Paul Gootenberg on the Global History of Drugs

There’s more or less never been a drug free society in human history but scholarly examination of the history of psychoactive drugs was surprisingly sparce until just a few decades ago. Paul Gootenberg is a distinguished professor of history, author of books on the history of cocaine, editor of the recently published Oxford Handbook of Global Drug History, and president of the rapidly growing Alcohol and Drugs History Society. We talked about the evolution of this interdisciplinary field of study from its mostly anthropological origins, its connections to commodity, consumption and cultural studies as well as medicine, sociology and politics, and the pioneering works shaping the field.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Ethan Edelman, and this is Psychoactive, a production
of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. Psychoactive is the
show where we talk about all things drugs. But any
views expressed here do not represent those of my Heart Media,
Protozoa Pictures, or their executives and employees. Indeed, as an

(00:23):
inveterate contrarian, I can tell you they may not even
represent my own. And nothing contained in this show should
be used as medical advice or encouragement to use any
type of drugs. Hello, Psychoactive listeners. You know, I thought,

(00:45):
as we're coming to the end of season two of
Psychoactive and not knowing really for sure what lies up ahead,
I was thinking about the sort of folks I'd most
want to have on before we conclude the second season,
and one of those is my friend Paul Gudenberg. He
is probably one of the two leading deans of drug

(01:09):
history studies. I mean, Paul has been uh he's been
a professor at Sunny State University of New York, Stony
Brook for many, many years. He's just a former Rhodes scholar. Um.
You know. He started off his historical stuff writing about birdship,
a k a guano and you know that, the commerce
and guano. But he moved from there into the field

(01:30):
of coca studies cocaine cocaine. Roughly thirty years ago he
wrote a book that might be regarded as kind of
a biography of cocaine cocaine. But he's now currently chairing
the association the Drug and Alcohol Historians Society. Uh. He
recently edited a seven hundred page edited volume of the
Oxford Handbook of Global Drug History. Um. You know, he

(01:54):
just helped organize a meeting in Mexico City where I
was at last June. Was one of my first encounters
with this order world. So Paul, I want to thank
you ever so much for joining me and my listeners
on Psychoactive. Oh it's a pleasure, Easan. So let me
just say just also speaking personally, you know, I realized
I've been looking back at the episodes of Psychoactive and

(02:15):
quite a number have been on history. Some have been
on different drugs like alcohol or or cava. Some have
been about the history of certain countries like Iran or Mexico.
Some have been about more you know, middle twentieth century histories,
like on drugs and jazz and the narcotic farms that

(02:35):
um that Nancy Campbell talked about. So history really is
a kind of favorite of mine and my true confessions here.
You know, when I was eight years old, I told
people what I wanted to be when I grew up
with a history professor. So for me, looking at the
history of drugs, even though it may feel kind of
obscure to many people, just seems incredibly rich. And it's
part of why I felt this a kinship with you

(02:57):
over all these you know, years and even decades. So
let me just start off, um by by asking this
this basic question. When you made that evolution right thirty
I years ago, from your early work on guano to
looking at coca, what was it that stimulated you? Was
it the commodities market element of this, or was there

(03:18):
something bigger than that? Or did you have your own
personal reason, as I did in some respects for being
interested in psychoactive drugs To some extent there was a
personal issue in the sense that maybe a little bit
more than yourself. I was a you know, child of
the sixties, so what I was growing up, the issues
and the questions around illicit drugs were very much in

(03:40):
the air. Um, and um kind of resurfaced with me
in the Es as I began to search around for
new topics of investigation. But how I felt into drugs
was quite easy at the time, which was I had
been kind of proven my way as economic historian of

(04:01):
the Andes, University of Chicago, pedigree, um, you know, all
all the stuff, interdisciplinarity, and I was looking for a
new topic to work on. And this was in the
early nineties. And I a friend of mine who had
been working as a journalist in the Andes said that
they've been working this was the contemporary explosion of cocaine

(04:22):
in the Amazon, andyes, at that time, in the Waiaga Valley,
and she told me, there's really nothing written about the
history of this stuff. This might be interesting to you.
And so, you know, I started poking around, and well,
and behold, it really was interesting. It was interesting because
it was a whole new unknown where if you had art,

(04:45):
you know, new archival work to do, and new facts
to establish and new perspectives to bring in. There was
just a tremendously open field. And it was exciting in
a way because you know, drugs are, let's face it,
they're an exciting and sexy topic and they have a
lot of um repercussions for how we think about the
world today. And contrary to what maybe a lot of

(05:10):
people think about historians, most historians are motivated by questions
that are in the zeitgeist today. And by the n nineties,
the you know, global drug regimes and the failures, the violence, um,
the scope, the global scope of a drug like cocaine

(05:30):
was pretty much everywhere. So I began to be interested
in his origins. But I do want to say one
other thing, which is what particularly attracted me to doing
drug history. And there were a few already established figures
in the field like David Corbright who or Musto people
we could we could talk about. Um. What really fascinated

(05:52):
me about this was all the learning that you could
do because it is so um cross disciplinary. There's so
much trespassing to be had in studying something like drugs,
because I mean, as you alluded to, there's this very
strong kind of traditional anthropological interest in shamanism and drugs

(06:13):
and taboos and non taboo substances. There was commodity studies,
which is something I was familiar with, but there was
a rising new variety of commodity studies about the social
constructions and the meanings that objects and substances have. There's
medical history and the history of medicine, which was at
that time beginning to take a highly a more critical

(06:37):
turn than it had in the past. That is, looking
at medicine um and its products as a kind of
a uh an object rather than a methodology. And history
just across the board. Sociologists, political scientists like yourself, legal scholars,
so many different angles to draw on in thinking about

