COLD WAR DRUG WARS
World War II cemented the status of drugs as strategic materials and weapons of war. As alliances shifted in the war’s aftermath, the access of nations and people to participation within the legal market and their vulnerability to accusations of illicit trafficking, reflected the persistent power of drugs as tools for acquiring economic and political influence, as well as their symbolic importance in Cold War struggles over global dominance. By the early 1950s, US leadership at the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs had established the centrality of the global drug control regime’s focus on the control of raw materials as well as ensuring that narcotic drugs, and synthetic substitutes for them, were subject to international controls. The work of the Commission of Enquiry on the Coca Leaf paired with ongoing diplomatic, political, and economic collaboration between the US and Andean nations produced in the early parts of the decade a sense of triumph at the FBN in relation to efforts to control the production of cocaine. This in turn prompted a shift in focus of US global drug policy toward efforts to extend a similar system of control over opium producing nations, nations that did not fall exclusively within a US sphere of influence. At the end of the decade when new threats to US hegemony would appear in the hemisphere, particularly Cuba, specific accusations tied to cocaine trafficking and hemispheric subversion would reemerge as central to drug policy and discourse. In the interim, the logical foundations of drug control, established during the previous decade with its alchemical power to target different substances, peoples, nations, and enemies, would be refined in polemical debates animated by Cold War and imperial rivalries.
These public debates about drugs, as agents of warfare and medicinal progress, provide a window onto the ideology of US imperialism. They also suggest the ways in which imperial ambition at mid-century, among both the United States and the Soviet Union, was articulated through a new logical framework that prioritized technological progress, scientific expertise, and economic productivity.7 The explicitly race-based arguments that had previously justified colonial conquest and genocide were increasingly replaced by arguments grounded in policing, public health, and the social sciences as the great powers battled for control and influence across the colonial and postcolonial world. The convergence of chemicals and the Cold War was on dramatic display when the United Nations convened in New York in the spring of 1952. The national and international press reported on debates at the UN General Assembly and in the US Congress as the United States, Soviet Union, and China publicly traded heated accusations over the deployment of chemical weapons in the context of the Korean War.
During the early years of the Cold War, the United Nations became a public international forum for the Soviet Union, United States, and their respective allies to articulate competing ambitions and political conflicts within a bureaucratic institutional setting where rules of procedure rather than battlefield tactics predominated. A new imperial rivalry was on display, for example, when the Soviet Union persistently challenged the seating of the Nationalist Chinese (Kuomintang) representative [exiled to Formosa (Taiwan) after defeat by the Communists in the civil war] in place of a delegation from the People’s Republic of China, and the United States defended the same. In 1952, the representative of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics began the UN’s Economic and Social Council’s First Special Session with a point of order declaring the presence of Kuomintang representatives “illegal” and “requested that that they should be expelled and replaced by accredited representatives of the Central People’s Government of the People’s Republic of China.” The US representative retorted by reiterating his country’s consistent opposition to Soviet efforts to unseat the “the Nationalist Government of China,” arguing that the proposal “should not even be considered in view of the fact that the Chinese Communist Government, in its international behaviour, and specifically in Korea, was showing open disrespect for the principles upheld by the United Nations.”8
Referring to the ongoing conflict on the Korean peninsula where US and UN forces battled the North Korean and Chinese armies, this confrontation embodied the rhetorical backdrop to a growing reliance on proxy war and the enfolding of liberation struggles within a US-Soviet bipolar global conflict. Allegations of drug trafficking played a surprisingly central role. The United States, whose influence in 1952 at the United Nations far superseded the USSR’s, triumphed through procedural maneuver, preventing the Soviet proposal to seat the Chinese government from coming to a vote. Not, however, before the USSR exacted public revenge. The Soviet representative noted “It was well known that the Kuomintang represented nobody but a group of mercenaries in the pay of the United States Government.” Furthermore, his government was “surprised to hear the United States representative mention the current situation in Korea as an argument in support of his proposal.” Countering, “As a matter of fact, it was rather the question of the bacterial warfare waged in Korea by the United States which should be discussed in the Council.”9
The United States disputed this allegation of deploying bacteriological warfare in an official report through the CND to ECOSOC only two months later, and countercharged the Chinese and North Koreans with smuggling heroin into South Korea and Japan.10 Standing accused of bacterial warfare, the United States suggested it was the accusers who sought to infect the West with dangerous substances: narcotic drugs. While on the surface there might seem to be a fundamental categorical distinction between narcotic drugs and agents of bacteriological and chemical warfare, the line in fact was quite murky when research and researchers explored the productive and destructive powers of various natural and synthetic substances; studying the destructive potential and how to cure infectious disease went hand in hand, and involved both natural and laboratory-manufactured agents.11 Moreover, Cold War rhetorical combat often relied on the implicit connection between the two.
