GUEST EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

Mexico, Shanghai, and Drug

History’s Global Turn
ISAAC CAMPOS

Abstract. This essay introduces the field of Mexican drug history and the
five essays that follow in this special issue. Through a brief review of some
major points of interest and contention over more than five hundred years
of history, it argues that the related scholarship is coming into its own and
should be of considerable interest to drug historians worldwide.

Last June, the Alcohol and Drugs History Society (ADHS) gathered in
Shanghai for its 2019 meeting. The year marked two major anniversa-
ries in the history of drugs. One is well known: 110 years since the meet-
ing of the Shanghai Opium Commission, famous among drug historians
as the first multilateral drug-control conference and the initial stepping
stone to the international drug prohibition regimes still in force today.
The other, also dating to 1909, is far more obscure but hardly less con-
sequential: it was the moment Mexico became a major player in the
international trafficking of narcotics.
The two events were not unrelated, though the published proceed-
ings of the opium commission, more than six hundred pages of detailed
reports on global drug traffic, only hint at this relationship, for the word
“Mexico” does not appear there even once.1 In short, as of February 1909,

Isaac Campos is an associate professor at the University of Cincinnati.

1. Report of the International Opium Commission, Shanghai, China, February 1 to February 26,
1909, vol. 1, Report of the Proceedings (Shanghai: North China Daily News & Herald Ltd.,
1909).

Electronically published April 23, 2020

The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs (Spring 2020) © 2020 by The Alcohol and Drugs
History Society. 1930-8418/2020/3401-0002$10.00 All rights reserved.
DOI:10.1086/707680
4 THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF ALCOHOL AND DRUGS F V34N1 (2020)

Mexico was largely irrelevant to the global narcotics trade. But things
were changing fast. During those February proceedings, in a carefully
timed effort to demonstrate American resolve in the drug fight, the
United States Congress passed the Opium Exclusion Act, a law that
prohibited the importation of so-called prepared (or “smoking”) opium
into the United States. That legislation, combined with opium-market
upheavals in Asia caused by the 1907 Sino-British Agreement, almost in-
stantly turned Mexico into a major supplier of illicit opium to its neigh-
bor north of the border. Further prohibitions on the US side over the
coming years, from alcohol to marijuana, would eventually inspire more
smuggling, further global connections, renewed political responses, and
so forth, in a now familiar cycle.2
This process is usually framed as the fundamental engine of Mexi-
can drug history, with developments in the United States producing ef-
fects in Mexico.3 And to some extent, and at certain moments in history,
like 1909, it has been true. But that familiar narrative often obscures as
much as it reveals. Though Mexico was not on the map of interna-
tional drug control in February 1909, drugs—along with antidrug ideol-
ogy, discourse, and policy—already had a very deep and nuanced history
in Mexico. Indeed, that history was arguably much longer, deeper, and
more nuanced than the history of drugs in the United States. One might
even argue that Mexico’s drug history down to that point, and ever since,
has been “exceptional,” though here we would simply like to argue that,
whatever outside influences have shaped Mexico’s relationship to drugs
over the last century, the domestic roots of that history have been
equally, if not more, influential to the course of events.
This special issue emerged from two panels at Shanghai 2019 that we
called “A Century (and More) of Mexican Drug Wars.” The prominent
2. Isaac Campos, “Imperialism and Mexican Drug Policy, 1912–1916: A Reassessment,”
forthcoming.
3. For a challenge to this model, see Campos, “Imperialism and Mexican Drug Policy.” On
the traditional model of “pressure-response,” see Daniel Weimer, Seeing Drugs: Moderniza-
tion, Counterinsurgency, and U.S. Narcotics Control in the Third World,1969–1976 (Kent, OH:
Kent State University Press, 2011), 177–78. For examples in the literature, see Froylán
Enciso, “Los fracasos del chantaje. Régimen de prohibición de drogas y narcotráfico,” in
Seguridad nacional y seguridad interior, ed. Arturo Alvarado and Mónica Serrano, Los
grandes problemas de México (México, D.F.: El Colegio de México, 2010); Luis Astorga,
Drogas sin fronteras (México, D.F.: Grijalbo, 2003); William O. Walker III, Drug Control in
the Americas (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981), 1–2, 48–49, 59; Maria
Celia Toro, Mexico’s “War” on Drugs (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1995), 6–7.
 MEXICO, SHANGHAI, AND DRUG HISTORY’S GLOBAL TURN 5

