New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery

Suzanna Reiss, “We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of U.S. Empire” (University of California Press, 2014)

Though the conventional history of the U.S.-led “War on Drugs” locates the origins of this conflict in a reaction to the domestic culture of excess of the 1960s, a new book argues that international drug control efforts are actually decades older, and much more imbricated with the history of U.S. access to international markets, than we have previously thought. Suzanna Reiss’s We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire (University of California Press, 2014) uncovers this history by tracing the transnational geography and political economy of coca commodities–stretching from Peru and Bolivia into the United States, and back again. The book examines how economic controls put in place during WWII transformed the power of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry in Latin America and beyond, and gave rise to new definitions of legality and illegality–definitions that were largely premised on who grew, manufactured, distributed, and consumed drugs, and not on the qualities of the drugs themselves. Drug control, she shows, is a powerful tool for ordering international trade, national economies, and society’s habits and daily lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Duration:: 43m
Broadcast on:: 14 Sep 2015
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Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

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J.C. Penney, make it count. Shop in store or online. Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Poe. I'm the editor-in-chief of the New Books Network, and I'm happy to say that the following interview is brought to you with permission by the excellent podcast, Who Makes Sense? A History of Capitalism. I hope that you enjoy this episode, and I hope that you visit Who Makes Sense. Recently, the popular TV show Mad Men closed its run with 1971's iconic Coca-Cola commercial, and its jingle I'd like to buy the world a Coke. On Who Makes Sense today, we delve into the history of Coca-Cola, including exploring how it became the global product that the commercial announced that it is. In last month's episode with Jennifer Van Vlak, we learned about how the history of aviation was intertwined with U.S. militarism and empire. Today, we investigate similar themes by looking at the coca leaf and products derived from it, especially Coca-Cola, but also pharmaceuticals. Today, we talk with Susanna Rice about how the history of the coca leaf and the U.S. drug control regime provides a way to interpret the history of capitalism across the mid-20th century and after. You are listening to Who Makes Sense? A History of Capitalism podcast. I'm Betsy Beasley, and I'm David Stein. Who Makes Sense is a monthly podcast devoted to bringing you engaging stories that explain how capitalism has changed over time. We interview historians and social and cultural critics about capitalism's past, highlighting the political and the economic changes that have created the present. We'd also like to take a moment to announce for our New York area listeners that we'll be having a live conversation with our friends from Descent Magazine's Belaybird podcast, which we've long been fans of. On July 7th, at 61 local in Brooklyn, we'll be speaking with Belaybird hosts Sarah Jaffe and Michelle Chen about the histories of labor and capitalism. You can find more info about the event and links to Belaybird on our website whomakesensepodcast.com. Now on to the show. Today, we speak with Susanna Rice. Welcome, Susanna. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and about the book? Of course. My name is Susanna Rice, and I'm an associate professor in the history department at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. The book that we're here to talk about is called We Sell Drugs, the alchemy of US Empire, and it came out last year with the University of California Press. So We Sell Drugs, the alchemy of US Empire, is a book that is about the history of the drug war, but written from a very different revisionist perspective that locates the origins of the drug war in the emergence of US power, particularly during World War II and in the two subsequent decades of the early Cold War, where I focus initially on one set of drug commodities, cocoa and commodities derived from it, including Coca-Cola and cocaine, to tell a story that's both about the history of efforts to regulate that particular set of drug commodities, but it turned into a much larger story about the emergence of US state power, imperial power, and corporate influence over the international drug regulatory regime. Could you describe your book in a little bit more detail, giving us an overview of the historical timeline of drug control that you're looking at? Absolutely. So I start talking about this history of drug control during World War II, which is actually I think a kind of, I was stunned when I realized that during World War II, the United States took on a pretty aggressive role of using economic warfare as a means for extending and advancing its international influence initially in the Western Hemisphere, but during the war, the major pharmaceutical competitors to the United States on a global scale had been Germany and Japan. And so the war was a profoundly decisive moment in shifting that power to the United States after the United States was involved in the victory in defeating Germany and Japan and essentially shutting down their drug industries, which gave the American pharmaceutical industry an opening to essentially assume a dominant and hegemonic role on a global scale. So I