13. Paul Gootenberg, “Secret Ingredients: The Politics of Coca in US-Peruvian Relations, 1915–65,” Journal of Latin American Studies 36 (2004): 258. This article describes the regulatory shift as a “semantic change”; here I am trying to suggest its cultural, political, and economic ramifications.
14. For national and global statistics on the production and trade in cocaine across the time period, see UN Permanent Central Opium Board, Report to the Economic and Social Council on Statistics of Narcotics for 1946–onward . . . (E/OB).
15. UN, PCOB, Report to the Economic and Social Council on Statistics of Narcotics for 1954 and the Work of the Board in 1955, Nov. 1955 (E/OB/11), The Board, Geneva, 1955: 11.
16. It also made it easier for the Coca-Cola Company to claim (inaccurately) that their drink never contained cocaine, and to avoid the awkward discussion of the ongoing use of coca leaves in their famous product.
17. Robert S. Schwab, MD to Commissioner H.J. Anslinger, October 19, 1950; File 0480–11 #2, Drugs: Coca Leaves, 1954–1966; 170–74–4; DEA; RG 170; NACP.
18. J.W. Macmillan, Director Human Resource Division, Office of Naval Research, Department of the Navy to Mr. H.J. Anslinger, Commissioner of Narcotics, October 20, 1950; File 0480–166, Drugs: Coca Chewing (1937–1963); 170–74–12 DEA; RG 170; NACP.
19. H.J. Ansligner, Commissioner of Narcotics to Mr. Albert J. Turner, Maywood Chemical Works, October 30, 1951; File 0480–11, Drugs: Coca Leaves (1933–1953); 170–74–4; DEA; RG 170; NACP.
20. Yvan A. Reutsch, “From Cocaine to Ropivacaine: The History of Local Anesthetic Drugs,” Current Topics in Medicinal Chemistry 1, no. 3 (August 2001): 175–82. It seemed to many that cocaine would be completely replaced by other drugs, but this never in fact happened. Yet, the promise was there as is captured in the headline: “New Analgesic Beats Cocaine” Drug Trade News, September 20, 1948.
21. William B. McAllister, Drug Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century: An International History (New York: Routledge, 2000), 164.
22. H. Halbach, “Coca Leaf, Public Health, and Narcotics Control,” November 1, 1962; MHO/PA/216.62; WHO; DEA: 4.
23. US Senate, Committee on Appropriations, Supplemental Federal Security Agency Appropriation Bill for 1949, Hearings before the Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, 80th Cong., 2d sess., May 10–12, 1948, 101.
24. “Drugs Stage a Recovery,” Business Week, May 7, 1949, 81.
25. “Cure by Novocain,” Newsweek, October 18, 1943. Such research was also conducted by other branches of the military; see for instance “Treatment for Flat Feet,” Science News Letter, March 3, 1945.
26. “Pain-Killer Found Widely Effective,” New York Times 34, no. 7, December 5, 1947.
27. “Anesthetic to Ease Arthritic Pain Found,” New York Times 23, no. 3, September 12, 1947.
28. Dr. M.A. Vahcel, “The Role and Importance of the New Synthetic Antimalarial Drugs in the Prevention of Malaria,” May 20, 1953; WHO/Mal/88; a60365; WHOA.
29. Vannevar Bush, Science: The Endless Frontier: A Report to the President on a Program for Postwar Scientific Research (Washington, DC: National Science Foundation, July 1945, reprinted 1960), 53–54.
30. Bush, Science, 53.
31. There is a longer colonial history to antimalarial research that is described in Charles Morrow Wilson, Ambassadors in White: The Story of American Tropical Medicine (New York: Kenikat Press, 1942) and Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
32. Vahcel, “Role and Importance.”
33. Vahcel, “Role and Importance.”
34. Leonard A. Scheele, “Public Health and Foreign Policy,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 278, Search for National Security (November 1951): 62–64.
35. “U.S. Drug Makers: Overseas in a Big Way,” Business Week, February 5, 1955, 94. About 26 percent of US drug exports went to Latin America, and of the companies in 1954 with $100 million or more in yearly sales, “few sell less than 25% of their output abroad. Some sell much more.”
36. Marcos Cueto, “Indigenismo and Rural Medicine in Peru: The Indian Sanitary Brigade and Manuel Nuñez Butrón,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 65 (1991): 22. It is important to note that Cueto in this piece is actually writing about the convergence of a number of factors that actually made this particular initiative an exceptional example of collaboration and exchange rather than simply an imposition of Western scientific norms.
37. Ashish Nandy, “Introduction: Science as a Reason of State,” in Science, Hegemony, and Violence: A Requiem for Modernity, ed. Ashish Nandy (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), 1–3.
