We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire

by Suzanna Reiss

  75. Ralph Hayes, The Coca-Cola Company to Hon. H.J. Anslinger, Commissioner of Narcotics, January 11, 1949; “Drugs Beverages 1947–1959” File 0480–9; Box 63; 170–74–4; DEA; RG 170; NACP. Aside from their coca leaf business, Maywood manufactured and sold other chemical products including: “Acetanilid, Aromatics (Ionones, Iraldeines, etc.), Cesium Salts, Caffeine Alkaloid, Cocaine, Coumarin, Flavors, Maypons (Lamepons or detergents), Lithium Metal, Lithium Salts, Rare Earth Salts (Cerium, Lanthanum, Neodymin, etc.), Rubidium Salts, Theobromine Alkaloid, Thorium Salts, Vanillin,” which while originally all pharmaceutical production, in the “past quarter of a century” had supplied various industries including “Air conditioning, Ceramics, Cosmetics, Electrical, Food, Glass, Metal, Textiles [and] Soap.” “Statement of Terms and Conditions relating to Public Invitation for Bids for Purchase of [Stock] of Maywood Chemical Works, Maywood, New Jersey,” Office of Alien Property, Department of Justice; “Drugs Beverages 1947–1959” File 0480–9; Box 63; 170–74–4; DEA; RG 170; NACP.

  76. “Memo: Maywood Chemical Works; Suggestion of Mr. Ralph Hayes of Coca Cola Company,” January 28, 1949; “Drugs Beverages 1947–1959” File 0480–9; Box 63; 170–74–4; DEA; RG 170; NACP.

  77. An example of S.B. Penick Company’s earlier effort to gain entry to the market is also filed in the FBN records at NACP. When the Coca-Cola Company successfully lobbied in order that the “Narcotic Drug Import and Export Act be held not to apply to the exportation of decocainized extract of coca leaves” (April 2, 1937), Penick unsuccessfully tried to import them under the same principle. Maywood brought these efforts to the FBN’s attention, prompting an investigation in February 1942. The FBN found “that there is a difference between decocainized extract [Coca-Cola’s Merchandise #5] in so far as the definition is concerned, and decocainized leaves . . . such raw material still retains its identity as coca leaves,” a controlled substance. And, the FBN would not authorize Penick to import these controlled commodities on the grounds that it posed a threat of creating excess that might slip into the illicit trade. Coca-Cola since the writing of national drug control legislation had always benefited from its close ties to the drug enforcement apparatus. Even before its collaboration with the government during World War II, as discussed in the previous chapter, Coca-Cola’s economic interests in the coca trade had shaped the writing of national legislation. Ultimately, the question was turned over to the “opinions section” of the Treasury Department that, in April 1942, backed up this decision forbidding imports of decocainized coca. E.H. Foley, Jr., General Counsel to H.J. Anslinger, Commissioner of Narcotics, April 19, 1942; File 0480–17 “Decocainized Coca Leaves (1930–1956)”; Box 64; 170–74–4; DEA; RG 170; NACP; and Chief, Narcotic Section to Mr. Cairns, Mr. Tennyson, February 6, 1942; File 0480–17 “Decocainized Coca Leaves (1930–1956)”; Box 64; 170–74–4; DEA; RG 170; NACP.

  78. Note that the designation of enemy, or “German” nationality as illegitimate, supplied a source of government revenue (the auction price), even if not fundamentally altering company operations.

  79. J.C. Louis and Harvey Z. Yazijian, The Cola Wars (New York: Everest House, 1980).

  80. Mr. Tennyson to Mr. Cunningham, Office Memorandum, June 13, 1949; File 0480–9, Drugs—Beverages, 1947–1959; Box 63; 170–74–4; DEA; RG 170; NACP.

  81. Compared to the 250,000 pounds of coca leaves used in the company’s operations in 1948, Maywood anticipated that in the next decade the annual demand for coca leaves would be 400,000 pounds per year. M.J. Hartung, President, Maywood Chemical Works to Hon. H.J. Anslinger, Commissioner, Bureau of Narcotics, July 30, 1948; File 0480–10, Drugs—Cocaine (1933–1962); Box 63; 170–74–4; DEA; RG 170; NACP.

  82. M.J. Hartung to H.J. Anslinger, December 2, 1948; File 0480–11, Drugs: Coca Leaves (1933–1953); Box 64; 170–74–4; DEA; RG 170; NACP. These types of collaborations are also examined in chapter 1, in particular in relation to covert activities and information gathering during World War II.