China denied using heroin as an offensive weapon, backed by the Soviet representative’s denunciation of this “slanderous falsehood,” and attempted to have read into the record a refutation supplied by the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which being excluded from the commission, could not “defend itself against such accusations.”12 FBN Commissioner Anslinger later boasted in US congressional testimony, “I did not permit the Russian delegate to read the Chinese propaganda in the meeting. I called him on a point of order.” Anslinger contested allegations of “the use of gas and bacteriological warfare by American troops,” and the Soviet contention that when speaking of heroin, “under the barbarous conditions of United States warfare—including the blockading of Communist China—no smuggling in or out of China was possible unless conducted by the Americans.” This back and forth over the warring powers’ interest in controlling an array of scientifically synthesized substances, including narcotic drugs, became an attention-grabbing aspect of Cold War conflict. As control of chemical and biological entities became increasingly central to superpower rivalry, politically volatile debates joined market and military power to mimic the magic wrought by laboratories: one’s medicine became another’s poison as the celebrated potential of drugs also made them fearful weapons of war. For US officials involved in policing the domestic drug economy, as Anslinger explained, there “is a good answer to their charge of bacteriological warfare, because we can show that it is chemical (heroin) warfare which is being carried on.”13
Cold War conflict brought to the fore the power of natural and synthetic compounds to wreak havoc, whether overtly deployed as part of a military arsenal or covertly used to infect the social order and undermine military discipline of enemy nations. Simultaneously, these substances became increasingly valued for their potential to advance health and national prosperity. The physical substances deployed in chemical or bacteriological (or even atomic) warfare were distinct and varied; however, there was a widespread belief in both the promise and peril of technological innovation for human health and disease at mid-century. Bacteriological and chemical warfare had been d
eployed to devastating ends during World War II. While Nazi experiments have received much attention, the Japanese Imperial Army’s Unit 731, led by physician and Lieutenant General Ishii Shiro, also experimented with human subjects to develop and spread biological warfare agents in China. As Ishii later testified to US interrogators, “bacterial bombs had been made and tested and rather sophisticated efforts made to breed and employ disease vectors as well.”14 On the Allied side, the United States dropped incendiary bombs filled with magnesium and napalm, which “caused more widespread devastation in Japan than the atomic bomb.” As historian Ruth Rogaski chillingly assesses these policies, “Japanese citizens, like vermin, perished through the application of chemical technologies.”15 The charges of narcotics drug warfare also pertained. The US Army accused the Japanese during World War II of war crimes for peddling drugs in conquered territories.16 Citing information supplied by the United States, the CND announced it was “profoundly shocked by the fact that the Japanese occupation authorities in Northeastern China utilized narcotic drugs during the recent war for the purpose of undermining the resistance and impairing the physical and mental well-being of the Chinese people.” The UN narcotics body recommended to ECOSOC, “that the use of narcotics as an instrument of committing a crime of this nature be covered by the proposed Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide.”17
This back and forth augured the increasing centrality of drugs to contests over power in the decades following WWII. In fact it was the well-publicized US refusal to prosecute Lieutenant General Ishii at the Tokyo war crimes trials, in the interests of capitalizing on his research for the US government’s own biological warfare research program, which stoked Chinese suspicion that the United States was deploying bacteriological weapons in the Korean War.18 The conflict escalated to the point of becoming, according to the US Army Center of Military History, “among the more remarkable episodes of the Korean War” when “North Korea, China, and ultimately the Soviet Union [attempted] to convince their own citizens and mankind at large that the United States was engaged in biological warfare (BW). Then and later American officials denied the charge and accused the Communist states of embarking on a propaganda campaign in an attempt to conceal their inability to control actual epidemics. The debate played a prominent part in the ideological struggle for world opinion that accompanied the fighting.”19
