The variety of contributions to the workshop demonstrated that the industrial production and distribution of drugs from the 19th century onwards did not fit neat distinctions between extraction in colonial and processing in metropolitan environments. Likewise, the conference discussed consumption patterns and views on drugs that resulted from the industrial situation as a global phenomenon. The themes of the panels, namely manufacturing processes, invisible and licit commodity chains, export countries and their domestic markets as well as a regional focus on the Middle East tied in both the supply and demand side of drug history, allowing the regulatory power of the state in the emergence of global capitalism to be revisited.

The first contribution explored the manufacturing process from the perspective of a “failed” attempt. TOMÁS BARTOLETTI (Zürich) introduced the story of Enrique Pizzi, an Italian pharmacist working in La Paz in the mid-19th century. Pizzi’s samples of Cocaïna reached the laboratory of German chemists Friedrich Wöhler and Albert Niemann, who would later develop the processing of what is known as cocaine today. By reexamining Pizzi’s research and its reception, which has previously been considered a failure, Bartoletti shed light on what is lost when drug and global histories are written as linear modernizing processes. The discussion, moderated by Harald Fischer-Tiné, highlighted how such stories of “failure” could challenge nationalistic historiographies of discovery by asking why certain paths were successful while others were not.

Keynote speaker JIM MILLS (Strathclyde) then presented new evidence related to Merck, the German leading pharmaceutical company at the beginning of the 20th century. He demonstrated that Merck actively developed strategies to cultivate a market for cocaine in India, while Indian consumers in turn defined how the drug was used. In doing so, Mills questioned the narrative of forced drug consumption under colonialism by pointing to the agency of commercial actors as well as consumers. This also allowed the emergence of a market for cocaine in early 20th-century India to be told from both the supply and demand side.

The second panel included examples of the agency of consumers and commercial actors as discussed by Mills by examining invisible and licit commodity chains. CHRIS DUVALL (Albuquerque) showed that psychoactive cannabis and knowledge of its uses was transmitted across the Atlantic by hard laborers from Western Europe, South Asia and Central Africa before 19255. While plant genetic analyses open new possibilities for studying the dispersal of psychoactive cannabis, Duvall stressed that the circulation of the plant reflected colonial geographies of labor. Although psychoactive cannabis migrated with enslaved Central Africans, the drug was used by hard laborers of different cultural backgrounds.

DIANA KIM (Washington D.C.) demonstrated that “pro-opium forces” in Southeast Asia in the early 20th century represented a diversity of interests rather than a monolithic commercial one. She argued that this diversity dissolved the distinction between moral arguments against and commercial arguments for the opium trade, which allowed her to question the valorization of prohibition and the relationship between drugs and empire. Discussant Miriam Kingsberg Kadia pointed out the significance and challenge of studying how drugs moved from producers to consumers, an invisible process prior to the moment that they became illegal.

The third panel discussed export countries and their domestic markets. PETER-PAUL BÄNZIGER (Basel) examined the trade in opiates in Switzerland from the late 18th to the mid-19th century. While pharmacies competed with itinerant traders in selling the opium-based panacea theriac, they later dominated the retail in potent industrial pharmaceutical products such as morphine. Having become a major exporter of opiates, Switzerland was late to focus on prohibition and Bänziger showed that pharmacies were lax about implementing regulations, with typical users being pharmacists, health care workers and academics who had easy access to the drugs.

In the 1920s, morphine was at the heart of a medical drug culture in Japan. As JUDITH VITALE (Zürich) described, morphine was considered a means of coping with the pressures of the industrial way of life until the depression brought on new ideas about morality. By the late 1920s, morphine use was associated with poverty and delinquency as seen in essays and media coverage on “morphine geishas.” Oleg Benesch opened the discussion, which appreciated the fact that both contributions also included a regional rather than strictly national perspective on drug history. While Bänziger mentioned the proximity of Switzerland to the German pharmaceutical industry, Vitale illustrated that the Japanese morphine industry did not fit the neat categories of commodity-producing colonies and drug-manufacturing metropoles.

The Middle East was the regional focus of the fourth panel. Public opinion on opium and other drugs in Turkey in the 1920s and 1930s was shaped by Mazhar Osman, psychiatrist and prominent member of the temperance movement. As a state delegate to the League of Nations Advisory Committee on Trafficking in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs, argued ELIFE BIÇER-DEVECI (Zürich), Osman advanced ethno-religious nationalism in Turkey by framing drug addiction as a foreign import and accusing religious minorities of promoting the use of cannabis.

HAGGAI RAM (Be’er Sheva) similarly showed how cannabis consumption was employed by the Israeli government to further marginalize Jewish immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa by criminalizing domestic use of the drug. Ram then turned to reports by the Arab League to the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs and Israeli archival documents to study the involvement of the Israeli military in hashish trafficking operations to Egypt. The discussion, moderated by Liat Kozma, asked how both contributions fit within global developments of scientific thinking on addiction or of drug trafficking employed in warfare. In conclusion, Kozma found that the conversations held over the course of the conference had all created possibilities for searching for interconnections and potential for future collaborations on drug history as a prism through which to view industrialism.

Conference overview:

Manufacturing Processes

Tomás Bartoletti (Zürich): Parallel Histories? Cocaïna and the Bolivian-Italian Missing Link

Discussant: Harald-Fischer-Tiné

Keynote

Jim Mills (Strathclyde): Cocaine Markets in Colonial India: Industry, Commerce and Consumption, 1885 to 1911

Invisible and Licit Commodity Chains

Chris Duvall (Albuquerque): The Mostly Invisible Transport of Psychoactive Cannabis across the Atlantic before 1925

Diana Kim (Washington D.C.): The “Evil Spectators”: Opium and Empire’s Stakeholders in Twentieth-Century Southeast Asia

Discussant: Miriam Kingsberg Kadia

Export Countries and Their Domestic Markets

Peter-Paul Bänziger (Basel): A History of Opiate Retailing in Industrialization Era Switzerland

Judith Vitale (Zürich): Morphine Geishas: The Japanese Drug Industry in the 1920s

Discussant: Oleg Benesch

Drugs in the Middle East

Elife Biçer-Deveci (Zürich): The Drug-Question in Turkey: A Nexus Between Pharmaceutical Industry, the League of Nations and Nationalist Policies

Haggai Ram (Be’er Sheva): Israel and the Dialectics of the War on Drugs: Detoxicating “Outsiders Within”, Intoxicating Foreign Enemies

Discussant: Liat Kozma