We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire by Suzanna Reiss (review)

The war on drugs has gained renewed attention over the last decade for a variety of reasons. The ongoing economic and social experiments—in some fifteen U.S. states, Uruguay, and, most recently, Mexico—with the legalization of marijuana are evidence of changing attitudes and policies. Latin American leaders such as Colombia's Juan Manuel Santos and Guatemala's Otto Pérez Molina were outspoken advocates in favor of rethinking how the drug war has been applied in their region. Whatever the new dynamics might be, we normally associate the advent of the war on drugs with Richard Nixon's presidency in the early 1970s, when he adopted a law-and-order approach to surging illicit drug consumption in the United States. Even Nixon's original embrace of the drug war is eclipsed by more contemporary elements such as the rise of Colombian drug kingpins in the 1980s and 1990s and Mexico's current internecine drug cartel feuds.

In this timely book, We Sell Drugs, Suzanna Reiss reminds us that the war on drugs started long before the early 1970s. She describes how from World War II through the 1960s a process of consolidation of U.S. hegemony over the international flow of "drug commodities" allowed U.S. officials to define the ideological and institutional frameworks for the international flow of select "drug commodities"—both illicit and licit. This control came through U.S. private industries—most critically, the highly profitable pharmaceuticals industry—as well as the U.S. federal government's heavy diplomatic hand in this era, when it held "unprecedented geopolitical influence." The result of this imbalanced system was that the advantages (namely profits) of drug control accrued to powerful political and economic elites while "the burdens of the system fell disproportionately on indigenous communities of the crop-growing regions in Peru and Bolivia and poor communities and racialized minorities living in the United States" (p. 9).

Reiss also points out that the definition of a drug—and especially a narcotic drug—was mediated by cultural politics, economics, and the way laboratories could "alchemically alter drug raw materials" into a variety of controlled substances, such as cocaine or others that "conveniently exited the regulatory gaze"—one being the coca leaves used in making Coca-Cola (p. 10). Reiss adds that the legal status of any drug was predicated on who grew, manufactured, sold, and consumed it—and not on the qualities of the drug itself. Because the United States and its corporations were riding high at the time, Reiss concludes that many of the international norms and structures adopted "pro-American" statutes or ideologies that formed the establishment of international control in the 1950s and 1960s.

One of Reiss's especially novel insights is that the scholarship on the history of pharmaceuticals and legal and illegal drug trafficking are rarely considered part of one economic and political system. Too often, she writes, our scholarly focus is the violent illicit side of the drug war, when in fact there are much more extensive and broader connections at work. For example, "national governments, police officials, scientists, and business executives" (p. 7) all attempted to "monopolize the licit."

In what is not a complete surprise given Reiss's sharp critiques of the international drug system, she weaves advocacy into her book. She hopes for more "human and effective drug policies" in the service of the "people rather than state or corporate power" (p. 14). After reading this important book, one will not need much more convincing that corporations and governments—namely, the U.S. government, starting long before Nixon took office—played hugely consequential roles in what we now consider the war on drugs.