Cocaine has a long and mostly forgotten history, which more often than not over the past century has revolved around relationships between the United States and the Andean republic of Peru.1 This essay examines that U.S.-Peruvian axis, through three long historical arcs or processes that preceded— and in some sense inform—the hemispheric “drug wars” of the past twenty years. For each stage, I will focus on the changing U.S. influences, signals, or designs around Andean coca and cocaine, the global contexts and competing cocaine circuits that mediated those transnational forces and flows, and the notably dynamic Peruvian responses to North American drug challenges. Each period left its legacies, and paradoxes, for cocaine’s progressive definition as a global, illicit, and menacing drug.This is mainly a synthetic essay, trying to make sense of a vast body of new research in international archives—but the history of drugs also makes fertile ground for trying new methods or approaches from the historical social sciences. Two approaches are worth mentioning here. First, this essay draws on the “new international history,” which is working to overcome traditional academic dichotomies between domestic and foreign actors, dominant and dependent geographies of power, and between cultural and economic dimensions of transnational events and relationships. I thus hope to go behind and beyond standard diplomatic history narratives of “drug control.” Second, this essay shares broadly in what can be termed a political or social “constructionist” view of drug regimes, an approach with long roots in the field of drug studies. Not only official drug policies but our basic attitudes towards drugs (friend or foe, legal or illicit, domesticated or foreign), their variable social uses and bodily effects, and shifting patterns of supply and demand, are to a good degree historically created, conditioned, and changeable. Drug history, including that of cocaine, is about our protean social relationships to mind-altering substances, more than any rigid dictates of biochemistry or current morality.2The three phases explored in this cocaine genealogy are: (1) 1860–1910, an initial period that saw the promotion of hemispheric coca and cocaine networks and cooperation between the United States and Peru in making cocaine into a modern and global medical commodity; (2) 1910– 40, which constituted an era of transition in which the United States reversed itself and launched a domestic and worldwide crusade to banish the drug, while Peru exhibited greater autonomy, ambivalence, and cultural crisis towards its national coca and cocaine; and (3) 1940–80, when contemporary cocaine “prohibitions” came to fruition and a global reach, accompanied by a high degree of U.S.-Peruvian collaboration. But this final period and process also witnessed the creation of illicit international networks of the drug; with them, as we also see, were born the persisting and paradox-laden North American drug dilemmas of the late twentieth century.The half-century from 1860 to 1910 witnessed the erection of legal coca and cocaine networks linking the Andes to the United States and Europe. This era saw coca transformed from an exotic botanical rarity (in the West) and traditional indigenous herb (in the Andean highlands) into a modern global commodity and a staple of late-nineteenth-century medicine and culture. Yet by 1910, both cocaine and coca had become controversial and contested commodities, and the U.S.-Peruvian coca connection was riven with contradictions.Cocaine, first crystallized from Peruvian coca leaf by 1860, was widely regarded as the modern miracle alkaloid of the late nineteenth century. By 1900, the United States had emerged as the world’s largest consumer and promoter of coca and cocaine for a range of medical and popular uses. Coca leaf spread first, inspired by luxurious French wine tonics (such as Vin Mariani) and a growing public and scientific confidence in coca’s active energizing qualities. During the 1860s, leading American physicians, such as William S. Searle, traded notes and fresh coca samples with their Peruvian counterparts. Erythroxylon coca, a mild yet complex stimulant comparable to tea or coffee, became embraced therapeutically by a range of American “eclectic” herbal physicians and drug companies for the treatment of a broad range of ailments, real and imagined. Culturally, coca became the antidote for that most emblematic of Gilded-Age American conditions—“neurasthenia,” the chronic nervousness associated with “brain-workers,” fast-paced urbanity, and competitive modernity. By the 1890s, a large consumer market for coca products existed where none had before. Infused in countless health tonics and patent medicines of the era, North America’s love affair with coca became immortalized in Coca-Cola, concocted in Atlanta in 1886, and by 1900 already one of the most marketable commodities ever seen.3 By 1900, the United States imported 600– 