We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire

by Suzanna Reiss

  Perhaps embracing a postwar reluctance to accept race and biology as an explanatory framework for inequality, and also reflecting the way in which sociocultural factors had always shaped “Indian” identity in the Andes, such arguments blurred the line between cultural practice and racially based notions of cultural, or even genetic, supremacy that increasingly were being articulated—in both the United States and the Andes—through the extension of a policing apparatus that accompanied modernization and economic development schemes. Such arguments helped justify an attack on indigenous communities. This involved outright criminalization of traditional practices (such as the banning of coca leaf chewing among soldiers and among laborers on certain large-scale agricultural projects) but also a larger attack on indigenous culture and society as these scholars sought to remake indigenous peoples into “productive” members of modernized nations. The United Nations Review echoed these sentiments when it described a scene of an unknown Andean woman holding a baby in a marketplace: “Though poverty and ignorance have been the woman’s lifetime companion, there is a chance the baby she holds on her lap will lead a totally different kind of life.”90

  Officials debated the best ways to make Indians modern. In Bolivia for instance, officials worried that “considerable economic dislocation would be caused if its production [of coca] were suddenly to be discontinued. It is suggested, therefore, that the transfer from coca to coffee should be gradual.” Replacing one stimulant with a more civilized other, coffee, was part and parcel of the economic logic that valued the unthreatening substitute: “In connection with the possible replacement of coca, priority should be given to tea together with coffee and a pilot project for tea similar to that proposed for coffee should be put into operation.”91 Development efforts depended on Andean indigenous labor to reconfigure the agricultural landscape, and they also included initiatives to cultivate consumer markets in the Andes for “North American” manufactured goods. This reworking of human raw material was to be pursued in the fields as well as the mines. In fact dispensaries run by mining companies were the largest purchasers and distributors of US pharmaceuticals and employed a labor force that might easily be sold, if adequately educated, other commodities like Coca-Cola (something the company was aggressively pursuing at that time).92

  The vision behind a Cornell University agricultural development experiment on a hacienda in Vicos, Peru, embodied the almost missionary quality that often accompanied US Cold War initiatives in social engineering. The project’s director, Allan Holmberg, explained, “Cornell University undertook a systematic program of research and development in order to determine how an Indian population would respond to a concerted effort to introduce it to a more modern way of life.”93 The Cornell Peru Project in collaboration with the Peruvian Indian Institute was viewed by its program managers—men who assumed the role of patron, a boss and patriarchal figure that could demand labor from peasants on the hacienda—as a “natural laboratory.”

  We were trying to manipulate and control large and complex blocks of reality (environment, society, and culture) in their natural setting. At the same time, we were trying to conduct our experiments and our interventions by dealing with substance that has a real meaning to the Vicosinos (like potatoes, cattle, land, or health). And we were trying to deal with this substance within the total context of culture. This, of course, is not experimentation in the laboratory sense of the measurement of the precise effect of a single variable, but rather the development of a strategy for the manipulation and control of systems or sets of variables in the direction of meaningful and purposeful ends.94

  The “purposeful ends” in this context was indigenous participation in capitalist development. Vicos was a community in Peru whose people, as labor, were owned by the land lessee—a lease bought by Cornell University that it administered during the 1950s in collaboration with the Peruvian government (with help from US AID, Carnegie, the Peace Corps, and others). Cornell’s researchers oversaw the Vicos Hacienda for five years before allowing Indian self-government, taking advantage of forced labor requirements to facilitate the transition to commercial farming. All the while these researchers introduced what they described as revolutions (in pesticides, drugs, and general consumption) in a self-conscious effort to stave off a real social revolution. Looking back on the project in 1964, one anthropologist-participant explained: “we similarly regard the late Allan R. Holmberg as a truly revolutionary anthropologist. Whereas [African independence leader] Kenyatta worked with native activists to confront colonial authorities and wrest power from them by force, Holmberg chose to prove a prototype for peaceful social reformation.”95 The program’s experimental ambition was to prevent revolutionary upheaval through liberal development schemes.

  The seemingly neutral science of economic development, deploying Western expertise to bring about economic and cultural transformation, masked the very real political struggle being waged by indigenous communities in the Andes seeking to redress their ongoing marginalization from economic and political power. Thus, in the Andes, the fear of revolution was responding not merely to international communism, but rather to ongoing indigenous mobilizations, as Holmberg himself explained the desire to avoid a “pan-Indian or pan-peasant movement, as in Bolivia, which would usurp the power of the government and initiate drastic reform.”96 The revolution in Bolivia in 1952 did bring about the radical redistribution of land and power in the country, although by the end of the decade, most scholars agree, the conservative bourgeois faction of the leadership had effectively consolidated their control, in part through the embrace of US economic development programs.97

