chapter 1
“The Drug Arsenal of the Civilized World” WWII and the Origins of US-Led International Drug Control
World War II was waged in part as a war for control over commodity flows. As one contemporary expert in economic warfare observed, “in a total war practically every commodity entering into foreign trade is important, directly or indirectly, to the war effort.”1 Even before the United States officially entered World War II, the president authorized economic measures such as export and shipping controls, the freezing of foreign assets, blacklisting, and foreign aid programs to strengthen the Allied cause and weaken the Axis capacity to wage war. Some of the commodities targeted for control were deemed vital to war making; for instance, rubber was needed to make bombers, tanks, and gas masks, and tin was used to manufacture everything from circuit boards to the millions of cans provisioning food for Allied troops. The strategic value of other commodities, including items as diverse as beef, coffee, and cacao, lay primarily in the indirect calculus that US purchasing and stockpiling of such goods could offset war-caused trade disruptions that had the potential to generate economic and political instability, especially for Latin American raw materials export-oriented economies cut off from the transatlantic trade.2 In this context US officials wrestled to control the international circulation of one uniquely valuable group of commodities: pharmaceuticals. The US approach to drug control over the course of World War II constituted a defining moment in the longer history of US efforts to influence the international pharmaceutical trade, to pave the way for US 15