1,000 (metric) tons of coca annually, mainly for this consumer market, and mainly from eastern Peru. One still feels the initial American enchantment with coca in Dr. W. Golden Mortimer’s classic defense of it, History of Coca: “The Divine Plant” of the Incas (1901).Cocaine, coca’s derivative, was a modern medical marvel, the first drug whose profile came entirely out of emerging laboratory science. Its medical uses, especially in surgery, boomed after the late-1884 news of its local anesthetic powers. Cocaine revolutionized anesthesia and hitherto unbearably delicate and painful operations, such as eye surgery. By the late 1880s, scores of American physicians and pharmacists, following European research leads, experimented with cocaine and publicized its other potential applications, in forums ranging from Detroit’s commercial Therapeutic Gazette to the staid New York Academy of Medicine. For a time, cocaine sparked serious debates as a therapy for a host of internal bodily and mental ills: for cholera, opiate addiction, hay fever, epilepsy, melancholia, and so on. Leading U.S. pharmaceuticals firms—Parke, Davis & Co., Schlieffelin & Co., Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, and Merck of New Jersey—swiftly became leaders in cocaine production, marketing five to six tons of it yearly by the turn of the century, about a third of world supply. Cocaine—purer, more powerful, more “scientific” than populist coca—was lauded by some of the greatest figures in American medicine, such as William Hammond and William S. Halstead. But doctors also developed a balanced appreciation of the drug’s dangerous side effects, and by the 1890s warnings and fears of another type of use, by thrill-seeking “cocaine fiends” who had discovered quickly the recreational uses of cocaine (by injection or snorting).4The United States, through a variety of signals and means, sought to encourage Peruvian production of coca (though less so with manufactured cocaine). In the mid-1880s, the heated interest of North American science and industry quickly filtered to Peruvian doctors, statesmen, and capitalists. The U.S. Navy and U.S. consuls stationed in the Andes worked to ensure coca supply routes during the great coca scarcity and price crisis of 1884–87; later, commercial attachés in Lima built contacts with local cocaine makers to diversify their business and helped Peruvians upgrade coca processing and shipping practices. One consul in the region worked to promote coca use up north to Americans (whom he termed “White People”) as a healthy substitute for their favored racial vice, whiskey. In the mid-1880s, Parke, Davis & Co. sent Henry Hurd Rusby, North America’s premier “pharmocognosist” (i.e., ethnobotanist), on a legendary Andean mission to scope out reliable coca supplies and study indigenous coca therapies, the first of Rusby’s many involvements with the drug. Drug-trade journals debated coca-growing schemes closer to or even within the United States, though this talk abated as Peru proved amply capable of meeting swelling American demands. (Anecdotally, the young Mark Twain dreamt of making his fortune in coca raising.)5 In fact, little push was needed here, as after 1898 South America drifted into the informally expanding U.S. commercial sphere. Indeed, by the late 1890s a clutch of American cocaine interests, flexing political muscle, implemented a U.S. tariff structure that strongly favored domestic manufacturers of the drug over the nascent Peruvian industry.The United States, however, was by no means the sole power vested in cocaine. It competed with a vibrant early science and “commodity chain” linking Germanic Europe to the Andes. Austro-Swiss Germans traversed the Andes in midcentury and revived a long dormant European curiosity in coca, now for an accelerated industrializing world.6 German pharmacologists ordered fresh Peruvian coca leaf during the Austrian Novara naval mission of 1859 to supply their leading-edge laboratories, where chemist Albert Niemann (among others) soon claimed credit for discovering its most active alkaloid, Kokain. The pioneer medical celebrities associated with the drug in the 1880s were Germanic: Dr. Karl Köller (in anesthesia) and the young Sigmund Freud (as psychopharmacologist and an avid user). And it was a German firm, E. Merck of Darmstadt, which earned its reputation making premium cocaine hydrochloride, its leading product line by the 1890s. Hamburg became the world’s cocaine entrepôt, and by 1900 German pharmaceuticals joined into a formidable cartel to manage unstable world cocaine prices and profits.7 (The French, á la popular coca-laced Vin Mariani, and the British with imperial Kew Gardens, also exerted some influences. Yet their interest focused more on neo-Incan coca cultures and coca leaf botany, and in products used from opera singers to bicycle racers.) The Germanic link reached far into Peru. Lima’s best-placed cocaine merchants and manufacturing pharmacies sported