The War on Drugs, The Ganjia Complex
The War on Drugs, Power and Drugs
The Future of Regional Plant Drugs
Plant Drugs
Explaining why (or when) a given substance became a global commodity while another did not is an absorbing task, carried out here with only the broadest of explanatory strokes.
For particular cases there are countless rea sons of timing, luck, finance, politics, organization, cultural predilection, elite preference, and even marital alliances, as between the chocolate-mad Spanish Habsburgs and the quickly infected Bourbon Court. Any explanation of regional limits, however detailed or plausible, is in one sense premature. If a particular psychoactive plant has yet to become a global crop or commodity, this does not mean that it will never do so.
One day betel and kava and other regional or hemispheric plant drugs may be as universal as cigarettes and beer. They could supplant them, given the health risks of to bacco and alcohol. The very corporations that now promote tobacco and al cohol may even market them.
In 1969 a new-products task force assembled by the J. Walter Thompson Company suggested that Liggett and Meyers consider manufacturing “betel morsels,” on the reasonable theory that mil lions of people must be on to something.
When that particular idea was run up the ºagpole, no one saluted. It shows, however, that sophisticated and well-ªnanced capitalist institutions—J. Walter Thompson was then the world’s largest advertising agency—were alert to the possibility of the further commercial exploitation of plant drugs
Also suggestive is the fact that, in recent decades, regional drugs have won new converts in or near established commercial zones, thanks to the growth of urban markets, cash economies, and innovations like “kava bars.”
Road building in Papua New Guinea has helped to commercialize betel use by simplifying shipments to cities like Port Moresby. Such vigorous regional expansion may be a prelude to global usage, with long-distance immigration the bridge. The chewing of betel quid has become common in the rapidly growing Bangladeshi community in London.
Kava drinking has appeared among Salt Lake City’s Polynesians, and Utah has successfully prosecuted its ªrst kava DUI case. The Mormons brought the Polynesians over, ex plained highway patrolman Paul Hiatt, and they brought their culture with them.
The herbal-supplement industry is another point of entry. Psychoactive substances such as St. John’s Wort and ephedra have become popular in North American and European markets.
Drawing on German clinical re search, marketers have pitched kava and other “natural” remedies as safe and effective alternatives to drugs like Valium. Kava extracts are available through mail-order companies, Web providers, health food and grocery stores, and discount pharmacies.
“We are very bullish on kava,” comments one marketing vice president. “It’s poised to be the next hottest garlic, ginkgo, or ginseng.” Take your kava powder with lemonade, advises another promoter, and you will taste nothing at all.
Add sugar and lemon-lime soda for a “party recipe,” a suggestion that evokes uses beyond the purely medicinal and calls to mind the historical role of sucrose in popularizing the unpalatable.
The recent expansion of coca production, “the Attila of tropical agricul ture,” has destroyed millions of acres of primitive forest, much as the Brazil ian coffee boom did in the nineteenth century.
A dense haze of smoke covers Peru’s Upper Huallaga Valley in August and September as growers slash and burn forests for coca. Many of these forests rise from “wet deserts,” land with a thin soil base that quickly wears out after the initial infusion of ash.
Pro ducers move on to newly cleared lands. The depleted soil, minus its forest cover, erodes in the heavy rain. Flooding increases; mud slides bury villages; rivers silt up in a cascade of environmental disasters.
Slash-and-burn cultiva tion of opium in Southeast Asia and Guatemala and that of cannabis in Co lombia and Mexico have brought similar problems. The regeneration of ma ture forest in these places may take centuries. Meanwhile, carbon dioxide accumulates and the atmosphere warms.
The processing of illicit drugs, which often takes place near the point of production, is another important source of environmental damage. In the Andes the conversion of one hectare (2.47 acres) of coca into paste generates as much as two metric tons of waste.
This includes the gasoline, kerosene, sulfuric acid, ammonia, sodium carbonate, potassium carbonate, and lime used in macerating and washing the leaves. Processors simply dump these chemicals onto the ground or into streams, where they poison aquatic life.
Waste from morphine extraction produces much the same result. Adding ecological insult to environmental injury, cocaine smugglers also traffic in endangered jungle species, exporting them, alive or dead, as pets, skins, aph rodisiacs, and folk cures. The Cali cartel used regional ªshing ºeets to smug gle both drugs and exotic animals through the Caribbean to the United States.
Changes in cultivation techniques have also disrupted the environment. South and Central American coffee bushes have traditionally been grown in the shade of fruit or other trees which protected the plants from direct sun light and produced cash crops, such as avocados, of their own.
The shade trees sheltered a variety of avian life second only to rain forests. However, since the 1960s planters have introduced a new species, Café caturra, in Co lombia and other coffee-producing countries. Caturra grows rapidly without shade.
It produces high yields, but at the price of heavy applications of fertil izers, as well as pesticides and herbicides to eliminate competing weed spe cies. Caturra now ºourishes on level or rolling land previously used for food crops and on older coffee plantations stripped of their fruit groves and forests.
