The War on Drugs, Psychoactive Revolution
The War on Drugs, The Ganjia Complex
Coca-Cola, Tea Slavery and Coffee
Tea
The Dutch first imported tea to Europe in 1610, but it remained quite ex pensive until the British East India Company commenced direct trade with Canton in 1713. After that the trade, legal and illegal, steadily increased. In 1784 the British government removed most of the duties on tea.
Low taxes undercut smugglers and further increased consumption, which reached over two pounds per capita—about 400 cups per year—in England and Wales at the end of the eighteenth century. By then consumers were paying only a quarter of what they had paid for tea in the 1720s.
The steady expansion of the China trade by the British East India Company and its rivals was the first stage of the development of the world tea industry. The second was the appropriation, in the mid-nineteenth century, of tea cultivation by the European colonial powers. The Dutch introduced tea bushes to the Coffeen (coffee-tired) lands of Java. in India and Ceylon, where a blight had so devastated the coffee industry that dead trees were stripped and shipped to England to make legs for tea tables.
April 1887 marked the turning point. In that month the British, Europe’s leading tea consumers, first imported more Indian and Ceylonese tea than Chinese. Cost was again decisive. The Chinese taxed their tea more heavily at the point of export and produced it less efficiently than on the large Indian plantations.
Chinese attempts to maintain the price by putting less tea on the market proved futile, as they no longer held a monopoly on production; Indian and Ceylonese producers simply took up the slack.
Aggressive retailers like Thomas Lipton made large, direct purchases of Indian and Ceylonese leaves. By using heavy turnover to compensate for low profit margins, Lipton could sell his tea for a little more than a shilling a pound, a sum within the reach of the poorest families.
Cacao
Cacao, another plant destined to become an important African crop, originated in the American tropics. The Olmecs domesticated it sometime after 1500 b.c. The Spanish learned of it from the Maya and the Aztecs, for whom chocolate, made from pulverized cacao beans and various spices, was the beverage of the social elites.
They served it at the end of banquets, along with tobacco, rather like the port and cigars of later European aristocracy. Chocolate bore similar aristocratic connotations in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, where it came to be drunk warm and sweet rather than cold and bitter in the Aztec manner.
Particularly popular among the secular and clerical elites of Spain, Italy, and France, chocolate had about it an air of ancient regime decadence. The obese Marquis de Sade was obsessed with it in all its forms.
From prison he badgered his wife for ground chocolate, crème au chocolate, chocolate pastilles, and even cacao butter suppositories to soothe his piles. “I asked . . . for a cake with icing,” he wrote in 1779, “but I want it to be chocolate and black inside from chocolate as the devil’s ass is black from smoke.”
Chocolate was democratized in the nineteenth century. Technological in novation, industrialized production, and expanded cultivation—Europeans were importing more than 100 million pounds by 1899—made it widely affordable as both beverage and solid food.
In 1828 Coenraad Johannes Van Houten, a Dutch chemist, patented a process for pressing most of the cacao butter from chocolate. The resulting cake, powdered and treated with alkaline salts, could be mixed with water to make cocoa, a cheap beverage that required no gilt pots or beating of heavy liquids.
Cocoa became a breakfast drink for children, chocolate candies tokens of middle-class affection. West Africans also produced kola nuts, a crop that entered world commerce late and in an unusual fashion.
Kola nuts are richer in caffeine than coffee beans and contain traces of theobromine, a milder stimulant also found in cacao. Kola nuts were traditionally broken into small pieces and chewed for their stimulating, mood-elevating, and aphrodisiac effects.
Because they dried out easily and required special packaging, their long-distance trade was largely limited to western Savanna Muslims, who prized kola as an alternative to alcohol. Coffee, tea, and cacao were less perishable and hence better suited to international commerce. Coffee,
for instance, could travel long distances without much detriment to quality, provided supercargoes took some elementary precautions, such as keeping the beans out of holds that had contained pepper. Kola did not enter world trade in any significant way until it became an ingredient in medicinal and “soft” drinks.
The international success of Vin Mariani, a coca wine introduced in the 1860s, led to experimentation with other alcohol-stimulant combinations like Vino-Kolafra, a kola extract in Marsala wine.
(“A liberal dose will sober a drunken negro in half an hour.”) The most famous of these new products was Coca-Cola, a blend of “the two most massive stimulants known to pre-industrial cultures,” their bitter after taste masked by a mix of favours and citrus oils.
It began life as Pemberton’s French Wine Coca, but its inventor, Dr. John Pemberton, removed the wine to placate prohibitionists. He repositioned Coca-Cola as a temperance drink. In 1903 his successors also removed the coca, by then a controversial drug as sociated with black crime sprees.
They replaced it with a decocainized ex tract to maintain the favour and added crystalline caffeine powder, extracted from refuse tea sweepings and other sources, to maintain the kick.
Coca Cola
This raised the wrath of Dr. Harvey Wiley, the great American apostle of pure food and drugs. Wiley defined a drug habit as “the taking of any stimulating, exciting drug which has no food value, and which produces directly excitation of any of the organs of the body or nerves controlling them in such a way as to suggest or compel a repetition of the dose.”
By that standard caffeine was habit-forming, and toxic in the bargain. Wiley’s conviction grew out of medical observation and personal experience. During the Civil War he traded his coffee ration for milk and felt much better as a result.