(07:01):
this this issue of you know, where to our contemporary
entanglements would drugs come from? And even basic questions that
continue to I wouldn't say plagued the field, but animate
the field, which is what are drugs? And so just
the important work here in the United States um by
court Right wasn't two thousand one, which was published by

(07:23):
Harvard University Press, which was Forces of Habit Drugs in
the Making of the Modern Rule, And that's where he
coins the term the psychoactive revolution. Right, the psychoactive Revolution,
And in many ways court Rights book, they're his synthesis
there is to take a global view and a long

(07:43):
historical view of many many drugs and drug like substances
and follow them through centuries and waves of of origins
and consumption and try to trace out what is the
big question in drug history. I do certain drugs spread globally?
Why does certain drugs become legitimized? Why does certain drugs

(08:07):
become illegitimized and then criminalized? So he was asking huge questions,
and the most interesting way is the way it begins
with this notion of the psychoactive revolution. And basically what
corp right Um proposes and I think is something that
really animated this larger community of people who work on drugs,
which is hundreds of historians today, is that drugs we're

(08:31):
actually quite important in the constitution of modernity as we
think of it today. Starting in the sixteenth century, all
types of stimulants began to flow together and reach first
Europeans and then Middle Easterners and Asians and North Americans,

(08:52):
and they began to be part of our kind of
integral lifestyles, everything from coffee to tobacco um and then
later things like you know, coca cola or opiates or
or for that matter, right becoming chocolate and one can

(09:13):
even look at sugar, right, and the work on sugar
that was very important in kind of also shaping the
history of drugs with Sydney Mintz's Sweetness and Power, which
gave I don't know if you've read that, but it's
a historical anthropology of of sugar UM around the same period,
which UM really set the stage for global thinking about

(09:36):
how consumption regimes and political regimes are closely related. And
UM sucros wasn't many ways treated as a a drug
in Sydney Mintz's terms, but court Right's book The Notion
of the Psychoactive Revolution the notion of asking deep historical
questions about UM, why drugs read, why some drugs don't spread,

(10:04):
why they become legitimate by state building processes later by
the eighteenth and nineteen centuries. Why is rum part of
the British Empire? Um? Why does cannabis never um reach
that kind of state nexus. He was asking big questions

(10:25):
and giving well founded historical answers to them. Are they
all correct or I agree with them all? No, But
he was opening, you know, the big canvas on UM
on doing serious drug history, and I still think it
remains one of the best books that anyone's interested in
kind of the history of drugs can look well, you know,

(10:47):
Paul d' reminding me here, right, is there probably the
article I wrote in my professorial days in the late
eighties early nineties, they garnered the greatest sort of respect,
and maybe not actually at the time. It's more headlong
lay of the last few decades was a piece I
wrote called Global Prohibition Regimes, subtitled the Evolution of Norms
International Society. And I wrote that in late nineteen eighties.

(11:09):
And what drove it was it was even stepping even
one step further back than court, right, It was asking
the question two questions really, One was how and why
is it that certain activities that at some point in
history are regarded as entirely legal or at least not
illegal all around the world substantly become criminalized throughout the world,

(11:31):
and not just criminalized throughout the world, but become the
subject of what I coined global global prohibition regimes. And
so when I start off with drugs and look backwards
and forwards and looking backwards, the first one that hit
me was basically, you know piracy and privateering, right, which
at one point our privateering is essentially licensed legal piracy,

(11:51):
and at some point they become the subject of the
first kind of global prohibition regime. The second one was
the prohibition of the global trade of global slave trade,
and then slavery itself, right, which really emerges in the
late you know, I mean only eighteenth century, then obviously
well into the nineteenth century, with the United States being
one of the last of of of of major countries

(12:13):
to ban slavery, at least in the western world, right.
And then it's followed by a kind of aborded efforts
to have an alcohol prohibition regime, a probition regime directed
at white slavery, which was the term for a for
a prostitution and the movement of women for purposes of
prostitution across borders. And then I jumped it forward to
the emerging regimes, global regimes that banning the killing of

(12:35):
elephants and whales and intelligence species, as well as other
types of activities. And then the second question I asked
was why is it that some of these global prohibition regimes,
you know, result and basically almost abolishing or getting eliminating
the activity at which they were targeted, whereas others utterly fail. So,
for example, the probition regimes directed at piracy more or less,

(12:57):
becomes largely successful except for little pockets of piracy you
know around you know, parts of Asia, Africa. The regime
criminalizing prohibiting slavery in the slave trade also becomes largely successful.
Where is the one against drugs, you know, utterly fails
right where you have a bigger markets probably existing per
capita um after the institution of the Global Provision Regime

(13:19):
than before. Now, one of my main arguments there was
that moral factors, it's not just all about economics and
security and politics, that there was actually a transnorm you know,
transnational moral dimension. And I argued that in fact, they
played very important roles, that there was a moralizing, paternalizing
um element to what happened in all of these regimes

(13:41):
that cannot be discounted um. And then the question about
why drugs failed, I mean, part of that had to
do with how susceptible the activities were to suppression. Right
that ultimately, you know, the emergency steamboats, uh, you know,
and some other factors makes piracy much less by a
ball on, you know, the factors with slavery I won't

(14:02):
go into, but that with drugs, you know, these things
were so easily trafficked and so easily in such small
amounts that it was no way to essentially suppress all
of this. But I also looked at the question of
technological developments, right, So, for example, the emergence of the
hypod during syringe in the middle of the nineteenth century

(14:26):
transforms the the notion of taking opioids, for example, the
emergence of morphine, the emergence of of cocaine being taken
in in in in those ways. In a very different way,
the emergence of the cigarette rolling machine, I think in
the early twentieth century transforms the nature of tobacco consumption
around the world. And so when you look when we

(14:46):
look across the board, I sometimes wonder, like, if you
look at coca cocaine versus coffee, how much did their
different evolutions have to do with the potential of those
substances to be synthesized into something much more potent. For example,
the fact that coffee, you know, never emerges as you