start in World War II looking at that shift in terms of the consolidation of US economic and political powers through the pharmaceutical industry, and I take it forward through the 40s, 50s, and early 1960s, which are often seen as being predecessors or decades in which the drug war hadn't genuinely taken off. Usually people talk about President Nixon in the 1970s as the kind of originator of the war on drugs. He declared a war on drugs in 1971 in his campaign in 1969. He used it as part of his platform to get elected, but in fact the foundations, the structural foundations for that war were laid in the earlier three decades. And so that's essentially the scope of the book is giving a kind of prehistory of what is commonly understood as the war on drugs and situating it within this moment where the United States emerges as a global superpower. Was there a key piece of evidence that catalyzed the research process that led to this book? I knew the questions that I wanted to ask having sort of come to political consciousness, moving to the United States in the 1980s in the midst of Reagan's accelerated war on drugs and also witnessing then as I grew older the pharmaceutical industry's capacity to market and sell unnecessary drugs on a mass scale. I sort of knew the questions I was asking, but there were some moments of genuine revelation. For instance, when I first went to the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, I didn't know I would start in World War II. I thought I was going to start actually in the 1950s and then an amazing archivist there led me to some records that revealed that there had been a Bureau of Economic Warfare that was very actively engaged in World War II and that those bureau files demonstrated that drugs were one of the most important and most difficult commodities to wage war with because if you're trying to encourage governments, for instance in Bolivia and Peru, where I focus a lot of the research to shut out German pharmaceutical companies, you can only convince them to do that, especially in the midst of war mobilizations where those countries are providing essential minerals and other resources for the American military apparatus, rubber, other things, you can only convince those governments to shut off the German pharmaceutical companies if you can provide them with alternative substitutes because for Bolivian and Peruvian governments, public health is also a critical pillar of their effort to sustain their legitimacy as the government and their respective countries and so that was something that was actually sort of surprising to me was how much to sheer volumes of archival material was produced around these discussions about how do we get rid of German drugs, how do we replace them with American drugs and so that was sort of for me at one moment where I realized that the questions I had had had these much much deeper roots in an American's geopolitical strategic ambition that was not very easily realizable, I guess that would be one thing that I would point to. Can you describe why COCA was so important for World War II and for the Bureau of Economic Warfare? What were some of its many uses? Yes, absolutely, so COCA, COCA leaves our indigenous to the Andes, the South American semi-tropical slopes actually of the Andes in South America. Today I think most people associate COCA production with Columbia but in fact until the 1970s and 80s the largest and actually I think today it's still true that Peru is the largest producer of COCA but 40s, 50s and 60s, COCA leaf growing was primarily centered in Bolivia and Peru. COCA leaves there have been used for millennia by the indigenous population for all a variety of different practices. Some direct consumption as chewing the COCA leaves gives you energy and it's useful at high altitudes for alleviating some of the symptoms that come with high altitude sickness. It also was used as a form of wage payment. It's very central to indigenous religious and spiritual practices. So there's a long and deep history of COCA leaf use in that region but once in the mid-19th century German pharmacists discovered that you could extract from the COCA leaf the cocaine alkaloid and that completely transformed the history of the leaf and the commodity markets that it would subsequently get those regions embroiled in on an international scale. So what happens after the COCA leaf you extract it you can make cocaine hydrochloride which is used in a variety of medical practices that have changed over time but primarily as a local anesthetic and you can also extract from the COCA leaf as a wily chemist in Atlanta, Georgia discovered flavoring extracts that produce most famously the drink the American drink Coca-Cola. During World War II though as far as the significance of COCA it was significant for the potential that researchers imagined it held. So there were all sorts of experiments in terms of can we provide COCA leaves or COCA extracts to Air Force pilots so that they can fly longer on missions. Is it something that we can use to give soldiers extra energy on when they're traveling through tropical regions? So there was more of a sort of anticipation I mean I think this is the era it's important to recognize of amazing amount of faith in the power of drugs to potentially transform the human experience and I think COCA sort of became central in that regard. But one thing that's really key for understanding I think in World War II also is that the United States in its effort to try to research, explore and ultimately monopolize the kinds of markets and uses for these plants and their derivatives was also intent on making sure that its manufacturers would be the primary agent in facilitating that commodification of the drug. And so one way in which