We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire

by Suzanna Reiss

  Two years later, responding to the Bay of Pigs invasion, Cuban foreign minister Raul Roa read aloud to the United Nations a telegram from Robert Williams challenging the US government to live up to its professed concern for “people willing to rebel against oppression” by responding to the urgent request from Southern blacks for weapons and manpower to help “crush the racist tyrants who have betrayed the American Revolution and the Civil War.” Roa added his own twist: “I would like to ask Mr. Stevenson what would happen if the government of the United States, which claims to be champion of democracy, dared to arm not only the Negroes of the cotton fields of the South, but the Negroes right here in Harlem?” The roaring applause and the red face of the US ambassador challenged Cold War bipolar understandings with an acknowledgment of common cause between civil rights and challenges to US imperialism.171 While Castro by this point was openly embracing Cuban ties to the USSR, Cuba’s economic and political challenge to the United States continued to embody a Third World and anticolonial challenge to US hegemony. This was on display at the 2nd Inter-American Conference on drug control convened in Brazil at the beginning of December 1961, while the United States still chafed at the Bay of Pigs fiasco. The Cuban delegate sparked a diplomatic row when he dismissed US allegations of Cuban drug trafficking and sought to shift participants’ critical gaze toward the United States by circulating a pamphlet with a section entitled, “United States Imperialistic Penetration of the Economic, Agricultural and Health Phases of Cuban Life, before the Castro Regime.” Attempting to resituate the struggle over drug control as a battle over sovereignty and the healthful use of national resources, the Cubans declared “all American countries have a common enemy in the United States in their struggle for a better health standard.”172 While the determined effort by US officials to implement their vision of drug control had been bolstered by the persistent effort to limit the circulation of drugs for medical and scientific needs, this Cuban challenge effectively questioned the political underpinnings of public health invocations, even while trying to claim the mantle of an alternative model to that being advanced by the United States. The US delegation believed Cuba’s main goal at the meeting was to “win friends for their Communist regime,” and the confrontation inspired US allegations of Cuban drug trafficking that persisted into the next century.173 By 1961 the FBN identified “Cuban nationals” as the force behind drug trafficking in the United States, and despite evidence that it was Cuban exiles rather than Castro loyalists behind the trade, deliberately cultivated the perception of Cuban government complicity, including a salacious report of narcotics seizures in an apartment “bedecked with pictures of Fidel Castro and the Cuban Communist flag.”174 One US congressman went so far as to suggest a more intimate connection between the revolution and narcotics: “It is my personal opinion that Castro himself must be a mighty good customer for this stuff by the way he carries on.”175

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  Drugs and war came together in unique ways as the growing influence of the United States confronted Cold War and anticolonial opposition at mid-century and beyond. New drugs brought promise as well as peril, and while the US government and corporations sought to secure access to raw materials and control over the manufacturing of drug commodities, they devoted considerable attention to policing drug production and consumption outside of their envisioned system of controls. National and international drug control initiatives across the decade of the 1950s implemented unprecedented legal sanctions for drug crimes that was bolstered by the historically constructed belief in a drug crisis that linked select drug users to communism, the spread of disease, social subversion, racial revolt, and criminality. New legislation introduced mandatory minimum sentences and capital punishment for drug violations and became a new and potent pillar of the US government’s coercive power to police at home and abroad.

  In the context of the Korean War, the civil rights movement, and revolutionary upheavals in the Americas, drug warriors selectively identified the “drug menace” by targeting groups deemed threatening to the economic and social order. In practice, the cry of “dope pushers” was leveled against the Cold War Communist enemies of the United States and mobilized domestically to limit the impact of black cultural expressions and political challenges to white power. When the media, public officials, and scientists labeled those who were arrested as “addicts,” they effectively concealed the political and cultural biases built into the new system of policing and controls, rendering the targeted communities “criminal” and empowering new instruments of class- and race-based social control in a language of scientific neutrality. A new vision of the hazards of uncontrolled drug production and consumption became a critical weapon in the US Cold War arsenal as it sought to secure its hegemony on a global scale.

  Conclusion

  When the Committee on Appropriations of the United States Congress met in March 1963 to review the annual budget for the Treasury Department’s Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the session began with a series of effusive tributes in honor of the agency’s first and recently retired leader, Commissioner Harry J. Anslinger. After more than three decades at the helm of the FBN, Anslinger had stepped down from his post, although he remained active in the field of drug control through his ongoing appointment as US representative to the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs. Congressmen from Virginia, Louisiana, New York, Massachusetts, and Oklahoma joined in a chorus of praise: “It has been largely through his influence and his unswerving devotion to duty that control over narcotic addiction has been achieved in the United States.” The accolades to his dedicated service in transforming the domestic policing of drugs were reinforced by homages to his international profile: “As the first Commissioner of Narcotics, Harry Anslinger became a world renowned figure in the regulation of the production and distribution of narcotic drugs. Always aware of the legitimate use of narcotics, he has throughout his long and enviable career protected the application of those drugs to their necessary use.” Special mention was made of the fact that he had been the 1962 recipient of the American Pharmaceutical Association’s “coveted Remington Medal,” awarded to the “individual who has done the most for American pharmacy.” A jury consisting of past presidents of this organization of professional pharmacists honored Anslinger for his work as an “humanitarian and international servant of the people, for his outstanding contribution to the public health and to the profession of pharmacy through control and suppression of illicit traffic in and use of narcotic drugs and for able representation of the US government in international affairs.”1