(15:07):
know caffeine and taking in it. It's never becomes an
injectable or stormable drug in the way that coca ultimately
doesn't get, you know, transmitted all around the world. It's
when it becomes cocaine that it becomes a more global commodity. Um.
You know, if if coca, if if cocky coffee had
emerged in other way, what might this history have been different.
So when you look at the technological element of of

(15:31):
why these things emerged and why they're prohibited or not,
what else pops out at you about all of that? Well,
I mean you've set a lot there, and I do
like your work on regimes. I have to say that
as a historian I was always borrowing from social scientists,
and especially you and Peter Andreas critical scientists. I admire
very much at Brown. But for example, some of the

(15:53):
issues that you're talking about remind me of the earlier
work of of Wolf Gong Chivels, who is I believe
chivil Bush is still alive, a European thinker. You know,
we don't have many of those left these days. Who
has written books on big subjects for a long time,
including speed and locomotives and lights and wars. And one

(16:17):
of his most influential books I found it was a
book that was published in German in the early eighties
called in the English version was called Tastes of Paradise,
A Social History of Spices stimulants and intoxicants. Whenever I
teach a course about drugs, I actually always begin with
shivil Bush because he gives you a way of thinking

(16:38):
about these shifts and that some of the technology technologies
that are involved in the things that he called the
intensification or acceleration of the drug experience. So he begins
with these imaginary drug experiences of say, what what we
call spices today, and through the impact of tobacco and

(17:00):
the impact of coffee, um up through the impact of
opium on European societies. It's a very European. But there
you already have these concepts about the acceleration and intensification
of drugs. And yes, you'll hear this every and everyday conversations.
You'll hear I was in a conversation with somebody the

(17:20):
other day yesterday night, in a hysterical mode, said to me, oh,
but the drugs today are just so much more powerful.
The pot kids are smoking today is just doesn't compare
to the the nickel weed we had when we were kids.
So there's always this continuing acceleration, which is of course
um in some ways. And this I think Court right

(17:44):
elaborated on. This is somehow is it some ways? You know,
it has an elective affinity, to use Vapor's term with capitalism.
As capitalism speeds up our everyday lives and consumption becomes
more and more speeded and needed, especially stimulant become part
of everyday lives. The acceleration process takes on a life

(18:06):
of its own, so drugs do become more powerful. A
great example of that is an alcohol. Alcohol used to
be very low grade. You know, you could only get
seven or eight percent naturally at most and beers, most
beers around the world where one or two percent, and wines,
you know, eleven or twelve percent. But come the seventeenth
and eighteenth century, with new distilling techniques in the nineteenth century,

(18:29):
you can make whiskeys and beyond that are just basically
low alcohol. And that creates social problems in its way
that you know, lighter substances did not in themselves entail.
So I should interrupt your You're you're reminding me of

(18:49):
two things here. One is it I remember when I
first read the Chivel Dish book. In that book became
very popular among my you know, friends who are all
interested in kind of the sociology of drugs and of
thinking about drugs. But the thing that mosted out for
me was the way he talked about spices playing a
kind of psychoactive role in in the Middle Ages, and

(19:10):
you know, because that was a period when you didn't
have coffee, you didn't have tobacco, only against the Europe
in the sixteen hundreds, uh, And spices play a range
of roles um in terms of you know, I mean,
they cover over the way people smell, they help with
food when it food is not very interesting. But also
there was the psychoactive element to that, and a lot
of the writing about spices sounds like the way people

(19:32):
write about psychoactive drugs in more contemporary times. What I
would say about about Silvia Bush, whether he was doing
this consciously or not, is that he was articulating historically
what we call today set and setting um that is
the impact of stimulants. Let's call the matter and toxic ins,

(19:56):
which is today one of the broader terms is coming
in has a lot to do with the environments that
we're in. A coffee house or um, you know, a
gin gin house has a lot to do with how
we imagine them to be. So the point of starting
with paradise was that these lux new luxury goods of

(20:18):
the you know, late Middle Ages that were coming into
Europe were loaded with meanings, and these meanings created sensations
in their consumers. And that that is very similar to
the processes that began to be attached in his view,
to other exotic substances later, like coca uh, not not coca,

(20:41):
but cocao, chocolate, um, tobacco, coffee, and so on. So
it is this idea of the kind of what anthropologists
and psychologists called the social construction of drugs um that
is a kind of a true social construction of drugs,

(21:02):
and that book is excellent and sort of like introducing
that idea without the jargon. We'll be talking more after
we hear this ad many of our audience will now

(21:27):
be familiar with the phrase drug set and setting. But
that's the phrase that's really kind of coined by Timothy Leary,
the Harvard psychology professor, oh and n LSD guru Um
to describe, you know, drug is one thing that impacts
your psychoactive experience, but the other two or the drug,
what exactly is the drug and the formulas you're taking it?
Is it a stimulant, it is a downer? Is it

(21:47):
a tranquilizer? As well as are you injecting it or
smoking it, or eating it or drinking it? And then
the setting, which is to some extent what you and
the broader culture expect this drug experience to be like,
and Leary coins that phrase, I think in the late
fifties early sixties. Then Andy Wile Andrew Wild who was
my very first guest on psychoactive he develops it in

(22:08):
his book The Natural Mind, which is a wonderful book
now fifty years old, about why people and individuals use
psychoactive drugs. And then Norman Zenberg, who was the Harvard
Medical School professor, develops it in a research study in
a book called Drug Set and Setting. So I think
you're right in terms of, you know, tracing back those
origins to UM two shivel Bush. That's very true. Now

(22:30):
it's also, of course the nature of the drug experience,
right that gets um that evolves. So at one point
in one of your talks, Aboys, so you mentioned the
sociologist Howard becker Um who writes a you know, an
article I think what's it called becoming a marijuana effectively
learning to become high in the the sort of social

(22:51):
constructivist you know, aspect of the drug experience, or I
think about you know Harry Levine who writes his classic
article called The Discovery of Addiction back in nineteen seventy eight,
you know, subtitle changing conceptions of a visual drunkenness in
America and looks at the way those notions of addiction
and in inebriation shift over time. So just say a

(23:11):
little more about that. Um, you know, this social constructivist
element in the field of history. You know, I'm going
perilously into social constructionism or social constructivism as sociologists like
to call it. Um. Becker is a fascinating character, by
the way, in everything, his his origins, his his musicality.

