Professional Affiliation

Professor of History, SUNY at Stony Brook

Wilson Center Project

"Early Cocaine, 1860-1960: From Lima to Washington, Miracle Drug to Global Menace"

Project Summary

This book, intended for a broad and interdisciplinary audience, will be the first archivally-based history of the Andean drug, cocaine. This original research traces cocaine's origins and social construction from the late 19th century, first, as a modernizing miracle drug, and after 1910, its transformation into a globally proscribed and marginalized illicit substance. While global in context, the book is based on close scrutiny of the transnational axis between Peru and the U.S., a critical relationship in the early definition and then prohibition of cocaine. This book draws theoretically on creative tension between economic and structuralist and anthropological and cultural perspectives in the history of drugs. This book, strongly anchored in Washington and its archives, will not only fill a yawning empirical gap, but will hopefully contribute to a sophisticated new drug history and to critical perspectives in international drug policy