The Protocol embodied the core prohibitionist principles embraced by the United States, and, in the words of David R. Bewley-Taylor, “was symbolic of US prominence within the UN control framework.”32 The USSR refused to participate in the proceedings regarding the Protocol. Instead, Soviet officials threw their weight (with the support of many former colonial countries) behind efforts to devise another instrument, ultimately realized as the Single Convention, which slightly weakened, although did not fundamentally transform, the control model advanced in the Protocol. The decade-long process of unifying existing international drug control law under a single convention culminated in a standoff between Anslinger’s reluctance to weaken any provisions proposed by the Protocol and the ultimately more widely accepted Single Convention.33 Amidst superpower wrangling, drug control provided a platform for Cold War campaigning. Competing power blocks, largely aligned with the drug manufacturing countries on one side and drug raw material exporting countries on the other, negotiated to advance their own interests.
Anslinger, through some wily diplomatic maneuvering in the midst of negotiations over the terms of the Single Convention, succeeded in using economic and political pressures to have the necessary number of three opium-producing countries ratify the Protocol, which accordingly went into effect in March 1963. Anslinger wrongly hoped this would undermine the Single Convention, which went on to receive the necessary number of ratifications (Kenya provided the critical fortieth accession) and went into effect in December 1964. Once ratified, the Single Convention superseded the Protocol as the prime instrument of international drug control. Despite Anslinger’s initial chagrin, by the end of the decade he was urging Congress to ratify the Single Convention as an effective international enforcement tool, which it did in 1967.34 There were differences between the two treaties, yet both entrenched the fundamental tenets of supply-side control and, as a US Public Health Service officer explained, the Single Convention “continue[d] essentially the previous international controls restricting production, distribution and use of narcotics drugs to medical and scientific purposes.”35 Moreover, in a triumph for a central principle of drug control, long advocated by Anslinger himself, US prohibitions against marijuana consumption (first introduced in national legislation in 1937), and any other nonmedical consumption of organic raw materials (coca, opium), were solidified in the international treaty. The final outcome ultimately reflected “US dominance in the UN control system [and] ensured that the Single Convention created a Western-oriented prohibitive framework for international drug control.”36 However, the initial standoff at the United Nations over the US representative’s support for the Protocol and Soviet support for the Single Convention shows how a new geopolitical context infused drug regulatory conflicts with symbolic power.
Soviet strategy was to align with Third World countries (including many producer states that saw the Single Convention as the lesser of two evils, and as an opportunity to push back against some of the more onerous drug regulatory provisions emanating from the industrial world) and to publicly challenge the considerable US influence at the United Nations where it initially enjoyed a voting-bloc majority.37 Debates about the mechanisms necessary to institutionalize drug control must be understood in relation to the anticolonial revolutions of the era. The United Nations, in and beyond the CND, had rapidly become a forum for US and Soviet denunciations of each other’s imperial ambitions. Soviet representatives depicted US initiatives as a replacement for European colonial control, and the United States countered with accusations focused on the Kremlin’s alleged expansionist designs. The US delegation to the United Nations reported, “Increasingly, both the United States and the Soviet Union are coming to see that the outcome of their struggle may be determined largely by what happens in the uncommitted nations,” as debates over sovereignty unfolded concurrent with efforts to regulate the international drug marketplace.38 In the first decade of the UN’s existence, the USSR could only level symbolic challenges to US domination. The US ability to gain passage of the Protocol occurred in a context where the “Soviet bloc” was excluded from “all committees established to deal with colonial disputes.” The United States, on the other hand, as one contemporary observer explained, “has been deeply involved in most aspects of the UN’s work concerning colonialism, and it has been extremely influential.”39 Mobilizations for political independence confronted contested international models for economic development when “the colonial powers and their allies and associates retained a very strong position in the UN” and as the Cold War facilitated the transition of these allies into an international anticommunist bloc.40 US influence at the United Nations offered a welcome framework to “avoid drifting in the dangerous currents of colonial rebellion,” as one contemporary international relations scholar explained, “filtering an act of intervention in colonial affairs through an international organization may transform what would otherwise have been labeled ‘an imperialistic act’ into an action recognized on every side as necessary and fair to all parties.”41
Chapter XI, article 73, of the UN Charter recognized the principle of equal rights and self-determination of all peoples, ensuring the international body became a forum where the implications of these terms were debated. This was reinforced in 1952 with the passage of Resolution 637 (VII), reiterating “The Right of Peoples and Nations to Self-Determination.”42 The United Nations included thirty-five member states in 1946; by 1970 national decolonization movements swelled that number to 127 member states. As the march of successful independence movements began to shift the balance of power in the United Nations across the decade, the United States consistently voted with other colonial powers to resist intervention in what they viewed as “domestic” disputes that came before the Security and Trusteeship Councils (which had jurisdiction over colonial and trust-territory issues respectively).43 There were a number of factors influencing the US position. While the United States increasingly used economic and political pressure to exert influence, with drug control just one prominent example, the country continued to have both colonies and trust