German names. It was a German migrant to Peru, one Arnaldo Kitz, who marched out in 1888 to find lost Austrian peasants (in the Amazonian colony of Pozuzo) and who created a new cocaine industry “on the spot”—the eastern Andes, ancestral homeland of coca. Moreover, Europeans took an active colonial mercantilist stake in coca. The British in India, as well as the French and Dutch in their tropical outposts, swiftly launched botanical and commercial experiments for coca plantations, which were abandoned (or so it seemed) when Peru, under German tutelage, countered with reliable cheap exports of semi-processed “crude cocaine” by 1890. The German cocaine nexus survived into this century. Hamburg brought in the bulk of legal Peruvian cocaine for refinement (whereas New York imported mostly coca leaf). American policy pegged Germany as the chief obstacle to global cocaine controls, during the first international narcotics conventions (1912) and beyond.Peruvian responses to these wordly forces proved crucial to the creation of modern cocaine as a global commodity. In the late nineteenth century Peru was a poor, ethnically fractured and economically devastated land, barely recovering from the multiple disasters of its first six decades of independent life. The coca bush was long associated with traditional leaf “chewing” by the country’s denigrated Andean Indian majority, so the precolumbian custom was thus viewed ambivalently by the country’s coastal white elite. Yet by the 1860s, Peruvian intellectuals and medical men, such as Manuel A. Fuentes, Dr. José Casimiro Ulloa, and Dr. Tomás Moreno y Maíz, began to actively revalorize native coca as a good thing and a sleeping fortune, sparked by growing European medical curiosity. In the mid-1880s, following the catastrophic War of the Pacific with Chile, a local medical and promotional movement for refined cocaine swiftly appeared, in concert with burgeoning scientific and commercial interest overseas. The innovative chemical and therapeutic research of Lima pharmacist Alfredo Bignon (a true unsung case of scientific “excellence on the periphery”) inspired after 1885 a medical-promotional “Cocaine Commission” and a handful of cocaine-exporting pharmaceutical workshops in the capital. This caught the attention of Peruvian authorities, who convened a blue-ribbon panel on the drug. Ulloa’s official “Coca Commission” of 1888 strongly urged Peruvian production of the drug itself for export: “crude cocaine,” not just coca leaf, coca elixirs, and the like. They urged a range of proactive steps to market coca as a mass “hygienic” (health) good for the Northern toiling masses; Peruvian coca could be the “coffee or tea” of the coming century. The country’s intellectual lights, such as sociologist Carlos Lissón, also saw cocaine as a modernizing good, as did pioneer promoters of Amazonian development.8 The activities were well underway.Peru thus became the biggest supplier of not only coca, but also cocaine, to this burgeoning world market from the 1890s until its saturation around 1905. Cocaine manufacturing, based on Bignon’s methods, spread from Lima to all parts of the country where coca thrived: the northern department of La Libertad, Amazonian Pozuzo, the tropical valleys of southern Cuzco and Huanta, and central Andean Huánuco. By 1900, the town and province of Huánuco had emerged as the capital of legal Peruvian cocaine manufacture, linked to the bustling coca plantations of the fertile Chinchao-Derrepente district, in the adjacent montaña (tropical Andean foothills) of the Huallaga river valley below. Grown at perfect midlevel altitude, Huánuco’s high-alkaloid leaf became famed for cocaine extraction. A government colonization program spurred a small wave of coca peasant migration into the valley (and to frontier Monzón), augmenting sharecroppers and labor for expanding elite planta tions. By 1900, the peak of the trade, coca products reached fifth place among Peru’s leading export commodities: some two million pounds of coca (mostly sent to Americans) and more than ten metric tons of cocaine (mainly to Germany).9 “Huánuco” and northwestern “Trujillo” leaf became branded commodities on world medicinal markets, edging out Bolivian and Cuzco varieties, which soon fell back onto traditional local markets. Immigrant entrepreneurs—French, Germans, and in Huánuco, an exotic circle of Croats— helped initiate cocaine processing in Peru. There sprung up about two dozen small factories, all employing local tooling and techniques. This 80–90 percent pure export—cocaine sulfates or crude cocaine—was akin to the illicit jungle pasta básica of the 1980s, but was sent on for refinement in northern medical markets via legal pharmaceutical firms in the core, rather than via clandestine Colombian labs and smugglers. After 1900, some of these areas’ most respected commercial families consolidated and led this industry: the Pinillos and Vergils of the north, and the powerful and ever-political