H-Diplo Article Review 1168: Paranzino on “Forum: U.S. Foreign Relations and the New Drug History”

christopher ball Discussion

H-Diplo Article Review 1168

14 March 2023

“Forum: U.S. Foreign Relations and the New Drug History,” Diplomatic History 45:5 (November 2021), 885-953. https://doi.org/10.1093/dh/dhab042

https://hdiplo.org/to/AR1168
Editor: Diane Labrosse | Commissioning Editor: Thomas Maddux | Production Editor: Christopher Ball

Review by Michelle D. Paranzino, US Naval War College

The War on Drugs is an important part of US and world history, but it is not merely that. On October 6, 2022, President Joe Biden pardoned all US citizens and permanent residents who had violated the federal law against possession of marijuana. He also suggested that the classification of marijuana as a Schedule I narcotic under the Controlled Substances Act did not make a whole lot of sense. While these moves seemingly indicate a historic departure from past practice, Biden’s pardon did not include growers or sellers of marijuana, nor did it result in the release of a single federal prisoner.[1] Moreover, the rescheduling of marijuana is not a simple process that can be accomplished via executive order, and a complete descheduling seems unlikely.[2] Meanwhile, the public hysteria over fentanyl portends another chapter in the drug wars, complete with a menacing foreign enemy—China—which is purportedly intent on undermining American society from within.[3]

It is thus heartening to see that the role of drugs in the history of US foreign relations is the subject of a special forum in Diplomatic History. As Daniel Weimer and Matthew R. Pembleton note in their introduction, “the nexus between U.S. foreign relations and drug control is a valuable window into the study of U.S. power and empire.”[4] The contributors to the forum reflect an admirable methodological diversity and are drawn from both established and emerging scholars in the field. Pembleton is the author of a groundbreaking study on the drug wars that transforms our understanding of their history through a novel periodization that extends the story further back in time, to the aftermath of the Second World War, when the Federal Bureau of Narcotics began globalizing its counternarcotics policies and ideologies.[5] Weimer’s book, while following a more traditional periodization that focuses on the 1960s and 1970s, demonstrates the salience of modernizing ideologies and counterinsurgency to the history of US drug control efforts in Mexico, Burma, and Thailand.[6]

In Pembleton’s chapter “Revising the Drug War: A Genealogical and Historiographical Sketch,” he raises a number of key issues that are central to our collective definition and understanding of the lower-case ‘drug wars,’ or upper-case ‘War on Drugs.’[7] Regardless of how one chooses to periodize or characterize these wars, they have involved multiple domains and theaters. Importantly, “though the drug war has a long history,” it also has “an underdeveloped historiography that has left many controversies unresolved” (890). Pembleton’s contribution provides further clarification into the origins and continuities of the drug wars. Specifically, he notes that they are “iterative and multi-causal,” and that they have “never been solely about drugs” (891). He argues that the drug war has been less “top-down” than has typically been depicted (896), and that “structural factors are more important than individual actors” (897). This interpretation helps explain the remarkable longevity and continuity of the drug wars and the centrality of “perennial tensions around race, class, and gender” (896). Perhaps most significantly, “the drug war has taught Americans to accept a state of perpetual conflict and imparted the lesson that the exercise of violence at home and abroad is the only way to safeguard U.S. security” (901-2).

Jeremy Kuzmarov, the author of several books on the drug wars and the US national security state, contributes an article on “The Failure of the U.S. High-Tech War on Drugs.”[8] He argues that the drug war is “a good lens for understanding the limits of U.S. international policing capabilities and the perils of an over-reliance on social control technologies, which have bred dystopian outcomes” (904). The article contributes to a burgeoning historiography exploring the connections between armed interventionism abroad and the growth of surveillance and policing technologies at home.[9]

One of the most original contributions is Joseph Spillane’s comparative examination of drug prohibition in Cairo, Egypt, and New Orleans, Louisiana.[10] In adopting cities as the center of analysis, rather than the nation-state or international organizations, Spillane is able to explore “the struggles over appropriation and control of public space, the influence of locally-contingent policy interpretation, and the impact of locally-directed policing and public health interventions.” Significantly, he also considers the “body of the heroin user itself as a site of analysis.” (917). The article weaves together thematic strands from Spillane’s previous scholarship, which has explored the bottom-up pressures leading to cocaine prohibition and the cultural history of prison reform.[11] In proffering new sites and methods of analysis that break free from the constraints of the traditionally top-down political narrative, Spillane reminds us of the many unexplored (and unexpected) angles of drug prohibitionism.

With her article, “Drug Control in the Age of Neoliberalism,” Brittany Edmoundson establishes herself as a fresh new voice in the debate over the US drug war and its consequences for source countries.[12] Framing her analysis as an exploration of the “intersection of neoliberalism and drug control in U.S. foreign relations with Latin America,” Edmoundson keys in on the example of Bolivia to trace the “mechanisms U.S. diplomats, policymakers, and politicians used to secure US influence over foreign drug control and economic policies while revealing the contradictions of pursuing a militarized drug control approach within the context of a neoliberal economic program” (927). This is an important article that reveals the hypocrisy at the core of the Reagan administration’s purported embrace of limited government and the free market.