role of so many Mexicanists at the meeting signals both the maturation

of Mexican drug history and the globalization of the ADHS. We thus
bring a sampling of these papers to the Social History of Alcohol and Drugs
with two principal objectives. First, we hope to nurture the continued
growth of Mexican drug history by showcasing the breadth and depth
of the latest scholarship in the field. Second, we want to stimulate a di-
alogue with scholars who work in other regions of the world, for we see
our work as contributing to a rising wave of scholarship that is recenter-
ing drug histories outside of the United States and Great Britain. Let us
then begin with a brief introduction to this very long and fascinating his-
tory in Mexico.
Even before Spanish colonizers arrived in the sixteenth century with
a host of presumptions and prejudices about intoxicants, Mexico al-
ready had plenty of experience with both drugs and sumptuary restric-
tions designed to control their use. Part of this is explained by the
country’s natural endowments. For one, Mexico is the world’s richest
country in hallucinogenic drugs, perhaps better described in this con-
text as “entheogens,” or substances that facilitate spiritual experience.
But there was also plenty of pre-Hispanic drinking, which was, like na-
tive entheogens, usually tied to spiritual belief. Thus, when the Spanish
arrived with their mission of both military and spiritual conquest, con-
flict was not long in coming over the use of these substances.
Peyote was first banned by the Inquisition in 1620, and similar prohi-
bitions for other drugs soon followed. However, it was alcohol that pro-
duced the most consternation.4 Pulque, a light, milky beverage made
from fermented agave sap, had been known as centzonttotochtli, or “four
hundred rabbits,” among pre-Hispanic Mexicans, meaning that its po-
tential effects were varied and limitless.5 Authority rarely applauds such
unpredictability, especially among the rabble. During the colonial period
it was the “drunken Indian” who was most feared. After independence
in 1821, it was usually drunkenness within the “pueblo,” the common-
ers, mostly mestizos, that fueled the fear and loathing.6 During the
long dictatorship of Porfirio Diáz (1876–1911), perhaps no other issue

4. Isaac Campos, Home Grown: Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico’s War on Drugs (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), ch. 2.
5. Campos, Home Grown, 48.
6. Deborah Toner, Alcohol and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Lincoln: Univer-
sity of Nebraska Press, 2015).
6 THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF ALCOHOL AND DRUGS F V34N1 (2020)

engendered as much concern among the elite.7 And while, in compari-

son to the United States, there was not much formal temperance agi-
tation in Mexico, there was endless hand-wringing and publicity given
to the problem of alcohol abuse. The press rarely lacked reports on
drunken brawls and knifings. State-level laws followed, as constitu-
tional restrictions, financial realities, and public resistance made broader
prohibitions impractical.8
Meanwhile, marijuana was also associated with violence and disor-
der in Mexico. But unlike alcohol, which had a widely accepted role in
Mexican life, marijuana’s reputation, beyond a few common applica-
tions in folk medicine, was all violence and madness. It was, “la yerba
loca,” the insanity weed, associated since the late eighteenth century
with herbolarias, herb dealers who were themselves menacingly linked
to witchcraft. It was also connected with prisons and soldiers’ barracks,
both of which were degraded, violent, and unhygienic environments.
As a result, marijuana’s unpredictability and unruliness, its four hun-
dred rabbits, were accented by fear of secret Indian knowledge and
witchcraft, as well as the general degraded reputation of prisoners
and soldiers.9
Thus when representatives of international drug control came call-
ing in 1912 to ask Mexico to sign on to the newly minted Hague Inter-
national Opium Convention, Mexico immediately agreed. After all, Mex-
ican domestic regulations were already largely in accordance with the
Hague’s prescriptions. Over the next couple of decades they were made
even more so. This was easy for Mexico. Unlike countries with a serious
national interest in the trade of these illicit narcotics (e.g., Peru, Bolivia,
Great Britain, and Germany), Mexico, at least officially, only had a fi-
nancial stake in alcohol, which, predictably, escaped prohibition for that
reason.10
It was only after drug prohibition that Mexicans (and others) began
to have a serious financial interest in trafficking drugs within and out
of Mexico. It was of course prohibition itself that made it so. When
the United States prohibited imports of “smoking” opium in 1909, a
multinational array of entrepreneurs sought to take advantage of the

