Drugs, Power, and Politics

Narco Wars, Big Pharma, and the Subversion of Democracy

Carl Boggs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317260936
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores the increasingly broad terrain of drugs in American society with an emphasis on politics. It begins with the War on Drugs initiated by President Richard Nixon in the early 1970s and extends to the current day with the vast power of the pharmaceutical industry (Big Pharma), expansion of global criminal syndicates, militarization of the drug war, and struggles between states and federal government over the legalization of marijuana. From the beginning, the drug war produced increasing authoritarian tendencies in American politics, visible not only in swollen national bureaucracies and burgeoning police functions, but in the rise of the largest prison-industrial complex in the world, a surveillance state, and the weakening of personal privacy and freedoms. At the same time, the legal drug system with some of the most profitable business operations anywhere has expanded to create a huge medical edifice, affecting the delivery of health care, development of modern psychology, evolution of the treatment industry, and many other areas of contemporary life, including the world of sports and recreation. Although prohibitionism remains very much alive, targeting a wide range of illicit drugs, today it is the hundreds of widely-marketed chemical substances sold by Big Pharma that result in some of the most serious health problems affecting society. This book explores the long historical trajectory of both the War on Drugs and the growth of Big Pharma, focusing on social outcomes and political consequences in the US and beyond.

CHAPTER 1

DRUGS

THE HISTORICAL MATRIX

At the time of this writing (late 2014), the seemingly endless War on Drugs has attracted new levels of public interest in the United States and, to some extent, worldwide. A rather ordinary Los Angeles Times front-page headline of May 28, 2012, reads “Cartels Push Drug Violence to New Depths,” detailing the arrest of Mexican Zetas cartel kingpin “El Loco” (Daniel Ramirez), a long-targeted mastermind behind gruesome killings in the ever-intensifying Mexican drug wars. The story focuses on the piling up of forty-nine mutilated bodies—heads, feet, and hands missing—alongside a northern Mexican road leading to the US border, a narrative that has become far too familiar. Martinez was said to have acted on orders from top commanders of the Zetas paramilitary group, with the intent of sending a message to the rival Sinaloa cartel and its allies. At this juncture we encounter a new phase of wide-open narco combat that has claimed up to 70,000 lives across Mexico in seven years. Sinaloa counts as just one of eight Mexican states riddled with bloody combat involving several powerful drug syndicates, rife with kidnappings, torture, and mass executions—ongoing battles of attrition driven by a War on Drugs centered in the United States, with eager Mexican governmental compliance. Some regions, including parts of Jalisco and Sinaloa, have recurrently been reported as on the verge of civil war as well-armed paramilitary forces operate with surprisingly few limits or restraints. President Felipe Calderón’s antidrug program launched in 2006 was at one point declared a success by US officials, but an everyday reality of bloody combat refuted such propaganda: in 2013 drug traffickers were doing more business than ever, as cartel networks orchestrated a virtually limitless supply of drugs, weapons, and money, always fueled by a voracious, drug-consuming nation just to the north.

Other newspaper headlines spoke to different facets of the drug predicament, one (in the Los Angeles Times) announcing, “Drugs Now Deadlier Than Autos.”¹ The chemical substances in question were perfectly legal: as the costly and failed drug war continued full-speed, data gathered by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showed that deaths from such routinely prescribed medications as Vicodin, Xanax, Ambien, Soma, and Fentanyl far outnumbered those from all banned drugs combined. With prescriptions for such drugs in the United States rising more than 40 percent since 2007 thanks to aggressive marketing by giant pharmaceutical companies, the dangers from adverse reactions, overdoses, addictions, deadly combinations of two or more drugs, and drug-related accidents have correspondingly skyrocketed.² The striking increase in overall American drug consumption—taken in high volume for every conceivable purpose—has given rise to flourishing legal and illegal markets spanning most ages, social groups, and geographical regions. Total US consumption of illegal drugs amounts to at least $50 billion yearly, while pharmaceuticals total roughly $320 billion—in each case amounting (in 2012) to nearly 40 percent of the global market.³ Other headlines called attention to the rapid growth of a “medicated military,” highlighted the failure of the drug war to impede the flow of contraband substances into the United States, and reported on federal attempts to destroy medical marijuana outlets in several states. Such media accounts speak to a complex, often byzantine, legacy surrounding drugs in US history: on one hand, large-scale consumption and marketing of mind-altering substances, and on the other a persistent moralistic drive toward prohibition, with its myriad coercive policies and laws.

