drugs and trade--4/22/25

22 Apr 2025

drugs and trade--4/22/25

0 COMMENTS

Today's encore selection -- from The World That Trade Created by Kenneth Pomeranz. Items ingested to produce an altered state have been featured in trade around the world for centuries:

“Today the word ‘drugs’ often refers to outlaw commodities, socially harmful and criminal goods that dwell in the underworld of the black market. ‘Recreational drugs’ are not considered part of the gross national product. Indeed, they are thought to subtract from the total of goods and services produced, because drug use prevents consumers from contributing to the economy through hard work or by the consumption of Igeal, ‘wholesome’ products. Drugs are viewed as an embarrassment to capitalism, a throwback to primitive times before bourgeois ethics and consumption patterns took hold. Illicit drug organization CEOs are called ‘barons’ or ‘lords’ as if they were medieval princes and their companies ‘clans’ or ‘cartels.’ Free trade, which is said to bring great advantages to everyone involved by increasing profits to the most efficient producers and reducing costs to consumers, does not apply to the world of drugs. This is the rare area in which government surveillance and control are demanded to reduce commerce and profits. Drug control is done not through market mechanisms, but through ‘wars’ waged by drug ‘czars.’ But are drugs really such exceptions? Are they economic outcasts with different rules?

“The fact is that, historically, goods considered drugs, that is, products ingested, smoked, sniffed, or drunk to produce an altered state of being, have been central to exchange and consumption. What has changed is not the commercial and social value of these goods, but the definition of ‘drug.’ New foods introduced from what seem to be exotic lands have historically passed through different phases in their social lives. They often started as drugs that caused pleasant pharmacological effects. As drugs they were seen as both medicines and sacraments of religious rites; that is, they were thought to have both spiritual and physiological effects. They either transported consumers into spiritual states of bodylessness or, conversely, heightened sensuality by serving as aphrodisiacs. They either heightened or dulled the senses, but in either case they transported users away from the drudgery of the workaday world. (A surprising array of foods were thought to arouse sexual ardor, from the plain potato and the addictive tobacco to the succulent tomato—called the ‘love apple.’) Although the introduction of new foods no doubt had had these social uses for millennia, only the transportation revolution of the sixteenth century caused these foods to occupy an important place in international trade. (Aromatic incenses like frankincense and myrrh were partial exceptions. They were not to be eaten, but inhaling them was supposed to alter people's moods, and they were traded over thousands of miles even in ancient times.) As the world economy made certain foods valuable, they were transformed from spiritual or sensual balms into the foundations of vast, secular fortunes.

In the seventeenth century, affluent people all over the world began to drink, smoke, and eat exotic plants that came from long distances. Coffee, tea, cocoa, tobacco, and sugar all became popular at roughly the same time. Both European and Asian consumers became addicted to these American, Asian, and African products. For three centuries they constituted the most valuable agricultural goods in world trade. Although today advocates of free trade generally exclude drugs from the free circulation of goods, in fact the plants that gave birth to the modern world economy were considered drugs. Sometimes, as with coffee and tobacco, they were initially outlawed in consuming countries. But their appeal became so strong that government after government decided that it was better to tax consumers of these delicacies and accept their use, even cultivate it, than to spend large amounts to prevent drug addiction.

“However, producers attempted to maintain their natural monopolies since most drug foods were indigenous to a specific place: Arabica coffee to Ethiopia (then domesticated in Yemen), cacao to Mexico, coca to the Andes, tea to China, tobacco to the Americas, Non-European originators of these exports, such as the Chinese, Ottomans, Aztecs, and Incas, attempted to control the trade and to prevent the export of seed or seedlings. They failed when Europeans used the persuasion of trade and the force of warfare to open ports. Before long, most of the drug foods were being produced in new, distant parts of the world that Europeans had colonized. Botanical gardens that nurtured exotic seedlings became the advance guard of empire. Colonial empires were built on the foundation of drug trades. So were many domestic bureaucracies and armies. Tariffs on tea, sugar, and tobacco accounted for a significant part of the revenue of numerous seventeenth- and eighteenth-century states. In fact, reliance on taxes on drugs is still one of the main sources of public revenues today. Known as sin taxes, charges on tobacco products and alcohol fund our schools and public health programs.

“The popularization of drug foods by Europeans often transformed their meanings, uses, and location of production. Tea and coffee gained initial favor in China and the Middle East because their caffeine contributed to the wakefulness necessary for religious rites. Muslim Sufi holy men and Buddhist priests popularized the drinks, which long were closely associated with religious observances. Cacao drinking was restricted to the Aztec theocracy and aristocracy in Mexico. In Europe all three beverages became tied to secular uses. Over time their class appeal changed: they began as aristocratic privilege, diffused to bourgeois pleasures, and eventually became mass delights and finally common necessities. The drugs that began as nourishment for spiritual contemplation became the sustenance of industrial workers. Along that path, the way they were consumed also changed. They were originally hot drinks with no sweeteners (the Aztecs added chili to cacao, the Arabs sometimes nutmeg or cardamom to coffee); later, so many additives were included that the original beverage was hardly discernible.

“Once they gained acceptance and began creating fortunes for merchants and state treasuries, most of the drugs became respectable. In areas marginal to world trade, they sometimes served as money. Cacao beans in Central America, tobacco in West Africa, opium in southwest China, and tea bricks in Siberian Russia were currency. But usually the goal was to transmute them into gold or silver. At first they were foundations of mercantilist empires. The Spanish doted on chocolate because of their dominion over most of Latin America, which had a natural monopoly on cacao until traders later moved it to Africa. The British, who were the first Europeans to become coffee crazed, found tea more to the advantage of their trade plans in China and India. The French and Americans, oriented to Latin America, became coffee addicts.

“These exotic drugs emerged from the outlaw underground to become central parts of the nascent bourgeois lifestyle in Europe. They went from the stuff of community, such as the tobacco smoked by Native Americans in council meetings or by West Africans in religious ceremonies, to the fuel of entrepreneurs and agitators for individual rights. Coffeehouses (which served other drinks as well) served as centers for trade and politicking in Europe. The first newspapers, men's clubs, and political parties were organized, and revolutions plotted, around tables serving coffee and tea. Smoking brought together men who created civil society amid the acrid clouds of tobacco. (Indeed, the coffeehouse was the world economy in miniature, an international emporium joining coffee from Java, Yemen, or the Americas, tea from China, sugar and rum from Africa's Atlantic islands or the Caribbean, and tobacco from North America or Brazil.)

“The nineteenth century would popularize these goods so much that they lost their revolutionary appeal and their sense of social distinction. Tobacco descended from elegant snuff and fine cigars to vulgar chewing tobacco. Aristocratic Parisian dandies at Versailles who delicately took snuff would not have recognized that this was the same substance that U.S. baseball players later called chaw and spit out on the sidelines or teenagers smoked furtively in school restrooms. Indeed, making it easier to consume tobacco while also working—as when cigarettes replaced the elaborate, heavy pipes that elites in the Middle East had favored for nicotine delivery—could be crucial to expanding the market, while also changing the social image of smoking. Sugar was debased from extravagant culinary dessert masterpieces to a huge source of working-class calories in beverages to an industrial additive in something so prosaic as, say, ketchup; coffee and tea descended from the elegant salons to become popularized with instant coffee and iced tea in military rations and in cafeterias."