7. Moisés González Navarro, El Porfiriato: La vida social, ed. Daniel Cosío Villegas, 2nd ed.,
vol. 4, Historia Moderna de México (México: Editorial Hermes, 1970), 72.
8. Campos, Home Grown, ch. 5.
9. Campos, Home Grown, ch. 5.
10. Campos, Home Grown, 189.
 MEXICO, SHANGHAI, AND DRUG HISTORY’S GLOBAL TURN 7

blossoming illicit market. Traders from Macao, on China’s southern

coast, who were already being pinched by new prohibitions on export-
ing opium to China, Canada, and Australia, began using Mexico as a
smuggling entrepot.11 Mexicans also took advantage, none more prom-
inently than Colonel Estebán Cantú, who, as Governor of Baja California
during the Mexican Revolution (1910–20), skimmed profits from the boom-
ing opium trade in his state, along with prostitution, gambling, and li-
quor, all vices that were pushed into the relatively lawless border region
by prohibitions in both the United States and the Mexican interior.12
During the 1920s, as Mexico was deepening its involvement with in-
ternational drug control regimes, and prohibitionist policy and ideology
hardened in the United States, the links between drug trafficking and
public officials increased, while new trafficking corridors and methods
were pioneered. Already by the 1930s, airplanes were being used by traf-
fickers to move drugs into the United States. All of this intensified co-
operation between the United States and Mexico in the drug fight.13
But it also inspired some dissent from increasingly accepted drug-war
orthodoxy. In the late 1930s, an iconoclast psychiatrist named Leopoldo
Salazar Viniegra challenged both Mexico’s reigning antimarijuana ideol-
ogy—causing a considerable scandal in the process—and the wisdom of
prohibitionist approaches to drug abuse. Salazar had dealt with Mexico’s
domestic drug abusers for years while working at the National Psychiat-
ric Hospital and the attached Hospital for Drug Addicts, and through this
experience concluded that prohibition not only failed to prevent drug
abuse but made matters worse by enriching drug traffickers. While Mex-
ico had actually pursued something resembling a public-health-oriented
drug policy in the 1930s, Salazar insisted that this had been a failure be-
cause, first, Mexico did not have sufficient resources to properly treat
drug addicts, and second, treatment was unlikely to work in any case,
as demonstrated by it having mostly failed in the resource-rich United

11. Campos, “Imperialism and Mexican Drug Policy.”

12. Eric Michael Schantz, “All Night at the Owl: The Social and Political Relations of
Mexicali’s Red-Light District, 1913–1925,” Journal of the Southwest 43, no. 4 (2001); Walker,
Drug Control in the Americas, 35–36; Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution: Counter-revolution
and Reconstruction, vol. 2 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 501–3.
13. On the airplanes, see Walker, Drug Control in the Americas, 140–41. On growing cooper-
ation between the US and Mexico, see Carlos Pérez Ricart, Las agencias antinarcóticos de los
Estados Unidos y la construcción transnacional de la guerra contra las drogas en México (1938–
1978) (Freie Universität Berlin, 2016); Walker, Drug Control in the Americas.
8 THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF ALCOHOL AND DRUGS F V34N1 (2020)