Drugs have long been a source of taboos, fears, myths, and warfare, despite being simultaneously integral to American economic and cultural life. As the preceding data suggest, in 2012 the United States led the world in consumption of both legal and illegal substances that we commonly refer to as “drugs,” with some twenty-four million Americans reportedly using illegal drugs—a solid increase over the previous decade, despite the best efforts of antidrug warriors.⁴ Understood broadly, products that conventionally fall under this label have figured strongly in human life for centuries, a font of pleasure, self-discovery, mood alteration, performance enhancement, and medical treatment—not to mention abuse, addiction, and myriad other harms. Historian Mike Jay points out that “drug cultures are endlessly varied, but drugs in general are more or less ubiquitous among our species.”⁵ In modern society drugs intersect with virtually every realm of social life, a reality met with misunderstanding, distortions, myths, and outright lies. A more critical, dialectical perspective is needed for a rational politics and social policy; Andrew Weil laments that “our present ways of thinking about drugs are as useless to us as a geocentric theory of the solar system.”⁶

A Contextual Framework

Viewed historically, drugs can be seen as natural or synthetic, legal or illegal, medically prescribed or simple commodities—that is, as virtually any substance exerting a biochemical impact on mind or body. In hegemonic American discourse, “drugs” are typically viewed as illicit, harmful, associated with deviant subcultures and criminal activity. In fact humans have partaken of literally thousands of mind- or body-altering compounds going back centuries, although references to “drugs” did not enter common English usage until the early fifteenth century.⁷ As medicines, psychological agents, intoxicating substances, and even food, drugs (of greatly varied dosage and frequency of use) have long been part of both traditional and modern cultures. Herbs derived from plants alone run into the many hundreds. In this context drugs can be defined to include not only familiar illegal substances like opiates, cocaine, cannabis, and hallucinogens, but also a wide variety of pharmaceuticals (painkillers, sedatives, antidepressants, sex stimulants, etc.); regularly available products like aspirin and sleep enhancers; commonly used intoxicants such as tobacco, alcohol, and caffeine; and foods including sugar and chocolate. In this sense drug consumption has been, and remains, one of the most ordinary of human activities, little different from eating, sex, culture, and entertainment.

Although the very discourse of drugs can be emotionally charged, simple generalizations have today become more elusive (and worthless) than ever. The degree of risk or harm from drug use ultimately depends on the type of substance consumed, frequency and amount of use, combinations taken, psychological framework of the user, and social context. Few drugs are so innately and powerfully addictive or harmful they cannot be managed by the user, and levels of harm bear little relation to questions of legality or social convention.

The colloquial understanding of drugs generally extends to illegal, “illicit,” or street goods—that is, recreational substances with questionable legitimacy, harmful by definition. Pharmaceuticals, on the other hand, are usually viewed as medicinal (“meds”) whether prescribed or over-the-counter (OTC), sanctioned within the established healthcare system. A better, more comprehensive and useful framework would identify diverse patterns of drug consumption, whether legal or illegal, that have existed for many decades and, in some cases, centuries. What should be immediately obvious is that the cultural, legal, and medical status of what we typically call “drugs” has varied enormously from time to time and place to place, often dramatically. Patterns readily visible today include (1) medicinal, pertaining to body (morphine, beta blockers, ibuprofen, etc.); (2) medicinal, pertaining to mind (sedatives, tranquilizers, antidepressants, etc.); (3) recreational or intoxicating (narcotics, cocaine, methamphetamines, marijuana, etc.); (4) mind-expanding or psychedelic (LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, etc.); (5) social or situational (wine, beer, spirits, tobacco); (6) religious or spiritual (peyote, various mushrooms and herbs); (7) sexually stimulating (Viagra, Cialis, numerous herbs); and (8) food-enhancing (sugar, salt, chemical additives, etc.).

