The Single Convention was designed to “replace all the existing multilateral treaties in the field . . . and extend full international control to the raw materials of narcotic drugs.” This purpose depended on the careful delineation of what constituted the legal, and defining at what stage and in whose hands raw materials became contraband. The WHO, which acted in a scientific advisory capacity to the CND, called for the coca leaf to be subject to the tightest regulatory controls. Moreover, reflecting the previous two decades of drug control initiatives, those working toward the convention’s implementation envisioned only three legitimate uses of the coca leaf, namely: “(a) the production of flavouring agents; (b) the medical and scientific needs, (c) chewing wherever it is a licit practice.” Then, of momentous import, the WHO added a caveat, “It should be borne in mind that of these three legitimate purposes, only the first is likely to remain permanent because the therapeutic value of cocaine is more and more put in question and because chewing may only be permitted for a limited period of time—up to 25 years after ratification of the Convention by a country.”12
In 1961, the WHO predicted that of the three then recognized legitimate uses of coca leaves, only one under the Single Convention would retain its legitimacy into the future: coca’s use as a “flavouring agent” for the manufacturing of Coca-Cola. Even as increased production of Coca-Cola was contributing to the status of the United States as the largest stockpiler of cocaine (a by-product of the flavor manufacturing process), the WHO’s assessment of the gradual disappearance of the second “legitimate purpose,” the extraction of cocaine for “medical and scientific need,” reflected general scientific sentiment. The impact of a dreamed-of future dominated by synthetic drugs, along with a growing faith in the wonders of laboratory science to create better, more potent substitutes, was apparent in the common perception of the time that the medicinal market for cocaine would disappear. Not all contemporaries embraced this prediction. When Dr. James W. Brown encountered a report in a 1969 article in U.S. News and World Report that echoed the WHO’s vision when it suggested that there was “no accepted medical use” of cocaine, he worriedly contacted the government:
I find cocaine one of the two or three most basic drug needs in my practice as I do a lot of nasal surgery under local and topical anesthetic. I have used it for twenty-one years and do not feel the drug is hazardous if properly used. I concur in its strict control but I do not feel that those of us who find it essential to their practices should be deprived of its use. . . . I have tried numerous other synthetic topical anesthetics and have found nothing to compare with its efficacy, both as an anesthetic and as a shrinking agent.13
Dr. Brown argued for cocaine’s critical and incomparable value to medical science, even while he conceded the need for “its strict control.”
The drug control apparatus directed the flow of commodities, such that the same drug might be licit or illicit depending on the context. Forecasts of cocaine’s disappearance were in fact inaccurate: to this day “medical and scientific” uses of cocaine have persisted even while the prominence of cocaine as a target of various US government administrations’ “wars on drugs” has meant that many people are largely unaware of the continuing legitimate uses for goods manufactured from the coca leaf—or the political, economic, cultural, and racial biases that historically produced the multiple legal designations and ideological significations. While indigenous coca leaf growers and consumers in the Andes are forced to defend against assaults on their cultural practices, the field of US corporate participation in the coca leaf and cocaine trade seems to have grown. In 2012 the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), the contemporary successor to the FBN, registered at least four authorized importers of coca leaves, five companies authorized to import cocaine, and fourteen companies authorized to manufacture it. From the limited information revealed in the filings, the end products derived from coca leaves and their potential productive powers are varied. One company, Stepan Pharmaceutical (which acquired Maywood in 1961 and continues to provide coca leaf flavoring extract to the Coca-Cola Company), as the DEA explained, “plans to import the listed controlled substance [coca leaves] to manufacture bulk controlled substance for distribution to its customer.” Other companies planned on using the leaves both for distribution to customers and for “research and analytical standards.” Companies manufacturing cocaine similarly seem to do so for a variety of not always publicly clarified purposes: “for the manufacture of reference standards,” for “sale to researchers and analytical labs,” for use in “clinical, toxicological, and forensic laboratories,” and mysteriously for manufacturing “the listed controlled substances in bulk [cocaine] for sale to its customers.”14 According to the most recently available annual statistics compiled by the UN Drug Supervisory Body (responsible for overseeing the international system of import and export controls designed to limit the market to “legitimate” medical and scientific demand), the United States in 2010 was the world’s only importer and utilizer of coca leaves and the “main reason for utilization was to manufacture a flavouring agent, while cocaine and ecgonine were obtained as by-products.”15 Nevertheless, the belief in the 1960s that the “therapeutic power of cocaine is more and more put into question” was also indicative of the general impact of a drug control logic through which a commodity itself came to embody all sorts of dangers, even if inevitably these associations continued to vary according to consumers and context.