States. The solution, he argued, was to create a state morphine monopoly

to compete with the drug traffickers, one that would offer the highest
quality morphine at the lowest possible prices, thus destroying the illicit
traffickers while giving users an incentive to stay in contact with physi-
cians who might help them with the underlying problems causing their
addiction. Remarkably, Salazar got his plan adopted, and it went into
force in Mexico in March of 1940. However, within four months, as a re-
sult of both US pressure and some Mexican diplomatic missteps, Mexico
was forced to rescind the policy and return to the one that Salazar had so
forcefully critiqued. It was, arguably, a missed opportunity for Mexico to
avoid what would evolve into a very bloody drug-war future.14
Meanwhile, Mexican drug production and trafficking continued to
respond to global market fluctuations. World War II, which cut off tra-
ditional supplies of opiates to the Western Hemisphere, provided new
opportunities for Mexican opium growers to fill the gap, and that produc-
tion came increasingly under the control of growers and traffickers in
northwest Mexico in cahoots with politicians, police, and military offi-
cials. In 1947, President Miguel Alemán transferred leadership of drug
control from the public health authorities to the attorney general’s office.
At the same time, the army and other Mexican security forces, especially
the (eventually notorious) Directorate of Federal Security (DFS), were
given greater roles in the fight against illicit narcotics.
The sociologist Luis Astorga has argued, quite influentially, that it
was with the creation of the DFS that the Mexican state began to control
drug trafficking more systematically. This system had two objectives: it
ensured that influential state actors could skim profits from the increas-
ingly lucrative trade, and it helped keep the traffickers under control and
out of politics.15 The details of this relationship nonetheless remain very
sketchy. Astorga cites allegations from US officials that a key Alemán con-
fidant and DFS founding member was closely tied to drug trafficking. But
as others have pointed out, many questions remain unanswered. Are we

14. Isaac Campos, “A Diplomatic Failure: The Mexican Role in the Demise of the 1940
Reglamento Federal de Toxicomanías,” Third World Quarterly 39, no. 2 (2018): 232–47. Ri-
cardo Pérez Montfort, Tolerancia y prohibición: Aproximaciones a la historia social y cultural
de las drogas en México, 1840–1940 (México: Penguin Random House, 2016), 282–307;
Astorga, Drogas sin fronteras, 205–27; Walker, Drug Control in the Americas, 122–27.
15. Luis Astorga, “Drugs and Politics,” in The Political Economy of the Drug Industry: Latin
America and the International System, ed. Menno Vellinga (Gainesville: University Press of
Florida, 2004), 88.
 MEXICO, SHANGHAI, AND DRUG HISTORY’S GLOBAL TURN 9

sure that these US reports on the connection were truly accurate? Even if
they were, what was President Alemán’s actual role in all of this? Was he
somehow not aware of the link between the DFS and the traffickers?
Could he have been orchestrating the trade himself? How many state of-
ficials were involved? And so forth.16
Whatever the answer, the decades after World War II were clearly
transformative for the global drug trade and Mexico’s role in it as a pro-
ducer, supplier, destination for drug tourists, and home to drug abuse of
various kinds. Part of the shift was cultural. While Mexico, and particu-
larly its border region, had been stereotyped as a land of vice since the
early twentieth century, the writers of the Beat Generation in the United
States, especially Jack Kerouac, idealized that reputation and leavened it
with orientalist fantasies about Mexico’s supposedly more earthy and
spiritual essence. Then, in 1957, the mycologist R. Gordon Wasson pub-
lished a piece on Mexico’s “magic mushrooms” in Life Magazine. Soon
American hippies, the heirs to the Beats, were traveling south to experi-
ence the mushrooms, and Mexico, for themselves.17
The 1960s also saw a rise in domestic drug use in Mexico among both
the poor and more well-healed youth who came to be called “jipis”
(Mexican hippies). The latter, who smoked marijuana or took psilocybin
like their brethren north of the border, were criticized loudly by some
Mexican intellectuals for copying American cultural trends. The irony
of course was that American hippies, à la Kerouac, were actively aping
what they imagined to be the authentic Mexico. As Eric Zolov puts it,
“One might see this process as an ethnically complex double mirror:
mestizo youth began to copy Anglo hippies who were copying indige-
nous Mexicans.”18
Meanwhile, below all of these cultural shifts, the drug business was
booming. In response, President Richard Nixon launched Operation In-
tercept in 1969, the first real salvo in his War on Drugs. Intercept involved
shutting down the traffic along the US-Mexico border in a putative search
for drugs, especially marijuana, though the real objective was to coerce

