We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire

by Suzanna Reiss

  I am especially grateful to Niels Hooper at the University of California Press for his backing of this project, along with the staff there whose skills have made the editing process smooth and enjoyable — Kim Hogeland, Wendy Dherin, and Kate Hoffman, thank you. Thanks to Paul Tyler for his editing prowess, and to Sebastaian Araya for sharing his considerable talents as a cartographer. Thank you to all the people who helped me acquire the necessary permissions for images contained in the text, especially Richard Sorensen of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Eisha Neely of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University, and Annie Rothstein-Segan, who graciously allowed me to reproduce a photograph from her father’s collection.

  In addition to the sources already mentioned, this project was made possible with financial support from numerous institutions including New York University’s Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, NYU’s Department of History, NYU’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, NYU’s International Center for Advanced Studies’ Project on the Cold War as Global Conflict, and the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center. I am also grateful for grants received from Princeton University’s Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, the University of Hawai’i Ma-noa’s University Research Council, and support received from UH’s Department of History. These funds enabled me to visit numerous archives, libraries, and private collections in Europe, the United States, and South America. I am forever indebted to the amazing librarians and archivists who deftly helped me navigate the historical record. Of special note are Fred Romanski and Tab Lewis at the US National Archives and Records Administration, who brought to my attention the records of the Board of Economic Warfare, and Mr. P. Massaoutis at the World Health Organization in Geneva, who let me occupy his office pouring over records for hours. I am also thankful for the warmth and generosity of Marcos Cueto, who welcomed me into his home and personal archives in Lima, Peru, at a critical formative stage of the work. Thanks are also due to Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, whose home in La Paz is an important oasis for activists and scholars working to decriminalize coca and advocate for indigenous rights. Thank you to Dr. Fernando Cabiesis, Dr. Uriel García Cacerés, Jaime Durand, Rafael Fernández Stoll, Rossana Barragán, and Alison L. Spedding, for taking the time to speak with me about their own historic involvement with the politics of coca and drugs in the Andes. Much respect to my fellow traveler and friend Hernan Pruden, who showed me the living archive of the coca market in Bolivia, introduced me to the art of coca leaf chewing, and brought me to fiestas where life in the Andes is constantly renewed.

  It is a great pleasure to acknowledge the immeasurable sustenance I have received from friends and family over the years. I would like to say a special thank you to Giovanni Vitiello for his friendship, sense of humor, and the joy and laughter he so easily keeps alive. Thank you to Christy Ringor and Greg Chun for keeping it realer, for feeding me, and for bringing a beautiful future revolutionary into the world. Thank you to Katti Wachs, Meredith Sterling, Will Lara, and Haik Hoisington for believing in me and for friendships I will always treasure. Thank you to Stan Pyrzanowski and the Rhythm Method for all the music and good times. Thank you to the Njoroge family for all the support. Thank you to my mother, Jean Reiss, and my brothers, Matthew and Justin, for indulging my intellectual explorations and sharing in the love and hilarity of life. Thank you to Patricia Hilden, whose political passion and astute eye have always inspired and guided my own belief in the power of academics to make a real difference in the world. Thank you to my amazing father, Timothy Reiss, who taught by example the value of hard work, and whose love has always given me strength. And thank you to Njoroge Njoroge, the love of my life.

  Notes

  ARCHIVAL ABBREVIATIONS

  CMM Carlos Monge Medrano Papers (in the possession of Dr. Marcos Cueto, Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, Lima, Peru)

  DEA Drug Enforcement Administration Library and Archive (Washington, DC)

  HUA Harvard Law School Library, Harvard University Archives (Cambridge, Massachusetts)

  LNA League of Nations Archives (Geneva, Switzerland)

  MRECB Archivo del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores y Culto (La Paz, Bolivia)

  NACP US National Archives (College Park, Maryland)

  PAHO Pan-American Health Organization (La Paz, Bolivia)

  RFA Rockefeller Foundation Archives (Tarrytown, New York)

  RWL Robert Woodruff Library, Emory University (Atlanta, Georgia)

  UNANY United Nations Archive (New York, New York)

  WHOA World Health Organization Archives (Geneva, Switzerland)

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Richard Nixon, “Special Message to the Congress on Control of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs,” July 14, 1969, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid = 2126; Richard Nixon, “Telephone Remarks to Students and Educators Attending a Drug Education Seminar in Monroe, Louisiana,” October 4, 1971, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid = 3179.