38. Shiv Visvanathan, A Carnival of Science: Essays on Science, Technology, and Development (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 22.
39. Stanley D. Tarbell and Ann Tracy Tarbell, Roger Adams, 1889–1971: A Biographical Memoir (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1982), 3, 11, 13.
40. Adams, “Man’s Synthetic Future,” 163.
41. Adelaide Kerr, “Man-Made Morphine Substitutes Pose New Narcotics Problem,” Washington Post, December 21, 1947, B8.
42. UN, ECOSOC, Third Committee, Social Humanitarian and Cultural Questions, 87th Meeting, 29 September 1948, Official Record, NY, 1948, 9–10, 14–15, 19–20.
43. UN, ECOSOC, Third Committee, Social Humanitarian and Cultural Questions, 88th Meeting, 30 September 1948, Official Record, NY, 1948, 23–24.
44. Protocol Bringing Under International Control Drugs Outside the Scope of the Convention of 13 July 1931 for Limiting the Manufacture and Regulating the Distribution of Narcotic Drugs, as amended by the Protocol signed at Lake Success on 11 December 1946. Signed at Paris, on 19 November 1948, UN Treaty Series, No. 688, 278–9.
45. WHO, “New Synthetic Drugs to be Examined by WHO Experts,” Press Release No. 749, January 24, 1949; 463–3–1; WHOA.
46. Charles C. Fulton, “The Identification of Cocaine and Novocaine,” Pamphlets on Medical and Chemical Aspects of Dangerous Drugs 16, nos. 255–92 (#283), Société de Nations, 178.8 A12, no.283, UN Library, Geneva.
47. Anslinger to Mr. E.L. Shamhart, Deputy Commissioner of Customs, August 6, 1945; File 0480–56, Novocaine (1933–1947); Box 133; 170–74–12; DEA; RG 170; NACP.
48. “Circular No. 51,” G.W. Cunningham, Acting Commissioner, Bureau of Narcotics, August 20, 1952; File 0480, Drugs: General; 170–74–4; DEA; RG 170; NACP.
49. P.O. Wolff, Head, Unit of Habit-forming Drugs, WHO, to Dr. Eddy, October 25th, 1949; 463–2–1; WHOA.
50. Nathan B. Eddy, Medical Officer, USPS to Dr. P. Osvaldo Wolff, Office of the Director General, WHO, November 2, 1949; 463–2–7; WHOA.
51. “WHO: It’s Achievements . . .,” March 4, 1953; WHOA.
52. William H. Hodge, “Coca,” Natural History 46 (February 1947): 86–93.
53. “WHO: It’s Achievements . . .,” March 4, 1953; WHOA.
54. On the racial politics in the history of cocaine regulation, see for example David F. Musto, The American Disease: Origins of Narcotics Control (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 6–8; and 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.
55. A.L. Tatum and M.H. Seevers, “Experimental Cocaine Addiction,” Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics 36, no. 3 (July 1929): 401.
56. W.E. Dixon, “Cocaine Addiction,” given as a talk at the Society for the Study of Inebriety, October 14, 1924, Bound Volumes of Miscellaneous Pamphlets on Medical and Chemical Aspects of Dangerous Drugs 12, nos. 131–60 (#138), Société de Nations, 178.8 A12, no. 138, UN Library, Geneva.
57. Tatum and Seevers, “Experimental Cocaine Addiction,” 405.
58. US Senate, Appropriation Bill for 1949, 101–2.
59. US House, Subcommittee on Appropriations for Treasury and Post Office Departments, Committee on Appropri
ations, Treasury Department Appropriations Bill for 1939, Hearings before the Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, 75th Cong., 3d sess., December 1937, 376.
60. Nancy D. Campbell, Discovering Addiction: The Science and Politics of Substance Abuse Research (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 2007), 30, 40.
61. US Senate, Appropriation Bill for 1949, 101.
62. See history of legislation as described in the Narcotics Manufacturing Act of 1960, Public Law 86–429, 86th Cong., 2d sess., April 22, 1960.
63. Campbell, Discovering Addiction, 119.
64. J.D. Reichard, “Addiction: Some Theoretical Considerations as to Its Nature, Cause, Prevention and Treatment,” American Journal of Psychiatry 103 (1947): 721–28.
65. Campbell, Discovering Addiction, 81.
66. US Senate, Appropriation Bill for 1949, 113, 116.
67. Gertrude Samuels, “A Visit to Narco,” New York Times, April 10, 1966.
68. US Senate, Appropriation Bill for 1949, 133.
69. John Welsh, “Lexington Narcotics Hospital: A Special Sort of Alma Mater,” Science, New Series 182, no. 4116 (Dec. 7, 1973): 1005.
