Seeing Drugs
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Seeing Drugs

Modernization, Counterinsurgency, and U.S. Narcotics Control in the Third World, 1969-1976

Daniel Weimer

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Seeing Drugs

Modernization, Counterinsurgency, and U.S. Narcotics Control in the Third World, 1969-1976

Daniel Weimer

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About This Book

A timely historical analysis of a persistent global problem

Since its declaration in the early 1970s, the American drug war has spanned the globe in a quest to stop the flow of illegal drugs into the United States.

Faced with rising heroin use in the United States and the fear of drug-addicted Vietnam veterans carrying their affliction home and propelled by the belief that heroin addiction spreads like a contagious disease, U.S. officials identified three Third World nations—Thailand, Burma, and Mexico—as the primary sources of illegal narcotics servicing the American drug market. Author Daniel Weimer demonstrates that drug-control officials in these countries confronted a host of interlocking factors shaping the illicit narcotics trade and that, in response to these challenges, policymakers applied modernization and counterinsurgency theory to devise strategies to assist the Thai, Burmese, and Mexican governments in curbing drug trafficking. The Nixon and Ford administrations sincerely believed their policies could rein in the narcotics trade and diminish addiction within the United States. In the end, however, the drug war only guaranteed continued American intervention in the Third World, where the majority of illegal drug crops grew.

"Essential reading for anyone interested in both the history of U.S. drug policy and the process of modernization during the Cold War." – William O. Walker III, author of Drug Control in the Americas and Opium and Foreign Policy

"Weimer persuasively demonstrates that discourses of modernization and counterinsurgency helped to shape both U.S. counter-narcotics policy abroad and domestic drug policy at home along coercive lines. An important and timely book with much to teach us about the contradictions of the 'war on drugs' in Afghanistan, Colombia, and elsewhere." – Brad Simpson, Princeton University

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Year
2011
ISBN
9781612775326

