NCJ Number
176721
Editor(s)
W O Walker O,
Date Published
1996
Length
289 pages
Annotation
Forty-six essays examine the history of negotiations and changing rhetoric surrounding issues of drugs and their control between the United States and Latin America.
Abstract
The seven essays in Part I introduce the phenomenon of cultural conflict and indicate that clashes between drug cultures and proponents of drug control traditionally have occurred within states. The debates in the Andes about whether to prohibit coca, despite it many uses, offer a prime example. Coca subcultures have endured over time, often because of their economic and social importance. In the early 1900s, North Americans condemned Latin America as being incapable of understanding how drugs threatened the economic productivity and social order of society. In turn, Latin Americans denounced North Americans as being uncultured and aggressive. Distrust and misperception often plagued inter-American relations over drugs in the 1920s and 1930s, as the essays in Part II show. The seven essays of Part II address the wartime experience with drugs, with attention to Peruvian cocaine production and control, as well as Mexican opium production and trafficking. Nine essays in Part IV focus on the efforts of the United States and Mexico, along with Andean countries, to resolve their differences regarding drug policies and cooperate in addressing common concerns about drug production and trafficking. After the retirement of Narcotics Commissioner Anslinger in the 1960s, the United States undertook a concerted effort to establish hegemony over drug control in the Western Hemisphere. This attempt achieved a measure of success by the time of the 1990 Cartagena drug summit, as the essays in Parts V and VI document. Simultaneously, intrastate hegemonic contests between drug subcultures and majority cultures continued as well, indicating in general terms the tacit acceptance within some countries of the legitimacy of those cultures. Chapter notes and suggested readings and films