70. US Senate, Appropriation Bill for 1949, 136.
71. John T. Connor, “An Early Skirmish in the Global War Against Disease,” 1958; pamphlet in RG 2; General Correspondence 1958; Series 200; RFA: 13.
72. Lawrence A. Clayton, Peru and the United States: The Condor and the Eagle (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), 172.
73. Connor, “Early Skirmish,” 7.
74. For more extensive discussions of development projects see Kenneth Lehman, Bolivia and the United States; and Jon Kofas, Foreign Debt and Underdevelopment: U.S.-Peru Economic Relations, 1930–1970 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996).
75. See UN, ECOSOC, ECLA, Economic and Legal Status of Foreign Investments in Selected Countries of Latin America: Foreign Investment in Peru, 7 May 1951 (E/CN.12/166/Add.11) and Investment in Bolivia (E/CN.12/166/Add.10). Stephen Zunes has characterized Bolivia’s relation to the United States as one of “extreme economic dependency.” See Stephen Zunes, “The United States and Bolivia: The Taming of a Revolution, 1952–1957,” Latin American Perspectives 28, no. 5 (September 2001): 34.
76. Lehman, Bolivia and the United States, 78.
77. John J. Bloomfield, “Plan Para Desarollo Un Programa de Salud Occupacional en Bolivia,” Salud Pública Boliviana 2, no. 4 (March–May 1961): 41–48; PAHO.
78. Lehman, Bolivia and the United States, 27.
79. UN, Report of the Commission of Enquiry, 9.
80. See Joseph Gagliano, Coca Prohibition in Peru: The Historical Debates (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994).
81. James Painter, Bolivia and Coca: A Study in Dependency (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1994), 2.
82. UN, Division of Social Activities, Draft Report of Meeting of Consultant to Consider a Preliminary Programme for the Proposed Seminar on Social Problems of the Indian Population and Other Related Problems, 1 September 1949; DAG 18/4.1.2.1 “Indian Affairs”; UNANY. This is discussed more extensively in the previous chapter.
83. Some 80 percent of “general taxes” revenue in the North and South Yungas, Bolivia’s most densely populated region, was “derived from coca” and went toward agricultural development, road construction, and education. UN, ECOSOC, CND, Third Session, Limitation of the Production of Raw Materials, 19 April 1948, (E/CN.7/110), 14.
84. Carlos Gutiérrez-Noriega and Victor Wolfgang Von Hagen, “The Strange Case of the Coca Leaf,” Scientific Monthly 70, no. 2 (February 1950): 85.
85. UN, Report of the Commission of Enquiry, 10.
86. United Nations, Report of the United Nations Mission of Technical Assistance to Bolivia (New York: UN Technical Assistance Administration, 1951), 106.
87. United Nations, “Raising Standards of Living in the Andes Mountains,” United Nations Review 1, no. 19 (1954–1955): 19.
88. Enrique Sánchez de Lozada, Bree ensayo sobre la realidad boliviana (La Paz: Universo, 1940), 27, cited in Charles H. Weston, Jr. “An Ideology of Modernization: The Case of the Bolivian MNR,” Journal of Inter-American Studies 10, no. 1 (January 1968): 96.
89. Allan R. Holmberg, “Vicos: A Peasant Hacienda Community in Peru,” in Economic Development and Social Change: The Modernization of Village Communities, ed. George Dalton (New York: American Museum of Natural History, Natural History Press, 1971), 522.
90. UN, “Raising Standards,” 19.
91. UN, Report of the United Nations Mission of Technical Assistance to Bolivia (New York: UN Technical Assistance Administration, 1951), 62, 64.
92. See chapter 2.
93. Holmberg, “Vicos,” 531.
94. Allan R. Holmberg, “Experimental Intervention in the Field,” in Peasants, Power, and Applied Social Change: Vicos as a Model, ed. Henry F. Dobyns et al. (London: Sage, 1971), 29.
95. Dobyns et al., Peasants, Power, “Introduction,” 19.
96. Holmberg, “Vicos,” 528.
97. See James F. Siekmeier, Bolivian Revolution and the United States, 1952 to the Present (University Park: Penn State University, 2011), especially chap. 2 for an overview.