(23:34):
You know, he's still living in Paris apparently no, well,
you know, he splits his time between Paris, where he's
become a famous sociologist profiled in New Yorker magazine, and
living in San Francisco where he's still working and writing
at the age of ninety four. It's just incredible. But
that article really was a kind of a breakthrough piece. Um.
He wrote that in the nine fifties where he observed

(23:57):
I think he was a University of Chicago graduate student.
Everything always goes back to the University of chicargog Um
and he did it basically a participant in ethnography with
jazz musicians in their audiences, and those are some of
the few people who you could find who were smoking
marijuana in the nine fifties. And he came up with
this thesis. It's very similar to what um as you said,

(24:20):
wow wow, brought up later or made into a broader
one that you had to learn how to use marijuana.
You had to learn what effects you could have your brain,
had to kind of be in a group and had
to you know, you could smoke pot and be like
Bill Clinton allegedly and not get high, or you could
smoke potting you could get high because you were getting

(24:41):
all these cues from the people around you as to
how to build that inter you know, that personal but
also interpersonal experience. And that's constructivism, which has a broader
history and philosophy and the social sciences in general. You know,
in sociology there is this broader school all you know
about social constructivism that really went mad by the nineteen eighties,

(25:05):
where everything became socially constructed gender, race, blah blah blah.
In the world of drugs, it has a specific meaning
and still is an internal debate as to you know,
what is the biological or chemical input. There are some
UM students of drugs who will still say there's an
important biological or chemical input to the drug experience, to

(25:29):
those on the other extreme who say there's very little.
But it's an important school, vitally important school in animating
how people look at drugs and history, because it's it
can begin to you can begin to wrap your way
around how drugs become socialized, how they change over time,

(25:53):
the internalization of meanings about drugs, how certain drugs become domesticated,
which is something that most people would prefer, that is
used in normal situations, used in ritual situations, used UM modestly,
or on the contrary, used in endangerous and risky ways

(26:13):
that UM endangered not only the individual, but they endangered society.
So UM historians have taken have really bought into most
of the constructivist ideas, which really do go I think
go back to Becker. I was never convinced. I'd like
to see that that Weary invented the term UM. Yeah, yeah,

(26:35):
I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure it was. It's attributed
to him, but it may be one of those urban legends.
I actually think it's not widely known in fact, that
he that he originated, and I think he you know,
he was a very creative intellectual be even but you know,
before his days of going, you know, into the guru area.
So it was a powerful notion that I think he

(26:56):
applied obviously to a psychedelic use, but applied more broadly.
But you know, Paul, I cut you off on another
point you were about to make there, which is it
was once again talking about the transformation in the technologies
around drugs, and you had begun to mention the gin epidemic, right,
you know that the in the sixteen hundreds when you
have the emergency. And I interviewed Ed Slingerland Um who

(27:18):
wrote that wonderful book about why is It? I think
it's called Drunk Drunk is the name of it, Um
about you know, why does alcohol persist throughout global society
notwithstanding its overwhelming harms. He makes the argument, the dominant
argument of the book is that, in fact that it
added more in the benefits of alcohol consumption in terms

(27:39):
of human evolution and civilization exceeded the harms. But then
he puts a caveat at the end where he said,
maybe the emergence of distilled alcohol first in Asia and
I think the thirteen fourteenth century and then in Europe
around the sixteen hundreds maybe changes the calculus, right, um,
And that could probably be said, I mean, I'm the

(28:00):
reference before to the cigarette rolling machine, which transforms tobacco consumption,
and the events of the hypodermic syringe, which transforms the
ways that people can take drugs in a very positive
way from the medical perspective, but a pretty destructive way
from a recreational perspective. Right, So there's another aspect of
technologies as well. I mean, Slinger in his book from

(28:20):
an alcohol perspective is part of a larger set of
what is sometimes called deep history, going back before we
have you know, strong archives. It shares a lot with
archaeology and you know, kind of a certain school of anthropology,
and there has emergency thesis in many fields. The drugs

(28:41):
were really important in early hunits, not just alcohol, but
other types of plant based drugs, um mushrooms, psychedelics of
all kinds, tobacco, and that they were important in creating
a great deal of our socialista Shian in groups. Um

(29:03):
and drugs brought people together and rather than for example,
there's this thesis that is is um has emerged for
understanding civilizations in the Middle East grain based civilizations, that
the main reason for growing brains in the Middle East
and the earliest known findings was to be able to

(29:25):
produce beer, because beer is what brought these communities into
small urban areas and created you know, larger political controls.
And so rather than beer being a side effect of
of a Neolithic revolution, it was the other way around.