COCA became a quantity I guess in World War II is that you had many people in Bolivia and in Peru who were interested in trying to manufacture cocaine for instance themselves and then sell it on the international market because as a local anesthetic it actually was. I mean now we have coding, we have all these synthetic versions of cocaine, lidocaine, etc. Novocaine, all of these synthetic versions but at the time they were still in their kind of infancy and so there was the sense that cocaine could as a pain reliever, it was a valuable drug during the war. But it was also important in some more ways that you detail. Can you explain to our listeners a little bit more about why COCA was so crucial? There's sort of two parts of it I guess like I was saying that one is that some of it was experimental that there was this hope that it could have amazing potential if researched adequately. But it was also one of the prime pain relievers of the era which during the war obviously when you have soldiers out in the field suffering injuries to have local anesthetics was critical. Cutting off the German supply or access to their raw material, COCA relief for their pharmaceutical industries capacity to manufacture cocaine meant that Germany had to turn to other sources or suffer and actually one thing that's sort of an interesting consequence of that is that Germany became the center for a whole new ray of synthetic drugs that were attempting to mimic the original drugs like cocaine that they no longer had access to the raw materials to produce. So during the war COCA and cocaine was part of a pharmacopia that was deemed critical even though if you had any actual measure of the relative production of well-being through the consumption of the drug I imagine it would be relatively small. But for officials at that time it was deemed critical and it was critical actually in another way not just in terms of preventing the access armies from getting access to these critical drugs that their government steamed essential for maintaining the health of their armies and militaries but it was also actually essential in the Andes itself where you had indigenous peoples Imara and Quechua peoples working in these export industries that were supplying critical war material to the United States particularly in the mining in mining tin. For those workers having a long tradition of often actually being paid with COCA that's the other critical component of it that often falls out of the public view is that COCA was essential to maintaining the the running of an economy in South America that was partially hooked into this international export marketplace but was also deeply embedded in traditions that had lasted and ongoing in the region for centuries. And so I think in that sense COCA also was a kind of lubricant for maintaining a relative balance in terms of controlling or managing the South American workers who were contributing from an American perspective to the US war effort and they wanted to make sure that along with COCA they would have access to pharmaceuticals but that they maintained a healthy working force in South America because that labor force was considered crucial to American military success in the war. In your book you address both licit and illicit drug trades. This is a very different approach than what we normally see in discussions of the drug industry. Could you talk about what is at stake politically in thinking about these markets in tandem? Absolutely. I mean I think that's one of the I hope interventions this book can make is that people too often in my mind separate those discussions entirely so you'll have research on an illicit market or research on a licit market and my argument is that in fact that designation is a historical and social construction. Cocaine is both licit and illicit for instance and so the question is not what's the illicit market or what's the licit market but what are the political stakes in drawing a line between designating some sites of production, consumption, distribution, legal and others illegal and I think that that has historically always been embedded unfortunately not in questions of public health or safety but rather in political and economic power so that you have groups of people in this context in relation to something like coca leaf and cocaine you have groups of people who are rendered illegitimate producers consumers of that drug in particular indigenous people in the Andes and poor minority communities in the United States while you have other people like Merck pharmaceuticals who can capitalize and make enormous profits off of the monopoly that essentially the legal framework endows them with that if you have certain people being established as the sole producers of legitimate drugs everyone else within that scene is rendered potentially criminal and that has enormous political implications you can start to and this was historically done identify political opponents as criminals by trying to insinuate that they are somehow involved in the illicit trade even while many of those people for instance in Peru in the 1940s you had in 1949 a military coup that brought in a general who was allied with the United States and overnight almost you had a whole group of pharmaceutical manufacturers, pharmacists who had been involved in the in the in the production of cocaine who suddenly because of their political opposition to the new military regime were labeled criminal drug traffickers and so I think you have to look at the politics behind the drawing of the line between legal and illegal in disentangling that it becomes very apparent the ways in which drug control is a historically grounded project in establishing power and in delineating who are legitimate contributors to public