98. Paul Doughty, “Human Relations: Affection, Rectitude, and Respect,” in Dobyns et al., Peasants, Power, 96.
99. Holmberg, “Vicos,” 544.
100. Holmberg, “Vicos,” 547.
101. UN, Report of the United Nations Mission, 91–93.
102. Holmberg, “Vicos,” 523.
103. James Le Fanu, The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2002), 215.
104. Verónica Montecinos and John Markoff, “From the Power of Economic Ideas to the Power of Economists,” in The Other Mirror: Grand Theory through the Lens of Latin America, ed. Miguel Angel Lentino and Fernando López-Alves (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 110.
5. THE CHEMICAL COLD WAR
1. US House, Committee on Appropriations, Hearings before the Subcommittee on Appropriations, Treasury-Post Office Departments Appropriations for 1953, 82nd Cong., 2d sess., 10, 11, 14–18, 21–25, 28 January 1952, 327. This echoed reports in the press. See, for instance, “Mau Mau Drug Use Seen,” New York Times, May 12, 1953, 3; “House Committee Thinks Mau Mau Uses Narcotics,” Cleveland Call and Post, May 23, 1953, 1C, 4C.
2. US House, Committee on Appropriations, Hearings before the Subcommittee on Appropriations, Treasury-Post Office Departments Appropriations for 1954, 83rd Cong., 1st sess., 10, 11, 13, 20, 25, 27, 30 March, 1, 2, 22–24 April 1953, 317.
3. US House, Appropriations for 1954, 317.
4. US consular officials in Nairobi doubted there were direct links between Kenyatta and the Mau Mau or Moscow; however, such highly charged accusations, much like the questionable accusations of the Mau Mau’s link to drugs, provided leverage for discrediting the anticolonial struggle both in Kenya and elsewhere. The Consul General at Nairobi to the Department of State, no. 93, October 24, 1952, reprinted in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, Africa and South Asia (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1979), 349–52.
5. J.A. Rogers, “Murder in Kenya!” (Pittsburgh) Courier, June 20, 1953, 18.
6. Ingrid Monson, Freedom Sounds: Jazz, Civil Rights and Africa, 1950–1967 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 134–35.
7. Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
8. UN, ECOSOC, 569th Meeting, First Special Session, 24 March 1952, Official Record, NY, 1952, 2.
9. Ibid., 2. It is worth noting the vote on the US proposal to adjourn debate on the Soviet proposal was adopted with 12 votes to 3, with 2 abstentions, reflecting US influence in the council.
10. UN, ECOSOC, CND, Report of the Seventh Session (E/2219) 15 May 1952.
11. The CIA, for example, funded research at the USPHS Addiction Research Center on substances deemed potential useful as weapons of war, including l
ysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). This was only “one of fifteen penal and mental institutions utilized by the CIA in its super-secret drug development program during the 1950s.” Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties and Beyond (New York: Grove Press, 1992), 24.
12. UN, ESOSOC, 580th Meeting, Fourteenth Session, 25 May, 1952, Official Record, NY, 1952, 60.
13. US House, Appropriations for 1954, 301–2.
14. Albert E. Cowdrey, “‘Germ Warfare’ and Public Health in the Korean Conflict,” Journal of Medicine and Allied Sciences 39 (1984): 154.
15. Ruth Rogaski, “Nature, Annihilation, and Modernity: China’s Korean War Germ-Warfare Experience Reconsidered,” Journal of Asian Studies 61, no. 2 (May 2002): 400.
16. US House, Appropriations for 1954, 300. An 1942 official report stated: “Wherever the Japanese Army goes, the drug traffic follows. In every territory conquered by the Japanese, a large part of the people become addicted to drugs.”
17. UN, ECOSOC, CND, Report to the Economic and Social Council on the Third Session of the Commission (E/799), 28 May 1948, 22.
18. Cowdrey, “Germ Warfare,” 155.
19. Cowdrey, “Germ Warfare,” 153.
20. George W. Merck, “Official Report on Biological Warfare,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 2, nos. 7/8 (October 1, 1946): 17.
21. See Rogaski on these campaigns in China. For a sampling of some of the major contributions to the debate on whether the United States did in fact use biological warfare in Korea, along with Cowdrey, see Stephen Endicott, “Germ Warfare and “Plausible Denial”: The Korean War, 1952–1953,” Modern China 5, no. 1 (January 1979): 79–104; “Letters,” Journal of the American Medical Association, 284, no. 5 (August 2, 2000): 561–62; Tom Buchanan, “The Courage of Galileo: Joseph Needham and the ‘Germ Warfare’ Allegations in the Korean War,” Journal of the Historical Association 86 (October 2001): 503–22; Milton Leitenberg, “Resolution of the Korean War Biological Warfare Allegations,” Critical Reviews in Microbiology 24, no. 3 (1998): 169–94.
We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire Page 36