  2. For two examples, taken from a vast literature, that reflect this focus on the late 1960s forward as the critical formative moment in the drug war, see Dan Baum, Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure (New York: Little, Brown, 1997); Jeremy Kuzmarov, The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009)

  3. William O. Walker, Opium and Foreign Policy: The Anglo-American Search for Order in Asia, 1912–1954 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).

  4. David F. Musto, The American Disease: Origins of Narcotics Control (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), vii.

  5. H. Wayne Morgan, Drugs in America: A Social History, 1800–1980 (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1981), 143–44; Douglas Clark Kinder and William O. Walker III, “Stable Force in a Storm: Harry J. Anslinger and United States Narcotic Foreign Policy, 1930–1962,” Journal of American History 72, no. 4 (March 1, 1986): 912.

  6. “Peru: The White Goddess,” “Scare with a Smile,” and “Clear Voice,” Time, April 11, 1949, 44.

  7. “Cuba Enforces Vaccinations,” New York Times, March 24, 1949, 10.

  8. “Navy to Fly Vaccine to Cuba,” New York Times, March 29, 1949, 22.

  9. Paul Gootenberg, ed., Cocaine: Global Histories (New York: Routledge, 1999); Paul Gootenberg, Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Joseph F. Spillane, Cocaine: From Medical Marvel to Modern Menace in the United States, 1884–1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Michael M. Cohen, “Jim Crow’s Drug War: Race, Coca-Cola and the Southern Origins of Drug Prohibition,” Southern Cultures 12, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 55–79.

  10. United Nations, Narcotic Drugs: Estimated World Requirements for 2012—Statistics for 2010 (New York: UN Office on Drugs and Crime, April 2012), 206–7.

  11. Musto, American Disease; Morgan, Drugs in America; David T. Courtwright, Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Doris Marie Provine, Unequal under Law: Race in the War on Drugs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Curtiz Marez, Drug Wars: The Political Economy of Narcotics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

  12. David L. Herzberg, “The Pill You Love Can Turn on You,” American Quarterly 58, no. 1 (March 2006): 82.

  13. Charles O. Jackson, “The Amphetamine Democracy: Medicinal Abuse in the Popular Culture,” South Atlantic Quarterly 74, no. 3 (1975): 323.

  14. Lee V. Cassanelli, “Qat: Changes in the Production and Consumption of a Quasi-Legal Commodity,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 242.

  15. Marez, Drug Wars, x.

  16. Andre Gunder Frank, “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Even Heretics Remain Bound by Traditional Thought,” E
conomic and Political Weekly 5, nos. 29/31, special number (July 1970): 1184.

  17. The term “therapeutic revolution” is taken from Morgan, Drugs in America, 10.

  18. Suzanna Reiss, “Beyond Supply and Demand: Obama’s Drug Wars in Latin America,” NACLA Report on the Americas (January/February 2010): 27–31.

  19. “Declaracíon Conjunta,” October 1, 2012, www.guatemala.gob.gt/index.php/2011–08–04–18–06–26/item/1656-declaraci%C3%B3n-conjunta.

  1. “THE DRUG ARSENAL OF THE CIVILIZED WORLD”

  1. Percy W. Bidwell, “Our Economic Warfare,” Foreign Affairs 20, no. 3 (April 1942): 423.

  2. Percy W. Bidwell, “Self-Containment and Hemisphere Defense,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 218, Public Policy in a World at War (November 1941): 179. For US economic warfare during World War II, see also Howard Daniel, “Economic Warfare,” Australian Quarterly 15, no. 3 (1943): 62–67; Jonathan Marshall, To Have and Have Not: Southeast Asian Raw Materials and the Origins of the Pacific War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Donald G. Stevens, “Organizing for Economic Defense: Henry Wallace and the Board of Economic Warfare’s Foreign Policy Initiatives, 1942,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 26, no. 4 (October 1, 1996): 1126–39.

