The Global Nexus of Drug Cultivation

It is a pleasure to write the closing chapter for this volume. My tasks are to present some common themes in these diverse studies, point out the unique features, and reflect on our roles as researchers of plant-based drugs and the people who produce, distribute, and use them. The research behind this volume is extraordinary. Doing fieldwork about drugs is risky. Almost every situation described here involves illicit activities. Growers, traffickers, and merchants of these substances have every reason to be suspicious about the researcher, and they have been both generous and trusting in revealing their worlds to us. In turn we hope that our interpretations will benefit these people, not by condoning what is illegal, but by offering enlightened counsel to decision makers who should act with the best information on the human dimensions and costs of their policies, thereby reducing some of the harm done by actions based on ignorance or incomplete information. Regardless of whether or not we approve of what they do, we must marvel at the extraordinary resourcefulness of these people, particularly the peasant farmers at the base of the drug enterprise. As Steinberg (chapter 6) notes, these seemingly conservative people are amazingly flexible and adaptable to the changing world around them. And one cannot help but admire the fortitude in their labors. Westermeyer (chapter 3) describes the work of Laotian opium harvesters as “pressured, repetitive, prolonged, and grueling. Thousands of bulbs rapidly incised and scraped, incised and scraped every day, day after day, from twilight to dusk—sometimes even at night by torch—for weeks.” Their efforts are typical. This is a volume about indigenous peoples and drugs, and it is much more. It offers insight into the drugs themselves, their production and marketing, their unique place in the process of globalization, the physiological impact of their use, their spiritual and perceptual dimensions, their impact on landscapes, and their role in social and political change, as well as the drug war and alternatives to conventional drug warfare. These studies represent work that, as Mathewson (chapter 1) has written, is “immense, compelling, and critically important.”

Desert Traffic: The Dynamics of the Drug Trade in Northwestern Mexico

The semiarid expanses of northern Mexico have long been a haven for drug trafficking and shipment into the southwestern United States. During the past 3 decades, a more specialized and dedicated drug industry has used the long U.S.-Mexican border to move illicit narcotics. Northern Mexico is not a heavily indigenous zone, and yet some native populations have been adversely affected by this recent industry, and not just a few have taken a role in it. Two states in northern Mexico that still have indigenous peoples are Sonora and Chihuahua. Both of these semiarid states are more sparsely populated than the rest of Mexico, yet both share a long, expansive border with the United States. Thus, neither state has escaped the activities of the drug industry, and some of the major drug cartels are located in this region (figure 8.1), the largest in urban areas such as Ciudad Juarez in the state of Chihuahua and Culiacán in the state of Sinaloa. Although these urban areas are the economic and logistical centers of two large cartels, an aspect frequently ignored in the literature, and certainly in policy circles, is the variety of scales of production in this industry. Aside from these giant cartels, drug cultivation, production, and transportation are also common at lesser scales, and the difficulties and dangers associated with drug production and trafficking extend to these small farmers. Small plots of marijuana (Cannabis sativa) and poppies (Papaver somniferum) dot the northern Mexican landscape, especially in the foothills and high peaks of the Sierra Madre. Most of the poppy production lies further south, in the states of Michoacan, Guerrero, and Oaxaca. Marijuana (Cannabis) is by far the more common of the two illicit crops grown in Mexico, partly because of its longer history of cultivation in the country’s mountainous regions and partly because of its greater ease of integration into agriculture. Poppy fields are a lot harder to hide, both from neighbors and from more interested authorities. Marijuana is also more easily intercropped with more common agricultural crops. Intercropping is the practice of growing two or more crops in the same field or parcel of land, and it is common when farmers need to maximize total output per unit of area (Wilken 1987: 248). I have seen marijuana integrated with corn, bean, squash, sunflower, and tomato plants.