Drugs were powerful tools in modern warfare and the specter of the deliberate spreading of disease, the potential “inability to control actual epidemics,” was accompanied by public campaigns to reassure populations of their governments’ preparedness. The US government contended with these issues in part through promoting pharmaceutical industry experimentation with concoctions that could be used as weapons or alleviators of deliberately spread devastation, whether biological or chemical. George W. Merck, as the head of the government’s biological warfare unit during World War II, described the nebulous line between “biological and chemical agents” that might be used to attack humans or crops, and could “prove of great value” to agricultural development, public health, and preparedness in case of postwar attack.20 The US countercharge that infection spread from Communist states’ “inability to control actual epidemics” rather than US biological warfare attacks, whether accurate or not, did demonstrate the new significance of drugs to national security. While there has been much disagreement over the legitimacy of biological warfare accusations, the belief in their accuracy fueled the massive expansion of vaccination and public health campaigns in China, Korea, and the United States.21 US newspapers broadcast the possibility that the Korean War “situation might be considered by the Soviets as a good one in which to stage a trial of such a weapon” and reassured the public that “mass immunization . . . is one of the weapons we are actively forging against germ warfare.” Science News Letter described the interest of “scientists and pharmaceutical manufacturers” in US nationwide polio vaccination trials in 1954 “as practice for what might have to be done if BW is ever let loose on the land.”22
This early 1950s US fear of future Communist biological warfare was accompanied in public accounts by a belief in the already immediate dangers posed by “chemical (heroin) warfare.” As the New York Times suggested in an editorial in 1953, the perception was widespread that Communist China was capitalizing on the revenue derived from the illicit sale of opium while also using “narcotic addiction as a weapon against the societies in which it can get a foothold”: “Opium as a secret weapon is considerably older than the Communist hullabaloo about bacteriological warfare. . . . This is not the time for timidity and soft words. . . . When we get the next bit of nonsense about [US] bacterial warfare the retort should be the documented charge against the Soviet Union and its puppets concerning something that is more deadly and that does not happen to be imaginary.”
In a portrayal of the culpability of drug users in helping fund the nation’s enemies (a tactic that became common to US antidrug campaigns through the early twenty-first century), the paper decried Communist strategy “when teen-age addicts in New York are helping to pay for the shells that kill American boys in Korea.”23 Similarly a Los Angeles police sergeant entitled a chapter of his memoir, “Dope Versus the Atom Bomb,” implicitly contrasting “free world” arsenals to those of “Communist saboteurs,” as he declared, “Red China is engaging ‘warfare by dope’,” infecting US teenagers to “undermine the moral strength of the nation.”24 Such interpretations illuminate how the narrative of criminal drug deployments shifted with the ebb and flow of diplomatic alliances. Until recently China had been the widely acknowledged victim of drug warfare dating back to European encroachment and the opium wars of the nineteenth century, culminating in the Japanese invasion during WWII. Cold War politics radically transformed this narrative in the wake of the US occupation of Japan and in response to the Chinese Revolution of 1949. Suddenly the United States recast the Chinese as purveyors of addiction, and Japan (as an occupied ally, rather than Axis enemy recently accused of peddling drugs as a wartime atrocity) joined the United States as victims of the nefarious drug warfare of Chinese Communists. In a “reverse irony” not lost on some members of Congress, US officials accused “Chinese Communists” of “a fantastic plot to ruin the US armies in Korea and Japan through the cheap peddling of heroin.”25
COLD WAR IMPERIALISM AND THE UNITED NATIONS