  The nature of the occasion lent itself to hyperbole and overly optimistic projections: US “control over narcotic addiction” had not in fact been achieved, and the policing, prosecution, and consumption of (legal and illegal) drugs escalated throughout the remainder of the twentieth century—a consequence in part of the policing and profit-making apparatus the FBN helped build in the 1940s and 1950s. The contemporary praise for Anslinger’s role in institutionalizing both national and international drug control suggests that by the 1960s the FBN commissioner had cemented his historic reputation as the nation’s first drug czar. More significant than Anslinger’s public prominence and recognized leadership, the tributes spoke to deeper structural factors, particularly the economic and political interests that made drug control such a viable vehicle for consolidating and expanding US power. The US government had been concerned with drug control since the early decades of the twentieth century, but it was not until World War II and the early Cold War that the nation wielded sufficient political and economic influence to dictate the regulatory logic and economic hierarchies of an assertive international drug control regime. Celebrations of Anslinger attest to the consensus among policymakers and pharmaceutical industry representatives of the material and symbolic importance of drug control to national security, public health, and private profit making. And while the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics is most famous for his strident public condem
nations of illicit drugs, drug users, and infectious enemy drug traffickers, congressmen joined with pharmaceutical industry representatives in emphasizing his contributions to the legal drug industry, praising his efforts on behalf of “American pharmacy” and the promotion of the “legitimate use of narcotics.” They explicitly tied the health of the country and the legal drug industry to the enforcement and regulation of self-interested definitions of illegality.

  Only a decade and a half before these public tributes, the FBN commissioner had warned Congress of a new and troubling development. In 1947 a “tremendous quantity of cocaine” had surfaced in Peru after the “cocaine traffic had been practically nonexistent for more than 15 years.” It is likely that the perceived spike in cocaine trafficking was a result of heightened policing rather than supply or consumer demand, but by 1950 Anslinger attributed a minor reduction in cocaine seizures to effective “enforcement activity of the Peruvian Government.”2 The US government sponsored hemispheric policing in the named pursuit of drug control, and launched an assertive campaign to implement an international drug control regime through the regulatory authority of the United Nations. The 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs was one culmination of this effort: a treaty that to this day delineates the definitions and reach of international drug control policy.

  The principles enshrined in the Single Convention reveal the persistent and defining influence of particular US-based economic and political priorities on the global policing of drugs. Even though Anslinger initially opposed the Single Convention, for what he viewed as its lax enforcement powers and potential to inflame Soviet and anticolonial ambitions in countries where drug raw materials were cultivated, he worked to ensure US corporate and government interests were enshrined within it. US pharmaceutical companies exercised considerable influence over the parameters of national and international drug control. When the CND met to discuss an early draft of the convention in 1955, attendees were invited to a “luncheon” at Merck and Co., Inc.’s laboratory in Rahway, New Jersey, with transportation provided by the company.3 Even without a record of what transpired when UN representatives working on drug control lunched at Merck’s facilities, the sustained lines of access to regulatory officials, the sharing of social spaces, and mutual work devising drug policy exemplified US economic and political dominance. FBN officials also pursued formal interventions on behalf of US companies. Consistently throughout the negotiations, Anslinger spoke for the interests of Maywood Chemical Works, Coca-Cola’s supplier, informing executives from both companies that he had succeeded in securing the “desired language” in the Single Convention—specifically he had “proposed an additional sentence to insure that the use, etc., of the coca leaves for decocainized flavoring extract be considered a legitimate purpose . . . which I hope will be satisfactory, as recognizing the legitimate need for Coca Cola.”4 The principles that guided the delineation of legality were carefully constructed so as to sustain a legitimate market for US manufacturers while stigmatizing other uses as “illegitimate.” The vice president of Coca-Cola wrote Anslinger in gratitude: “It is most fortunate that you intervened in the Commission’s proceedings as deftly and decisively as you did and that your position was sustained. . . . It need scarcely be said that your action is most warmly gratifying.”5