16. Guillermo Valdés Castellanos, Historia del narcotráfico en México (Mexico City: Aguilar,
2013), 159.
17. Eric Zolov, Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999), 106–11; Jorge García-Robles, At the End of the Road: Jack Kerouac in
Mexico, trans. Daniel C. Schechter (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); R.
Gordon Wasson, “Seeking the Magic Mushroom,” Life Magazine, 13 May 1957.
18. Zolov, Refried Elvis, 111.
10 THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF ALCOHOL AND DRUGS F V34N1 (2020)

Mexico into using aerial-borne herbicides in eradication campaigns. Af-

ter a considerable diplomatic crisis, Mexico agreed to increased cooper-
ation, though not yet the herbicide program. Herbicides would only be
approved in the mid-1970s, as a more aggressive antidrug program of-
fered an opportunity to rein in the increasingly powerful narcos while si-
multaneously rooting out leftist guerrillas who sometimes occupied the
same remote territory. These operations, called “Trizo” and “Condor,”
produced significant abuses by the military and, as a result, increasing
antipathy for the state. It also inspired the traffickers to be more careful,
pay bigger bribes, and get more organized.19 By the 1980s, under the
leadership of Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, and with the growing profits
derived from smuggling Colombian cocaine through Mexico (made pos-
sible by Reagan-era crackdowns on Caribbean smuggling routes), these
trafficking organizations, now dubbed “cartels” by US officials, grew into
a serious problem for the authority of the Mexican state. The 1990s saw
various signs of that shift: in 1993, the gangland assassination of the
Archbishop of Guadalajara outside that city’s airport; in 1994, Luis
Donoldo Colosio, presidential candidate for the PRI, the party that had
ruled Mexico, and supposedly controlled drug trafficking, since the Sec-
ond World War, was assassinated during a campaign stop in Tijuana; that
same year, a top official in the PRI and the brother-in-law of President
Carlos Salinas de Gortari was also assassinated; soon after, Salinas’s
brother Raúl was indicted for masterminding that murder and found
to have hundreds of millions of dollars in Swiss bank accounts. He was
eventually acquitted, and the case, which from the beginning exhibited
obvious signs of narco-corruption, has never been solved.20
Then, in the year 2000, the PRI, after 71 years in power, lost its grip
on the presidency to Vicente Fox’s PAN party. But high hopes that true
democracy had actually reached Mexico were soon shattered by an es-
calating war between the increasingly out-of-control drug cartels. In
2006, after barely winning a highly disputed presidential election, the
PAN’s Felipe Calderón declared “war” on the traffickers, only to see
Mexico spiral into an orgy of violence and atrocities, complete with