1

Drugs and the American Experience

Respite—respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore;
Let me quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!
Quoth the Raven “Nevermore”
—Edgar Allen Poe, “The Raven”
This line from Poe’s most famous work offers the reader a metaphor illuminating the American experience with drugs. The protagonist in “The Raven” quaffs nepenthe (a mystical drug that eases pain and sorrow) to quiet the anguish caused by the loss of his love, Lenore. Yet his respite is short-lived and his heartbreak will surely return, as the raven’s “nevermore” indicates. The pain-stricken character finds only temporary relief in nepenthe, which antidrug advocates would read as evidence that drugs are not the way to cope with loss or emotional distress. In a reversal of this reading, however, drug prohibitionists take the place of the protagonist. They hope that antidrug polices, law enforcement, and source control will vanquish drug use and addiction, only to find drug users and drug trafficking reemerging with a defiant “nevermore.” Both readings, when taken as metaphors of the history of drugs in the United States, contain elements of truth. The ensuing analysis, though, will focus on the latter interpretation in examining the history of drug prohibition and source control in the United States.
It will also explore the connections between the history of drugs, drug policy, and addiction in the United States on the one hand and the issues of modernity, culture, and identity on the other. Drug addiction emerged as a product and problem of modernity in turn-of-the-century America, when powerful forces such as industrialization and urbanization—in short the processes of modernization—cause social, economic, political, and cultural shifts to Gilded Age and Progressive Era conceptions of self and society. The cultural crisis occurring during this period was intimately linked to the growing problem of addiction; similar links between cultural crisis and the forceful manifestation of drugs as a social and cultural problem during the postmodern era of the late 1960s and 1970s will be explored in later chapters. Throughout the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, drugs would be linked to “foreign others,” social decay, uplift at home and abroad, and American national identity. Indeed, an antidrug American identity clearly emerged in the twentieth century as private citizens, professional organizations, and governments built institutions and formulated policies to contain and eliminate domestic drug abuse and foreign production and trafficking. An integral function of antidrug institutions would be the development of addiction discourses that used medical and legal knowledge to define addiction and legitimate local, state, or federal intervention to reclaim or punish addicts for the good of society.
Opium: From Ancient to Modern Times
Psychoactive substances, such as opium, tobacco, tea, alcohol, and cannabis, have played a role in all of recorded human history, and most likely even earlier. Most drug use stemmed from medical necessity, but what is now termed “recreational use” has also been part of the human experience.1 Opium use, a focus of this study, predated Western civilization. Archeological evidence suggests that its cultivation originated in Neolithic and early Bronze Age Europe. The fossilized seeds and seed capsules of the opium poppy, Papaver somniferum, dating from circa 3100 b.c.e. have been found in ancient lake beds in Switzerland, Germany, and France. While the sap derived from a scored poppy’s seed capsule contains the psychoactive alkaloids used in all opiates, the seeds also perform useful functions: they are edible and produce oil. Given the opium poppy’s caloric and mind-altering properties, Mark David Merlin argues that premodern humans cultivated poppies with the same care that they cultivated food plants. Thus, the modern poppy is a product of human dabbling in nature.2
From its origins in ancient Europe, the opium poppy spread southeast into the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and Asia. As Asian scholar Carl A. Trocki pointed out, it is ironic that a drug associated with Asia and seen as the “cause” of many Western social problems probably found its way from the West to the East along Neolithic trade routes.3 In ancient Greek civilization, where the opium poppy assumed religious importance through its use in fertility cults, references to the plant occur as early as 2000 b.c.e. Merlin notes the image of poppies within ancient Greek iconography, as in the agricultural cult of Demeter, where the goddess is often shown holding wheat and poppy capsules in her hand. Homer referred to the plant’s anesthetic properties in the Odyssey, when Helen “cast a drug into the wine” of Trojan War soldiers to lull their pain.4
Opium’s role in early Greek religion, particularly among shamanistic cults, gradually waned as developing Greek city-states increasingly restricted and standardized religion, including access to the divine. However, though opium’s religious importance may have declined by Greece’s classical era, its medicinal use was strong. Greek and then Roman pharmacology recommended opium, either its sap or the boiled capsules and seeds, as a general palliative for gastrointestinal disorders, insomnia, pain, and bronchial problems.5 Neurologically, opium’s alkaloids depress the human nervous system and also produce a euphoric state that makes the drug an ideal treatment for a variety of ills. Yet opium’s beneficial effects can be offset by its potency: an overdose can produce death by depressing an individual’s sympathetic nervous system to the point of shutdown, causing the cessation of breathing. Moreover, prolonged use of opium causes physical addiction, and withdrawal produces physical and mental distress.6
From Greece and Rome, knowledge of opium’s effects traveled to the Middle East, where it was added to the Arab pharmacopoeia. By the eighth century, understanding of opium’s properties had extended to China, India, and Iran; opium consumption became common there, and soon the three countries were producing opium for export. Widespread use of opium in the Middle East and Asia has been attributed to four factors. First, those regions’ wealth of fertile soil, water, and abundant peasant labor was conducive to extensive poppy growth. Second, Islam’s prohibition on alcohol consumption favored the adoption of opium consumption as an alternative. Third, opium’s medicinal properties were valued in a region where the same climate that favored large-scale poppy production also spawned numerous illnesses, such as malaria and diarrhea, and conditions arising from the intense heat, that could be alleviated with opium. Fourth, many peasants and laborers in Asia and the Middle East found that opium helped them cope with hunger, an ever-present problem. Their close proximity to opium production made the drug less expensive than alcohol and provided a cheap distraction from a commonly harsh existence.7
Opium use in Asia and the Near East became widespread, but its popular use in Europe remained comparatively moderate for a long time, perhaps because of Europe’s distance from the opium producing regions. Addiction often occurs in areas in close proximity to drug production or distribution, a state Europe did not experience until the nineteenth century, when global commerce and standardized production of opium allowed for quicker and less expensive import of the drug. Nevertheless, from its role in Greek culture onward, opium remained an integral part of European medicine. European medical practitioners, like their counterparts in the East, found opium to be of utmost utility in treating a variety of human ills. Medieval and Renaissance physicians employed numerous opium preparations. In addition to prescribing raw opium as a medicine, they mixed the drug with alcohol; laudanum, for example, which consisted of opium mixed with red or port wine, was a popular concoction. Other admixtures combined opium with a variety of herbs, fruit, and roots.8
Drugs and Capitalism: A Symbiotic Relationship