The State and the Ongoing Struggle Over Coca in Bolivia: Legitimacy, Hegemony, and the Exercise of Power

Dangerous Harvest, the title of this volume, is an especially appropriate metaphor with which to begin to discuss and understand the ongoing, protracted, and increasingly violent struggle over coca in Bolivia—the third most-important coca leaf–producing country in the world (BINM 1998: 65). Such a metaphor—which suggests the reaping of a product that is potentially precarious, menacing, ominous, and even deadly—points to the fact not only that coca is an inherently conflict-ridden arena or social space but also that the most enduring and significant upshot of the current drive against coca, what is being “harvested” by recent counternarcotics efforts, is the potential for long-term structural instability and conflict in Bolivian society. In this chapter I pay special attention to this struggle over coca in Bolivia, particularly from the late 1980s to the early part of 2000. I will argue that the contest over coca in Bolivia reflects and embodies numerous and inherently conflictive claims and counterclaims (social, political, economic, and ideological) by different segments of Bolivian society, many of which entail fundamental questions about legitimacy, hegemony, and challenges to the exercise of power by elites and state elites. That is, to view the coca conflict as essentially one between “evil” or “criminal” coca growers and traffickers, on the one hand, and enlightened, law-abiding authorities and citizens, on the other—precisely the criminal justice perspective that ideologically informs, guides, and justifies current anticoca policy by U.S. and U.S.-funded counternarcotics agencies and programs—is not only not enlightening but also fundamentally counterproductive in that it fails to provide the necessary insights with which to grapple with and arrive at a just solution to some of the most important roots of the current coca strife in Bolivia. I will also try to understand and explain the seemingly successful coca eradication efforts in the late 1990s and first half of the year 2000, as well as how and why resistance to these efforts by coca cultivators in the Chapare appear to have been particularly ineffective in recent years.

The Stimulus of Prohibition: A Critical History of the Global Narcotics Trade

The current war on drugs being waged by the United States and United Nations rests upon a fundamental misunderstanding of the global nar­cotics traffic. In 1998, for example, the White House issued a National Drug Con­trol Strategy, proclaiming a 10-year program “to reduce illegal drug use and avail­ability 50 percent by the year 2007,” thereby achieving “the lowest recorded drug-use rate in American history.” To this end, the U.S. program plans to reduce foreign drug cultivation, shipments from source countries like Colombia, and smuggling in key transit zones. Although this strategy promises a balanced attack on both supply and demand, its ultimate success hinges upon the complete eradi­cation of the international supply of illicit drugs. “Eliminating the cultivation of il­licit coca and opium,” the document says in a revealing passage, “is the best ap­proach to combating cocaine and heroin availability in the U.S.” (U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy 1998: 1, 23, 28). Similarly, in 1997 the new head of the United Nations Drug Control Program, Dr. Pino Arlacchi, announced a 10-year program to eradicate all illicit opium and coca cultivation, starting in Afghanistan. Three years later, in the United Nation’s World Drug Report 2000, he defended prohibition’s feasibility by citing China as a case where “comprehensive narcotics control strategies . . . succeeded in eradicat­ing opium between 1949 and 1954”— ignoring the communist coercion that al­lowed such success. Arlacchi also called for an “end to the psychology of despair” that questions drug prohibition, and insisted that this policy can indeed produce “the eradication of coca and opium poppy production.” Turning the page, however, the reader will find a chart showing a sharp rise in world opium production from 500 tons in 1981 to 6,000 tons in 2000— a juxtaposition that seems to challenge Ar-lacchi’s faith in prohibition (Bonner 1997; Wren 1998a, 1998b; United Nations 2000d, 1–2, 24). Examined closely, the United States and United Nations are pur­suing a drug control strategy whose success requires not just the reduction but also the total eradication of illicit narcotics cultivation from the face of the globe. Like the White House, the United Nations Drug Control Program (UNDCP) re­mains deeply, almost theologically committed to the untested proposition that the prohibition of cultivation is an effective response to the problem of illicit drugs.

