| This dissertation charts the longer history of contemporary drug contraband by focusing on the Pacific state of Sinaloa, the cradle of the Mexican drug trade. Historians working on drug trades in Latin America have now produced many accounts of the development of global drug commodity chains, and of the origins of drug prohibition regimes as well as smuggling and illicit flows. This dissertation is different in its attempt to trace the emergence of drug trafficking as a historically specific set of relationships emerging between states---above all, the United States and Mexico--and global markets, all mediated by shifting cultures of medical and social understandings of pleasure and pain.;Drug trafficking from and into the United States began in connection with Pacific World trade booms in the nineteenth century, and by definition, when United States the outlawed free trade in narcotics in 1914. Marijuana cultivation has a long history in Mexico, and poppy cultivation dates at least a century, brought to Mexico by the Spanish Crown and Chinese laborers imported to work in mines and railroads. Anti-immigrant sentiments, Pacific trade, and incipient pharmaceutical machinations ---including imports of marijuana seed and other controlled substances from U.S. companies such as the Pacific Drug Company in Seattle, Langley and Michaels Co. in San Francisco and Wells Fargo--- created the initial early twentieth century conditions for the Sinaloa drug trade.;By the 1920s, members of Sinaloa's economic elite and American entrepreneurs, facing constraints of the growing international trade control of pharmaceutical drugs and land redistribution after the Mexican Revolution, enlisted peasants in opium and marijuana growing. This raised production levels using the regional infrastructure recently developed for agricultural shipping to deliver marijuana, opium and heroin north. Utilizing archival materials largely off-limits to researchers until recent openings in Mexico's authoritarian regime, the thesis also documents the deep involvements of Mexican and American government officials and corporate interests in drug trafficking from its inception. This work highlights historical contradictions at the core of drug prohibition in North America. |