territories under its jurisdiction.44 It is worth noting that the lack of representational government in places like Puerto Rico and the Trust Territories of the Pacific made them particularly valuable sites for conducting tests of the new atomic, chemical, and biological weapons so critical to US Cold War arsenals. US economic and military alliances with European powers also militated against stances embracing anticolonial positions. While the United States ostensibly opposed imperialism in the name of democracy and the right to self-determination, such “principled U.S. positions were tempered by having to deal with the ongoing economic weakness of their European allies.” Furthermore, anticolonial movements often challenged the terms of foreign investment which placed the United States on the defensive, as did the resulting perception that they fostered instability and threatened the establishment of US military bases (a key component of its Cold War strategy). As historian Henry Heller argues, “anticolonialism was one thing, but opposition to economic imperialism by third world leaders was quite another matter so far as Washington was concerned.”45 Finally, with the USSR assuming the role of “most outspoken critics of colonialism at the United Nations,” US foreign policy became driven by anticommunism, a priority that often necessitated procolonial politics.46 The US representative on the Trusteeship Council, Mason Sears, explained this prophylactic vision, “We ensure freedom tomorrow by blocking Communism today.”47 This diplomatic maneuvering was widely perceived as the superpower struggle that it was. US delegates reported back to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations that an emerging Afro-Asian bloc “wish[es] to keep ‘colonialism’ from being a ‘cold war’ issue. The Asian and African countries do not wish to give these European powers a chance to hide behind an attack on Soviet Imperialism and thus perhaps divert attention from their duty to promote self-determination pursuant to article 73 of the charter.”48
The United States used its disproportionate
power to influence struggles defining and asserting self-determination. In 1952, for example, after most of the leadership of the nationalist forces had been killed or imprisoned, a constitutional convention established Puerto Rico as a US Commonwealth. Recognized by the United Nations, Puerto Rico’s status constituted a new category apart from the original interpretive framework outlined in the UN Charter, having ended colonial rule in a manner that “involved neither full independence nor full integration.” Puerto Rico’s semi-independent status became a model for European colonial territories such as Suriname, the Netherlands Antilles, and French Togoland among others.49 In terms of recognizing the power of newly independent states, the United States also played an important role in determining the international balance of power. Responding to growing domestic resentment over US expenditures on the United Nations, US officials “conceded that on an ability-to-pay basis we would owe in the neighborhood of 38 percent, but averred, in effect, that other states had better start showing some sense of sharing the burden.” The General Assembly “grudgingly” accepted in 1957 that “no state should pay more than 30 percent of the budget.”50 It was demonstrated at the time that relative to GNP the US payment was in fact “abnormally small” and that across the 1950s the “less-developed states” increased their contributions far more rapidly than the developed states, with African states in the period from 1946–69 contributing the most in relative terms.51 Nevertheless, the absolute value of the US contribution fueled US congressional disillusionment with the United Nations, particularly when votes did not go its way. In what might be seen as an updated version of nineteenth-century Euro-American paternalists chafing at the burdens of colonial administration, small states were accused of not paying their “share” in discussions over how to apportion representation in this international forum. Sovereign equality did not imply economic equality and, at least in terms of international governance, US representatives believed all states were not in fact equal.52
While the General Assembly could not dictate policy with the force of the veto-empowered Security Council (whose five members were the victorious Allies in WWII: the United States, United Kingdom, Soviet Union, China, and France), as an international public forum that included representatives from all UN member states it did exert considerable political and symbolic influence. By 1960 state membership at the United Nations soared to 114 states, and the new members, all former colonies (35 from Africa, 15 from Asia, 11 from the Middle East, and 2 from the Caribbean), constituted a solid two-thirds majority that often garnered support from the Soviet bloc.53 Contests over drug control unfolded in the midst of these revolutionary shifts in power, and fueled US skepticism towards the United Nations. In 1960 Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev launched an opening salvo calling for a UN declaration demanding immediate independence for all non-self-governing countries that ultimately evolved into a more moderate, yet nevertheless significant resolution passed by the General Assembly in December 1960: “The Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples.” Calling for the end of all armed action against liberation movements, declaring colonialism a violation of people’s human rights and right to self-determination, and demanding “immediate steps to be taken . . . to transfer all powers to the peoples” of dependent territories, the declaration echoed sentiments first expressed by the non-aligned Afro-Asian world at Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955.54 Despite a moderating clause that stated any attempted “disruption” of the territorial integrity of a country went against the principles of the UN Charter, the major imperial powers (including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, and Australia) all abstained. But they could not prevent the resolution’s adoption by the General Assembly.55 A special committee, known as the “Committee of 24,” was established to oversee the declaration’s implementation which, despite its lack of enforcement powers, managed to dominate much of the debate on the floor of the General Assembly across the decade and produced a number of resolutions on behalf of anticolonial forces. According to a former US representative to the Committee of 24, resolutions were “normally . . . worked out by a group of communist members and anti-Western African and Arab States,” often with the support of “Latin American” members who sought a middle ground so as not to alienate US officials. This inability of the United States to mobilize a majority in a context where “self determination is equated with independence” fueled public confrontation over US imperialism, such as when the delegate from revolutionary Cuba denounced US control over Puerto Rico and the US representative resigned from the committee in disgust.56
