chapter 5
The Chemical Cold War Drugs and Policing in the New World Order
While anthropologists involved in social engineering projects in the Andes hoped their work might forestall upheavals in the mold of African liberation struggles, similar fears resonated on the floor of the United States Congress. During January 1952 annual appropriations hearings for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, a World War II and Korean War veteran, and member of the House of Representatives, Alfred Sieminski, warned that international collaboration was urgently needed to prevent drugs being deployed as the fuel firing up global revolution: “I wonder, inasmuch as our fleet now, for the first time in history, is refueling in the Mediterranean, and great bases are being built in Africa and since Africa becomes of some interest to us, if you could pass on to your British counterparts that an Oxford graduate, later schooled in Moscow, is behind the colored unrest in the Kenya area and is no doubt the Kremlin’s No. 1 man to lead a race rebellion on that continent with the aid of drugs as fuel.”1 Rep. Sieminski’s vision, while misrepresenting Kenyan independence leader Jomo Kenyatta’s biography, nevertheless embodied the convergence of fear and global ambition that animated US discourse linking drugs to the Cold War, civil rights, and “race rebellion” in the 1950s and beyond. Persistent in this focus, Sieminski would later simplify his expression of concern: “Let us put it this way. Are drugs playing any part in the Mau Mau movement which seeks to throw the white man out of Africa?” FBN Commissioner Harry Anslinger confirmed that 174