He took Coca-Cola to court in 1911, declaring caffeine to be a dangerous and unlabelled additive in a product marketed and sold to children. After lengthy litigation, the company reduced the caffeine content by half In 1910, the year before the trial opened, Coca-Cola was available in every U.S. state and territory. But it remained a largely American product until World War II opened the window of global opportunity.
Coca-Cola’s Robert Woodruff made it a policy to supply U.S. soldiers anywhere in the world with nickel Cokes, whatever losses the company might absorb. (“We’re playing the world long,” he later remarked.)
The government went along, exempting Coca-Cola’s military sales from sugar rationing. The GIs in turn introduced millions of Europeans and Asians to the drink. Sixty-four bottling plants, some manned by German and Japanese POWs, sprouted in their triumphal wake.
By 1955 this “sublimated essence of all America stands for, a decent thing honestly made, universally distributed, conscientiously improved through the years”—according to James Farley, New Deal politico turned chairman of the Coca-Cola Export Corporation—sold in 89 different lands.
That figure rose to 155 in 1991. Pepsi-Cola, its chief rival, was by then available in 151 countries. One of the “conscientious improvements” of Coca-Cola and its competitors was the removal of the kola extract as cheaper sources of caffeine and taste became available. Modern cola drinks, observes the historian Paul Lovejoy, are just as “uncola” as 7-Up. Like most good puns, this one limns a deeper truth.
The key psychoactive ingredient in soft drinks is caffeine, whether it comes from kola, guarana, or any other plant. The same is true of coffee and tea. Of course, these drinks are much more than stimulating drugs, as any anthropologist or advertising executive will attest. They are rich with cultural significance and political connotation.
Citizens of Warsaw lined the streets and cheered the arrival of the first Coca-Cola trucks. But none of these drinks would have achieved the same degree of worldwide popularity had they not contained caffeine or an equivalent stimulant.
Although he became a bit of a crank on the subject, Wiley had a point: no caffeine, no Coca-Cola phenomenon. Caffeine was an essential booster stage in the rocket of drugs that lifted Coca-Cola into planetary orbit, an orbit sustained by cleverly exploiting its status as American icon and embodiment of the western consumer lifestyle.
The War on People
In the 1970s, the Nixon administration developed a conviction that drugs had become a significant problem. That problem had to be addressed with public law, using the strongest tools in the arsenal, and to their fullest extent. The offensive would target the production, distribution, and consumption of these substances.
A Washington Post journalist describes the War on Drugs’ onset as follows: As declarations of war go, it was low key. On June 17, 1971, President Richard M. Nixon held a news briefing in the West Wing of the White House.
In his usual dark suit and striped tie, speaking comfortably from notes, the president branded Americans’ rising tide of drug abuse “public enemy number one.” He continued: “In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive. . ..
This will be a worldwide offensive. . .. It will be government-wide . . . and it will be nationwide.” To fund this new war, Nixon declared, he would ask Congress to appropriate a minimum of $350 million. (In 1969, when Nixon first took the oath of office, the nation’s entire federal drug budget was just $81 million.)
As drugs became more popular, especially with younger Americans, over 80 percent of Americans also developed a conviction that even possession of lower-level drugs should be criminalized.
Congress passed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970,which rescheduled certain (“harder”) drugs. Just over a decade later, as the offensive intensified, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which introduced mandatory minimum criminal sentences (including for lower-level drugs) and generally targeted drug dealers.
The War on Drugs – in a way typical of moral panics, as defined in the next Part – exemplifies a social consensus that drugs were a threat and that the threat had to be addressed through public law. It is a product of several presidential administrations and congresses, made up of politicians from across the political spectrum.
The same Washington Post journalist emphasizes this point by quoting President Joe Biden: Two years later, then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) tore into the George H.W. Bush administration, declaring, “We need another D-Day. Instead, you’re giving us another Vietnam: a limited war, fought on the cheap, financed on the sly, with no clear objectives, and ultimately destined for stalemate and human tragedy.”
Mainstream politicians vied with one another to be seen as the toughest of the drug warriors. Harsh drug laws did not end with Reagan. Both Bush and Bill Clinton further escalated the War on Drugs, passing federal laws that increased imprisonment and provided massive resources for local and state enforcement.
The key aspect of the War on Drugs is, of course, that it hasn’t worked. That is especially true of the criminalization of drug possession. Although the United States is estimated to have spent over one trillion dollars on this effort, it has failed to affect any drug-related outcome – whether drug consumption, trafficking, or addiction.
Between 1980 and 2019, while the number of arrests in the United States remained roughly the same, the number of arrests based on drug-related charges almost tripled of the estimated drug-related 1,155,610 arrests in 2020, 86.7% were for possession of a controlled substance, and only 13.3% were for the sale or manufacture of a controlled substance.
Despite the rhetoric of successive governments, neither the legislative enactments nor their enforcement appears to have targeted harder drugs or drug trafficking. Instead, the data suggests that use, possession, and trafficking of all types of drugs was criminalized (and targeted).
As a result, the War on Drugs disproportionately criminalized those who engage in more common activities, such as the use of lower-level drugs. Unsurprisingly, deterrence does not seem to work for drug use. In other words, criminalization reduces neither drug use nor related issues, such as addiction and overdose deaths.
(In fact, more recently, drug use and the availability of certain harder drugs have increased.) If there were ever some people who elected to refrain from engaging in criminal activity out of fear of incarceration, they would likely be those who can choose to refrain from engaging in these activities, such as drug dealers.