  3. “Ample Opium, Other Drugs Stored, McNutt Declares,” Washington Post, December 10, 1941.

  4. Luis Galluba, “Pharmacy and the War,” Vital Speeches of the Day 1, no. 3 (November 15, 1944): 90.

  5. Paul V. McNutt, “How Do We Stand on Medical Drugs?” Domestic Commerce 27 (April 10, 1941): 333, 335.

  6. Alfred D. Chandler Jr., Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1990): 164. For histories that deal with drugs and war, see David T. Courtwright, Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Roger Cooter, Mark Harrison, and Steve Sturdy, eds., Medicine and Modern Warfare (Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999).

  7. James Le Fanu, The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2002), 206–17.

  8. Daniel R. Headrick, “Botany, Chemistry, and Tropical Development,” Journal of World History 7, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 15. See also Peter Neushul, “Science, Government, and the Mass Production of Penicillin,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 48 (October 1943): 371–95; E.F. Woodward, “Botanical Drugs: A Brief Review of the Industry with Comments on Recent Developments,” Economic Botany 1, no. 4 (October–December 1947): 402–11.

  9. “Morphine Substitute,” Science News Letter, August 16, 1947, 98.

  10. Charles Morrow Wilson, Ambassadors in White: The Story of American Tropical Medicine (New York: Kenikat Press, 1942), 324.

  11. Apparently the surgeon general of the US Army had been granted authority in 1925 to stockpile opium that had been seized by authorities to be held in case of national emergency, but it is unclear whether these stockpiles were consolidated with those under the authority of the FBN. See US, Joint Army and Navy Munitions Board, The Strategic and Critical Materials (Washington, DC: Army and Navy Munitions Board, 1940), 26.

  12. John C. McWilliams, “Unsung Partner against Crime: Harry J. Anslinger and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 1930–1962,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 113, no. 2 (April 1989): 221–22.

  13. US House, Committee on Appropriations, Treasury Department Appropriations Bill for 1941, Hearings before the Subcommittee on Appropriations for Treasury and Post Office Departments, 76th Cong., 3d sess., 11–16, 18–19 December 1939, 4, 12 January 1940, 432.

  14. US House, Committee on Appropriations, Treasury Department Appropriations Bill for 1943, Hearings before the Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations House of Representatives, 77th Cong., 2d sess., 6, 15–18 December 1941, 7–8 January 1942, 160.

  15. McNutt, “How Do We Stand on Medical Drugs?” 333.

  16. US House, Appropriations Bill for 1943, 163.

  17. US House, Act to Create in the Treasury Department a Bureau of Narcotics, Public Law 71–357, 71st Cong., 2d sess., June 14, 1930.

  18. Medical science defines narcotics as drugs derived from opium or opium-like compounds.

  19. For overviews of international drug regulation, see William McAllister, Drug Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century: An International History (New York: Routledge, 2000); Arnold H. Taylor, American Diplomacy and the Narcotics Traffic, 1900–1939: A Study in International Humanitarian Reform (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1969); William O. Walker III, Drug Control in the Americas (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981); David F. Musto, The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); David R. Bewley-Taylor, The United States and International Drug Control, 1909–1997 (New York: Pinter, 1999).

  20. Anslinger to Morlock, March 18, 1942; File 0480–11, Drugs: Coca Leaves (1933–1953); 170–74–4; DEA; RG 170; NACP; US House, Committee on Appropriations, Treasury Department Appropriations Bill for 1945, Hearings before the Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations House of Representatives, 78th Cong., 2d sess., 29–30 November, 1–4, 6–9 December 1943, 539.

  21. Douglas Clark Kinder and William O. Walker III, “Stable Force in a Storm: Harry J. Anslinger and United States Narcotic Foreign Policy, 1930–1962,” Journal of American History 72, no. 4 (March 1, 1986): 919–20.

