The Forefathers of Crack
Mintz, Sidney W.
AS UNIQUELY PERPLEXING AS THE SCOURGE of cocaine may seem, it is but the youngest of a long lineage of substances which provide novel sensory experiences. The economic forces driving cocaine's...
...As part of the struggle to get workers to the factories on time every Monday morning, tea-whatever its nutritive deficiencies-appeared to increase productivity over the short term...
...One can barely imagine a time when a milder version, properly prepared under state supervision for public purchase, might enter into the circuits of everyday commerce...
...The public's right to consume alcohol remains so stoutly defended it is nearly unchallengeable...
...Even as an illegal commodity, cocaine has acted much like its predecessor stimulants...
...After all, Coca-Cola began as an imitation of the famous French "medicine" Vin Mariani : an inferior red Bordeaux generously laced with coca leaves...
...What makes cocaine truly sinful, even for those who can't just say no, is not its toxicity: It is produced, bought and sold under circumstances that prevent the state from taxing it, or even from taxing the investments made with the profit it yields...
...In this case, the paramountcy of consumer freedom tends to be played down, even by the most enthusiastic advocates of free trade...
...Like heroin, cocaine, "crack" and possibly marijuana, absolutely no increase in productivity results from its use...
...In the Antilles, sugar brought enslavement, the destruction of indigenous peoples and the reordering of life around the plantation...
...All yielded great profit to capital and the state and eventually became respectable, as control of production and sale came under the state's purview...
...took out...
...Cocaine alkaloids only disappeared from Coca-Cola when federal narcotics laws made it illegal...
...Chief among those nonessential foods were the bitter stimulant beverages-coffee from the Middle East, chocolate from the New World, tea from China-and sugar...
...Of course, capitalism as an abstract category "does" nothing...
...tobacco became food for the spirit...
...Yet there are times when the consumption of such substances are so deleterious that it interferes with worker efficiency and production...
...And they struggle with each other where their interests differ: individual against individual, corporation against corporation, region against region, government against government-at each level submerging the interests of lesser groups to attain "higher" ends...
...H ARDLY ONE OF THE NEW COMMODITIES of the seventeenth century escaped proscription by someone, somewhere...
...and the state, in addition to what is spent to control and harass the purveyors, has trouble claiming its share...
...In dramatic contrast to tea, the damage opium effects is rapid and catastrophic-nearly complete physiological degeneration...
...The risks alcohol poses for labor productivity, for instance, are of less interest to the liquor industry than to others...
...The Chinese complained fairly that the British refused to peddle it in England...
...In the concluding decades of the seventeenth century, merchants, plantation owners, slave traders, bankers and government officials discovered that satisfying the desires of the humble might prove even more profitable than pleasing the palates of the wealthy...
...T HE PHARMACEUTICAL DIFFERENCE BEtween opium and cocaine on the one hand, and tea or coffee on the other, conceals the more important issue of the role of capitalist enterprise in the production and movement of these substances...
...Though not a food, tobacco accompanied these other novelties and came to be consumed with happy, almost meal-like regularity...
...While the English became strongly habituated to tea and sugar, the tropical areas where they were produced underwent drastic transformations...
...Ought not "capitalism" somehow attempt to control it, even while trying to protect the sacred rights of the consumer...
...tobacco helped to suppress hunger and calm the user...
...capitalists do...
...Grown in India and smuggled into China by the British, it paid for the vast quantities of tea the Honourable East India Co...
...The right of the consumer to use his/her buying power freely is one of the touted political achievements of capitalist society...
...Tea remade the Indian subcontinent and the economic life of its peoples...
...6 (MARCH 1989) 31RCOC Am4a COCA The production of the leaf became a means for the control of land, the regimentation of labor and the expansion of British civil and military power...
...Precious objects and materials in great variety-ivory, dyes, spices, medicines, plants, silk-had been carried across the earth's surface for millennia to satisfy the cravings of the rich and powerful...
...Sugar doubtless fared best because its immediate physiological consequences do not take a visible form-slurring of speech, flushing or dizziness, for instance...
...sugar provided large numbers of calories quickly...
...S NCE COCAINE CAN SHARPLY REDUCE general consumption, as well as wreck individual productivity and taxpaying, a vigorous capitalist economy has difficulties with widespread addiction among wage earners...
...The economic forces driving cocaine's production and generating hostility toward it are no different today from what they were three centuries ago when the rising flood of commerce in tea, coffee, sugar and tobacco linked Western Europe to its tropical colonies and revolutionized world consumption...
...the profits it garners are not made by "respectable" capitalists...
...Making these beverages intensely sweet, as well as calorie-rich, was sugar-known to the Europeans for centuries, but rare and precious until it began to arrive in substantial quantities from the New World...
...The sweet calories were welcome, the hot drink itself made a cold meal seem warm, and the stimulant cheered the ill, the ill-fed, the overworked, the very young, the elderly...
...VOLUME XXII, NO...
...Lung cancer that adds to the public debt burden does not distract tobacco corporations...
...Their first appearance in Europe was linked to Europe's aggressive outward thrusts beginning at the end of the fifteenth century and rising in tempo thereafter...
...How many billions are channeled away from company coffers to be spent on cocaine rather than automobiles, transistor radios or ski vacations...
...It too was an essential player in the unfolding British imperial chess game...
...The galling difficulty of being unable to profit from unregulated consumption, experienced by capital and state alike, may be at least as irritating as the presence of so toxic a substance in the public schools...
...Before tea was planted in large quantities in India, China was subjugated with opium...
...Legalization of marijuana seems less improbable, in view of the hallowed place of alcohol and tobacco in daily life and the general view that consumer sovereignty is sacred...
...In all cases, the medicinal effects of the substance were touted at the outset...
...But what of opium...
...In the modern world, cocaine sins thrice: It interferes with labor productivity...
...It drew over a million and a half enslaved Africans to the British West Indies between the 1640s and the end of the British slave trade in 1808...
...Toxic substances such as tobacco and saccharine are actively retailed...
...From medicines, tea and coffee became "foods...
...And, perhaps more like opium than the others, cocaine has provoked a bitter struggle between two kinds of "free enterprise," a struggle which is bound to continue until the drug economy is domesticated by respectable capitalists and the state, and the drug itself is made less toxic...
...It has found a ready and growing market, transforming the habits of millions of consumers while wreaking vast and irreversible changes on producer nations...
...spent coca leaves still figure in its production...
...The right to kill oneself with chosen products is not unlimited, to be sure, but it is substantial...
...Often supplanting more nutritive substances- including beer, ale and broth-tea led the new pattern of consumption, changing from a treat for royalty to the very symbol of working class hospitality and homeyness, the first pause that refreshed...
...As more and more disinherited rural people gathered in Europe's cities and industrial production spread, tea and sugar came to satisfy people who were hungry anyway...
Vol. 22 • March 1989 • No. 6