Ornithologists have found the high-tech ªelds of sun-coffee farms almost de void of birds, and have begun promoting shade-grown beans as a green alter native
The cultivation of drugs necessitated clearing land for ªelds and for roads to get the crops to market. Both processes facilitated the accidental transfer of weed species.
Planters and road crews moving into an area brought with them seed lots, tools, domestic animals, packing materials, ship ballast, and any number of alien objects to which “hitchhikers” adhered. “In Ceylon,” reminisced the British botanist Henry Ridley, “I have had to walk many miles before I could get out of the area of South American weeds.”
Hitchhikers of a different sort attached themselves to exports. The Argentine ant, an aggres sive agricultural and household pest in California and other parts of the United States, arrived in a shipment of coffee beans to New Orleans around 1891.
Another danger, from the standpoint of human ecology, was that intensive cultivation of drug crops would supplant the food production necessary to sustain the population. The Chinese were particularly sensitive to this issue.
Critics accused British-American Tobacco of foisting Bright tobacco cultiva tion on the hungry peasantry. Company ofªcials themselves professed con cern about the abandonment of soybeans, grain, and other food crops.
Even countries and regions which can easily import food, but which intensively cultivate psychoactive plants as cash crops, risk catastrophic failure due to pests and blights. The plant louse Phylloxera vastarix nearly destroyed Euro pean vineyards in the late nineteenth century.
Only the grafting of vinifera vines onto resistant American roots saved the industry. All these problems—deforestation, pollution, blights—would have oc curred in some degree anyway. They are inherent to commercial agriculture, not just plant drug cultivation.
Still, the psychoactive revolution appears to have madeabadsituation worse. Botanists have long noted that plants which provide human pleasure are often dispersed more quickly and freely than sta ple foods. Yet they drain the soil while providing (cacao, opium, and canna bis excepted) little or no nutritional beneªt. A. H.
Grimshaw, a physician and nineteenth-century opponent of tobacco, pointed out that thousands of acres of valuable land had been “run out,” ruining farm families in the process: “Breadstuffs, wool, hemp, ºax, or some useful article might be raised on lands now occupied in the cultivation of tobacco.” If tobacco were not culti vated,
Americans could get by with fewer imports; they would also have to clear less new land to produce essential foods and ªbers. Setting aside the op portunity costs to tobacco farmers, it is hard to dispute the social and environ mental logic of Grimshaw’s argument.
Continuum of Drug Use
Theglobal conºuence of plant-derived drugs and alcoholic beverages can be thought of as ongoing movement along a continuum ranging from local to regional to hemispheric to worldwide use. The wider the use, the more ex tensive the environmental consequences. Tobacco’s seventeenth-century boom is perhaps the most dramatic case of historically and ecologically signiªcant movement along the continuum.
However, the expanded produc tion of wine, spirits, coffee, tea, cacao, sugar, opium, cannabis, and coca all ªt the general pattern, with differences of detail in timing, direction and rap idity of spread, and degree of initial opposition. Thenotion of a continuum implies that a drug can move—or be pushed— down the geographic scale.
This has sometimes happened, though not often. The infrequency of movement back toward isolated local use is a clue to the transcultural biological foundations of drug reinforcement. It is also an indi cation of how entrenched psychoactive commerce has become, despite in ternational efforts to control or prohibit it.
The history of drugs is essentially a history of expansion, with technological change and capitalist enterprise pro viding most of the driving power. Drug control, to borrow a Cold War anal ogy, is more about containing use than rolling it back. The notion of a continuum further implies that the conºuence of psycho active plant resources is not necessarily complete.
Drugs that seem limited to local, regional, or hemispheric consumption may turn out to be incipient global products. A world of betel juice and kava bars may seem unlikely, but ruling out the possibility would be peremptory and ethnocentric.
Still, if betel and its ilk are to make further geographic progress, it will be against keen competition, not only from existing natural products but from synthetics. Mescaline must compete with MDMA (Ecstasy), nutmeg with MDA (methylenedioxyamphetamine), qat with the amphetamines.
Plant drugs now compete with chemicals that produce similar effects but are supe rior from the standpoint of compactness, potency, cost, and taste, or lack thereof. Here is one last reason why some plant drugs have remained re gional. They missed, so to speak, the historical window of opportunity, open from the late ªfteenth through nineteenth centuries, but since closing rap idly.
If a psychoactive plant did not, for whatever reason, achieve global culti vation and use by the end of the twentieth century, the odds of its doing so during the twenty-ªrst will become increasingly long. psychoactive novelty over the last hundred years has been and will continue to be the introduction of synthetic drugs by multinational pharmaceutical companies.
Psychiatry’s biological turn and the rise of “cosmetic psychopharmacology,” the prescription of proªtable new drugs to ªne-tune mood and improve performance, assure the continued introduction of “clean” synthetic alternatives to natural drugs. Inevitably, some of these prod ucts will ªnd their way into the drug underworld