While the Committee of 24’s work is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is indicative of the ways in which anticolonial movements by the 1960s were forcing the United States to reconsider its approach to international diplomacy, including narcotics control. Only a few months after the General Assembly issued the Declaration on Colonial Independence, the United Nations circulated the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs for ratification. Describing the convention as a Soviet ploy to win anticolonial alliances, FBN Commissioner Anslinger initially advocated against US ratification, although with the sufficient support of other states it went into effect in December 1964.57 The Single Convention, from Anslinger’s perspective, reflected a Communist victory: a dangerous example of drug policy intersecting with Cold War and anticolonial politics. When Anslinger argued before Congress against ratification he characterized the elimination of the closed list of raw material–producing states (the major distinction behind his preference for the Protocol over the Single Convention) in stark terms:
The Soviet bloc took the bit in its teeth with the assistance of the neutrals and the newer African nations emerging into independence, by holding out the idea that they might be able to participate in this legitimate traffic. . . . The Soviet bloc even held out the proposition to the African nations, “You vote with us and you can produce opium.” That was not the worst of it. . . . The Soviet bloc made reservations as to the countries not there for political reasons. . . . I think Communist China forced the Russians into this position . . . the Russians felt the people who were not there should not be bound. . . . The Communist Chinese were always complaining about the fact Formosa was making the estimate for all these people. . . . What they are trying to do with these reservations, they are trying to break out of this tight control.58
In this dramatic accounting, Anslinger tapped into sentiments that held widespread appeal, reorienting conflicts over access to participation in the global drug economy toward questions of political legitimacy.59 Drug control as Cold War conflict marginalized the Third World challenge to the dictates of the industrial world, deploying a logic—embraced to a certain extent by both the United States and the USSR—whereby the alleged immaturity of the “neutrals and the newer African nations” made them vulnerable to bribery and political manipulation. US Congressman John R. Pillion (NY) responded by urging newspapers and television media to “publish [Anslinger’s] recital” about the Single Convention in order “to prove to the world that the Communist Soviet apparatus is primarily responsible for this proposed United Nations action.” He lamented the “consolidation of political voting power shifting from the United States and the free world into the control and direction of the Communists in the Sino-Soviet bloc.”60 In a context where the United States lined up with other colonial powers to contain the implications of “self-determination,” the fervent invocations of the need for US-guided drug control to protect “free nations” reflected Cold War competition and the anticolonial challenge to US dominance at the United Nations. The primary architect of the international treaty, Adolph Lande, was a US international civil servant, Anslinger’s close friend and confidant in the UN secretariat overseeing narcotic drugs, and by the early 1970s a representative of the American Pharmaceutical Manufacturers’ Association, echoed these concerns. At the United Nations Lande lamented challenges to US dictates, which he couched in racist assertions of cultural superi
ority when he worried that “the UN drug control apparatus was being staffed increasingly by non-Westerners,” and complained that their frequent opposition to the US prohibitionary stance was due to their “low intellectual level” and “violent anti-Americanism,” especially among Africans.61
Despite this (mostly symbolic and revealing) furor, the Single Convention consolidated into one treaty drug control mechanisms that had worked and would continue to work to US advantage. It incorporated the basic tenets of drug control that had been promoted by the United States since World War II: it institutionalized inequalities between the industrial and nonindustrial world, oriented control toward raw material–producing states, and privileged a capitalist international economic framework as the guiding principle behind it. By 1967, with Anslinger’s approval, the US government ratified the Single Convention to ensure, in the words of President Lyndon B. Johnson, the country continued to play a “leading part in international cooperation for the control of narcotic drugs.”62 For all the heated US-Soviet posturing, the drug control regime weighed most heavily on Third World and producing nations. The newly consolidated regime extended international efforts to control the production and circulation of raw materials backed by two key principles. First, it called for the main manufacturing countries, mostly colonial powers (including the United States, England, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Holland), to fulfill their obligations to the control regime by limiting drug output to global “legitimate” needs. As Anslinger explained the new thrust of the drug control regime, “Today, every one of those countries is fulfilling those obligations in relation to manufacturing. So instead of the manufacturing countries being the culprits today, it is the producing countries.” This then led to the second guiding tenet: that countries in the industrial world were “the principal victims of overproduction.”63 Even while industrial world laboratories churned out drugs on an unprecedented scale, the logic of drug control emphasized the need to control production in the nonindustrial world, embedding within it a new imperial framework for securing hierarchical economic flows, while invoking victimization to legitimize the extension of First World police oversight.
We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire Page 25