By the later eighteenth century, opium and opium preparations were commonplace as bottled medicines in both Europe and the British colonies in North America. In addition to opium, a host of other psychoactive substances—alcoholic beverages, tobacco, cannabis, coffee, coca, and sugar—had become global commodities in the parts of the world where the Western powers had established themselves. European colonization expanded global trade, standardized the production of certain drugs, and provided them to millions of Europeans, Americans, and Asians at affordable prices. Historian David T. Courtwright terms this proliferation in drug traffic, production, and consumption the “psychoactive revolution.” The psychoactive revolution occurred between 1500 and 1789, when “early modern merchants, planters, and other imperial elites succeeded in bringing about the confluence of the world’s psychoactive resources.”9 For Courtwright, the only psychoactive substances to eventually become global commodities were the ones that enjoyed mass consumption in Western nations.10
Opium and sugar represent two examples of once obscure substances that ultimately became global commodities because of European expansion and commerce. British traders, most importantly the British East India Company, commercialized opium throughout the eighteenth century. In east India the company, through a system of licensed farms, established the extensive cultivation of poppies, which produced tons of raw opium bound for China. Later, in the nineteenth century, the British government took over the opium trade and established government-run monopolies. The ever-growing Chinese taste for smokeable opium, introduced in the mid-seventeenth century, ensured a stable and lucrative market for Indian opium produced and controlled by the British colonial enterprise on the Indian subcontinent. From 15 tons in the 1720s, the India-to-China trade in opium grew to 3,200 tons by 1850. Opium production occurred on a scale and style fitting of the industrial revolution. In factories at Patna and Benares, located on the Ganges River valley, the sap of poppies was boiled to extract impurities, formed into head-sized spheres, packed into wooden chests, and stamped with the name of the locales from which the opium came. By 1900, China possessed 13.5 million opium addicts whose habits supported an annual importation of 39,000 tons of opium.11 The same capitalist apparatus that plied Chinese addicts with opium also allowed for the cheap exportation of the drug to Europe and the United States.
Sugar’s transformation from an exotic substance to a bulk commodity was similar to that of opium. The same forces shaping the opium trade played a decisive role in making sugar a staple of the Western diet. Anthropologist Sidney W. Mintz identified three conditions necessary for the development of a global commodity: the rise of a consumer market in Europe and America tied to industrialization, European colonization, and the “creation of colonial enterprises (such as plantations) to produce consumer goods (and to soak up a substantial portion of the products of the homeland).”12 The economic restructuring brought about by the industrial revolution in the West created a place for sugar in European and American diets by providing a quick source of calories and energy. The trade in sugar, produced and harvested by Caribbean slave labor, allowed for capital accumulation that fueled further industrialization and forged the trade routes connecting the African slave trade with Western consumers and European and American capitalists. Sugar, like opium, played an important role in the development of global capitalism.13
In the United States, the psychoactive revolution and the development of capitalism combined to supply American citizens with a variety of mind-altering substances, of which opium will be the focus here. From the colonial era until the latter part of the 1800s, Americans regularly used opium and opiate derivatives without any social or governmental restrictions. In tune with his European counterparts, the surgeon general of the American Revolutionary Army, Dr. Benjamin Rush, promoted laudanum to sooth everyday aches and pains. Given the state of medical science and the absence of antibiotics, physicians like Rush regularly prescribed opium to alleviate symptoms. Self-medication also spurred opium consumption in the United States, since obtaining the drug was little bother.14
Until the mid-nineteenth century, crude opium was the most common form of the drug, but scientific advances throughout the 1800s changed the state of medicine. One such advance was the chemical extraction of morphine, the principal psychoactive alkaloid in opium, in 1805 by the German pharmacist Friedrich Ser-turner. In 1827, the pharmaceutical company Merck initiated commercial production of morphine. The advent of commercial morphine, in conjunction with the development of the hypodermic syringe in midcentury, revolutionized medicine. Unlike opium and admixtures of the drug, which varied in their potency and thus were prescribed in high doses to overcome possibly weak content, morphine administered via a hypodermic needle provided precise and predictable therapeutic results. Also, hypodermic administration greatly quickened delivery of morphine to the brain’s receptors, producing faster and stronger effects and thereby increasing the likelihood of addiction.15 By the late nineteenth century, patent medicines sold in pharmacies, general stores, mail-order catalogues, and at traveling medicine shows contained opium and morphine. Americans could also obtain hypodermic needle kits and morphine tablets, soluble in water, from these same sources.
In 1874, medical science took another leap forward when the Englishman C. R. Wright synthesized diacetylmorphine by boiling morphine with acetic anhydride. Wright’s discovery soon reached a mass market when the Bayer Company began large-scale production of the chemical under a trade name: heroin. More potent than morphine, heroin, like the substances from which it was derived, was soon widely used by physicians and in popular medicines. By 1900, then, the American public had at its disposal three opiates in crude or adulterated form. Unregulated, produced in large quantities, and advertised in newspapers, catalogues, and magazines, opiates came into widespread use among the American public.16
Joining the narcotic trio of opium, morphine, and heroin was cocaine, the principal alkaloid derived from the coca leaf grown in the Andean region of South America. Evidence of coca dates back to 3000 b.c.e., and human use of the plant probably originated from its stimulating properties and nutritional value. The coca bush figured prominently in Incan society, where it, like all other plants and animals, was considered to be endowed with spiritual entities. Coca’s divine characteristics were coupled with the plant’s practical uses. When chewed with vegetable ash or lime, the cocaine content of the leaves (0.1 to 0.9 percent) is absorbed into the body along with substantial amounts of vitamins and minerals, such as B-1 complexes and calcium. Coca leaves furnished nutrition, supplied stimulation on par with strong coffee, and, in the high-altitude regions of the Andes, aided in overcoming oxygen deprivation. Indian laborers regarded coca as essential to their daily work, something not lost on American workers once coca and cocaine became psychoactive global commodities at the turn of the century.17
Until the latter half of the nineteenth century, coca use remained primarily regional. In 1860, however, cocaine was first isolated from the coca leaf, and two years later Merck, once again taking the lead in new drug manufacturing, began to produce it in crystal form. But Merck was not solely responsible for popularizing cocaine; the company produced only moderate amounts for researchers. Sigmund Freud praised cocaine and its effects, and his adulation furthered the drug’s popularity. His 1884 essay “Über Coca” (On Cocaine) reported on the scientific literature of cocaine as well as advocating its benefits. Freud recommended the drug as a panacea for pain, depression, alcoholism, morphine addiction, and impotence, basing his endorsement on contemporary findings and his own self-administration. More importantly, Freud suggested cocaine as a possible topical anesthetic, an idea that an associate, Carl Koller, fully developed by employing cocaine in ophthalmic surgery. This use of cocaine’s numbing effects led to its application in numerous medic...

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