Huánuco clan of Augusto Durand, who was one of Peru’s best-known caudillos and políticos. The northern Trujillo circuit increasingly specialized in beverage-related coca-leaf sales for U.S. markets. It eventually became, via Maywood Chemical of New Jersey, the privileged supplier for Coca-Cola—albeit, to maintain respectability, in de-cocainized form after 1903. Huánuco’s cocaine industry, in particular, became an expansive regional politico-economic pole, articulating the tropical estates of Huallaga’s Amazon to drug markets, drug firms, and soon, to “snow” aficionados and antinarcotics reformers across the globe.High hopes were invested in Peruvian cocaine (no pun intended). Cocaine, in the words of statesman Alejandro Garland, was the “essentially Peruvian industry.” Cocaine became so highly valorized in Peru because it fused modern Western science and liberal commerce with a dormant ancient national resource, coca leaf. Coca signified the wondrous and profitable gifts Peru could offer the world, and even its native stock went up with its new Europeanized uses (hadn’t Andean peoples first discovered it?). Cocaine embodied deferred nationalist hopes of industrialism after a century of commercial dependence.10 It combined a Peruvian botanical monopoly with proof of the possibilities for Peruvian innovation and entreprenuership without recourse to old-style government intervention. In part, such positive and positivist associations reflected how cocaine—by 1900 a waning nineteenth-century miracle drug—was seen in the world at large, with a strong added dose of national pride.So, when between 1900 and 1920 cocaine began its transformation abroad— from miracle to pariah drug, from boom commodity to unwelcomed illicit one— its legacies were paradoxical. The principle legacy was the working existence of global circuits of commodity cocaine: the U.S.-Andean and the distinctive European link, which now was to be limited or suppressed. The American preference for coca leaf imports—enshrined in U.S. politics on tariffs—was preferably satisfied through open currents of commerce with Peru. Cocaine earned its place as the “first modern global drug,” not only in its far geographic reach but in its broader cultural implications.11 In one generation, its image became inverted in Western medical circles, from a novel modern panacea to an unscientific “mania,” and from the hope of exhausted modern brain-workers to the bane of our criminal classes, “easy women” (i.e., sex-workers), despised racial minorities, and catchall “others.” One paradox in this complex transformation was that coca—a relatively benign object of widespread popular use, and a possible domestic alternative to cocaine—became vilified by the same medical, professional, and governing circles that turned against stronger cocaine, with minor dissent. Another irony lay in how the United States, the most avid consumer of both substances, quickly transformed into the world’s most passionate and committed anticocaine crusader, in what medical historian David F. Musto has diagnosed generally as “the American Disease”—our eternal love-hate obsession with drugs as remedy and scourge.12 For Peru, these were highly confused messages: once so vital to develop, cocaine was now deemed a bad thing. It took another 50 years for Peruvians to fully get that message, perhaps due to the high initial hopes placed on the drug, as well as the material and regional interests at stake.Cocaine did decline globally in the years 1910 to 1940, both in worldly prestige and bodily usage. World consumption likely halved from a 15-ton yearly peak to less than 4 tons in shrinking medical use by the eve of World War II. This era saw the first attempts, led by the United States, to project a global prohibition regime against cocaine at the same time licit world networks diversified and shifted toward Asia. The depression of locally produced Andean cocaine produced notable ideological challenges to American designs but as yet no illicit response. Significantly, the interwar period also represents the nadir of criminal or recreational (ab)use of cocaine, particularly within the United States itself.The United States was the prime mover in most of cocaine’s changes as Europeans, Peruvians, and other emerging actors watched, waited, or eluded them. The sources of the anticocaine movement in the United States were complex, and will never be narrowed to one overriding cause. It first welled up from local levels—by 1905, most American states had passed specific “anticocaine” statutes in reaction to increasing awareness of its dangers, real and imagined, and to the emergence of underground markets and deviant cultures of pleasure-seeking nonmedical cocaine use. The highly visible and fear-inspiring figure of the “coke fiend,” who appeared more menacing than behaviorally passive and still often upper-class opiate habitués, predated drug prohibitions. By 1905, cocaine use also became notoriously racialized: the newly Jim-Crow South feared rampaging “Negroes” on coke, while northern cities, New York especially, imagined unscrupulous pharmacists and dealers or predatory “Jew-peddlers” everywhere. This was an effective mixture of “moral panic”— a classic passionate drug scare—and serious muckraking concerns. The reduced club of U.S. cocaine manufacturers joined the campaign, led by professionalizing pharmaceutical and mainstream medical interests such as the A.M.A.