#251 Between Coca and Cocaine: A Century or More of U.S.-Peruvian Drug Paradoxes, 1860-1980

By Professor Paul Gootenberg

From the Introduction

Cocaine has a long and mostly forgotten history, which more often than not over the past century has revolved around relationships between the United States and the Andean Republic of Peru.2 This essay examines that U.S.-Peruvian axis, through three long historical arcs or processes that proceeded–and in some sense inform–the hemispheric “drug wars” of the past twenty years. For each stage, I will focus on the changing U.S. influences, signals or designs around Andean coca and cocaine, the global contexts and competing cocaine circuits which mediated those transnational forces and flows, and the notably dynamic Peruvian responses to North-American drug challenges. Each period left its legacies, and paradoxes, for cocaine’s progressive definition as a global, illicit and menacing drug.

This is mainly a synthetic essay–trying to make sense of a vast body of new research in the archives–but the history of drugs also makes fertile ground for trying new methods or approaches from the historical social sciences.