Modern Use and Environmental Impact of the Kava Plant in Remote Oceania

The kava plant, Piper methysticum Forst. f., is an attractive shrub in the pepper family, Piperaceae (figure 12.1). Known by various names in tropical Pacific, such as yagona, kava, kava kava, ’awa, seka, and sakau, it is propagated vegetatively, as are most of the traditional crops in the region. Kava has been used for many centuries to produce psychoactive preparations. Its active principles, several lipidlike substances known as kavalactones, are concentrated in the rootstock and roots. These psychoactive chemicals are ingested traditionally by Pacific islanders as cold-water infusions of chewed, ground, pounded, or otherwise macerated kava stumps and roots. Mind-altering kava preparations are, or once were, imbibed in a wide range of Pacific Ocean societies. These include peoples living in some lowland areas on the large Melanesian island of New Guinea in the western Pacific to very isolated islands such as those in Polynesian Hawai’i, 7,000 kilometers to the northeast (figure 12.2). Beyond this widespread local use in the tropical Pacific, utilization of kava in parts of Europe as a plant source for medicinal preparations has a relatively lengthy history. In Europe it has been used as a sedative, tranquilizer, muscle relaxant, relief from menopausal symptoms, and treatment for urinary tract and bladder ailments (Lebot et al. 1999). Over the past decade, there has been rapidly increasing interest in kava well beyond the areas of traditional use among Pacific Islanders (figure 12.3). This includes a huge surge in the use of kava products in Europe, North America, Australia, and elsewhere. Within the past 3 to 5 years there has been widespread recognition of its potential to emerge as a mainstream herbal product. Modern cultivation and use of kava in the Pacific has significantly expanded in some traditional use areas such as Vanuatu, Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, and Pohnpei. There are also significant signs of rejuvenated interest in kava cultivation in some traditional areas of use where it had been abandoned because of depopulation, political prohibition, or zealous missionary denunciation. Increasing use and cultivation of kava on these Pacific islands has been stimulated by local consumption rates and rising demand for commercial export.

Suppressing Opium and “Reforming” Minorities: Antidrug Campaigns in Ethnic Communities in the Early People’s Republic of China

In China, the term minority nationalities is used to refer to all ethnic groups that are not Han Chinese. According to the 2000 census, a total of 55 minority nationalities numbered in total 106 million people, or 8.4 percent of the total population in the mainland (Zhu 2001). However, the size and composition of minority nationality populations in China is extremely heterogeneous. In terms of population, based on the 1990 census, the smallest, the Lhoba, numbered only 2,312, whereas the most populous, the Zhuang, were 15.5 million strong (National Statistics Bureau 2000: 38). Socially and culturally speaking, the differences among the minority nationalities are large: Some are hunter-gatherers or slash-and-burn cultivators, whereas others are highly sinicized Chinese-speaking groups like the Hui and the contemporary Manchu. Minority nationalities are spread all over China, and 90 percent of them live in mountainous areas (Li 1994: 72). Because of this geographic distribution, isolated minority areas became safe havens for poppy planting and opium production, especially after the opium suppression campaign of 1906–1911 by the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). In most cases, opium was introduced into minority communities in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Opium’s effects on minority communities have varied considerably. Generally speaking, there have been three possible types of effects. First, members of some minorities have become addicted to opium but relied on others to obtain the opium supply. Second, members of other minority groups have acted mainly as poppy cultivators and raw opium suppliers but have been less involved in consumption and trafficking. Last, members of yet other minority groups have become involved not only in poppy planting but also in opium trafficking and consumption. Opium has thus come to play an important role in a minority’s social and economic lives in those areas affected by the drug. By exploring how antidrug campaigns were carried out in the Jiayin Erlunchun community in northeast China and the Liangshan Yi and Aba Tibetan areas in southwest China, I will explore all three types of the effects of drugs on minority communities up to the late 1950s. The People’s Republic of China was established in 1949. To Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communists, drugs were remnants of capitalist and feudal culture and had no place in the new China to which they looked forward.

