We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of U.S. Empire by Suzanna Reiss, and: Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America by Peter Andreas (review)

The economic, military, and diplomatic power of the United States has grown with the creation of markets in the Atlantic and the Americas. U.S. policies that determined which of these are legitimate and which illegitimate created a framework in which the United States and then much of the world have operated for centuries. This structure of legality and illegality, despite the explicit intentions of the organizers, has fueled a vast and violent global market in forbidden commodities. The growth of these illicit market operations has in turn fueled a dramatic increase in state power in the United States and abroad. These two books explore how government policies created illegal markets and the ways that people, from government officials to smugglers to corporate managers, fared in this process.

Drug control has been central to the creation of a U.S. empire, Suzanna Reiss explains, in this fascinating window onto a neglected moment in the political economy of cocaine production in the Americas. Many earlier scholars have noted the usefulness of the division between licit and illicit drugs to those seeking to control colonial labor or to enforce social order. Reiss finds a similar logic operating in the post–World War II era, a time when the American system of drug control became the world’s system. Her goal is to examine the creation of legal markets in the production and distribution of drugs, particularly cocaine, along with the establishment of a system of control over illegal production of the same substance. This bifurcation helped the United States dominate countries in Latin America and, not coincidentally, also served private U.S. enterprises. Drug control, she writes, “has been central to the projection of US power since the middle of the twentieth century” (p. 1).

Reiss’s choice of the 1940s and 1950s is a good one. It is a period largely neglected in a literature that has tended to focus on the early twentieth-century years of international drug control or the “War on Drugs” period from the 1970s onward. The Cold War was the moment when new international institutions favored by the United States established a global system of drug control that persists to this day. To some extent Reiss’s book travels familiar territory, particularly with its focus on Director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics Harry J. Anslinger, the aggressive bureaucrat who set the parameters for U.S. drug policies for decades. Her particular contribution, however, is a carefully documented explanation of the relationship between Anslinger’s bureau, pharmaceutical companies, and international institutions such as the World Health Organization.

Due to limitations in the sources—Reiss accessed only government archival material, not corporate—the story tends to be told from the perspective of U.S. or international agencies. However, she does work with some material from Bolivian government archives in one chapter, helping to broaden the book’s perspective, particularly about the impact of U.S. and UN drug policies on the coca economies and cultures of Peru and Bolivia. There, local modernizers collaborated with U.S. and international institutions and U.S. companies, but found their interests shunted aside—an intriguing story that Reiss could have developed further to illustrate the compromised forces resisting U.S. power.

There is only a little here about the illegal production and markets themselves; her focus remains largely the control side of the equation. Further, while the period of the 1940s and 1950s set in place many of the modern institutions of global drug regulation, the actual exercise of U.S. anti-drug power during this time was quite limited. Although Anslinger makes for a good villain, his impact on U.S. empire was slight, particularly in contrast to...