  83. Pat Watters, Coca-Cola: An Illustrated History (New York: Doubleday, 1978), 164, 198.

  84. “Coca-Cola: World and Friend,” Time, May 15, 1950, 30.

  85. H.B. Nicholson, “The Competitive Ideal: The Economic Route to Friendship,” Vital Speeches of the Day 19, no. 5 (December 15, 1952): 152. The speech was delivered by Coca-Cola Company President H.B. Nicholson at the New York Herald Tribune Forum in New York City on October 20, 1952.

  86. Watters, Coca-Cola, 198.

  87. Nicholson, “Competitive Ideal,” 152.

  88. Nicholson, “Competitive Ideal,” 152.

  89. Walt Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1960). For foundational work on dependency and underdevelopment, see Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America, trans. Marjory Mattingly Murquidi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies in Chile and Brazil (New York: Penguin Book, 1971); Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

  90. James A. Farley, “Brand Names: A Basis for Unity, Our Greatest Hope of Expanding World Trade,” Vital Speeches of the Day 18, no. 15 (May 15, 1952): 473. The chairman of the board of Coca-Cola Export Corp. presented this speech at the annual Brand Names Day dinner, New York City, April 16, 1952.

  91. Ralph Hayes, The Coca-Cola Company to Commissioner Harry F.[sic] Anslinger, Bureau of Narcotics, April 25, 1950; File 0480–9, Drugs—Beverages, 1947–1959; Box 63; 170–74–4; DEA; RG 170; NACP.

  92. H.J. Anslinger, US Commissioner of Narcotics to Augustu R. Arruda, Esq., Attorney, Lisbon, Portugal, April 29, 1946; File 0480–9, Drugs—Beverages, 1947–1959; Box 63; 170–74–4; DEA; RG 170; NACP.

  93. Charles B. Dyar, Narcotics Control Officer, Office of the US High Commissioner for Germany to Mr. H.J. Anslinger, Commisisoner of Narcotics, Treasury Department, January 2, 1951; File 0480–9, Drugs—Beverages, 1947–1959; Box 63; 170–74–4; DEA; RG 170; NACP. It is worth noting that Pepsi did not include coca extracts in its drinks.

  94. H.J. Anslinger, Commissioner of Narcotics to Mr. Charles B. Dyar, Foreign Relations Division, OMGUS, Office of Political Affairs, January 10, 1951; File 0480–9, Drugs—Beverages, 1947–1959; Box 63; 170–74–4; DEA; RG 170; NACP.

  95. Ibid.

  96. Louis and Yazijian, Cola Wars, 16, 33.

  97. 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.

  98. Ludy T. Benjamin, Jr., Anne M. Rogers, and Angela Rosenbaum, “Coca-Cola, Caffeine, and Mental Deficiency: Harry Hollingworth and the Chattanooga Trial of 1911,” Journal of the History of Behavioral Sicences 27 (January 1991): 42.

  99. Watters, Coca-Cola, 198, 162.

  100. E.J. Kahn, Jr., The Big Drink: The Story of Coca-Cola (New York: Random House, 1960), 15.

  101. Louis and Yazijian, Cola Wars, 13.

  102. Kahn, Big Drink, 20–33, 98.

  103. Kahn, Big Drink, 159–60.

  104. Victoria De Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance Through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 3.

  105. H.J. Anslinger, Commissioner of Narcotics to Ralph Hayes, April 12, 1950; Ralph Hayes, The Coca-Cola Company to Hon. Harry J. Anslinger, Commissioner of Narcotics, May 18, 1950; Carroll E. Mealey, Deputy Commissioner to District Supervisor, NY, June 9, 1950; Albert J. Turner, Treasurer, Maywood Chemical Works to H.J. Anslinger, Commissioner of Narcotics, July 11, 1950; File 0480–9, Drugs—Beverages, 1947–1959; Box 63; 170–74–4; DEA; RG 170; NACP.

  106. H.J. Anslinger, Commissioner of Narcotics to Ralph Hayes, June 20, 1950; Ralph Hayes to Mr. Albert Turner (Treasurer of the Maywood Company), Maywood Chemical Works, June 23, 1950; File 0480–9, Drugs—Beverages, 1947–1959; Box 63; 170–74–4; DEA; RG 170; NACP.

  107. Nicholson, “
Competitive Ideal,” 152.

  108. “Chronological Listing: Countries with Coca-Cola Bottling Operations and Year Introduced, 1906 through April, 1969”; Folder 5; Box 10; No.620-Coca-Cola Collection; Special Collections; RWL.