Introduction

The global drug trade and its associated violence, corruption, and human suffering create global problems that involve not only the use and abuse of substances that have traveled across great geographic spaces but also political and military conflict and policy, economic development, and indigenous and ethnic minority rights in the production regions. Drug production and eradication efforts directly affect the stability of many states and relations between states, shaping and sometimes distorting foreign policy (McCoy 1991, 1999; Bagley and Walker 1996; Meyer and Parssinen 1998; Albright 1999; Rohter 1999). Drug production and the efforts to halt it often derail national and local development (Westermeyer 1982; Smith 1992; Goodson 2001) and create potential human rights violations as small-scale producers get caught in the legal crossfire between their dangerous harvest and economic hardship (Sanabria 1992; Kent 1993; Clawson and Lee 1998). External demand and influence, not indigenous cultures, have transformed apparently simple, local agricultural activities into very complex global problems. Psychoactive plants have always played important cultural roles in indigenous and ethnic minority landscapes. After a history of coevolution and experimentation, indigenous societies came to use psychoactive substances derived from plants in a range of religious and healing rituals. Traditional healers, or shamans, consume psychoactive plants to consult with the spiritual world in order to foretell the future and assist patients; patients ingest psychoactive substances to rid themselves of demons or diseases; and indigenous cultures use psychoactive substances in semiritualistic social situations to reinforce social and political bonds or simply as recreation. However, as these traditional cultures come into contact with the outside world, nonindigenous societies often mimic these practices, trying to reach a “new level of consciousness.” The poppy is an example of a psychoactive plant taken out of a traditional context and adopted by cultural outsiders for nonsacred use. In turn, globalization alters the plant’s use and symbolic meaning within its traditional-use hearth area. Several chapters in this volume show that heroin, a derivative of poppies, is used and abused worldwide and in its original hearth, where the plant was once viewed as a sacred medicinal and ritualistic plant. The profane use of opium leaves a trail of destruction in its wake in the form of addicts and soaring HIV rates as the virus spreads through shared heroin needles.

Environmental and Social Consequences of Coca/Cocaine in Peru: Policy Alternatives and a Research Agenda

The demand for illicit drugs can leverage dramatic changes in land cover and associated native biological diversity. These changes, in turn, can lead to loss of critical habitats and rare species of plants and animals, in addition to the degradation of remaining habitats and the contamination of water bodies. Concomitantly, demand can transform social and economic processes, acting against the interests of long-time residents, such as indigenous groups, by attracting new colonists and fomenting crime and violence. Given these potential interconnections between illicit drugs and grave social and environmental consequences, it is more than peculiar that so much scholarly work on environmental transformations does not consider drug-related causes in those countries that supply or transship the drugs. Examples of this myopia include most of the literature on tropical deforestation, where illicit drugs are ignored (e.g., Anderson 1990; Wood 1990; Dove 1993; Myers 1993; Place 1993; Rudel 1993; Brown and Pearce 1994; Jepman 1995; Goldsmith 1998; Barraclough and Ghimere 2000; Horta 2000). The chapters in this book partly correct this deficit and I provide here information for the case of Peru and for “coca/cocaine.” In this chapter, I provide an overview of the way these processes have acted in Peru in relation to the demand for coca leaves, which are transformed into cocaine paste and cocaine. I find great spatial heterogeneity in the negative impacts, at least some of which can be explained by the values and practices of particular social groups. A political ecology approach is helpful in this assessment because by definition illicit drugs intermix the power of governments and economic forces with outcomes toward and resistance by local peoples. I begin by characterizing “coca/ cocaine,” first disaggregating the two words and then showing how the associated processes have affected geopolitics acting upon and within Peru. Then, I examine the evidence available for the effects of coca/cocaine on local landscapes inhabited by indigenous and other social groups. Finally, I outline the known environmental consequences. In the conclusion, I provide the elements necessary for a more complete research agenda that, in turn, could provide the information needed to explore policy alternatives for the social actors involved.

