"Chicken or eggs?: Rethinking illicit drugs and 'Development'".

Official and NGO-style thinking about “drugs and development” usually follows a conventional logic: “Lack of development” (poverty and statelessness) fosters illicit activities (such as peasant drug crops) which can only be alleviated by interventionist economic development and sustained state-building projects (“alternative development,” crop substitution, full integration of illicit actors into public services). However, emerging research by historians and other social scientists suggests in many cases the reverse is just as true. Post-war modernization projects in the Global South set the stage for the takeoff of dynamic new 1970s-90s illicit economies in coca/cocaine, poppy/ heroin, and other drugs (Smith, 1992). These became, in effect, its own form of autonomous grassroots development. Like the growing consensus that the half-century “drug war” is a failed crusade, we must question the teleology around “development” in drug studies–a concept long under duress, by both academic right and left, in other fields. My own role in this debate is a 2018 volume (co-edited with my colleague, Colombian ecologist Liliana Dávalos), The Origins of Cocaine: Colonization and Failed Development in the Amazon Andes (Gootenberg and Dávalos, 2018). Mixing archival case studies with quantitative and historical mapping techniques, our research found that the original three core birthing sites of modern illicit coca—Peru's Upper Huallaga Valley, Bolivia's Chapare region, and the Ariari zone of Meta Department in Colombia—bore striking historical resemblances. Each area had been, starting in the 1950s and 1960s, a key state-supported site of roadbuilding and peasant colonization agricultural projects in the Amazonian frontiers of the eastern Andes. These projects arose within a larger Cold-war vision of integrating the lowland tropics via a vast continental “Marginal Highway of the Amazon.” The twin goal was to quell upland agrarian discontent and unlock the region's untapped agrarian riches, in retrospect an ecological pipedream (or nightmare, given the eventual deforestation and biodiversity impacts). It was an ideal avidly supported in the 1960s by national elites and reformers in Washington and multilateral institutions like the IDB and World Bank. Despite distinctive national contexts, each site drew in tens of thousands of impoverished or oppressed campesinos seeking to build fresh livelihoods. Rather than isolated backward pockets, these zones, at least for a while, represented some of the most concentrated state activities and services (such as credit or marketing offices) of the greater Amazon. And in each case, by the mid-1970s, the failures or abandonment of these original developmentalist promises and processes (a long complex story itself of shrinking, debt-ridden, or rising neoliberal states), swiftly led peasants into illicit coca cropping. Orphaned by their states, such “refugees of development” turned en masse to drug crops for survival (explored in older ethnographies like Molano Bravo, 1987 or Sanabria, 1993), which in turn feed spiraling 1980s international trafficking networks. Even decades beyond into the 1990s, these same initial sites remained epicenters of the global cocaine trades. This is a specific origins story for illicit coca-cocaine—greatly complicated by 1980s drug war interventions and escalating drug-war violence—but Dávalos and I also detect parallels elsewhere. The maconha (South American cannabis) belt of Paraguay's borderlands was a byproduct of failed post-war export promotion, and Mexico's remote village poppy and marijuana plots across the states of Sinaloa, Sonora, Chihuahua, and Guerrero popped up in the wake of the post-war retreat of the statist modernizing agrarian reform. State irrigation and settlement projects in Michoacán fertilized drug trades (Maldonado, 2013). Cocaine export hub cities like Medellín or Santa Cruz in Bolivia were regional development poles, not backwaters. The most dramatic parallel, however, is found halfway around the Global South in the now infamous global heroin hotspot of Helmand province, Afghanistan–brightly illuminated in a new book by James T. Bradford, Poppies, Politics, and Power: Afghanistan and the Global History of Drugs and Diplomacy (Bradford, 2019). Long before the Taliban regime and opiates, only a handful of area specialists knew Helmand as the site of Asia's longest (1946-79) and most strategic U.S.-assisted development project: the Helmand Valley Development Project (HVDP), a massive dam and development zone modelled after the New Deal TVA. Intensive irrigation, roads, planned cities and villages, American designs, and schools would make this backwards “tribal” region the model Afghan “breadbasket,” later redirected into commercial cotton farming (Cullather, 2002). A secularizing leftist government of the 1970s (much like Peru's statist Velasco regime of the same era) redoubled the mega-project. But to no avail as inapt ecological conditions (similar to the Amazonian story), plus local resistance, led to its breakdown and an erosion of state legitimacy, as well as opium planting among the many thousands of peasants lured to the valley. The HVDP became dubbed Afghanistan's “unfinished symphony.” A striking coincidence of timing and politics thus marks the