  Even more striking, during a series of meetings and conferences geared toward gaining widespread acquiescence to the Single Convention’s implementation, FBN officials actively intervened to guarantee sufficient quantities of raw material be available to US pharmaceutical manufacturers. Establishing a political economy of legality tied to North American economic priorities entailed more than simply enshrining favorable definitions of legality in the language of the treaty. When some delegates saw the treaty negotiations as an opportunity to pressure Andean countries to reduce the quantities of coca leaf being grown, anxious US representatives agreed but wanted assurance that the reduction would not affect coca fields being grown for export to US manufacturers. FBN officials specifically demanded not a reduction but an expansion of coca fields being grown for Maywood, to secure “sufficient quantity of coca leaf for the needs of this important industry.”6 After negotiations among Maywood representatives and US and Peruvian officials, the chief of the UN CND, also on the scene, approvingly observed that he “believed deliveries of these commercial supplies, intended for flavoring extract, would naturally reduce the availability of leaves for chewing.”7 By 1962, securing the interests of manufacturing countries in drug control was thus presented as a mechanism for “reducing the availability” of raw materials that might be used to other ends—specifically in this context it presented an attack on indigenous communities’ consumption and use of the leaves on their own terms.8 Definitions of legitimacy were entrenched within an unequal hemispheric hierarchy whereby the countries that produced raw materials were encouraged to steer national production exclusively toward an export market geared toward the industrial nations, reflecting and exacerbating not only the unequal relations between nations involved in the coca trade, but also contributing to hierarchies of political and economic power among different peoples within those nations. Drug control became a mechanism for extending US influence into the domestic and international life of its allies and enemies alike.

  The trajectory of drug control implementation in the Andes is particularly revealing in this regard. In 1960, as a “result of the enactment of the Legislation on Narcotics,” the Bolivian government came into the possession of 130 kilos of cocaine. Bolivia contacted the Pan American Sanitary Bureau (PASB)—an institution which by then served as the World Health Organization’s regional control center for the Americas9—which in turn contacted the WHO in Geneva asking for advice: “The Government would like to find a legal way of selling the Cocaine and has asked our advice as to the procedure to be use[d] in this case.”10 By 1960, countries like Bolivia that had been especially targeted by the drug control apparatus as producers of raw materials for the manufacturing of narcotic drugs were forced to bargain for inclusion in the international marketplace within the framework established by the control regime. Both Bolivia and Peru had resisted elements of the drug control regime’s implementation. They were nevertheless forced to contend with its logic not merely as gestures of international diplomacy, but as a prerequisite for a viable position in an economic order increasingly dominated by the United States. In this particular instance, Bolivia was seeking to transform into legitimate commodities drugs that the government had seized from “illicit” channels, searching for “a legal way of selling Cocaine.”

  The drug control regime, however, effectively excluded Bolivia from participating in the marketing of manufactured drugs. The WHO responded to the PASB petition and explained, “Bolivia may grant an authorization to export the cocaine to a country which has issued a prior import authorization.” Yet, in an international drug marketplace where import and export authorizations were hard to come by for a nonestablished manufacturer, it was highly unlikely that Bolivia was going to obtain the necessary certificates. The most logical outlet for the cocaine, the United States, as a matter of policy only imported the raw material in any case. Under the terms of the 1931 Geneva Convention’s regulatory provisions, which would soon be reproduced and subsumed by the 1961 Single Convention’s ratification, the relevant article for contraband drugs that had been seized was “interpreted to permit domestic use for medical or scientific purposes of drugs appropriated by a government, but not the export of such drugs.”11 This meant that once rendered “illicit,” drugs could only be channeled back into legal domestic markets, presumably since the quotas and limits within the legal international market would be exceeded if “illicit” drugs were added to the field. Bolivia, as a primary producer of drug raw materials in a regulatory climate oriented toward supply-side controls, was a particularly precarious petitioner for inclusion in the international cocaine trade.

  The hierarchies of participation within the coca commodity chain—and
international drug markets more generally—were firmly entrenched by the time of this incident. Those countries that might participate in given stages of drug production and manufacturing had been codified in international policy. Countries that cultivated the raw material, the coca leaf, were locked into a system where they were effectively excluded from any significant participation within the market for manufactured drug commodities, except as consumers of North American or European manufactured goods. Even while Bolivia and Peru persisted for the next half century in defending domestic coca leaf production and chewing, they recognized the authority of the international control regime, as was evident in Bolivia’s petition to the PASB for guidance, as well as in both countries’ ratification of the 1961 Single Convention, even while expressing official reservations regarding a provision that required the complete elimination of coca leaf chewing within twenty-five years of ratification. Participation within the international market was predicated upon acceptance of the authority of the international policing apparatus and the categories of legitimacy and criminality that traveled with it. So, in the Andes where domestic consumption of the leaf persists, indigenous growers and consumers continue to operate at the precarious borders of legality.