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  • Seeing Drugs: Modernization, Counterinsurgency, and U.S. Narcotics Control in the Third World, 1969-1976 by Daniel Weimer
  • Russell Crandall
Daniel Weimer , Seeing Drugs: Modernization, Counterinsurgency, and U.S. Narcotics Control in the Third World, 1969-1976. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2011. 328 pp.

In 1993 the Colombian cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar was killed by police while attempting to flee from a rooftop in his hometown of Medellín. Some two decades later, Escobar's inimitable image as a drug producer extraordinaire still dominates our understanding (and, at times, Hollywood's depiction) of the U.S.-led war on drugs in Latin America and across the globe. In more recent years, the nihilistic and savage Mexican narcotics "capos" and Afghani guerrillas-cum-heroin producers have added additional flavor to our understanding of these illicit actors who provide the drugs so readily consumed in the United States.

Yet, as Daniel Weimer deftly shows in his exhaustive and timely tome, Seeing Drugs, Washington's "source country" antidrug campaign started in Southeast Asia and Mexico in the early 1970s, well before more recent but often controversial U.S. led campaigns in Escobar's Colombia in the 1980s. Weimer takes the reader back to the presidential administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford when, he posits, Washington's belief in source control efforts was rationalized by a "drugs-as-disease" metaphor that conveniently placed the responsibility for American's drug scourge overseas. In turn, this characterization rationalized aggressive antidrug efforts in Third World producer and transit states, most notably Thailand, Burma, and Mexico.

Weimer painstakingly shows how Washington's "supply side" drug war in Thailand, Burma, and Mexico took place against the backdrop of the ignominious U.S. withdrawal from a prolonged, arduous counterinsurgency and modernization campaign in Vietnam. Weimer believes the growing discrediting of "blind anti-communism" ensured that the drug war would emerge as a more palatable justification for interventionism. That is, the "logic of source control" (p. 217) meant that U.S. officials were bound to identify a new monster to slay, and nothing served as a more convenient foe than the murky illicit drug trade.

Weimer writes about how the prescriptions of modernization (i.e., economic development) and counterinsurgency central to the antidrug campaigns attempted to produce good governance, economic development, and internal security. More than simply stemming drug production and trafficking, the antidrug campaigns—which [End Page 151] now also sought to change, via aid and security projects, the way source country populations lived—were one more way that the powerful "Orientalist" United States could control exotic foreign lands.

In Weimer's depiction, the intentional and self-serving discourse of "drugs as a disease" helped bolster the notion that source control was an essential component of any effective counternarcotics campaign. That is, source control could fix all sorts of societal problems not only by keeping the drugs out of the United States but by cleaning up illicit activity and promoting development in the producer countries. For Weimer, this metaphor is not simply hyperbole but a shrewd marketing plot that justified—and continues to justify—U.S. training, aid, and, at times, boots on the ground.

Weimer believes U.S. politicians came to embrace and promote the idea that the drug scourge needed to be confronted abroad. The growing outcry over the "heroin epidemic" among U.S. troops in Vietnam and the affliction they might bring stateside played into this political pressure to "do something" about drugs. Not surprisingly, and fitting neatly into Weimer's thesis, President Nixon told the American public that "this deadly poison is a foreign import" (p. 74).

In Thailand, the manner in which the U.S.-funded antidrug operations were implemented was directly linked to the two decades of counterinsurgency cooperation between Washington and Bangkok. This meant, for example, that the Royal Thai government would not only attempt to reduce the northern hills tribes' opium trade but would also build thousands of miles of roads in order to bolster economic development and state authority. The Thai authorities also promoted crop substitution programs in order to turn opium farmers into budding capitalist entrepreneurs.

By the mid-1970s Mexico had replaced Southeast Asia...

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