Overall drug consumption in the United States has long been rather common, and is now so widespread as to be normal, taken for granted, routine. Drugs are easily available at meals, restaurants, bars, hospitals, stores, musical events, military facilities, and sports activities, and, of course, in household cabinets, while pharmacies dot the American landscape by the thousands. Advertisements for costly prescription drugs—used to treat heart conditions, depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, and sexual problems, for example—flood the TV airwaves and Internet sites. Major pharmaceutical companies are keenly aware of the many reasons people use chemical substances, marketing new lines of commodities for hundreds of billions of dollars yearly. Without great benefit of advertising, meanwhile, underground cartels, gangs, and small-time traffickers reap tens of billions more in profits from intoxicating “street” drugs. By far the most lucrative earnings, of course, come from thoroughly legitimate food, alcohol, tobacco, and coffee markets, and these generally turn out to be the most harmful.

Among the eight distinct modalities of drug consumption mentioned above, the prevailing orthodoxy frames as “illicit”—thus innately harmful—only specific types of recreational, intoxicating, or mind-altering substances: opiates, cannabis, cocaine, methamphetamines, and hallucinogens such as LSD. Yet the classification distinguishing some recreational products from others—for example, cannabis from wine, opiates from liquor—is rather arbitrary, having no logical relationship to abuse levels, addictive properties, health impact, or social harm. All these drugs have long histories of human consumption and all engage certain psychological impulses, what Ronald K. Siegel calls the “fourth drive” that exists alongside such human needs as food and sex.⁸ The same is true for mind-expanding or “psychedelic” drugs that are usually less problematic, less potentially addictive and destructive, than many widely marketed legal drugs. For Siegel, “the pursuit of intoxication is no more abnormal than the pursuit of love, social attachments, thrills, power, or any number of other acquired motives.”⁹ Compulsive drug-taking associated with dependency and addiction is, as with most other substances, merely one of several possible outcomes—and here not even the most common.

Humans have always explored altered modes of consciousness, in one fashion or another. Indeed “altered states” can be realized through not only drugs but also meditation, hypnosis, dreams, mystical experience, intense exercise, and even foods. Mind-altering substances like peyote and mescaline were long used by native peoples in the Western Hemisphere and elsewhere, with few if any signs of abuse or harm. Today psilocybin mushrooms are found and processed around the world. Within the Amazon tropics can be discovered no fewer than forty hallucinogenic plants regularly used by indigenous peoples, with severe problems rarely encountered. Psychedelic drugs, including LSD, are easily synthesized, packaged, and sold. Dozens of studies, moreover, have shown powerful therapeutic results for such comparatively benign drugs.¹⁰ Mind-expanding substances, when taken intelligently and in moderation, can help people more fully engage their imagination, sense of creativity, and interactive energies. They can facilitate personal catharsis, self-inquiry, and consciousness transformation. In this context Neal Goldsmith refers to the potential for a “revised world view” through judicious use of psychedelics.¹¹

Much depends here, as elsewhere, on the general framework of drug experiences. Many substances can be used for positive results, whatever their legal, cultural, or ideological status, and most can surely be abused. As for psychedelics, whether a “trip” is good or bad often depends on several variables that are both external and internal, situational and psychological. In the words of one researcher, cited by Weil,

Conventional forms of psychotherapy often enable people to understand how their habits of thinking about themselves and others produce frustration and pain, but you can spend years in therapy gaining all this insight and keep on being the same frustrated, neurotic person. One good psychedelic session can make you feel what you are doing and show you how to do it differently. In the right hands and settings, these drugs can convince you that the worst problem in your life can be solved by changing your own attitudes and ways of perceiving and can motivate you to make the necessary changes.¹²

What needs to be emphasized here is “in the right hands and settings”—in other words, within a benign or uplifting social context.

