefore, ‘addiction-forming’ drugs might be a more appropriate expression than ‘habit-forming.’”49
The US delegate, Nathan B. Eddy—who served as a medical officer at the US Public Health Service (USPHS)—concurred and emphasized, “at least for control purposes ‘addicting drug’ is a more exact term and nearer the meaning intended than ‘habit-forming’; as you say, the latter is too comprehensive.”50
“For control purposes,” then, “addicting” was determined to reflect the greater social menace posed by the consumption of certain drugs. The Expert Committee went on to officially “caution against the erroneous characterization as addiction-producing, of such substances or drugs which in fact do not bear a real addiction character, but merely create habituation. The use of tobacco is an example, alcohol is another.” The “real addiction characters” of certain drugs as defined by the WHO was unique in many ways “from many earlier ones, given by pharmacologists and psychiatrists, in the sense that they include the social aspect, the harm done not only to the individual but to society.”51 So, the dangerous aspect of drug consumption, according to the parameters of the emerging drug control regime, resided not only in an individual’s consumption habits or even the physiological action of the drug on a person’s body, but also in the threat these bodies posed to the larger society. As such the definition inherently structured into the drug control regime the power of cultural, racial, class, gender, national, and other biases to influence the determination of what constituted a menace to the community.
Such biases were evident in the work and conclusions of the UN Commission of Enquiry on the Coca Leaf, as discussed more extensively in the previous chapter. It was widely acknowledged at the time, as described in the US publication Natural History in 1947, that “the coca habit is more universal among Andean Indians than the tobacco habit is among civilized people.”52 And the fact that the habit of coca leaf chewing, unlike tobacco, was prevalent among a racially distinct and economically impoverished population who were not considered “civilized,” made the attack on coca seem all the more necessary. The WHO’s logic reflected larger structures of power operative in the world at mid-century. And the parameters of the drug control regime—those drugs (and people) that got targeted—were flexible in defense of this larger vision. When specifically asked to address the question of coca leaf chewing, “The Expert Committee came to the conclusion that coca chewing is detrimental to the individual and to society and that it must be defined and treated as an addiction, in spite of the occasional absence of those characteristics.”53
FIGURE 7. A Peruvian peasant in Vicos in 1952 holding a coca leaf bag, lime dispenser (to dip into while chewing the leaf), and a cigarette in his hand. According to drug control officials, tobacco use constituted a “habit” while coca consumption was an “addiction.” [“Vicosino Holding Coca Bag, Lime Dispenser.” Photograph by Abraham Guillén. Allan R. Holmberg collection on Peru, #14–25–1529. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.]
Scientists declaring coca addictive, despite “the occasional absence of those characteristics,” suggests the definition was more socially than scientifically based, a phenomenon long true in the history of the policing of cocaine.54 As early as the 1920s scientists drew clear distinctions between the physiologically addictive properties of opiates—where symptoms of withdrawal were manifest—in contrast to cocaine. Nevertheless, cocaine users in scientific and popular representations continued to be identified as “addicts.” In a 1929 article in the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics the social aspect of addiction trumped the “absence” of physical symptoms: “Although, therefore, in contrast to morphine, we consider a tolerance to cocaine in the pharmacological sense as unproved, we are compelled to recognize the fact of a passionate addiction.”55 The threat posed by such addiction, first diagnosed among consumers in the industrial world in the 1920s, was similar to that which would animate attacks on coca leaf chewing in the Andes in the 1940s and 1950s. It resided in the perception of the related uncontrolled behaviors deemed “irregular” or socially undesirable. As the author of the textbook Practical Pharmacology characterized the threat, cocaine was “a substance to produce complete abandon and an utter disregard for consequences and future . . . the normal person gets no pleasure from injections of cocaine.”56 And elsewhere, “Chronic cocainism produces marked sexual irregularities in man, usually increasing libido by allowing freer play of the imagination; most female cocainists exhibit nymphomania.”57 Beyond the implicit gendered hierarchy of presumed independent thought even among addicts in this particular characterization, the politics of declaring and identifying a “passionate addiction” was rooted in racial, gender, and class conflicts in both the Andes and the United States. The medical concept “addiction” was a category most meaningful among the field of international experts who defined and enforced it, not exclusively as a scientific phenomena, but as a social construction of the object, behavior, or population to be controlled—through imposed isolated or refashioning into productive members of society.
By the 1950s such definitions of addiction drew upon scientific research in both the Andes and the United States. Studies of indigenous coca consumption helped establish the baseline for the drug control regime’s policing of “addiction.” In the industrial world, other vulnerable populations would become the objects of scientific inquiry into the addictive properties—and attendant need for regulation—of an array of new synthetic substances being churned out by pharmaceutical laboratories.
THE NARCOTIC FARM
At mid-century, drug development and experimentation (particularly when involving the use of human subjects) tended to occur (or at least get documented) within public institutional settings. In both the Andes and the United States the test subjects for such research were drawn primarily from military personnel, prisoners, asylum populations, committed “narcotics addicts,” and poor people in need of medical assistance or cash. This was dramatically on display at the US Narcotic Farm run by the USPHS in Lexington, Kentucky. As the Commissioner of Narcotics testified bef
ore Congress about the work being done at this institution:
We are having a drug revolution. New drugs are coming into the field of medicine, all of which, so far, were discovered in Germany during the war. . . . Every country in the world is now going to ascribe to the protocol on synthetic drugs. We will put these new drugs in the same compartment as morphine and heroin and other derivatives of opium and the coca leaf. All of those organizations are looking to one place, and only one place, where we can get accurate information, and that is the work at Lexington.58
And indeed, the CND, the National Research Council, the WHO, and a range of pharmaceutical firms all drew upon the work done by scientists working for the USPHS at Lexington to determine the addictive potential of various new substances and, by extension, the reach of drug control. The Narcotic Farm was jointly run by the USPHS and the Bureau of Prisons and it housed a research unit—the Addiction Research Center which was at that time the only research center in the world that was conducting studies on “addiction” using live subjects—i.e., prisoner-patients who had previously been identified as “addicts” and were deemed, as such, extremely valuable for testing the addictive potential of new drugs. FBN Commissioner Anslinger exulted, “There is no question about the research work there. It is the finest in the world. The research is not conducted upon animals, but upon individuals who are themselves addicts.”59
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