—in good part to narrow or monopolize the field of professional use and to repair damaged public trust in their reputations. Cocaine, U.S. historian Joe Spillane now shows, had become a glaring national symbol of unregulated drugs and unreformed drug companies.13 Cocaine also got caught up with, and sometimes conflated or lost in, surging Progressive-era campaigns against narcotics (with their new medicalized addiction model of abuse) and alcohol (that oldest of American demons). Antidrug reformers stressed that as narcotics became proscribed, so must cocaine, to prevent former opium addicts from embracing the drug. Starting in 1906, the pure F.D.A. acts scrutinized, regulated, and exposed coca patent-medicine frauds and the few cocaine concoctions catering specifically to fiends. Its crusade climaxed in a failed 1911–12 Chattanooga show trial that accused Coca-Cola itself of marketing a fraudulent (since cocaine-free) product, with H. H. Rusby now a prime government witness against coca. In 1914, responding to international treaty imperatives of our own making, congress unanimously added cocaine to the Harrison Narcotic Act (the first federal drug law); in 1922, coca imports came under strict control in the Jones-Miller Act, which banned all cocaine imports. The vigilance of U.S. Treasury agents, State Department officials and later Harry J. Anslinger’s zealous rein of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN, 1930–62) came into action.Subsequently, cocaine consumption in the U.S. and elsewhere fell dramatically off its 1917 peak during the interwar period, in what one pundit calls “the great drought.” To be sure, cocaine found a haven in certain cultural niches: jazz music, horse racing, Hollywood orgies and song, but mainly confined to their realms of folklore. American fiends slowly faded into memory. Cocaine medicinal usage continued to shrink as substitutes like procaine came on line and cocaine research dried up (since it fit poorly with the newly constructed medical or opiate addiction paradigm). And yet notably, almost no organized international network of illicit cocaine emerged after prohibition laws, in contrast to those that coalesced around alcohol, or an even newer ex-miracle drug, heroin. The inescapable conclusion that emerges from a close and critical scrutiny of the era’s public health and FBN reports is this: there were fewer and fewer cocaine fiends, and by the 1930s effectively no cocaine was being smuggled from abroad. Confiscations of cocaine were measured in ounces or vials of diverted European medical-grade. No illicit factories came to life and no smuggling sprouted from Andean coca fields.14 In part, this pattern reflected a constricting U.S. political economy of cocaine production and control: first four, then only two New Jersey firms (Merck and Maywood), who only imported bulky and easily tracked coca leaf to their sheltered and minutely regulated market. The Coca-Cola Company, now breaking into export markets, was still invested in Peru (northern coca-leaf flavoring, de-cocainized in New Jersey, was critical to its secret formula) and now became a staunch government ally, supplying much-needed intelligence. These firms energetically cooperated with U.S. drug officials, who in turn, promoted their name and causes over the subsequent decades. U.S. borders became sealed to cocaine, which withered away early urban cocaine gangs or “combinations,” and sent thrill seekers to other drugs. By the late 1930s, Anslinger trumpeted cocaine not as a present danger (as opposed to his famous “Reefer Madness” antimarijuana campaign of the era) but as exemplar of what hard-nosed repressive policies, not to mention his inspired leadership, could do.15In contrast, the American campaign to internationalize anticocaine prohibitions, much less take it to the source in Peru, did not go very far beyond much spilled ink at international conferences. Other nations did not catch the U.S. cocaine panic, and American incentives to push them in that direction stayed low-key, given a lack of credible domestic cocaine threat by the 1920s. In the 1910s, U.S. diplomats such as Hamilton Wright, acting almost unilaterally, had anticocaine clauses included in the antiopiates 1912–14 Hague Convention. Even as a passive nonmember, American critics pushed cocaine issues onto the agenda of the League of Nations’ various Geneva drug conventions of the 1920s and 1930s: for example, the short-lived “Coca Committee” convened in 1934. The politics of coca’s