In the War on Drugs There's Not Much Metaphysics Behind the Ideology

Interview with Jorge Hurtado Gumucio, psychiatrist and founder of the La Paz Coca Museum. Mallasa, La Paz, Bolivia, 17/1/2010. By Max Jorge Hinderer

A Coca Museum?

MJH When and why was the Coca Museum founded?

JH The museum was founded in 1997. The main intention is to present the real effect of the encounter with a plant. It's information on a hidden, buried history. Nonetheless, when the museum was founded this information was fundamental in setting out a solution to a stupid dilemma that Bolivia was caught up in.

The official history of coca, of cocaine in particular and of addictive drugs, is based on a journalistic question. "Coca is bad" and that's enough...but in fact that's not the case. Here in Bolivia it's a part of life like any other food. So I try to give this information in an unusual form, a synthetic form, and to show the facts to a public that previously only had the information given by the media, unless through a few books which are more for a few specialists than for the general public. We wanted to reach the visitor who always considered the question of coca: to win these people over, to inform them. Basically the aim was to create a space for the spread of knowledge on the real question of coca. Because there are things that happen in the War on Drugs, for example, that are beyond surreal. Political fiction, cheap political fiction, let's say. The Inquisition of 500 years ago was much more sophisticated in its crusade against the coca leaf than the War on Drugs at the beginning of the 21st century. Today it's so far removed from context that you end up believing it because it's so extreme. If they set up an imaginary situation that's beyond what the craziest imagination could come up with, it must be true, no? The UN against a plant...

MJH Is the public that visits the Coca Museum international?

JH Mostly. There are national visitors but relatively few. Most are foreigners. Besides, tourism in Bolivia is related to consumption.

MJH Of coca or cocaine?

JH Of cocaine, basically, because the only thing the world knows is cocaine. Really no-one knows anything else. That's why no-one associates coca with Coca-Cola. Which anyway is fundamental to clarify the central problem of Bolivia, specifically its relations with the US in the 20th century.

Coca or cocaine?

MJH The coca leaf has been used in South America, in the Andean region, for thousands of years. Whereas cocaine is an alkaloid processed from the coca leaf, a chemical product invented in Germany in the 19th century. What is the relation between the two?

JH 4,500 years more or less. Remnants of coca have been verified by carbon dating in archaeological remains in Peru. 4,200 years ago the plant was domesticated for humans. Coca is as old as food in general, as the domestication of plants. In the colony 500 years ago the new owners of the land brought the concept of mercantilism, of the primacy of the material above all else. I think mining exploitation created what might perhaps be called the deformation of the use of coca. At that time the Incas and almost all the Andean cultures consumed coca and no-one had any problem. But slavery created a situation of forced extraction of energy, and with this coca took on a new role. Not simply a custom of people in egalitarian societies, but something imposed. Because the imposition of its use in the mines, during the Spanish conquest and Inquisition, shows how forced labour was fundamentally related to it. First came prohibition, bringing down production levels and the royal income. This was the result of a prohibition by the priests under Charles V. First of all they recognized and feared that coca also had a strongly religious value. In Spain they said "it's the host"...isn't it true that in Spain they say "it's the host" when something is good? It's the Andean host, in contact with the divine, provided on a scale beyond measure, and while it was maintained there was no problem. With the entry of mercantilism and the superexploitation of humans in the mines, consumption of coca was already different. Already it no longer took one gram but many grams a day to survive and endure the level of physical exertion, the bad food. And it's there, I believe, that the consumption of coca suffered its first deformation.

MJH The first big step in the historical transformation of coca into cocaine?

JH In a way yes. It was the discovery that intensive use allows something more than normal use. But cocaine is in no way the stimulant that exists in the plant, and this seems to me be much more important. When you chew coca, obviously, you are woken up and have more energy. Your emotional state is raised. You feel better, it's obvious. But with cocaine this doesn't happen. Why? Because it's a completely different molecule. When you chew coca you have energy but you're relaxed, released. With cocaine you're tense. In chemical terms the stimulant in the plant is actually what we call ecgoncine. An original alkaloid of the plant with stimulant qualities. But when it is processed. as in the case of cocaine, it creates another chemical compound, ecgoncine chlorohydrate. This comes to be what we know as cocaine. Ecgoncine is still there, except that we are using a transporter which, in this case, is a chlorine. A chlorine molecule is added to the ecgoncine molecule, to transport it and disperse it more easily in the organism. Sometimes chemists tell me "nothing is changed", but if you really look at the phenomenon you see that the molecule is already no longer ecgoncine, it's ecgoncine chlorohydrate. Not only is it a transporter, but the molecule has changed, functioning as an entirely foreign substance, as it is not present in ecgoncine. Technically speaking the chlorohydrate is 1,700 times more active than ecgoncine alone. This is what cocaine is. It gives the active alkaloid a potency which is not present in the plant. And this new compound, foreign to coca, is given the name 'cocaine'. In speaking of the evil of cocaine, people say, "ah yes, because it's taken from the coca leaf". Cocaine is bad, it comes from the leaf, so the leaf is bad. But from the technical chemical point of view the manipulation is absolutely concrete, it's real.