Anslinger, as head of the FBN, strategically deployed drug warfare allegations to influence drug control policy at both the national and international levels, particularly with regard to his championing of international passage and national ratification of the 1953 Protocol for Limiting and Regulating the Cultivation of the Poppy Plant, the Production of, International and Wholesale Trade in, and Use of Opium (the Protocol). Described by William McAllister as the “high tide of the original drug-control impetus,” the Protocol brought together the harsher aspects of US narcotics regulatory efforts, extending them to opium producing countries.26 With the two primary coca producing countries already collaborating to varying degrees with the drug control regime, Anslinger sought to extend its reach beyond the Western Hemisphere. The ongoing focus on securing the production and distribution of raw materials took on global proportions and might be viewed as a proving ground for the reach of US imperial ambitions in the midst of the decline of the European colonial empires. Politicized accusations of dope peddling unfolded in a global context where an East–West rivalry between capitalism and communism increasingly filtered through disparities in wealth and power between the industrial and nonindustrial world, and where a North–South divide was being transformed by widespread upheaval as colonized yellow, brown, and black peoples challenged and overthrew white colonial power. Exemplifying this dynamic, when Anslinger appeared before the Senate Subcommittee on Foreign Relations advocating US ratification of the Protocol, the chairman of the committee depicted the global nature of the problem: “And we, of course, are well aware that North Korea, or the Chinese in North Kor
ea, simply have been the satellites of the Kremlin. Now, is there any place where the Kremlin has penetrated elsewhere, Guatemala or any of the other places that they have utilized the drug that you know of—[?]”27
FIGURE 11. Harry J. Anslinger testifying before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 1954. [Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, reproduction number, LC-USZ62–120804.]
Acknowledging a hierarchy of proxy control, North Korea by the Chinese and the Chinese by the Kremlin, Anslinger denied direct knowledge of the scope of Soviet penetration around the globe. Yet, the image of the Kremlin’s covert influence over “satellites” or “puppets” in relation to political subversion or, as with the earlier-described Mau Mau, fostering drug-induced rebellion, provided an ideological framework that at once represented the Third World as dangerously malleable, even unfit for self-government, while providing the rationale for US imperial expansion. Just twenty days before this testimony a US-backed military coup had successfully ousted the democratically elected government of Guatemala.
While drug control was only one ideological and institutional weapon in the Cold War arsenal, following these efforts does provide a perspective on the forces propelling the larger struggle for global influence. The Protocol incorporated many of the provisions of previous treaties and was designed to consolidate them under one instrument with escalated powers of enforcement.28 It limited raw opium production to seven states (a “closed list” including Bulgaria, Greece, India, Iran, Turkey, the USSR, and Yugoslavia) and limited purchases of drugs exported from these states based on national estimates of legitimate demand—estimates that would be set even for states not party to the convention. This was arguably an imperial effort to meet (and regulate), as Anslinger described, “the medical needs of the world” by targeting source, or supply-side, countries as the foundational tenet of drug control, and limiting the scale of the trade according to Western definitions of medical value.29 Along with the power to effect on-site inspections, any state “impeding the effective administration” of the Protocol could be subject to embargo.30 The treaty purported to introduce “the most stringent drug-control provisions yet embodied in international law.” It extended reporting provisions to raw opium and, in a “victory for Anslinger,” stipulated that opium be “restricted to medical and scientific needs,” a definition with built-in exemptions whereby “in a manufacturing country like the United States” military stocks were excluded from the estimate.31 Three of the seven Protocol-identified legitimate world suppliers of raw opium had to ratify the convention before it came into force, an event that did not happen until 1963 in the midst of heated UN debates over whether the Protocol or an alternative agreement known as the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs (the Single Convention) should dictate international control efforts.
We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire Page 24