WWW/article/FYI: _BETWEEN COCA AND COCAINE: A Century or More of U.S.-P

BETWEEN COCA AND COCAINE: 
A Century or More of U.S.-Peruvian Drug Paradoxes, 1860-1980

Paul Gootenberg, with Commentary by Julio Cotler

Professor Paul Gootenberg The Wilson Center, Washington

Department of History, SUNY-Stony Brook

June 2000

REVISED DRAFT/Wilson Center, Latin American Program/Working Paper

I thank the Wilson Center, and its Latin American Program in particular,
for their hospitality and largesse this year; Julio Cotler (Instituto de
Estudios Peruanos, Lima) for his commentary; Kathy Morse for assistance;
colleagues, friends and helpers in the larger research project this essay
represents; and our new son, Danyal Natan, for allowing the sleep needed to
put it together.

Cocaine has a long and mostly forgotten history, which more often than not
over the past century has revolved around relationships between the United
States and the Andean Republic of Peru. This essay examines that
U.S.-Peruvian axis, through three long historical arcs or processes that
proceededand in some sense informthe hemispheric "drug wars" of the past
twenty years. For each stage, I will focus on the changing U.S. influences,
signals or designs around Andean coca and cocaine, the global contexts and
competing cocaine circuits which mediated those transnational forces and
flows, and the notably dynamic Peruvian responses to North-American drug
challenges. Each period left its legacies, and paradoxes, for cocaine's
progressive definition as a global, illicit and menacing drug.

This is mainly a synthetic essaytrying to make sense of a vast body of new
research in the archivesbut the history of drugs also makes fertile ground
for trying new methods or approaches from the historical social sciences
Two approaches are worth mentioning here. First, this essay draws on the
"new international history," which is working to overcome traditional
academic dichotomies between "domestic" and "foreign" actors, dominant and
dependent geographies of power, and between cultural and economic
dimensions of transnational events and relationships. I hope to go behind
and beyond standard diplomatic history narratives of "drug control."
Secondly, this essay shares broadly in what can be termed a political or
social "constructionist" view of drug regimes, an approach with long roots
in "drug studies." Not only official drug policies, but our basic attitudes
towards drugs (friend or foe, legal or illicit, domesticated or foreign),
their variable social uses and effects, and even shifting patterns of
supply and demand, are to a great degree historically created, conditioned
and changeable. Drug history, including cocaine's, best focuses on our
protean social relationships to mind-altering substances, than say the
rigid dictates of drug chemistry or current morality. 

The three phases explored in this cocaine genealogy are: 

1) 1885-1910: the promotion of inter-American coca and cocaine networks (an
initial period when the U.S. and Peru actively worked together to make
cocaine into a modern medical and global commodity). 

2) 1910-1940: an era of transition when the U.S. reversed itself and
launched a domestic and worldly crusade to banish the drug (while Peru
exhibited greater autonomy, ambivalence and cultural crisis towards its
national coca and cocaine).

3) 1940-1980: when contemporary cocaine "prohibitions" came to fruition and
with a global reach, accompanied by a high degree of U.S.-Peruvian
collaboration. But this final period and process also witnessed the birth
of illicit international networks of the drug, and with them, as we also
see, the persisting and paradox-laden North-American drug dilemmas of the
late twentieth century. 

Cocaine: Global Histories (1999), the book by Paul Gootenberg, places in a
historical perspective the production and international commercialization
of coca and cocaine since the nineteenth century. 

article at:

http://www.usfumigation.org/Literature/Scientific%20Papers/Gootenberg/gooten
burgcotler.htm

[Is the William Searle mentioned 'the' Searle of the corporation that
marketed (when Monsanto owned them) aspartame?]



Anyone know of an article discussing the similar rapid social legitimations
and delegitimations of heroin? or of marijuana?

some pithy quotes:

0. 
"(Anecdotally, even the young "Mark Twain" dreamt of making his fortune
raising coca.)". . .

1.
In fact, little push was needed here, as after 1898 South America drifted
                   into the informal expanding U.S. commercial sphere.
Indeed by the mid-1890s, a clutch of U.S. cocaine interests, flexing
political muscle, overtly discriminated
                   against the nascent Peruvian cocaine industry, by
getting U.S. tariffs to strongly favor domestic manufacturers of the drug,
and their coveted coca-leaf inputs
                   and imports over refined drugs.

2.


The U.S., however, was by no means the sole power vested in cocaine. It
competed with a vibrant early science and "commodity chain" linking
Germanic-Europe
                   to the Andes. Austro-Swiss-Germans traversed the Andes
in mid-century and revived a long dormant European interest in coca, now
for an industrializing
                   world. German pharmacologists ordered fresh Peruvian
coca supplies during the Austrian Novara naval mission of 1859, for their
leading-edge laboratories,
                   where Albert Niemann (among others) soon claimed credit
for "discovering" its most active of alkaloids, Kokain. The pioneer medical
celebrities associated with
                   the drug in the 1880s were Germanic: Dr. Karl Koller (in
anesthesia) and the young Sigmund Freud (as psycho-pharmacologist and an
avid user), and it was a
                   German firm, E. Merck of Darmstadt, which earned its
name making premium cocaine hydrochloride, its leading product-line by the
1890s. 

3.

The
                   German cocaine nexus survived into this century. Hamburg
brought in the bulk of legal Peruvian cocaine for refinement (whereas New
York imported coca), and
                   American policy pegged Germany as the chief obstacle to
global cocaine controls, during the first international Narcotics
Conventions (1912) and beyond.


4.

High hopes got invested in Peruvian cocaine (no pun intended). Cocaine, in
the words of statesman Alejandro Garland, was the "essentially Peruvian
industry."
                   Cocaine became so highly valorized because it fused
"modern" Western science and liberal commerce with a dormant ancient
national resource, Peruvian coca
                   leaf. Coca signified the wondrous gifts Peru could offer
the world, and even its native stock went up with its new Europeanized uses
(hadn't Andean peoples
                   first discovered it?). Cocaine embodied deferred
nationalist hopes of industrialism. It combined a "natural" world monopoly
with proof of what innovative
                   Peruvians could do, without recourse to old-style
central government intervention. In part, such positive and Positivist
associations reflected how cocaine­by
                   1900 a waning nineteenth-century miracle drug­was seen
in the world at large, with a strong dose of national pride.

5.

Cocaine earned its place as the "first modern global drug," not only in its far
                   geographic reach but in its broad cultural implications.
In one generation, it became inverted in Western medical circles, from a
possible modern panacea to an
                   unscientific "mania," and from the hope of exhausted
modern "brain-workers" to the bane of our criminal classes, "easy women"
(i.e., sex-workers), despised
                   racial minorities and catchword "Others."