It is possible at this juncture to speak of the “phenomenology” of drugs as it relates to the human experience. The great difference between wine-drinking in moderation with meals (common in Mediterranean Europe) and desperate guzzling of alcoholics on skid row should be obvious enough. The same can be said of traditional coca-leaf versus modern crack-cocaine consumption, opium poppies versus heroin, painkillers on the battlefield versus a daily OxyContin addiction, pot smoking versus concentrated THC intake, and herbal sleeping aids versus regular or heavy sedative use, possibly mixed with alcohol. The view that particular classes of natural or synthetic drugs are innately destructive or addictive while others are not—the prevailing outlook of the medical-drug complex—does not stand up to close scrutiny. The familiar prohibition ethos substitutes abstract moralizing (drugs are evil) for rational, critical thought informed by an open-minded, empirical search for (both positive and negative) evidence. Within so much contemporary public discourse the topic of drugs is riddled with half-truths, distortions, and myths—nowhere more so than in the corporate media. One much-overlooked reality is that the vast majority of people who consume drugs of even the “hard” variety can live relatively normal lives—or, where problems do surface, manage to contain them over time.¹³ (In some cases, of course, chemical substances can help make life more bearable, more satisfying.) Even here, however, those products most frequently abused turn out to be legal in status: pharmaceuticals, alcohol, tobacco, and foodstuffs like sugar.

Drugs in America

Although drugs have long been part of the general human experience, nowhere have they been more widely consumed over the past century than in the United States. Chemical substances in their great varieties have found fertile terrain in a society that continues to exhibit a love-hate relationship with any substance labeled “drugs.” From the earliest years of national development, Americans have, in fact, had a voracious appetite for drugs—always, however, within a cultural matrix of sharply divided opinions, government prohibitions, media fearmongering, and high levels of addiction. In 2012, more than twenty-four million Americans (9.2 percent of the population) were reported to have used illegal drugs in the preceding year—an increase from 8.3 percent in 2002.¹⁴ A 2008 survey found that Americans were consuming pot, cocaine, and heroin at rates double that of Europeans, with pharmaceutical comparisons showing yet higher levels of US production and sales.¹⁵

During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Siegel’s “fourth drive” no doubt extended to a long list of substances: hemp, tobacco, alcohol, cocaine, opium, morphine, and food products like sugar. Up to the present, repressive government policies (not always seriously enforced) have made little dent in what has become the most flourishing (and lucrative) drug culture ever known. The early settlers reportedly drank and smoked heavily despite a far-reaching Puritanism. Calls for regulation and temperance coincided with high rates of popular indulgence. Later, drugs became widely acceptable and available within a rapidly industrializing order, likely serving as “therapeutic” antidotes to the mounting hardship, stress, and boredom of urban life. Opium and cocaine, for example, satisfied a common desire for excitement and adventure beyond the dreary routines of modern life. Ordinary drinks like Coca-Cola were laced with such drugs as cocaine and caffeine, while companies such as Merck processed, refined, and marketed the coca leaf. Popular use of marijuana, peyote, and hallucinogenic mushrooms was inherited partly from Indian tribes. Alcohol consumption (and indeed alcoholism) skyrocketed with the steady proliferation of saloons and taverns. Morphine as painkiller came into wide use during the Civil War, with its massive battlefield casualties; by the start of the twentieth century literally hundreds of opiate preparations could be readily purchased at local stores. In the 1890s, the German firm Bayer was marketing not only the everyday painkiller aspirin but various barbiturates and sedatives in the United States as well as Europe.

That a deep Puritanical strain in American life instilled mass feelings of guilt and shame regarding these and other indulgent practices would do little to undermine the popular appetite for drugs; the irrepressible “fourth drive” would remain alive and vibrant. Drugs signified less a phenomenon of “disorder” or “pathology” than of everyday normalcy, as even US presidents (Monroe, Grant, and McKinley to name three) were known for having strong alcohol and tobacco habits. The desire for mood-altering substances, it turns out, was pervasive across most demographic groups. During the nineteenth century even refi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Drugs: The Historical Matrix
• 2 An American Crusade
• 3 Delusions of an Epoch
• 4 Drug War, Authoritarian Politics
• 5 Narco Globalism
• 6 The Medical-Drug Behemoth
• 7 The Medicalized Society
• 8 The Great Pot Wars
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author