  As Vicos researchers sought to transform subsistence farmers into wage laborers who manned large-scale export-oriented farms, native communities fought back to preserve some of their customary rights and cultural practices. One example was the negotiation over “traditions” that actually stemmed from peonage rather than cultural practice, such as trying to eliminate coca leaves as wage payment and challenging workers’ customary coca-chewing breaks or rest and rejuvenation time which from the perspective of the patron seemed a marker of “laziness” but for the “Vicosino on the other hand this was a social period, characterized by conversation and joking.”98 While “[c]ontrary to early expectations, there ha[d] been little resistance to the acceptance of modern medical practices or even to the purchase of modern drugs,” these experts were frustrated by the persistence of cultural values that seemed to undermine the preeminence of the cash and export-oriented economy.99 “More often than not, increased economic benefits are channeled through traditional value and social systems, intensifying old imbalances . . . for example, that additional income derived from economic development may be spent in gaining prestige through staging more elaborate religious fiestas rather than be put to productive uses.”100 These experts echoed the vision of a UN technical mission in Bolivia that identified “the fiesta and the habit of coca leaf chewing” as the source of “nonessential expenditure [which] is directly harmful to health and working efficiency,” and recommended that “education on the evils of the present habits should be accompanied by an increased supply of household and other goods suitable for popular consumption.”101

  FIGURE 9. Cornell graduate student teaching a Vicosino the application of chemical pesticides. [“Mario Vazquez and a peasant spraying the crops with DDT.” Photograph by Abraham Guillén. Allan R. Holmberg collection on Peru, #14–25–1529. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.]

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  The legacy of these initiatives is mixed, although it does help explain some of the structural delineation of legal and illegal drug economies—as well as the conflicts they engendered. Holmberg would look back on the work done at Vicos with pride: “The traditional system is now being subjected to many inroads. Today there are few communities that have not been touched, however lightly by the technological revolution. Coca-cola, the tin can, penicillin, and even the wrist watch
and radio have penetrated to the most remote haciendas of the Andes.”102

  Interestingly all of the products mentioned may have been manufactured from raw materials—coca, tin, chinchona—exported from the Andes, although clearly here rhetorically the technological revolution is one being exported into—not out of—the region. Looking at the alchemy of empire at mid-century, considering substances, people, and communities affected by drug control initiatives, provides perspective on the logic and structures that facilitated the expansion of US capitalism. Healthy bodies and societies came to be defined in terms of their capacity to sustain a market hierarchically structured to promote North American–manufactured goods—and unhealthy, threatening bodies were targeted for experimentation and transformation. The unequal power between nations and within nations in the hemisphere translated into the unequal roles that various peoples would play in the fashioning of a new world order.

  FIGURE 10. Photograph, “General store in Vicos selling alcohol and coca,” 1951. [Photograph by Abraham Guillén. Allan R. Holmberg collection on Peru, #14–25–1529. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.]

  While the therapeutic revolution embodied the privileged priorities of the manufacturing countries, this era that has been referred to as “the golden age of drug discovery” brought new challenges for policing, along with new possibilities for profit making. Scholar James Le Fanu has aptly pointed out that “the dynamics of the therapeutic revolution owed more to a synergy between the creative forces of capitalism and chemistry than to the science of medicine and biology.”103 To this must be added not merely the creative force of capitalism and chemistry, but the power of the state to coerce participation within the new structures being lauded as the promise of the future. The success of US drug development depended not only on the ability to procure and transform the raw material, but also on the capacity to test and market the reworked commodity as a desirable consumer item.

  For prisoner-patients at Lexington, their drug crimes stripped them of their human rights, making them valuable inputs into the drug development process as raw material. In the Andes, indigenous communities with even fewer recognized rights were approached as objects for the study of social transformation: laboratory objects for the production of a modern, productive citizenry. Concepts like “addiction” and the regulation and policing such labels justified were selectively deployed in an effort to transform the habits and lifestyles of people not fully invested in—indeed often in active political, cultural, and social opposition to—the cultural and economic hegemony of the United States. In the context of the US-Soviet Cold War rivalry, and the attendant American interest in expanding the capitalist marketplace, these projects took on a peculiar urgency. The extension of the drug control regime provides perspective on the era’s “development economics,” which scholars Veronica Montecinos and John Markoff have argued “blossomed as the Western powers, especially the US, sought to continue and extend the now-established tradition of state-run economic management, with an eye to warding off Third World revolution.”104 The seeming contradiction of a capitalist system dependent on mass production and mass consumption targeting overconsumption or “addiction” was reconciled through cultural narratives grounded in scientific market logic. Implicit notions of cultural superiority profoundly shaped the scientific rationale behind the selective attack on coca leaf chewing and the process of designating legitimacy within the system out of which it emerged. The logic of institutional and popular scientists, including their awkward efforts to protect tobacco and alcohol from regulation while targeting coca leaves, reflected the larger structures of power operative in the world in the postwar era and, in particular, the determining influence of US capitalism. The fear of revolution and desire for US power combined to create powerful cultural narratives around drug control that continued to animate the chemical cold war, as will be seen in the following chapter.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Chemical Cold War