life and economic participation so I think that the line between legal and illegal should be seen as something that is constantly being drawn and redrawn and not as an obvious sort of established fact of well obviously this is dangerous and this isn't dangerous the drugs are always dangerous and they're always also powerful and potentially helpful and so in drawing that line it's more about establishing a power and influence over who gets to participate in governance and public and social and civic life and so I think I think that it's really always important to ask or to sort of critically interrogate where and why and how and who is getting targeted by these these designations of legality and illegality and at least in terms of drug control in the history of the coca commodity circuit that has very definitively fallen along the lines of empowering the US government and empowering us corporations to essentially try to establish a monopoly over drug production consumption sales and profits while also providing the government very very powerful tool for going after political dissonance minority populations poor and dispossessed people because it's it became such a sort of viable and easy way of stigmatizing their efforts at vocalizing their dissent. Chances are at least a few of our listeners have taken a pill made by Merck perhaps with the swig of Coca-Cola or those of them who have 401ks they might have investments in these companies. Can you tell our listeners about how these companies figure in this history you tell? Yeah I mean it's sort of it's sort of amazing to me um these connections Coca-Cola was one of the earliest companies there were others in Europe particularly in the 19th century who tried to capitalize on this new discovery of the coca leaf and its stimulating properties in tonic wines and other beverages Coca-Cola in the 1880s in Atlanta prohibition was introduced before prohibition came on a national scale and Pemberton a chemist in Atlanta decided to try to open up a new kind of niche market for coca drinks that didn't have alcohol so that he could get around prohibition he did that he had caffeine sugar coca and he made coca cola by the early 20th century however cocaine because of its newness and popularity as a prescription drug for all sorts of things that today no one would prescribe it for including a cure for opiate addiction and other things had started to get a reputation for being a dangerous drug and so Coca-Cola anticipating what would happen actually a year after they after they started to extract the cocaine they anticipated that the federal government was going to start to regulate cocaine and they were right the Food and Drug Act was passed which demanded that companies put on their labels all of the ingredients that were in their products there was a fear that because cocaine was starting to be stigmatized that if you had cocaine on the label of coca cola the popularity of the drink would diminish so the coca cola company turned to a pharmaceutical company Maywood Chemical Works to extract the cocaine alkaloid from the coca leaves so that they could still use the remnants of it as a flavoring extract which today is probably if people know about coca cola it's most commonly known as a component of merchandise number five part of their secret ingredient but to extract the cocaine alkaloids so that they could avoid having to have cocaine on their list of ingredients Maywood Chemical Works subsequently was taken over in the second half of the 20th century by a company called step on pharmaceuticals based in New Jersey in Maywood New Jersey and what step on continues to do for the coca cola company is what it was enlisted to do at the beginning of the century which is essentially import coca leaves from Peru which is where all of coca cola's coca leaves come from i was actually in Peru at their national coca monopoly offices and something between 95 and 99 percent of all of the coca leaves that are legally exported from Peru go exclusively to the step on pharmaceutical company where Stepon then extracts the cocaine alkaloid and provides the remaining flavoring extract to the coca cola company for the production of coca cola this caused some problems particularly during the early cold war where you had European countries questioning the growth of American corporate influence in their countries and coca cola became a kind of focal point or a symbol of that influence that was widely challenged and even threatened with being banished and rejected and so the coca cola company Maywood chemical works worked with the federal borough of narcotics and its head of man named Harry Anslinger to try to reassure those countries that coca cola was safe and desirable and interestingly one of the ways that they attempted to do that was by trying to reassure those companies or countries that there was no there were no drugs included in the drink there was no cocaine in the drink and so the federal borough of narcotics established a system of verification where they would send agents to these pharmaceutical labs in New Jersey to test the flavoring or the the syrup that coca cola exported for the production of coca cola in other parts of the world to certify and guarantee for an international audience that there was there were no narcotics included in the drink so it's a sort of interesting tangled web between these world of coca cola company these pharmaceutical companies and the federal borough of narcotics who are all attempting to both facilitate the production expansion and profiteering I guess of of the industry but also to work with a drug regulatory apparatus to ensure that this commodity can be distributed on a global scale and there's an irony there of course because it's the drug control