  109. Walter P. McConaughy, Commercial Attaché to Secretary of States, December 30, 1943; File 78098; BEW; A1/Entry500B; FEA; RG 169; NACP.

  110. Ibid.

  111. “Population Data, Etc. Pertaining to Different Regions: Expansion Plan,” circa 1937, undated; Folder 10; Box 5; No.10-Robert Woodruff Collection; RWL.

  112. Memo, H.R. Horsey to Mr. R.W. Woodruff, President, The Coca-Cola Corporation, January 27, 1936; Folder 10; Box 5; No. 10-Robert Woodruff Collection; Special Collections; RWL. In an interesting example of how the “nationality” of a product affected its marketing, the report went on to say that “under the laws of Peru it is necessary that products sold there be labeled showing whether or not said product is national or foreign. In accordance with this law, we decided to permit the words ‘INDUSTRIA PERUANA’ to be placed on the skirt of the crown. The question of a proper customs declaration for concentrate is now being considered.”

  113. Resources for Freedom, vol. 1, 6.

  3. RAW MATERIALISM

  1. An earlier version of this chapter appeared as “Policing Development: Andean Drug Control and the Expansion of US Capitalism,” Social History of Alcohol and Drugs 23, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 128–50.

  2. At the end of the war, Peru and Bolivia were the main sites of coca cultivation. Unlike Peru and Bolivia, Colombia had only a minor domestic economy that was already being subject to government limitation and control, culminating in a policy of forbidding cultivation, distribution, and sale of coca leaves and payment of wages in coca with the passage of Decree No. 896, March 11, 1947.

  3. “Legitimate needs” were defined by the conventions as being for either medical and scientific purposes or, reflecting the influence of the United States on establishing the parameters of the legitimate market, for use in the manufacture of a “nonnarcotic flavoring extract,” i.e., for Coca-Cola.

  4. Paul Gootenberg, “Secret Ingredients: The Politics of Coca in US-Peruvian Relations, 1915–65,” Journal of Latin American Studies 36 (2004): 14.

  5. UN, ECOSOC, CND, Report to the Economic and Social Council on the First Session of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs Held at Lake Success, New York, from 27 November to 13 December 1946 (E/251), 27 January 1947, 11.

  6. UN, Report on the First Session of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs; UN, ECOSOC, CND, Second Session, Preparatory Work for a Conference to Consider the Possibility of Limiting and Controlling the Cultivation and Harvesting of the Coca Leaf (E/CN.7/73), July 7, 1947, 5.

  7. Before WWII coca leaf growing countries included Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, the Netherlands Indies (Java, Indonesia), Formosa (Taiwan), and Japan. Peru has always been the largest grower, followed by Bolivia (which was surpassed by Colombia only in the late 1970s and 1980s, where cultivation relocated as a result of the heavily militarized war on drugs). At the time of the UN commission, Peru and Bolivia were the most significant sites in South America, cultivation in Ecuador was considered “practically non-existent,” and what was then only a negligible harvest in Colombia was already being reined in by the government (see Report of the Commission of Enquiry, 105; full cite in note 9). As for the rest of the world, with the end of WWII, the Supreme Allied Command assumed control over Japan and Japanese-occupied Formosa and Java, ensuring that whatever—if any—minimal production continued there was already firmly tied in to the drug control apparatus. While coca leaf was grown primarily in Peru and Bolivia, chewing was practiced in regions throughout the Andes and in some places in Brazil and Venezuela—but again, outside of Bolivia and Peru, consumption was considered relatively insignificant (at least to the eyes of international drug controllers).

  8. The United States and other industrial powers had always been adamant that domestic policing of drugs was exclusively the terrain of their own national governments (which is partly why the drug control apparatus always focused on the supply side). For more details see William McAllister, Drug Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century: An International History (New York: Routledge, 2000).

  9. UN, ECOSOC, Report of the Commission of Enquiry on the Coca Leaf, May 1950, Fifth Year, Twelfth Session, Special Supplement 1, Official Record (Lake Success, NY: UN, July 1950): 65, 68.

  10. It seems that occasionally, when adequate supplies were not forthcoming from Peru, the United States also turned to Bolivia, which thus intermittently and on a much smaller scale had an export market (see for example UN, ECOSOC, CND, Third Session, Limitation of the Production of Raw Materials [/CN.7/110] 19 April 1948, 8) where in 1942 Bolivia exported 92 kg to the United States, in contrast with 343,290 kg to coca leaf chewers in Argentina).

  11. Peru produced limited amounts of cocaine for domestic production. Peru also produced relatively minimal amounts of crude cocaine paste for export to European pharmaceutical houses, where it was refined into cocaine hydrochloride. The vast majority of this production was eliminated during WWII when the European market was cut off and the United States exerted economic pressures to limit production.

