Paul Gootenberg on the Global History of Drugs

type of drugs. Hello, Psychoactive listeners. You know, I thought, 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 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 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 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 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

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

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

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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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

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 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, 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 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

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, 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 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, 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.

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, 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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 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.

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 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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

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, 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 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

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

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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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

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 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 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

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 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 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

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 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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, 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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

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

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

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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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

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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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.

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 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 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, 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 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.

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 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 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.

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 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 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, 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 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 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 to Cycleactive now see it, don't miss it.