Reiss - We sell drugs : the alchemy of US empire

The United States government has never waged a war on drugs. On the contrary, drugs in generaland so-called narcotic drugs such as cocaine in particularconstitute part of a powerful arsenal that the government flexibly deploys to wage war and to demonstrate its capacity to bring health, peace, and economic prosperity. Drugs historically have not been targets but rather tools; the ability to supply, withhold, stockpile, and police drugs, and to influence the public conversation about drugs, has been central to projections of US imperial power since the middle of the twentieth century.

This book explores the relationship between drugs and war from World War II through the early Cold War and, in particular, how policing and profiting from their intersection has propelled the consolidation of US economic and political power on a global scale. It is an historical account of the international geography and regulatory sinews attached to one group of commodities that was foundational to international drug control: coca leaves and the various substances and consumer products derived from them. Throughout the time period of this studythe 1940s through the early 1960sand still to the present day, those commodities included pharmaceutical-grade cocaine and the beverage Coca-Cola. The story reveals the importance of the pharmaceutical industry and drug control to US national power by examining the implementation of regulatory controls, cultural narratives, and economic hierarchies that accompanied the delineation of legal and illegal participation within the coca commodities marketplace. This history provides an important perspective on the origins of ongoing global and domestic economic hierarchies that influence the access of people and communities to vital medicines. It also illuminates the profound limitations and biases that currently shape national and international drug control policy and debate.

The war on drugs has inspired public and political debate for decades. Its origins are commonly attributed to the administration of President Richard Nixon, who in a special message to Congress in 1969 warned the American public that drugs were a growing menace to the general welfare. By 1971, drug abuse was public enemy number one and Nixon called upon the country to wage an all-out offensive against that deadly enemy.

Historians who have studied US national and international drug control initiatives have shown that concerted efforts to police the flow of drug commodities began earlier than is frequently recognized. Such initiatives date back at least to the beginning of the twentieth century, when US reformers joined with British officials in an attempt to regulate the opium trade. or scientific fact, but rather an historical construction rooted in beliefs and practices that changed over time and in context. Fundamental to this process was US policy during World War II and the early Cold War, which dramatically solidified the contours of a national and international drug control regime structured according to the geopolitical and strategic interests of the US state and private capital. The US government and the US pharmaceutical industry were the driving force behind the establishment of international drug control during this time period, culminating in the creation of the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs in 1961. Locating the origins of late twentieth-century drug control in this mid-century moment sheds light on the interconnection between the growth of domestic and international policing apparatuses on the one hand and the historic rise of US economic hegemony on the other.