Suzanna Reiss, “We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of U.S. Empire” (University of California Press, 2014)

New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery · Sep 14, 2015 · 41m

Though the conventional history of the U.S.-led “War on Drugs” locates the origins of this conflict in a reaction to the domestic culture of excess of the 1960s, a new book argues that international drug control efforts are actually decades older, and much more imbricated with the history of U.S. access to international markets, than we have previously thought. Suzanna Reiss’s We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire (University of California Press, 2014) uncovers this history by tracing the transnational geography and political economy of coca commodities–stretching from Peru and Bolivia into…