aside the concept of the drug war for a moment, even the word “drug” on its own poses challenges. In his book Forces of Habit, David Courtwright uses the word “drugs” “as a convenient and neutral term of reference for a long list of psychoactive substances, licit or illicit, mild or potent, deployed for medical and non-medical purposes.”[27] Courtwright goes on to write about what he calls the big three (alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine) and the little three (opium, cannabis, and coca). Trade in the first three was an essential plank in the European colonial project—by 1885 taxation on booze, tobacco, and tea made up half of the revenues of the British government.[28] “Historians of commodities know that key stimulants—exotic spices, coffee, tobacco, chocolate—played defining roles in consumption and class styles in the construction of European capitalism,” writes Gootenberg.[29]
Courtwright sums up the connections between narcotics and the colonial project succinctly. “The elites most responsible for promoting drug cultivation and use were European. They could not have overspread the world so rapidly, nor brought it so completely under their dominion, without the large-scale production of alcohol and the cultivation of drug and sugar crops, the latter commonly used in, or made into, potent drinks. With these psychoactive products they paid their bills, bribed and corrupted their native opponents, pacified their workers and soldiers, and stocked their plantations with field hands.”[30] In the Americas, the introduction of sugar by the Spanish went hand in hand with the enslavement of millions of African people throughout Central and South America and the Caribbean. The colonization of North America was made possible in part through the introduction of alcohol into Indigenous communities. Today, coffee covers 44 percent of arable cropland in Latin America.[31] And tobacco smoking spread from Hispaniola through European traders, eventually gaining a foothold as a cash crop in colonized lands around the world. But it is not to these substances, so vital in the creation and maintenance of empire, to which our minds turn when we hear of drugs, and especially not in the context of a war against them.
Instead, within the state framework of the drug war, the public is made to fear the by-products of what Cartwright calls the little three: opium, cannabis, and coca. Each of these substances was used for a long time by Indigenous peoples around the world. Opium was used for curing illness in Europe and North Africa before Arab traders introduced it to China more than two millennia ago. Marijuana, a hearty crop that produced not only cannabis but also strong hemp fiber, was long used in India and Asia. Indigenous folks throughout the Andean region ingested coca leaf to quell hunger and boost energy and strength.
Coca, opium, and cannabis have, to different extents, played key roles in state and elite formation, like their licit cousins. In the Andean highlands, Spanish colonizers commercialized coca plantations in order for mine workers to have access to the stimulant.[32] The opium wars in China were key to British colonialism, and English and American colonialists defended their right to make money off the trade. “I do not pretend to justify the prosecution of the opium trade in a moral and philanthropic point of view, but as a merchant I insist that it has been a fair, honorable and legitimate trade; and to say the worst of it, liable to no further or weightier objections than is the importation of wines, Brandies & spirits in to the U. States, England, &c,” wrote Warren Delano II, who was the grandfather of FDR, and whose firm, Russell and Company, had a stake in the opium trade (smuggling opium into China) in the nineteenth century.[33]
The role of governments and particularly the US government in determining what constitutes illicit markets and illegal drugs is a crucial element of their war on drugs. “States monopolize the power to criminalize: laws precede and define criminality. Through their law-making and law-enforcing authority, states set the rules of the game even if they cannot entirely control the play,” writes scholar Peter Andres.[34] The ease with which substances can be prohibited by a state is the ease with which they can be made legal as well, a point not lost on drug policy reformers or students of history. “For instance, alcohol smuggling networks linking the United States to suppliers in Europe, Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean created a formidable policing challenge during the Prohibition Era—and were eliminated with the stroke of a pen with the repeal of the Volstead Act in 1933.”[35]
It is also important to keep in mind the historical context of narcotics cultivation itself, as this too has been determined to a great extent by North American and European interests. The isolation of morphine, heroin, and codeine from opium was achieved by European chemists in the nineteenth century, and commercialized by pharmaceutical companies that still exist today. The first cocaine labs to transform coca leaves into concentrate were set up by German scientists, the process invented to prevent the leaves from rotting in transport to colonial centers. The US and German governments both played integral roles, together with the government of Peru, in the promotion of coca and cocaine exports. “In the 1890s, US commercial attachés in Lima honed contacts with local cocaine makers.… And helped Peruvians to upgrade their shipping and leaf-drying techniques.”[36] By 1902, 2,400 kilos of cocaine were produced in the Andean region, and Merck, a German pharmaceutical company, controlled a quarter of the market.[37] Around that same time, an estimated 600–1,000 tons of coca was being imported into the United States, mostly for use as an ingredient in Coca-Cola.[38] It was Bayer that first marketed heroin as a cough suppressant, and later, Smith, Kline & French of Philadelphia promoted amphetamines for the treatment of the common cold.[39] At that time there were no legal controls over the trade and marketing of pharmaceuticals, or over the claims the pharmaceutical industry made about emerging wonder drugs like cocaine.[40] It wasn’t until the twentieth century that the international community got together, at the urging of the United States, to create a global regime of prohibition.
Foreign Occupation and Drugs
Processes of modern colonization that reach back to the period when Nixon first declared a war on drugs have shaped the geography of drug production and trafficking. It was in that period that new marijuana plantations in Mexico were sown by US smugglers. Don Henry Ford, a blue-eyed smuggler-turned-organic-farmer in Texas, told me about pushing seeds on Mexican farmers in the Sierra Madre, the northern mountain range splitting Chihuahua from Sonora, Sinaloa, and Durango: “I was one of the guys that did it, see, I used to go down to Sinaloa you know, and show ’em the money. I’d say look, ya know, here’s some seeds, why don’t you plant these instead, this is what we want.”
Ford and I met in a small ranching town in Texas not far from San Antonio. He picked me up from the Greyhound station in a pick-up truck littered with hay, and we drove over to a classic Texas BBQ joint, where we talked over meat, pickles, and coleslaw. “It was like look, if y’all grow this shit for me instead of this other kind, I can sell this better. We were the ones that created the demand.… It’s like, I’ll pay you a shitload of money, $100 a pound or whatever, you know.”
Though there were lone wolves like Don Henry Ford, who eventually ended up serving prison time for smuggling, the Mexican Army was historically the primary organization dedicated to marijuana trafficking. “The case based data collected by the author over a 7-year period unequivocally point to the army as the primary transporter of marijuana shipments to the border,” writes scholar Patrick O’Day, who relied on data he gathered through his own observations when he encountered an unwillingness on the part of authorities and police on the US side of the border to speak openly with him about drug trafficking.[41] “The lack of reporting and misreporting of relevant facts, the disappearance of incident reports, and the extreme paranoia of law enforcement personnel interviewed for the purpose of shedding light on this politically sensitive topic became so noteworthy during the course of the author’s research that the obstruction itself has become part of the findings,” he wrote.[42]
Eventually, also because of a push from the United States, mass marijuana production made its way south toward Colombia. Washington ran interdiction programs in Mexico in the 1970s, in Sinaloa, Guerrero, and elsewhere,[43] and in 1976 began aerial spraying of poppy crops in Chihuahua, Durango, and Sinaloa as part of Operation Trizo.[44] Twenty-two thousand hectares of land had been sprayed by the end of 1977. According to the DEA, “The large numbers of arrests that resulted from Operation Trizo caused an economic