the federal borough of narcotics itself is obviously also one of the major institutions working to suppress what they're calling an illicit drug trade while they're facilitating the expansion of a different kind of drug trade a trade in products like coca cola one of the things you show in the book to make this point and we'll post an image of this on our website is a seal from the u.s. treasury department with an eagle on it that says quote flavoring extract certified non-narcotic that was one of those moments I mean you asked when you had moments when I was in the archive and I opened the file and I saw that certified non-narcotic seal and then I saw the correspondence that was attached to it which was the then head of the coca cola company writing to the head of the federal borough of narcotics saying look we need your help and we've got an artist who's come up with this seal can we make this official and you use this to help us get into those markets and the federal borough of narcotics said yes so it was actually a coca cola commissioned design for a u.s. federal borough of narcotics official government seal that would be stamped on their barrels of syrup that were being exported from the United States to try to reassure other countries that this was a legitimate and desirable product. And what about Merck? Maywood and Stephon were essentially coca cola's pharmacists I would argue. Merck was the other side of that trade. Merck was the major producer of cocaine hydrochloride derived from coca leaves. They essentially split the market between them and Merck as the major producer of cocaine also had an inordinate amount of influence on the federal borough of narcotics and on the international flow of coca commodities and the international coca market. Actually today this is a sort of random fact but even in Bolivia and Peru today they're slang terms for cocaine that they call the illegal cocaine they'll call it Merck but Merck was the major player in the legal cocaine market which meant that they for instance could send their lawyers to ensure that as new international drug conventions were being devised and negotiated over that there would always be for Merck access to the drugs that they wanted. Coca Cola of course was doing the same thing as well. Your book takes a transnational approach to a drug war story that is often perplexingly told in very domestic terms. The alleged rise of drug use and abuse in the United States and the increase of policing and imprisonment that was supposedly a response to this rise. So this is the story that we usually tell. Could you talk about this intervention that you're making and how foregrounding the transnational changes how we think about drug markets? Yeah I think it does in a number of different ways. One way is that it shows how domestic debates about drug control are too narrowly configured because drug control has always been about the expansion of US imperial power on a global scale. Not just in terms of the fact that the drugs themselves are obviously derived from an international marketplace of raw materials and trade so at that level it seems crazy to talk about drugs as a domestic issue when you know even Coca Cola is an internationally derived commodity but so is cocaine and so you have to think about where these drugs are coming from to understand not only how they're getting into the United States but why and what the sort of vectors of power are that are delineating those legal and illegal circuits. I think another aspect of it is that drugs and particularly drug control in the call for waging war on certain communities and sites of drug consumption has also always had particularly I think well during World War II it was a way of stigmatizing enemy forces but during the Cold War it was also a very convenient kind of symbolic way of discrediting political opposition to the rise of American influence and capitalist expansion. The Cuban revolution and the emergence of Fidel Castro became is an example of one of the ways in which you had drug warriors in the United States attempting to discredit his administration or also the revolution in China a way of discrediting communist governments even though the charges were largely baseless and I think that those efforts at discrediting political opponents or stigmatizing what were depicted as communist governments as drug traffickers also tied into the ways in which domestically you had a civil rights movement and many people within the United States identifying with anti-colonial struggles and international efforts at ameliorating economic inequality you could easily also transfer that same sort of logic onto them and I think that that happened is that you had people like Harry Ann Swinger the commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics who was a staunch anti-communist but also very hostile and opposed to civil rights and in his mind those things were interconnected and the war on drugs was a way for him to pursue both objectives that he could try to squash political dissent at home and abroad and I think that there's always been that dynamic to the rhetoric around the war on drugs but also the actual implementation of sanctions and arresting and deposing and trying to squash political dissidents so I think that's one important way of thinking about the significance of the international as a window onto some of the dynamics that are happening domestically because the domestic struggles are always inevitably intertwined with the international economic political and military forces that are shaping the way that government officials but also everyday people are understanding their situation and their relationship to the state and their relationship to the law and the vulnerabilities that they confront