Cannabis in Colonial India: Production, State Intervention, and Resistance in the Late Nineteenth-Century Bengali Landscape

When approaching the subject of rural producers and their environments in nineteenth-century India, it is necessary to be mindful of the range of studies during the last 30 years or so that have emphasised the importance of resistance to colonial projects. These studies, most notably those published in the Subaltern Studies project (Guha 1982), have focused on the strategies and agendas of peasants in South Asia and have emphasized their importance in shaping rural developments and relationships during the period of British rule. This work has shown how these agendas and strategies often led to conflicts of interest with the colonial state. Importantly, however, these studies have insisted that resistance to colonial designs was not always expressed in confrontation and rebellion. Resistance could often be subtle, difficult to detect, localized, and small scale, coming in forms such as “foot dragging, dissimulation, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage and so forth,” which have been called “the weapons of the weak” (Scott 1985: 29). Such perspectives are important in this study as it focuses on the ways in which Indian rural producers of hemp (Cannabis sativa) narcotics transformed their environments in the process of producing the drugs for the domestic market in the nineteenth century. Definitions of the various preparations of hemp varied from place to place, and indeed different officials and administrators would give differing accounts. The preparations that are mentioned might broadly be understood as follows: Ganja is the dried flower head of the Cannabis sativa variation of the hemp plant, which is mixed with tobacco and smoked, often in a chillum (clay pipe). Bhang is the ground leaves and stalks of the Cannabis sativa, mixed into a paste and drunk with milk and sugar or taken neat with black pepper. Charas is the dried, sticky exudation of the sativa, smoked with tobacco in a chillum. Majum is a green sweetmeat made with the ground leaves of the plant and mixed with butter, milk, and sugar and baked. Muddat is a preparation of hemp and opium. After a brief introduction to the hemp narcotics market in India during this period, the chapter will consider the modes of production in the rural areas of the main hemp products.

Opium Production in Afghanistan and Pakistan

Opium cultivation in Afghanistan and Pakistan is long-standing, probably covering thousands of years. Only in the decades since the 1960s, however, has opium been cultivated and transformed into rough morphine and heroin for export to the world market. Local men have traditionally smoked opium, whereas women eat it. To understand who cultivates opium in Afghanistan and Pakistan and why they cultivate it is the objective of this chapter. The volume of production and spatial distribution of opium cultivation is also discussed. Both Afghanistan and Pakistan have a long tradition of ingesting stimulants, intoxicants, and depressants. These ingestibles are discussed in the context of common consumption and their great cultural, spatial distribution. A brief synopsis of the current scale of opium production in Afghanistan is given. With the destruction of irrigation facilities since October 8, 2001, in the major opium-growing regions of southern Afghanistan where the Taliban Pashtuns reside, it is unlikely that cultivators will stop growing opium, the most highly valued crop. On the contrary, 2002 levels have soared to 1990s levels. In 2000, unpublished reports recorded that two Afghan provinces alone, Helmand and Nangarhar— home to the hard-core Pashtun Taliban and former anti-Soviet, U.S.-backed mujaheddin—produced 79 percent of Afghanistan’s production, which is 72 percent of the world’s opium supply. By 2001, the United Nations Drug Control Programme said that the 1999 production total of 4,581 tons had diminished to a 2002 total of 3,276 tons, and as a consequence of a Taliban enforcement program due to overproduction the amount had dwindled to 185 tons in 2001. These late estimates are not definitive because of the wholesale civic disruption in the poppy-growing regions. International heroin prices have not reflected the dramatic alleged reduction of opium production, with a gram of heroin in London holding steady at around $100. Interdiction programs in Central Asia have confiscated substantial amounts of heroin (Lubin, Klaits, and Barsegian 2002), but the supply continues, leading one to conclude that much of the bumper crop of opium in 1999 and in previous years was held in storage. The Taliban could claim that their eradication program diminished production, but in actual fact there was a glut of opium on the market and the Taliban’s program was a smokescreen in an effort to raise the market price. The 2002 harvest indicates that vast areas of southern Afghanistan were already planted to the levels of the 1990s.