Policing for profit: United States imperialism and the international drug economy

This dissertation is a study of the circulation and control of coca commodities (including coca leaves, pharmaceutical-grade cocaine, and Coca-Cola) in the western hemisphere from World War II through the early Cold War. The history of drug control provides a window onto the hemispheric political and ideological order the United States government pursued with the expansion of the American capitalist system. It studies the delineation of a line between legal and illegal participation in the international provision and consumption of drug commodities and the attendant managerial arrangements of global power. The project presumes the global as a constitutive element of figurations of national power, and by tracing participation and control over the flow of drug commodities (and the social and political narratives which accompanied them), grounds the history of the rise of US capitalism within the international sphere from which it sought raw materials, consumer markets and political and economic collaborators.; The dissertation examines the postwar rise to global dominance of the American pharmaceutical industry; the extension of markets for U.S. manufactured commodities overseas; and the selective criminalization of "drug" production and consumption within an international capitalist economic system where the aggressive marketing of some drugs, to some people, was encouraged. It is a study of US empire and the ways in which control over the manufacturing, distribution and consumption of commodities within the capitalist system has shaped the cultural, legal and economic lives of people and the inter/national geography within which they live. Studying the business of health and warfare through attempts to control and pursue the legal and illegal provisions of medicaments, reveals the ways in which diplomatic leverage in contexts of both war and peace has operated historically in part through efforts to control the flow of strategic commodities. The research reveals how cultural narratives about drugs, and public health and safety intersected with institutional powers in the United States at mid-century to consolidate the authority of select corporate and state participants in the drug trade and control apparatus, while structuring an unequal relationship between the United States and other countries in the hemisphere.