unequally so in addition to all these transnational sites one place you take us to in the story is the narcotic farm in Lexington Kentucky can you describe what occurred at the narcotic farm the narcotic farm is wild I have that picture in there right where it's actually engraved over the door narcotic farm and apparently that caused some confusion where people actually thought they were growing narcotics but in fact what the narcotic farm was was a prison slash I guess reformatory of sorts where people who had been convicted of crimes who were also designated drug addicts were sent some of those prisoners were incorporated into research that was being conducted there into pharmaceutical manufacturers efforts to produce drugs that would not be addictive and what addiction is is a huge other question that still unresolved scientifically medically socially culturally but at that time the idea or the sort of presumption was that these criminal addicts were socially unredeemable but were very valuable inputs into the possibility of devising or discovering and producing new kinds of pharmaceutical commodities that could relieve pain but not get someone addicted and so that they actually had an addiction research center at this narcotic farm where some of these patients were this is all before the exposure of the Tuskegee experiments and other things led to the idea that you have to get informed consent so these people who were already vulnerable as prisoners and as people who had exhibited drug issues or addiction issues were essentially guinea pigs for pharmaceutical companies efforts at devising new drugs that they hoped would trump triumph over this the stalking horse of addiction and these patients were given incentives to participate in the studies nevermind that the incentive to have access to drugs when you're a criminal with drug problems is probably an obvious one but they were there were guinea pigs at this at this institution where there were these grand visions of the scientists I mean I think that the scientists many of them thought that the work that they were doing was was good works that they were you know trying to push the humanity forward to a new level of of access to non-threatening beneficial pharmaceuticals but what they ultimately were overlooking was the basic humanity of many of the prisoners because they really did see them it seems like from at least the archives that I was looking at whatever their good intentions they saw them ultimately as another kind of raw material input into a larger kind of system for manufacturing drugs that would benefit other people not the people who were guinea pigs in the narcotics farm some of the philosophy behind it seemed to be that you had these people who needed to be completely refashioned into productive members of society I think unfortunately that the the idea that they weren't already productive members of society gave a lot of latitude in the way for what I think today would probably be pretty much widely acknowledged as unethical research on captive prisoners who who were not in a position to provide informed consent we're currently in the midst of debate and struggle around the controversial trans-pacific partnership agreement of which it's thought pharmaceuticals play a major role based on all your research into the history of pharmaceuticals do you have thoughts on these negotiations there is a terrifyingly opaque set of negotiations happening right now that seem from what I can glean to give the pharmaceutical markets and again in this context not Brazil and India but American and European pharmaceutical manufacturers even greater power over patents drug pricing and being able to actually push out the generic drug markets the kind of fledgling generic drug markets that are beginning to emerge it's really worrying because obviously drugs can be weapons of war but they also can be tools for creating healthy bodies and so many people have a need for just basic access even if you're just talking about anti-malarials or drugs that in the west or in the United States are readily available for many parts of the world they're just completely too expensive or there's no distribution networks to actually provide the population with access to drugs that are sort of considered on an international basis central to public health and every government's kind of obligations to their populations these trade negotiations they I think they're terrifying because the pharmaceutical industry already or at least the major players within the pharmaceutical industry already have had such a defining influence on global access to medicines that have historically not serve the needs of the majority of the world's population but rather serve the needs of the industrial world's population and if there are further restrictions on the opportunity for countries like Brazil or India to come up with generic alternatives that could only exacerbate what already is I think a public health disaster in many parts of the world and a just basically inhumane policy in terms of denying people access to drugs that could actually be quite easily provided simply because of pharmaceutical companies and vicious profit line if you liked our show make sure to check us out at whomakesensepodcast.com like us on facebook at facebook.com/whomakesense and follow us on twitter at whomakesense and let us know if there are topics that you want to know more about you can learn more about Suzanne's work on our website who makes sense podcast.com who makes sense is supported by the Yale public humanities program and the University of Southern California's Department of American Studies and Ethnicity. Join us next month for more histories of capitalism. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]