(29:46):
Alcohol was repellent to Neolithic revolutions and the formations of
early states. And similar thesis have been made about some
of the ancient um of societies of the America's and psychedelics.
And I remember I actually at your at your keynote
address in Mexico City this past June, right to the

(30:07):
conference of Alpha Drunk Historians. You talked about that earlier.
You point make the point first of all, that it's
the Americas from which the large majority of psychoactive plant
substances emerged, right, It's not as much Asian Africa. And
that's secondly that that early history you know, both among
small groups and then at some point then becoming more
of a tool of the elite um once you begin

(30:29):
to get the larger inca and as tickets cetera empires. Right, Well,
there's a it's a it's a very open area of
study um among archaeologists and anthropologists, but it's getting more
and more attention now. Although I have to say that
the notion of psychedelics in the Americas or whatever we're

(30:51):
going to call them, the term changes from time to time,
goes back to classic ethnobotanists. I think it was a
guy named Winston Labar who first termed this idea of
the American drug complex. And he just did this kind
of empirical study and he found out that something like
of what we're known of psychoactive alkaloidal substances that were

(31:16):
used had their origins somewhere in the America's usually in
the tropics. And there's a ecological reason for this. But
why societies, small scale and then larger scale societies got
so involved, and so it was a topic of tremendous
um researched by ethnobotanist, the most famous of whom you're
probably familiar with, who's Richard Evan Shults and who has

(31:38):
probably been mentioned on more episodes of Psychoactives. What I associated, however,
was that you also pointed out that he was from
an American perspective, very pivotal and had a global influence,
but that there were other European equivalents who even preceded
him in some of these ethnobotanical studies. Yes, he was
not the first ethnobotanist, but he had a tremendous impact

(31:59):
because of this position at Harvard. He was somewhat of
a maverick. I don't know. He was apparently a Republican
UM very he held very conservative political views, but he
did you know he collaborated with Hoffman too in one
book later about but he was a cat. He had
to use full names here with Albert who you know

(32:21):
who who discovered LSD or synthesizing and in the forties. Um,
but he was a he wasn't ethnobotanists who did a
lot of firsthand research among indigenous people's and other people's
in Colombia and in the Amazon. And he had this

(32:42):
anthropologists ethnobotanist idea of drugs neutral. It's something to be
studied it's something to be relativized. All societies used them.
We need to know more about this, We need to
know about their meanings. There forms of ingestion, their their
chemist reason. He was a great cataloguer of the of

(33:04):
the particularly hallucinogenic um plants of the Americas, and he
kind of legitimized them. No, and a powerful influence on
Andy Wile and Wade Davis and Dennis Mintenna and a
whole range of us and also somebody because he was
trying these substances as well. It makes you realize how
pathetic in some respects that here you have the federal
government National Student on Drug Abuse, you know, spending billions

(33:26):
of dollars to give out to study drugs to people
who are essentially required not to have used those. I mean,
it just said, you know, let's let's let's tie our
hands behind our back and trying to make generalizations about
the properties of these substances. Um. Going back to your
idea about technology and other things to take in suit
account are the technologies of smuggling and contraband and um,

(33:52):
there's a lot of interest in that now, and smuggling
cultures and smuggling routes and how drugs become a wizard
smuggled goods and their technology is important too, because you know,
one are the first technologies that are used, they're going
to be you know, people walking with through borders with
you know a few at it's called ants smuggling. And

(34:13):
then there's gonna be the automobile, and then there's going
to be the train, and then there's gonna be the airplane,
and then there's gonna be the Internet. And you get
to a point where the technologies that are supporting UM
the abilities of smugglers and contraband is to get around
a prohibitionist regime which is taking shape really from the

(34:34):
sixties onwards. The technologies are favoring UM smuggling more than
the control I mean call that goes into what some
people call the Iron law prohibition right of drugs getting
more potent, more compact. You know, probably the scientific article
I've most quoted over many episodes of Psychoactive is the

(34:54):
piece that Joseph Westernmeier wrote in the Archives of General
Psychiatry fifty years ago called the pro heroin Effects of
anti Opium laws and pointed out, as you had prohibitions
on opium emerging in Southwest and Southeast Asia. The market
shifted towards heroin because it was more compact, easier to smuggle,
more discreet to consume. If you even look back at
a hundred years ago in the the United States when we

(35:17):
when we banned opium in ports, you begin to have
the switch to heroin, right, Um, you can see the
same thing happened, Um, I mean more contemporaneously with the
bands on first on pharmaceutical opiates and with heroin, the
shift to fentonel. You know, perhaps the most compact form
of opioids we have available more or less and now
the most deadly. And that's happened in a whole range

(35:39):
of other areas as well. And mean to cocaine is
to some extent that story as well. Well. Well, cocon
never traveled very far as a commodity, really couldn't do that.
It didn't stay. It wasn't powerful enough, it didn't have
that cultural kind of transmissibility, so it stayed within the
Andean region, much like what court right argue that there's

(36:01):
some regional drugs, but once it was actually indust For
a second, because I'm just having done recently episodes on
cava the South Pacific substance, and also on cot from
the Horn of Africa and Yemen. Similarly, like coca, these
things do not transport well so that they would have
been they I mean, and those have remained essentially regional

(36:22):
psychoactive plant products right where coca you know, by virtue
of being refined and then getting first into coca Cola
van Mariani, the popular Bordeau wine with a co confusion,
and then more in the broader cocaine markets is different
in that regard, right, um afordable, but coffee and tobacco
and tea, those all do transport very well. And alcohol

(36:48):
it can be produced anywhere, but also transports very well. Right,
So the transportability of different substances appears to make us
very sign I mean, if you ask why why thn
cava are cot? I mean, those things might have been
more appealing if in a kind of um modernized element,
if they could have traveled well, And it makes sure,

(37:10):
I mean, I always wondered the question what would compete
effectively with coffee in the contemporary world, and if coca
becomes decriminalized in some ways, could it emerge as a
competitive product, or if they figure out what contra cava
how to turn it into something or is it the flavor,
the smell, on the taste. And that's why coffee is
so pre eminent where is it? Doesn't that's not true
of many of these other substances, A wide a variety

(37:34):
of caffeinated or pseudo caffeinated substances like what and from
Brazil or mante from the Southern cone. They could become
minor competitors as global commodities to coffee. But you know,
coffee is coffee, though there was a problem, wasn't the
in the I wish you mean coffee is coffee because