But the transformation you spoke of earlier of in the mines at Potosí also had an effect at the social and ritual level. Coca always had a relation to work, always. It's the coffee of the Andes. Sometimes, when discussing prohibition, we ask: can you imagine a world without coffee? The machinery of capitalism would stop if coffee consumption ended. It energizes the system, and coca does exactly the same. And with another advantage, in that coffee has no food value other than calories, whereas coca contains a basic necessary level of the vitamins and minerals needed every day. You can live on 100 grams of coca.

The technique of chewing coca is also a technique of dose control. Because of the very way it's done it takes time. The size of your mouth is limited. At the most you can put 8 grams of leaves into your mouth without it becoming difficult to consume. You have to wait a while. At the same time the process in the mouth is one of pre-digestion. During this process a quantity is released and no more. You have regular administration, which is ideal for the administration of any pharmaceutical: it enters your system, last a number of hours and later weakens. It creates broad curves which you're able to handle physically and psychologically. Cocaine, on the other hand, functions in very fast doses and routes. The nasal, pulmonary or intravenous routes produce extremely potent and fugitive peaks. This can create an imbalance.

Historical and economic imbalance

MJH In speaking of imbalance, the mines, labour power, capitalism, are you arguing that the history of the transformation of the alkaloid is also an economic history?

JH It's History with a capital 'H'. The history of the economic and social function of coca is part of the History of the world and its economy. During the Spanish conquest and the colonial mining exploitation coca was used for the physical extraction of labour. In the mines of Potosí, when they recognized that this was what drove the extraction of silver, they not only made coca legal but enforced its consumption. This is fundamental to capitalism: surplus value is what counts.

MJH At the same time cocaine is the cliche drug of immaterial labour, for advertising agents, Wall Street brokers for example. Its history is like the long memory of the active principle, from colonization to neoliberalism, of a technology to mobilize labour power.

JH Cocaine is something like the extract of the maximum energy from the plant, compressed to be taken in a smaller container. Then you can take it more easily and also take it in larger quantities. When you chew coca and work, you are energized and are giving a function to the energy, which otherwise would be lost not in the production, but in your organism. With the consumption of cocaine that's exactly what happens. And there lies another contradiction between coca and cocaine: with the passage from coca to cocaine, in terms of labour productivity, it contributes not so much to physical but intellectual labour, a psychological yield. Unless you're very active or you have sex, your organism receives more electricity than it needs, or perhaps than it can burn. The same thing happens with cars. They put on a turbocharger to extract as much juice as possible. In mechanics it sounds good, but for the human organism it's a burden.

But regarding labour power, there we see how the system resorts to what are wrongly known as drugs to meet the needs of industry and work. Certainly, the extraction of energy from the worker is more subtle in mechanized factory industry than in the mines, and maybe even more so on the intellectual side.

MJH On a macro level through, could we say that the historical process of the alkaloid ends up as a technology of government?

JH Yes, definitely. But it applies to drugs in general. The idea that 'drugs are bad' is totally absurd from a medical point of view, but it serves to justify control of the population. As simple repression, of course prohibition is an instrument of power. And from the standpoint of production - the exploitation of the worker - the same is obviously true.

The utilitarian use of drugs is seen most clearly in war. For example in the Vietnam war marijuana consumption was extremely high, along with that of heroin. Cocaine and amphetamines were very important in the second world war. They were distributed so that the soldiers would be stimulated, with more energy, in altered emotional states. But I imagine the lows came later.

A new stage?