  Drugs and Policing in the New World Order

  While anthropologists involved in social engineering projects in the Andes hoped their work might forestall upheavals in the mold of African liberation struggles, similar fears resonated on the floor of the United States Congress. During January 1952 annual appropriations hearings for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, a World War II and Korean War veteran, and member of the House of Representatives, Alfred Sieminski, warned that international collaboration was urgently needed to prevent drugs being deployed as the fuel firing up global revolution: “I wonder, inasmuch as our fleet now, for the first time in history, is refueling in the Mediterranean, and great bases are being built in Africa and since Africa becomes of some interest to us, if you could pass on to your British counterparts that an Oxford graduate, later schooled in Moscow, is behind the colored unrest in the Kenya area and is no doubt the Kremlin’s No. 1 man to lead a race rebellion on that continent with the aid of drugs as fuel.”1

  Rep. Sieminski’s vision, while misrepresenting Kenyan independence leader Jomo Kenyatta’s biography, nevertheless embodied the convergence of fear and global ambition that animated US discourse linking drugs to the Cold War, civil rights, and “race rebellion” in the 1950s and beyond. Persistent in this focus, Sieminski would later simplify his expression of concern: “Let us put it this way. Are drugs playing any part in the Mau Mau movement which seeks to throw the white man out of Africa?” FBN Commissioner Harry Anslinger confirmed that “riots” in Kenya had been traced to the “use of dagga, which is the same as hashish or marijuana, [and] has become widespread in Nairobi where the Government established a commission to look into the situation.”2 Referring to a recent article in Life magazine, the congressman explained his line of questioning was motivated by the worry that “American magazine and printed opinion deal well with the problem of communism and race tensions, yet little is said of the influence, if any, of narcotics in spreading both movements; in easing infiltration to carry out missions of plunder, torture, degeneration, murder and death.”3

  This pairing of narcotics with communism, racial tension, violence, and political rebellion was widespread in US public life and helped drive the passage of increasingly coercive drug laws and enforcement measures at both the national and international level throughout the 1950s. Examining this heightened policing of drugs shows new mechanisms of social control that depended in large part on monopolizing the power of laboratory-manufactured commodities in both material and symbolic form.4 This discourse selectively linked narcotics to criminality in confrontation with an increasingly empowered politics of social change. The congressman’s invocation of Kenyatta depended on sets of associations increasingly articulated in a white American reaction to the threat posed by African liberation movements at home and abroad. While in fact Kenyatta did not attend Oxford (he graduated from the London School of Economics), did not use drugs to fuel rebellion (as reporter J.A. Rogers said, “They don’t need it. The indignities and the injustices they suffer are enough to drive them on,”5) and was neither a Communist nor the leader of the Mau Mau (the Kenya Land and Freedom Movement), in London he did meet with Pan-Africanists such as civil rights leader Paul Robeson, whose passport had only recently, and very publicly, been revoked due to his criticism of US foreign policy in Korea. Extensive coverage of the anticolonial uprisings fueled white fears and mobilized black solidarities. So for instance, jazz drummer Art Blakey’s “A Message from Kenya” paid tribute to the rebellion through Afro-Cuban musical forms, in a decade where the coercive powers of the state, mobilized in no small part through the pairing of drugs and war, confronted Soviet and Chinese Communism, the civil rights movement, “Negro” and Puerto Rican youth, jazz musicians, and Cuban revolutionaries.6

  In the early 1950s, as the Cold War turned hot in Korea and the superpowers jockeyed for global influence across the nationalist, anticolonial Third World, the material and symbolic power of drugs was both celebrated and feared. The belief of diplomat
s, scientists, and pharmaceutical executives in the productive power of new drug developments was accompanied by intensified national and international efforts to identify and police the perceived dangers posed by these drugs circulating outside these authorities’ sphere of influence. The “wonder drugs,” described in the last chapter, when viewed as migrating beyond the reach of direct control, easily devolved into mediums for transmitting social and political unrest, a phenomenon frequently described by recourse to a language of disease, contagion, social dysfunction, political subversion, and criminality. This chapter follows US officials’ policing of the drug market as a constitutive element of efforts to consolidate a US-dominated capitalist economic system in the face of domestic and international challenges to its hegemony. It charts the role that “drug warfare” played in regulatory debates at the United Nations, in justifying the introduction of the first mandatory minimum sentences in the United States, and in shaping Cold War confrontations. The research reveals how a seemingly neutral logic linking science, law, health, and national security empowered policing officials to pursue perceived threats to the dominant cultural, political, and economic order. The selective policing of drugs became an important regulatory tool and rhetorically charged framework invigorating and defining the pursuit of US power.