Finally, when we turn to the third “legitimate use” of the coca leaf enshrined in the Single Convention, the hierarchies of nation, class, and cultural bias in the operations of drug control are starkly apparent. The Single Convention presented a new challenge to coca growing countries and particularly their indigenous peoples. For years Peru and Bolivia had responded to the drug regulatory priorities of industrial countries with compromise and resistance. Bolivia had signed onto an early League of Nations convention in 1925 and Peru had ratified the 1931 Geneva Convention; however, both countries did so with specific reservations that they would not try to limit domestic consumption of the coca leaf.16 The 1961 Single Convention required that all parties to it abolish the practice of coca leaf chewing within their countries within twenty-five years of their national ratification of the treaty. Peru ratified it in 1964 and Bolivia in 1965. Both countries continued to resist this provision even after the transitional period had passed. The issue remains contentious and, in fact, the fate of the status quo was called into question with a twenty-first-century Bolivian government proposal to have the ban on coca leaf chewing completely removed from the Single Convention, and barring this, Bolivia would denounce and withdraw from the convention, and re-accede without recognizing the criminalization of coca leaf chewing. In January 2011, at the very end of the UN-mandated eighteen-month wait period for such proposals to either be challenged or become law, the United States and a few other countries submitted formal objections. Bolivia subsequently withdrew its accession of the treaty and only in 2013 re-acceded with a firm reservation that it did not recognize coca leaf chewing as criminal. The events have promoted a broad public debate internationally about the wisdom of the ban on coca leaf chewing, the exclusion of countries like Bolivia from participating in the international trade for coca-derived products, and the heavy toll drug control takes on poor and indigenous communities confronting prohibitions on traditional and nonexport market-oriented uses of the coca leaf.
The president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, argued the ban violated the recently adopted UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, in particular that “indigenous peoples have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and traditional cultural expressions.”17 Bolivia’s casting of this drug control debate as a question of indigenous sovereignty and defense of tradition has garnered support for its challenge to the UN Single Convention from around the world, and most significantly across South America. This unprecedented challenge issued by the firs
t Aymara president of a nation comprising the world’s largest population of indigenous coca leaf chewers to the General Assembly of the United Nations reflects an important moment in the history of international drug control, whatever the outcome. Unfortunately the petition and the limited scope of its objective (it is not a call for decriminalization or for fundamentally challenging the tenets which guide the political economy of drug control) reflects the persistence of the logic and practical foundations of international drug control that remains wedded to the powers and interests of the United States and the global capitalist system its influence has sustained.
