Opium, Coca, Peyote and More Discussed in 'Dangerous Harvest'

Michael K. Steinberg, Joseph J. Hobbs, Kent Mathewson

"Dangerous Harvest" brings together geographers and historians to discuss drugs and indigenous groups. The relationships historically are embedded in tradition, religion and ritual. This well researched volume has the experts describe issues that include opium in Laos, Afghanistan and Pakistan; coca in Bolivia; marijuana in Belize; peyote in Texas, and kava in Oceania.

The geographars bring a wholistic approach to the issues because they examine them through the lens of culture, economy, ecology and landscape. The global drug trade and the violence, corruption, and human suffering connected with it create global problems that include political and military conflicts, ethnic minority human rights violations, and stresses on economic development. Drug production and eradication affect the stability of many states, shaping and sometimes distorting their foreign policies. External demand for drugs has transformed many indigenous cultures from using local agricultural activity to being enmeshed in complex global problems.

"Dangerous Harvest"provides the global overview of the indigenous peoples' relations with drugs. The case studies examine historical uses of illicit plant substances. The final chapter synthesizes the major points made and forecasts future directions of crop substitution programs, international eradication efforts and changes in indigenous landscapes. The book helps unveil the farmer, not to glamorize those who grow drug plants but to show the deep historical, cultural and economic ties between farmer and crop.

Throughout history almost all traditional indigenous societies have used psychoactive substances derived from plants in religious and healing rituals. Once such plants are adopted by outsiders for profane use, the often impoverished peasant farmers who grow them are faced with a life of extreme poverty or are lured by the prospect of a very lucrative cash crop with a steady market. Before long, their cultural and physical landscape is drastically altered.

As described in a book review in "Geographical Review" in 2006, "Perhaps the best feature of the book, overall, is that it provides a very strong case, either explicitly or implicitly, that the so-called war on drugs has been a colossal failure and an appalling waste of time and money. This is particularly well laid out in the chapter on 'The Stimulus of Prohibition: A Critical History of the Global Narcotics Trade, which is extremely thorough, well researched, and more than 90 pages long."

The chapter's author, Alfred McCoy, argues convincingly that the international war on drugs being waged by the United States and the United Nations, which, on the part of the former, has involved $150 billion since 1971, has been based on a "fundamental misunderstanding of the global narcotics traffic" (p. 24). As McCoy points out, there seems to be an ongoing failure to recognize that the demand for drugs is quite inelastic, whereas the supply is highly elastic. In other words, production is greatly responsive to price increases, which invariably are stimulated by control efforts, whereas demand for drugs is not. Efforts to eradicate the supply of drugs, still the main target of the "drug war," have been successful--at least temporarily--only in political environments of "total coercion," such as in Communist China and colonial Asia. Of course, the presence of such environments is inconsistent with other international policy goals--for instance, freedom and democracy.

But in cases of imperfect coercion "a whirlwind of unforeseen consequences" has been unleashed, notably when the first U.S. drug war during Richard Nixon's presidency "ultimately stimulated the supply of drugs on 5 continents." Such supply increases were achieved through production in new areas (as in Afghanistan since the U.S. invasion; see chapter 4), production of easier-to-smuggle derivatives, as when heroin replaced opium in Laos (see chapter 3), or manufacture of synthetic drugs.

"Dangerous Harvest" is a great resource to gain an understanding of the role drug plants have had on the world in political, military, environmental and economic decisions.