  22. US House, Committee on Appropriations, Treasury Department Appropriations Bill for 1944, Hearings before the Subcommittee on Appropriations for Treasury and Post Office Departments, 78th Cong., 1st sess., 10–12, 14–16 December 1943, 8, 18 January 1944, 487.

  23. For an overview of Anslinger’s career see John C. McWilliams, The Protectors: Harry J. Anslinger and the Bureau of Narcotics, 1930–1962 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990). For Anslinger’s own self-aggrandizing perspective see Harry J. Anslinger and William F. Tompkins, The Traffic in Narcotics (New York: Arno Press, 1981 [1953]); Harry J. Anslinger, The Protectors: The Heroic of the Narcotics Agents, Citizens, and Officials in Their Unending, Unsung Battles Against Organized Crime in America and Abroad (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1964).

  24. US Senate, Committee on Military Affairs, Strategic and Critical Materials and Minerals, Hearings before the Subcommittee of the Committee on Military Affairs, 77th Cong., 1st sess., May–July 1941, 7, 16. By the end of the war the government collapsed “strategic and critical materials” into one category with subsets A, B, and C contingent on availability, explaining that “it had become impractical to differentiate clearly between the pre-war classifications.” Within Group A, for which ongoing stockpiling was deemed essential, were included the drugs iodine, opium, quinidine, quinine, castor oil, emetine, and hyoscine. See US Military Academy, Department of Social Sciences, Raw Materials in War and Peace (West Point, NY: USMA AG Printing Office, 1947), 131, 159–61.

  25. Dennis B. Whorthen, Pharmacy in World War II (New York: Haworth Press, 2004), 7.

  26. For good historical overviews of the coca market see Paul Gootenberg, Cocaine: Global Histories (New York: Routledge, 1999); Paul Gootenberg, Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Joseph F. Spillane, Cocaine: From Medical Marvel to Modern Menace in the United States, 1884–1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Steven B. Karch, A Brief History of Cocaine (New York: CRC Press, 1998).

  27. “Coca Leaves,” November 5, 1943; File 0480–11, Drugs: Coca Leaves (1933–1953); 170–74–4; DEA; RG 170; NACP.

  28. There is an extensive literature on coca’s role in Andean society from precolonial times to the present. A useful selection includes: Madeleine Barbara Léons and Harry Sanabria, Coca, Cocaine, and the Bolivian Reality (New York: State University of New York Press, 1977); René Bascopé Aspiazu, La Veta Blanca: Coca y Cocaine en Bolivia (La Paz: Ediciones Aquí, 1982); Joan Boldó i Clement, ed., La Coca Andina: Visión Indígena de una Planta Satanizada (Coyoacán, Mexico: Instituto Indigenista Int
eramericano, 1986); Deborah Pacini and Christine Franquemont, eds., Coca and Cocaine: Effects on People and Policy in Latin America, Cultural Survival Report 23 (Peterborough, NH: Transcript Printing, 1991); Fernando Cabiesis, La Coca ¿Dilema Trágico? (Lima: Empresario Nacional de la Coca, 1992); Edmundo Morales, Cocaine: White Gold Rush in Peru (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996); Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Las Fronteras de la Coca: Epistemologías Colonialies y Circuitos Alternativos de la Hoja de Coca (La Paz: Instituto de Investigaciones Sociológicas “Mauricio Lefebvre,” Universidad San Andrés y Ediciones Ayuwiri, 2003).

  29. In 1934 Bolivia’s export market consisted of Argentina and Chile and a very small amount (probably for research purposes) in 1930 and 1932 to Germany. UN Box 8070, Coca Leaf; R4945, 1933–1946; 12/8070; RG 8; Registry Files; LNA.

  30. Gootenberg, Andean Cocaine, 125–28.

  31. Oral history interview, Oscar R. Ewing, April 29, 1969, pp. 57–64, Truman Library, Independence, MO. The Coca-Cola Company was the only company as far as my research has shown to ever be granted permission by the FBN to use this coca-based flavoring extract; in effect the law was written exclusively for them.