Nevertheless, increasingly vocal criticisms of the drug control regime persist both nationally and internationally in the face of its obvious failures in curbing drug use, in generating unprecedented levels of violence stretching from Mexico, through Central America and South America, and in devastating countless numbers of lives through mass incarceration for drug consumption. While important, many of these debates get trapped within the deceptively neutral logic of the drug control regime itself, for instance by focusing on the question of whether drug use should be treated as a crime or an illness (in the midst of the aggressive cultural and medical promotion of legal drugs), or whether some drugs, like marijuana or coca leaves, should be removed from regulatory oversight (as if the drug properties themselves have been the primary determinant of legal status). The so-called drug problem will not be eliminated until the political economy of drug control and its origins in the logic and structural hierarchies sustaining US global power are directly addressed. There seems to be some promising movement in this direction with organizations such as the Global Commission on Drug Policy arguing that criminalization has fueled rather than reduced a global drug pandemic, and in a June 2011 report, the commission cited Bolivia’s challenge to the UN ban on coca leaf chewing as a welcome frontal assault on “drug control imperialism.”18
The drug control apparatus emerged as a mechanism for policing and protecting selectively designated “legitimate” drug production—and created a seemingly neutral, medically backed, and socially promoted framework for the policing of people and activities that seemed to threaten the envisioned social and economic order. In the United States, drug manufactures, pharmaceutical executives, and scientists collaborated with the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and the United Nations to secure their markets while limiting and controlling the parameters of others’ participation. Modern laboratory science created a whole new array of products that helped propel the United States into a dominant global position as the primary supplier of mass-manufactured drugs and medicines. The capacity to refashion raw materials seemed limitless. The process of securing and limiting to the industrial world access to raw materials used to manufacture finished drug commodities emerged with the establishment of a US-led policing apparatus that enforced and legitimized the boundaries of legality. US political and economic leaders proffered the country’s unique ability, role, and function as the preeminent global suppliers of manufactured drugs, as seeming proof of the advantages of US capitalism not just for the country but also for the world. The logic of drug control was such that these same goods became dangerous when their production, distribution, and consumption were not confined to “legitimate” sites and participants. The construction of this legitimacy was influenced by national, social, racial, and economic biases. As with coca leaves and laboratory chemicals, certain groups of people too became part of the landscape of raw material, to be refashioned, “developed,” and guided along a path toward appropriate participation within the marketplace, or even isolated from the general populace so as not to spread antisocial disease.
The US pharmaceutical industry grew in tandem with the rise of US political power and depended on the concurrent fashioning of a regulatory and policing apparatus to secure their mutual dominance. The production of drug commodities and their valorization as harbingers of a future relieved of illness through technological breakthroughs became a foundation for the expansion of US capitalism, and often provided a seemingly objective explanation for obstacles to its success. At mid-century in the Andes, elites paired with international experts to stigmatize indigenous coca leaf consumption by characterizing it as an impediment to Indian development, societal progress, and modernization more generally. Similarly, the escalation of criminal penalties in US domestic politics was a direct response to the political turmoil presented by the intersection of the Cold War and the civil rights movement; in particular, the threat posed by African American challenges to white cultural and economic hegemony. The public mobilization of fear and cultivated sense of crisis attributed to Communist dope-pushers and an infectious black criminality led to the dramatic escalation of criminal penalties associated with drug consumption and distribution and the disproportionate incarceration of African Americans. From the human guinea pigs who filled US Public Health Service narcotic farms and provided valuable research material for pharmaceutical development and experimentation, to the Andean peasant farmers subject to anthropological and social experiments that degraded traditional culture (including coca) in the service of producing modern, wage-earning citizens, the burdens of the enforcement regime have been carried by the poor, racialized minorities and the politically and economically disenfranchised. The history of the establishment of the international drug control apparatus and the particular history of the coca leaf within it together reveal the twentieth-century dynamics of American imperialism. US dominance over policing and the political economy of the international drug trade was predicated on the production of drug commodities and consuming citizen-subjects as raw materials for fashioning a US-centered capitalist world.
Acknowledgments
This project would never have come to fruition without the incredible guidance, support, and confidence bestowed on me by mentors, friends, family, and colleagues. It is an honor to be able to express my appreciation for all the people whose encouragement over the years has made this book possible.
I began working on this project as a doctoral student at New York University in the late 1990s—a magical place populated and inspired by a brilliant assembly of faculty and students. A special thank you to Jamie Wilson and Mireille Miller-Young, who went through the program with me and whose joy for life, intellectual camaraderie, and friendship have anchored me ever since. For sharing the fun of intellectual community and exchange, thank you Valeria Coronel, Betsy Esch, Christopher Winks, Kim Gilmore, Dayo Gore, Bryant Terry, Forrest Hylton, Jasmine Mir, Peter Hudson, Eric McDuffie, Orlando Plaza, Rich Blint, Daniel Inouyé, Adria Imada, Julie Sze, Grace Wang, Victor Viesca, Hillina Seife, Sobukwe Odinga, Michelle Chase, Dan Rood, David Kinkela, Seth Markle, Ted Sammons, Khary Polk, Njoroge Njoroge, and Kobi Abayomi.