(37:56):
if it's wonderful roma, I mean that thing, it's and
it's already established itself in the path dependency since the
sixteenth century. Is the kind of you know, primary um
stimulant of of Western societies and others UM. But you know,
in the ninet twenties, the League of Nations was worried

(38:19):
that there would be a trade in raw caffeine because
there were mountains of caffeine that were being stored when
they began to make decaffeated coffee UM. And they thought
that this, you know, this white substance was going to
be like the next um drug. That was going to
be you know, across traffic, across borders. But I don't

(38:40):
think the global caffeine trade UM never took off as feared,
or it's only made it into a few energy drinks
that we unfortunately consumed a lot of UM today. Well, Paul,
I'm just thinking if we think in terms of drug biographies, right,
I mean, you've sort of done one on cocaine. But
if we look like if coffee, for example, right, I mean,

(39:03):
if you look at where it was originally sort of
used and then where the major loci production have been
in recent centuries, right, I mean that's one like if
you take something like tobacco that comes from the America's
and and maybe the same is true of cacao, which
becomes chocolate, comes from the America's and becomes globalized, right,
and then those things begin to produce be produced in

(39:24):
many other parts of the world. Coca maybe the same
thing where you begin to get production in the East Indies,
for example, Indonesia, Malaysia. But I'm thinking about when we
look at these substances, which are the ones that sort
of emerged in one area and that region continues to
be the dominant production region. Throughout centuries. Which are the

(39:45):
ones where it begins in one region and then another
region basically becomes a dominant production place. And which are
the ones where it's initially starts someplace else and then
like coffee or something gets you know, becomes you know,
disassociated from its original I could give you the whole
lecture about the kind of the shifting dynamics of you know,

(40:05):
coffee production and marketing around the world, because it's um
there's been a lot written about it in it but
what I would say the most important thing to bear
in mind is that these goods were part of the
rise of early modern and then modern commercial empires and colonialism.

(40:26):
So coffee, you know what, as a as a plant,
most of what we consumers coffee today came from the
Horn of Africa. It had a across the Arabian Peninsula
a kind of coffee culture, and spread slowly throughout the
Middle East. But it's the rise of European colonialism that
shifts the locusts of where coffee is going to be important. Um,

(40:52):
the Indian Ocean region actually began the whole um rise
of coffee as a global commodity, but very much under
the control of indigenous merchant groups in India and along
what we we call the Emirates today. And but then

(41:14):
later by the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the Dutch and
the English and the French are getting involved and displacing.
It was a very profitable commodity, and they displaced these
native merchant um networks, and coffee itself as a colonial
crop begins to spread to areas where it could be

(41:34):
more profitably concentrated by these colonial powers. So the first
major area where this amplification of coffee happens, well, first
there's the Dutch in Java, which is still why we
call um coffee Java sometimes. But as the Caribbean and
Haiti in the French they grow. They they they plantationized

(41:55):
coffee in the Caribbean with the slaver regime in Sandmang,
and then when that's overthrown in the eighteenth century, coffee
begins to spread to another slave regime in Brazil and
expands on a global scale in the nineteenth century in
a way that had never been seen before, very much

(42:16):
part of the rise of the informal American sovereignties in
the America. So the big coffee market that's emerging in
the nineteenth centuries between the mass consumption of coffee in
the United States with all the rise of these frontier
markets and coffee roasters and a m p s and
all of this, and these Brazilian plantations that are multiplying

(42:39):
and multiplying, particularly around the Santos you know, sal Bolo region.
So by the end of the nineteenth century, Brazil is
producing eight of the world's coffee, and it's like a
hundred times more coffee than has been produced at the
beginning of the nineteenth century. And it's become an everyday commodity,
democratized in the United States and beginning to become democratized

(43:03):
in Europe as well. And really, you know, at that
point has transformed, um, the way we we live um.
And why did Brazil lose that role? Then in the
twentieth century, Brazil still has an important role in the
history of coffee. But to give you the short answer
of that, the commodity historian and myself will tell you
this is it. Brazil continued to be very important, along

(43:26):
with Colombia and Central America, dominating world coffee markets until
the eighties. And something happened at the end of the
eighties that changed the way coffee um was marketed globally,
and that was the end of the Cold War. At
the end of the Cold War, the International Coffee Agreement,
which was a way that the United States thought that

(43:48):
it was containing revolution in the tropical belts of the
America's and Africa and Southeast Asia because so many millions
of coffee peasants depended on the price of coffee being
you know, stable, so they wouldn't become communists. The Americans
withdrew all their support from the International Coffee Agreement, and

(44:09):
so coffee began to fluctuate in price and in ways
that was unimaginable during the Cold War, and that's led
to the rise of these new coffee producers. Vietnam is
one of the largest coffee producers in the world now, ironically,
but also African countries. The coffee belt has sort of
spread throughout the globe. They're um you know, more in

(44:31):
response to market mechanisms than this politicized market that had
been in the mercantilest market that had been in the
twenty century. Let's take a break here and go to
an ad Now politic compared of contrast to other drugs,

(45:01):
coca is so identified with the Indian region of Latin America.
But there's a point at which what the Dutch takeing
to East Asia, and that emerged as what any I
don't know, was it even more dominant export exporter for
some years than in Latin America. Yeah, well, the quick
version of that story about how that comes back around.

(45:25):
Coca is emerging along with cocaine, you know, as a sizeable,
important um new drug. Um It was used in drinks,
and he was used in medicines. Cocaine was a medical
commodity of great importance, particularly in surgery. It was beginning
to be there were beginning to be some of strong

(45:47):
reservations about its wider use, and so European imperial powers,
including the British, the French, the Dutch and the Germans,
began experiment with their own coca plantations. They all wanted
to see if in their colonies, you know, this was
the era of the imperilous grab, particularly in Africa, in

(46:08):
their own colonies, whether or not they could make a
killing on you know, a wide variety of commodities and
drug substances. The British did successfully grow coca in India
at Sri Lanka, but the one that really took off
was the Dutch, and there was a long history behind this. UM.