MJH In the 1970s the world suffered a profound change. Not just a change in the labour regime in western capitalism - from fordism to postfordism - but also the beginning of the War on Drugs on a large scale. In '71 the UN in Vienna reaffirmed the plan for the general eradication of coca. At the same time consumption of cocaine, above all in the US, increased exorbitantly along with demand. At the end of the '70s Bolivia, along with Colombia, became the leading producer of cocaine. The workforce needed for the changed production of the coca leaf come from the Altiplano, former miners without work since a wave of privatization and unemployment. In '85 neoliberalism devastates the labour situation in the mines, and after the IMF impositions there are massive waves of migration to Chapare and Santa Cruz. The same year they set up the Palmasola prison a few kilometres from Santa Cruz de la Sierra. It's very prompt, and when Law 1008 and the 'zero coca' policy come into force it becomes the biggest complex in the country. What is changing with Evo Morales, who is himself, in his political background, a product of migration and organization among the coca workers?

JH Evo comes from Oruro, he wasn't a miner but he comes from a mining area. In the Andean Altiplano he practically lived in the mine, it was a mining economy all around him. The end of mining also ended the most important class contradiction of the time. Already there are no miners like there were then. The miners were the political union vanguard, maybe one of the most radical in history. With the closing of the mines this whole movement, struggle and revolutionary direction ended, but it was transferred directly to the coca war, bringing with it many of the old protagonists. To an extent they are the same protagonists, the same actors of the social struggle around mining. They go and they struggle over something else. But here the advantage of the coca war has been that the North Americans have maintained an enormously strong presence. As Jorge Sanjinés says, it's important to know who is the main enemy. The Bolivian presidents were not the main enemies, they were just a lot of puppets. With the coca war the main enemy really acquires a face. And the peasant, the coca grower in particular, understands where the enemy really is. This has really been very important because at this point we start to understand that fighting the Bolivian governments was absurd. We sense that they have no decision-making power. It was a waste of time to talk to them. Better to speak directly to those running the show. Then this polarization that sets in at the time of the expulsion of the US embassy. Fabulous, no? From the point of view that it clearly shows how farcical all this is. And above all that their presence is more pro-narcotrafficking than anything else.

MJH Now I think everyone in Bolivia recognizes that a real change is underway. This change is expressed by a leader who comes from a coca union background. At the same time Bolivia is celebrating its new indigenous sovereignty, promoting a new original authenticity. As a psychiatrist and expert in the history of coca and cocaine, what effect can this change have on what we're talking about? What could be the future history of cocaine in Bolivia? Not just that of the coca leaf, which has been re-empowered as a symbol of Andean-worker identity, but for cocaine.

JH I believe the industrialization of cocaine is an inevitable step.

MJH Legally?

JH Yes, because crossing the Bolivian border the value of coca lies in its alkaloid, as an energizer and an anaesthetic. This role is good then. Cocaine is a good anaesthetic. And then, why not? It must inevitably come to this, there's no other option.

MJH How do you connect your proposal with the government's ideological propaganda, which proposes returning to original identity, given that cocaine is seen as an alienation of the authentic?

JH This is related to the War on Drugs and the tremendous harm people have suffered from it. It's like a trauma. 'Coca is not cocaine', etc. are slogans which can be useful at a specific moment. As a way of stating the problem clearly, in a popular form without much discourse, I think it works. Having said that, the word 'cocaine' doesn't signify a substance, it signifies a politics, a technological concept, a dogma, it signifies too many things. For me and many others the term 'cocaine' is not just a substance, it's all the manipulation, all the deaf and dirty war hidden behind a value. When they say 'zero cocaine' that's zero production. I have opposed the slogan 'coca is not cocaine' because ultimately cocaine also has great value, what happens it that it's used badly. But no-one talks of the deeper chemical side. Obviously we can't say that coca is cocaine, because really it's not. Cocaine is a molecule discovered and named by the Germans, cocaine chlorohydrate. Cocaine chlorohydrate is not a plant, therefore it's not coca. Now my proposal goes in the same direction. If someone, some German or whoever, gave a substance a name which is now identified with something else, well, I propose that we ourselves name ecgoncine 'Evocaine' and enter directly into its industrial production.

MJH Replace cocaine with Evocaine?

JH Absolutely and necessarily, because it's the only way to get out of all this sht they've caught us up in. And then we can finally prohibit cocaine itself: that concept is really finished.

MJH As a political principle?

JH As a chemical principle too. It's possible to do better. What the Germans did in the 19th century was good, but technology now permits much more. Why produce a bad molecule? Let's make a good molecule. And why call it cocaine if that's not what it is? In the War on Drugs there's not much metaphysics behind the ideology.

For related reading see John Barker's 'From Coca to Capital: Free Trade Cocaine', http://www.metamute.org/en/articles/from_coca_to_capital