Drug War Capitalism by Dawn Paley Page A

common cold.[39] At that time there were no legal controls over the trade and marketing of pharmaceuticals, or over the claims the pharmaceutical industry made about emerging wonder drugs like cocaine.[40] It wasn’t until the twentieth century that the international community got together, at the urging of the United States, to create a global regime of prohibition.
    Foreign Occupation and Drugs
    Processes of modern colonization that reach back to the period when Nixon first declared a war on drugs have shaped the geography of drug production and trafficking. It was in that period that new marijuana plantations in Mexico were sown by US smugglers. Don Henry Ford, a blue-eyed smuggler-turned-organic-farmer in Texas, told me about pushing seeds on Mexican farmers in the Sierra Madre, the northern mountain range splitting Chihuahua from Sonora, Sinaloa, and Durango: “I was one of the guys that did it, see, I used to go down to Sinaloa you know, and show ’em the money. I’d say look, ya know, here’s some seeds, why don’t you plant these instead, this is what we want.”
    Ford and I met in a small ranching town in Texas not far from San Antonio. He picked me up from the Greyhound station in a pick-up truck littered with hay, and we drove over to a classic Texas BBQ joint, where we talked over meat, pickles, and coleslaw. “It was like look, if y’all grow this shit for me instead of this other kind, I can sell this better. We were the ones that created the demand.… It’s like, I’ll pay you a shitload of money, $100 a pound or whatever, you know.”
    Though there were lone wolves like Don Henry Ford, who eventually ended up serving prison time for smuggling, the Mexican Army was historically the primary organization dedicated to marijuana trafficking. “The case based data collected by the author over a 7-year period unequivocally point to the army as the primary transporter of marijuana shipments to the border,” writes scholar Patrick O’Day, who relied on data he gathered through his own observations when he encountered an unwillingness on the part of authorities and police on the US side of the border to speak openly with him about drug trafficking.[41] “The lack of reporting and misreporting of relevant facts, the disappearance of incident reports, and the extreme paranoia of law enforcement personnel interviewed for the purpose of shedding light on this politically sensitive topic became so noteworthy during the course of the author’s research that the obstruction itself has become part of the findings,” he wrote.[42]
    Eventually, also because of a push from the United States, mass marijuana production made its way south toward Colombia. Washington ran interdiction programs in Mexico in the 1970s, in Sinaloa, Guerrero, and elsewhere,[43] and in 1976 began aerial spraying of poppy crops in Chihuahua, Durango, and Sinaloa as part of Operation Trizo.[44] Twenty-two thousand hectares of land had been sprayed by the end of 1977. According to the DEA, “The large numbers of arrests that resulted from Operation Trizo caused an economic crisis in the poppy-growing regions of Mexico. In order to reduce the social upheaval, the Mexican government formally asked the DEA to stop participating in the surveillance flights.”[45]
    In Mexico, in the 1980s, the US launched Operation Condor, a new program of aerial pot plantation spraying. Operation Condor and Operation Trizo, together with the intercept programs, pioneered the supply side, cat-and-mouse-style drug control tactics used up until today. In their book Drug War Mexico, Peter Watt and Roberto Zepeda argue that these US programs made heroin and marijuana prices spike and encouraged the “cartelization” of the drug trade. “For the producers and traffickers with the best political contacts, the largest networks, and sufficient resources, and for those who had adapted to survive the initial years of this new phase of anti-drug policy, this sharp and