Last but not least, “Stuck in Traffic: Conflicting Regimes of Global Drug Regulation” reminds readers of “the way narcotics control had the paradoxical effect of helping to construct the inverse category of rational use of medicines.”[13] Co-authors David Herzberg and Jeremy A. Greene are giants in the field of drug history, having authored or co-authored nearly a dozen books between the two of them.[14] The themes of the article will not surprise readers familiar with their work, as it explores the “project of separating ‘drugs’ from ‘medicines’” and the “boundary concept of ‘legitimate medical need’” (941). This is accomplished by putting two ostensibly different documents—the first edition of the World Drug Situation, published in 1988 by the Essential Drugs Program of the World Health Organization, and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s annual World Drug Report—into dialogue with one another. Doing so exposes the damage inflicted by “the separation of these expert bodies,” which has recreated “a moral dichotomy that inheres in things (drugs) and elides the political realities that truly shape harm and benefit: access to drugs; the context in which people use drugs; and the machinery for governing and policing drug commerce and drug use” (951).

The plurality of viewpoints on drugs and the history of US foreign policy makes this Diplomatic History forum a must-read for anyone seeking to better understand the ways that drugs have been defined and categorized over time (in a politicized licit/illicit binary), the centrality of narcotics control to US policy, and the consequences of US narcotics control policies for individuals and source countries alike. The forum introduces debates over periodization, characterization, structure, and agency that scholars of the drug wars must continue to grapple with, and in doing so proves the longevity of its value and contribution to the field.

 

Michelle Paranzino is an assistant professor in the Strategy & Policy department at the US Naval War College. She is the author (as Michelle Getchell) of The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Cold War: A Short History with Documents (Cambridge/Lexington: Hackett, 2018) and is currently working on a book about Ronald Reagan and the War on Drugs.

 

 

[1] Jacob Sullum, “Biden’s Marijuana Pardons Did Not Free a Single Federal Prisoner or Deliver the Expungement He Promised,” Reason, October 24, 2022, https://reason.com/2022/10/24/bidens-marijuana-pardons-did-not-free-a-single-federal-prisoner-or-deliver-the-expungement-he-promised/

[2] “The Complexity of Rescheduling or Descheduling Marijuana Under Federal Law,” October 20, 2022, https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/the-complexity-of-rescheduling-or-8303986/

[3] Phelim Kine, “The War on Drugs Puts a Target on China,” Politico, February 7, 2022, https://www.politico.com/news/2022/02/07/fentanyl-china-war-on-drugs-00005920

[4] Daniel Weimer and Matthew R. Pembleton, “Introduction: U.S. Foreign Relations and the New Drug History,” Diplomatic History 45:5 (Nov. 2021): 885-9, here 887.

[5] Matthew R. Pembleton, Containing Addiction: The Federal Bureau of Narcotics and the Origins of America’s Global Drug War (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2017).

[6] Daniel Weimer, Seeing Drugs: Modernization, Counterinsurgency, and U.S. Narcotics Control in the Third World, 1969-1976 (Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2011).

[7] Matthew R. Pembleton, “Revising the Drug War: A Genealogical and Historiographical Sketch,” Diplomatic History 45:5 (Nov. 2021): 890-902.

[8] Jeremy Kuzmarov, “The Failure of the U.S. High-Tech War on Drugs,” Diplomatic History 45:5 (Nov. 2021):  903-914; Kuzmarov, The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009); Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation-Building in the American Century (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012).

[9] See, for instance, Peter Andreas and Ethan Nadelmann, Policing the Globe: Criminalization and Crime Control in International Relations (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Stuart Schrader, Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019).

[10] Joseph F. Spillane, “Global Drug Prohibition in Local Context: Heroin, Malaria, and Harm,” Diplomatic History 45:5 (Nov. 2021): 915-926.

[11] Joseph F. Spillane, Cocaine: From Medical Marvel to Modern Menace in the United States, 1884-1920 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Coxsackie: The Life and Death of Prison Reform (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).

[12] Brittany Edmoundson, “Drug Control in the Age of Neoliberalism,” Diplomatic History 45:5 (Nov. 2021): 927-939.

[13] David Herzberg and Jeremy A. Greene, “Stuck in Traffic: Conflicting Regimes of Global Drug Regulation,” Diplomatic History 45:5 (Nov. 2021): 940-953, here, 943.

[14] Among these titles are Jeremy A. Greene, Prescribing by Numbers: Drugs and the Definition of Disease (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Jeremy A. Greene, Generic: The Unbranding of Modern Medicine (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); David Herzberg, Happy Pills in America: From Miltown to Prozac (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); David Herzberg, White Market Drugs: Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in America (Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2020).