  12. UN statistics for exports from Peru in 1946 showed 236,000 kg to the United States, 41,000 kg to France (perhaps tied to postwar allied operations), 635 kg to Switzerland, 514 kg to the United Kingdom, 7,000 kg to Argentina, and 11,000 kg to Bolivia. I have not found a similar breakdown for later years, but from various sources it appears that after this the United States (aside from the Andean regional market) was the exclusive importer (I know this to have been the case for the last twenty years, having seen the export records held at the offices of the national coca monopoly, ENACO, in Lima). UN, ECOSOC, CND, Second Session, Coca Leaf: Request by the Government of Peru for a Field Survey (E/CN.7/106), 30 July 1947, 57.

  13. See chapter 2, and Gootenberg, “Secret Ingredients.”

  14. US Treasury Department, Bureau of Narcotics, Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs for the Year Ended December 31, 1942–1956 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1957).

  15. US Treasury Department, Bureau of Narcotics, Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs for the Year Ended December 31, 1931, 7.

  16. Report of the Commission of Enquiry, 84.

  17. UN, Limitation of the Production of Raw Materials, 13. In 1948 Bolivia reported to the United Nations that large landowners’ estates only accounted for 17 percent of all coca grown, whereas small producers’ lands accounted for the majority. For export, see Report of the Commission of Enquiry, 87. The “greater part of the coca leaf exported from Peru came from plantations operated either directly or indirectly by the exporters themselves. As regards Bolivia, one of the objects of the Bolivian Coca Producers’ Corporation is to export the coca leaf produced by the members of the Corporation, which is composed mainly of large landowners.”

  18. Report of the Commission of Enquiry, 9.

  19. Report of the Commission of Enquiry, 103.

  20. Laura Gotkowitz, A Revolution for Our Rights: Indigenous Struggles for Land and Justice in Bolivia, 1880–1952 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

  21. Gotkowitz, Revolution for Our Rights, 235, 279.

  22. Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 1. See also Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); and Mariola Espinosa, Epidemic Invasions: Yellow Fever and the Limits of Cuban Independence, 1878–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

  23. Letter from M J Hartung, Vice President, Maywood Chemical Works to Mr. Stuart J. Fuller, Assistant Chief, Division of Far Eastern Affairs, Department of State, c/o American Consulate, Geneva, Switzerland, May 26, 1936; 12–19946–8070; LNA. Note that US corporations were also key mediators in Bolivia; in 1940 Maywood collected in
formation for the US FBN on “Bolivian coca leaves,” which was forwarded on to the League of Nations. See Letter from H J Anslinger, Commissioner of Narcotics to Mr. Herbert L. May, League of Nations, March 28, 1940; 12–10799–8070; LNA.

  24. H.J. Anslinger to Mr. W. Edwin Clapham, Merck & Company, Inc., January 27, 1948. Re: Merck and Maywood’s need for more coca leaves, see letter from W. Edwin Clapham, Narcotic Products Manager, Merck & Co., Inc. to H.J. Anslinger, January 22, 1948 and Maywood Chemical Works to Commissioner of Narcotics, July 20, 1948; File 0480–11, Drugs: Coca Leaves (1933–1953); 170–74–4; DEA; RG 170; NACP. Merck in fact proposed setting up plantations in Costa Rica or Guatemala to augment their supply, which Anslinger rejected as unnecessary and counter to the general interest in limiting production. He also mentioned previous government efforts to grow coca in Puerto Rico—discontinued for similar reasons.

  25. Lehman makes the similar argument that the “political logic of pursuing a plan to which the United States was already ostensibly committed seemed self-evident.” Kenneth D. Lehman, Bolivia and the United States: A Limited Partnership (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), 117.

  26. It is interesting to note that when the question of raw materials was first raised, Peru proposed the CND might include manufacturing countries in its inquiry—apparently to no avail. See the minutes of the UN, ECOSOC, Social Affairs Committee of the Economic and Social Council, Summary Record of First Meeting (E/AC.7/3), 8 March 1947, 4.

  27. UN, Request by the Government of Peru, 46–47.

  28. UN, Request by the Government of Peru, 48.

  29. Letter from G.E. Yates (Director, Division of Narcotic Drugs) to Phillippe de Seynes (Department of Economic and Social Council), 14 February 1956. Narcotic Drugs, Advisory Services in the Field of Narcotics, Box RAG 2/109/021 Nov 55- Oct 56, UNANY.