I am deeply indebted to Robin D. G. Kelley for his generosity of spirit, intellectual rigor, and political commitment—a beautiful person whose example since my undergraduate days has shaped the kind of scholar I aspire to be, and whose support has helped me get to where I am today. A warm thank you to Sinclair Thomson for consistently believing in the value of this work, and for his gentle guidance as I grappled with my ideas and sought out people and archives in Peru and Bolivia. Marilyn Young, Greg Grandin, Michael Gomez, Ada Ferrer, Allen Hunter, and Jeremy Adelman all provided mentorship and models of scholarship of worldly consequence.
Walter Johnson’s graduate seminar on American capitalism provided the critical space for this project’s genesis, and a decade later being a fellow at Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History for a year under his and Vincent Brown’s able stewardship helped me transform the research into this book—I am grateful for both. Our wonderful cohort of fellows—Patrick Wolfe, Marisa Fuentes, Kristen Block, Paul Kramer, Joshua Guild, Cynthia Young, Gunther Peck, and Edward Rugemer—brought good humor, intellectual imaginings, lunchtime bonding, and dance-filled evenings that sustained my efforts and continue to fortify and inspire. And thank you to Larissa Kennedy and Art
hur Patton-Hock for taking such good care of us during our residency.
I have benefited from participating in both formal and informal exchanges with numerous scholars whose own work, insightful comments, critical questioning, and interest in the project challenged me in important and productive ways—while some of those providing this feedback did not agree with my premise or conclusions, the book has benefited enormously from many moments of lively intellectual discussion and debate. For all of this I need to shout out, in no particular order, Pablo Morales, Michael Fox, and Christy Thornton of the North American Congress on Latin America, Nikhil Pal Singh, David Roediger, Laura Briggs, Linda Farthing, Jesse Freeston, Mary Renda, Adam Rothman, Brian DeLay, Amy Greenberg, David Kazanjian, Joseph Nevins, Mark Weisbrot, Rachel St. John, Sven Beckert, Alison Frank Johnson, Bruce Schulman, Brooke Blower, Bethany Moreton, Stephen Mihm, Shane Hamilton, Colleen Dunlavy, Sarah Haley, Allan Kulikoff, Jessica Lepler, Steve J. Stern, Francisco Scarano, Jeremi Suri, William Cronon, Florencia Mallon, Alfred W. McCoy, Nan Enstad, Stephen Kantrowitz, Brenda Gayle Plummer, Mark G. Hanna, Christine Hunefeldt, John Marino, Luis Alvarez, Daniel Widener, Takashi Fujitani, Everade Meade, Michael Monteon, Michael Parrish, Nathaniel Lee Smith, Matt R. Pembleton, Daniel Weimer, Jeremy Kuzmarov, Jonathan V. Marshall, William B. McAllister, William O. Walker III, Brian O’Connor, and the anonymous reviewers of my book manuscript.
I am thankful for the support and intellectual stimulation I received from a wonderful group of friends and scholars that I have met at the University of Hawai’i Ma-noa, including Cyndi Franklin, Matt Romaniello, Ned Bertz, Becky Pulju, Marcus Daniel, Vina Lanzona, Noelani M. Arista, Wensheng Wang, Shana Brown, Rich Rath, Kieko Matteson, Mimi Henriksen, Bob McGlone, Herb Zeigler, Jim Kraft, Jerry Bentley, Dick Rapson, Matt Lauzon, Kim Lauzon, Ned Davis, David Chappell, Leonard Andaya, Yuma Totani, David Hanlon, Karen Jolly, Jun Yoo, Elizabeth Colwill, Peter Arnade, Vernadette Gonzalez, Robert Perkinson, Mari Yoshihara, Ming-Bao Yue, Wimal Dissannayake, John Rieder, Christina Bacchilega, Laura Lyons, Richard Nettell, Craig Howes, Ruth Hsu, Yun Peng, John Zuern, Monisha Das Gupta, Hokulani Aikau, Lois Horton, Johanna Almiron, Anthony Johnson, Jonathon Osorio, Joy Logan, David Stannard, Patricio Abinales, Mari Matsuda, Charles Lawrence, John Charlot, Loriena Yancura, Paul Holtrop, Paul Lyons, and Monica Ghosh.
We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire Page 30