(46:29):
Dutch were consummate commercial imperialists and their botanical gardens were um,
we're always um experimenting with new commodities, and they started
setting up in Java and Sumatra kind of model plantations
for coca, and the coca plantations there were much more
cost effective than they were in the Andes, where it

(46:51):
was generally a kind of a chaotic peasant run prop
the way we think of today coffee, say, in a
small hold place like Colombia. UM. And instead there were
these massive plantations, very high productivity, went to scientific processes
and linked to a kind of a mercantilist policy of

(47:12):
the Dutch state, which was to dominate the cocaine markets
of Europe. And so the Dutch set up this national
cocaine factory, and it was in the middle of Amsterdam
and all this you know, East Asian coca came up
there in the teens and through the nineteen twenties was
made into cocaine spread around Europe. Um. There was so

(47:33):
much of it being produced in Holland that it was infiltrating.
It's kind of been a gray zone into Asian markets
as well as a kind of an illicit drug UM
and so what was But there's never any there's never
any real emergence of domestic consumption of coca cocaine very
much that we can you know that we can point

(47:56):
to UM not in Indonesia and what we call today Indonesia. Uh,
there are people who are studying that in the case
of India, whether or not that happened in the case
of India or not, but really not UM. And what's
interesting is that the Dutch actually got rid of most
of their cocaine and coca voluntarily. It was one of

(48:17):
the few examples of this happening. And that is when
they were has to do with some very complex politics
of the League of Nations and trying to limit drugs
in the nine twenties and nineties, and the Dutch decided
that the cocaine business was just not that important to them.
What was more important was getting concessions about their opiate
farming as it was called in Southeast Asia. So they

(48:39):
downgraded the um the cocaine colonialism that they had. That
Japanese had done something very similar by the way, with
Formosa what we call today Taiwan um and developed a
very high grade modernistic cocaine industry based on UM for

(48:59):
most and colonized coca that was Some of the largest
UM pharmaceutical companies in Japan were involved in this. So,
Paul switching subjects here, you know, on the criminalization and
evolution of prohibition regimes, right, I mean both. I don't
just mean global regimes, but even prohibition laws. But when

(49:20):
we look at these prohibitions from a more global perspective,
is it right to put it all on the US
and on the West? Is being the driving force for
all of these things? Or in fact, are there very
traditions of prohibitionism throughout the world going back centuries, if
not millennia. So you've asked a good question, what is

(49:40):
it that makes twenty century global prohibition your term? There
are some historians who can try to contest them. We
never really had full global prohibition. What is it that
makes it different? One of the things in my mind
that makes it different is is part of this whole
thing that you don't what sociologists like Scott would call

(50:03):
high modern modernism, this idea that the state can absolutely
try to control individual behavior, restructure society according to you know,
a set of ideal parameters, and we've seen that most
of those ideas you know, have failed, whether it be
the Soviet Union or drug prohibition, they fall into kind

(50:27):
of overambitious, you know, state led projects. And I think
a lot of people who are looking at drugs are
now and alcohol as well, alcohol prohibition. You said that
you had MC around here, you know. Her thesis is
that alcohol prohibition in the United States was integral to
the process of modern you know, federal state building in
the United States. And I think a lot of people
who look at drugs now are interested in its intersection

(50:49):
with processes like state building and wars. But whether or
not is it always from the center? Is it that?
That has been one of the most contested UM issues
in recent years. And I'll just give you an example
of one of the most interesting books on this subject,
which is Uma compos A very good colleague of mine

(51:13):
published a book about a decade ago called Homegrown Marijuana
and the Origins of Mexico's War on Drugs. What he
argues in here is that by the nineteenth century, first
of all, marijuana cannabis is not indigenous to Mexico, but
it was one of these drugs that gets adopted and
becomes indigenized during the nineteenth century, mostly by non indigenous

(51:36):
people's mestizo people's in Mexico, but by the late nineteenth
century becomes very much the discourses around marijuana become very
frightening to Mexican elites. Marijuana is something that that poor, desperate,
violent people use, and there's this idea of marijuana leading
to madness, an idea that um comes in those every

(51:57):
ten years or so, you know you and now um
and so marijuana madness. You know, what was translating the
United States is reefor madness. According to Compost, is really
a conception that's that's made in its modern form in Mexico,
and Mexico's drug laws by n seventeen are beginning the

(52:19):
prohibition of marijuana in Mexico, and so he in the
end it's always suggestive, but he suggests that what happens
in the United States, rather than racism against Mexican Americans,
he suggests it was a different type of flow. Mexico's
prohibitionist fears and anxieties about marijuana become adopted by physicians

(52:42):
and politicians in the United States. In the nineteen thirties
and are then amplified by the kind of Anslinger type
of campaign. So in in in composed this idea, you know,
so there's nothing that's American about this. It can be
and I can have origins in other places as well.