inclusion in international antinarcotics efforts are still murky, and seemed to ape the logic and language of opiates (coca bushes were to cocaine as poppy to morphine). The United States, as the principled, mobilized crusader for drug controls, assumed the universalist stand that all abusable manufactured drugs merited a global control. From the start, this meant the suppression of raw-materials production, in which Americans conveniently had no colonial stake. Big-power politics also played a role. Britain seconded this U.S. position, in part stemming from concerns that cocaine would replace opium in China and its Indian colonies (a significantly unknown episode). However, Britain’s primary motive in adopting its anti-cocaine stance was to stymie stronger antiopiates resolutions, knowing that Germany (the world’s largest cocaine and morphine interest) would veto all-encompassing controls. Surprisingly, however, the Germans went along with the idea instead, for a variety of reasons.16 The contradictory results, visible in countless League of Nations reports and resolutions from the 1920s on, were fictional big-power designs on cocaine: spotty statistics mandated and published, an idealistic national import “quota” system, scattered on-off debates, and periodic American pleas for real action. Officials also noticed from the start that Peru and other producers blatantly refused to sign onto these paper controls. By the 1920s, Bolivia spiritedly defended its indigenous coca use in international forums, while Peru did its best to ignore the League and other internationalist pronouncements on drugs. The weak League, focused on opiates, nonetheless did help delegitimize cocaine in global ideological arenas, and defined the drug’s shrinking medicinal quotas. This inadvertently sparked a new cocaine network—this time in Southeast Asia.North American anticocainism filtered through a more complex cocaine world between 1910 and 1940. Two novel global cocaine chains burst onto the scene: first the Dutch-Javanese colonial link (which served European markets through the 1920s), and later (in the shadows of fictive League controls) a Japanese pan-Asian network. Both new mercantilist circuits took Peruvian producers, who considered coca their national birthright, wholly by surprise, and for a two-decade interlude between 1920 and 1940 bypassed the Andes as world cocaine centers.The Netherlands first experimented with Javanese coca production in the mid-1880s, but like others, these early colonial efforts went dormant. Yet suddenly after 1905, encouraged by colonial officials, the island sprouted dozens of modern and extremely productive coca plantations; by 1912 more than 1,000 tons yearly of high-alkaloid Javanese leaf effectively wiped Andean coca from European ports. Amsterdam’s state-of-the-art and state-sponsored NCF cocaine works (the Nederlandsche Cocainefabriek), formed as German patents ran out on Ecgonine cocaine-extraction methods, swiftly became the world’s dominant and fully integrated producer of the drug. After World War I, and a telling crisis of overproduction, the NCF became a leg of now League-sanctioned European cocaine supply and pricing syndicates. Yet, with such poor legal market prospects, and with pioneering Dutch commitments to ideals of international institutional cooperation (as in The Hague), the Netherlands voluntarily moved to dismantle their cocaine empire in the late 1920s. Nevertheless, Java still produced coca in the 1930s, and even Merck N.J. (wary of Peru-vian leaf quality) invested in its own corporate plantation there.17As the Dutch nexus faded, the imperial sun of industrializing Japan rose— this time, in an Asian response to League and American controls. Japan established its first colonial coca plantations on Taiwan in 1916; by the late 1920s, with leading national chemists like Jokichi Takamine at work, the island was producing upwards of three tons of cocaine a year (half of official world medicinal needs). In 1917, in a fascinating jump across global commodity chains, Hoshi Pharmaceuticals even purchased a massive tract of land in Peru’s Hual-laga valley, near tiny Tingo María. There it found raw material, and perhaps coca know-how, until the operations were expropriated in 1937. Some of Japan’s largest drug firms, manipulating military ties, forged this cocaine (and even weightier heroin) network, which peaked during the 1930s. They survived by faked official drug statistics and retail markets across Asia, some of which evidently involved shadowy or coerced sales.18 From the start, the United States and the League (alarmed over any cocaine circuit outside of its influence) expressed deep concerns over Japanese cocaine, and narcotics sales later raised serious legal questions at the Tokyo War-Crimes Trials.In this larger context, the American relation to Peruvian cocaine was changing. Yet one would falsely assume that the United States could easily or successfully “export” its drug