(53:05):
So just to like Pageant often is at one point
you also make in your writing if a cannabis is
paradoxically the leaf studied of the major world drugs, why
do you think that, Why do you think that is? Oh? Yeah, well,
I think that that is actually being remedied now. I
think there are a lot of people who are doing dissertation,
serious dissertations. I had one in my own department about
the Caribbean recently. But I I have a a pretty

(53:31):
good thesis as to why when drug history began to
really began with the hard drugs, right, it began with
those studies that we mentioned earlier about opiates, and then
people began to study cocaine, and for some reason marijuana
just remained completely out of the scope of people who
are doing serious studies. And why was that? Well, I

(53:51):
think in part it was the image problem. Marijuana was
just too much of a stoner's drug. It was something
that we assumed we knew about. Um it was too easy.
Um it wasn't something that was the fit. A serious
type of study was kind to the Cheech and Chong
of drug history. But that has begun to shift. I mean,

(54:15):
they're very serious studies that are emerging and they're changing
a lot of ideas about the global spread of cannabis,
about the global impact about I mean, Paul I was
struck by the amount that's coming out about cannabis and Africa.
I mean, just before a trip I took to Nigerian
Sierra Leone and I was doing some background reading and
there's serious scholarship about cannabis and South Africa and West

(54:36):
Africa are parts of other parts. So yes, because it
was always assumed that, for example that um uh. There
was even a synthesis by Chris Duval The African Roots
of Marijuana came out just a few years ago and
has had a tremendous impact on the field, and he
argues that Africa was an important way station in the

(54:59):
global ation and dissemination of marijuana to the Americas and elsewhere.
That it's is completely hidden history of very very um
um rapid African innovation and use of different forms of cannabis,
including and this might shock you, the invention of the
bomb in East Africa. Um but there's been a lot

(55:24):
about Duval's book that other historians who work on cannabis
is and oh well, I don't know if that linguistic
argument works that well or there's not enough research on this.
But I think cannabis's time has come now for serious research,
given that, um it stopped being such a marginal topic.

(55:45):
I mean, you know, for years the only source that
people had was the Marijuana Conviction, those types of works
that were written very much in haste in the early
seventies of her to you know, have a counter critique
to that's the Marijuana Conviction by Richard Bonnie and White Bread.
Richard Bonnie having been the deputy director of the Nixon

(56:06):
Schaefer Commission fifty years ago and still a professor teaching
at the University of Virginia Law School. So paulicies were
almost at a time. Last question here, when we look
at the major lacuna in drug history studies these days,
I mean, we see more stuff emerging on synthetic drugs,
for example, and how important that is raises important questions about.

(56:27):
You know, as more and more drugs can be produced
synthetically at lower costs and get into from their planned origins,
that's going to represent a major evolution. But the thing
that struck me, in part because of my own personal
role in all of this over the last thirty years
and my own evolution, is it still seems I cannot
think of a serious, really substantive, comprehensive history of US

(56:49):
drug policy from the nineteen seventies to the present, in
terms of looking at the War on drugs, in terms
of looking at the congressional politics, in terms of looking
at White House policy of but going into you know,
doing fl I request, in doing archival research, I don't
know if you can think of anything I mean substantial.
And I wonder, you know, is this in the works

(57:10):
or are there good reasons why this hasn't happened as yet?
And that's a great question, you know, you somebody else
brought that up with me recently. And you know, sometimes
in academic fields there are some questions that are so
big and they you just remain there as holes because
people assume it's been done and it hasn't been done.
And you're right, there have been people who worked a
lot on the mid century UM and US drug policies,

(57:34):
like the book by Katherine Fright. Now there's more and
more work and kind of those historical archives, but I
don't think that there's an overarching history of the US
War on drugs. In part it's because, like a lot
of historical questions, people were waiting to see how it
turned out, how does the story end? And now that

(57:55):
we see that the story is ending in a way
that was not for addicted by his constructors in the
nineteen fifties through seventies UM, and is falling apart and
losing all consensus and losing global consensus as well. For example,
we have no partners to wage a war on drugs
left in Latin America. UM. That's an important example. UM.

(58:19):
I think, yeah, it's time, and I've heard of people. UM.
For example, a colleague of mine in Britain who had
worked on Mexico wants to write a history of the
d e A in this whole period UM and their involvements.
But he says it's very difficult, driven UM kind of

(58:40):
the hiding or hoarding of documents. So it's very difficult
to do that type of war. So we're likely works
that were written a long time ago, like Epstein's Agency
of Fear, written in the moment with a kind of
ideological way to them book about the Nix scenaria. But
he was a journalist. Well, listen, Paul, we are basically

(59:01):
out of time. I hope. I We've left a lot
of dangling questions and half completed answers, which I hope
will take up in future future seasons of Psychoactive, if
in fact we succeed in that. But I'm very grateful
for you taking the time uh to talk with me
and my listeners on Psychoactive about the global history of drugs.

(59:22):
So thank you very part of this. Okay, Paul and
I'll be following up offline so we can schedule our
next bike ride around Brooklyn. Okay. If you're enjoying Psychoactive,
please tell your friends about it, or you can write

(59:42):
us a review at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get
your podcasts. We love to hear from our listeners. If
you'd like to share your own stories, comes and ideas,
then leave us a message at one eight three three
seven seven nine sixty that's eight three three psycho zero,
or you can email us at Psychoactive at protozoa dot

(01:00:04):
com or find me on Twitter at Ethan natal Man.
You can also find contact information in our show notes.
Psychoactive is a production of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures.
It's hosted by me Ethan Nadelman. It's produced by Noham
Osband and Josh Stain. The executive producers are Dylan Golden,
Ari Handel, Elizabeth Geesus and Darren Aronofsky from Protozoa Pictures,

(01:00:28):
Alex Williams and Matt Frederick from My Heart Radio, and
me Ethan Naedelman. Our music is by Ari Blucien and
a special thanks to a Brio, s F Bianca Grimshaw
and Robert BB. Next week, I'll be talking with Charlie

(01:00:52):
Winninger and New York psychotherapist and author of Listening to Ecstasy,
as well as his wife, Shelley Winninger, about healthy age
and sexuality with M D m A and marijuana. And
it may help me get in touch with my eight
year old, my eighteen year old, my twenty eight year old.
And I can do that when I'm sober, because my

(01:01:14):
inner child, or my inner eighteen year old, or my
inner thirty year Olds. Thanks to tell me and thanks
to remind me of and that that's vitality and spontaneity
that I had then is still available to me. Subscribe
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