19. Weimer, Seeing Drugs, ch. 6; Aileen Teague, “Mexico’s Dirty War on Drugs: Source Con-
trol and Dissidence in Drug Enforcement,” Social History of Alcohol and Drugs 33, no. 1
(2019): 63–87.
20. Ted Galen Carpenter, Bad Neighbor Policy: Washington’s Futile War on Drugs in Latin
America (New York: St. Martin’s, 2003), 184–85.
 MEXICO, SHANGHAI, AND DRUG HISTORY’S GLOBAL TURN 11

decapitations, mass graves, and increasing evidence that the state sim-
ply is no longer able to control the narcos. All the while, drugs continue
to flow into the United States, while arms are smuggled back south to
carry out the killings, to the tune of perhaps 200,000 dead over the last
15 years.21 And the questions that have lingered since the Alemán ad-
ministration, about how high the corruption goes, continue. On 10 De-
cember 2019, as we were in the process of completing this special issue,
Genaro García Luna, the man in charge of Calderón’s drug war, was
indicted and arrested in the United States for taking millions of dollars
in bribes from Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán’s Sinaloa cartel. For many
the arrest confirmed years of suspicion that Calderón’s government had
been favoring the Sinaloa cartel in its War on Drugs.22
Clearly, a lot has happened since 1909. Luckily, the field of Mexican
drug history is beginning to come into its own, and we are beginning to fill
in the details of this extraordinary history. The field has reached a point
where we can even begin recognizing something of a revisionist move-
ment within it, one that challenges the US-centric model that has dom-
inated drug studies in North America since the 1970s.23 This movement
is in harmony with the broader field where, for example, scholars have
begun highlighting the Asian roots of antidrug discourses and policy
models, while others are discovering the rich nuance and largely over-
looked history of drugs in Africa and the Middle East.24 Whether we call

21. Estimates of course vary. In 2016 the death toll was reported to be 170,000. In 2018
some claim it was as high as 250,000. See Human Rights Watch, “Mexico: Events of
2016,” https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2017/country-chapters/mexico; Brianna Lee
and Danielle Renwick, “Mexico’s Drug War,” https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder
/mexicos-drug-war; “Estrategia fallida: 250.000 asesinatos en México desde el inicio de
la ‘guerra contra el narco,’” https://actualidad.rt.com/actualidad/272788-mexico-llega
-250000-asesinatos-inicio-guerra-narcotraficoReferences; “In Mexico, Not Dead. Not Alive.
Just Gone,” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/world/americas/mexico-drug-war-dead
.html.
22. “Arrest of Top Crime Fighter Stuns Mexico, Where Corruption Is All Too Routine,”
New York Times, 11 December 2019.
23. Isaac Campos, “The Making of Pariah Drugs in Latin America,” in The OUP Handbook
of Drug History, ed. Paul Gootenberg (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
24. For Latin America, see Paul Gootenberg and Isaac Campos, “Toward a New Drug His-
tory of Latin America: A Research Frontier at the Center of Debates,” Hispanic American
Historical Review 95, no. 1 (2015): 1–35. Work on Asia is of course not new, but much of it
was originally quite Eurocentric. For more recent works that break from the Eurocentric
model, see Frank Dikötter, Lars Laamann, and Zhou Zun, Narcotic Culture: A History of
12 THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF ALCOHOL AND DRUGS F V34N1 (2020)

this revisionism, or decentering, or the global turn, the field is clearly ma-
turing and reaching to—borrowing some terminology from 1960s mod-
ernization theory—“take off.”
While scholars of drugs in Mexico continue to be deeply interested in
fundamental questions related to drug trafficking and the War on Drugs
there—for example, the origins of Mexican drug policy; the US imperial
role; the development of trafficking networks and drug corruption—
these essays demonstrate how the maturing field is deepening these in-
quiries, more fully integrating them with the mainstream historiography
of modern Mexico, and even discovering whole new veins of research. At
the same time, all of these essays speak to questions that can inform work
in the rest of Latin America and, more broadly, throughout the world.
José Domingo Shievenini’s “A Small Distinction with a Big Differ-
ence: Prohibiting ‘Drugs’ but Not Alcohol in Mexico, from Conquest to
Constitutional Law” compares Mexican approaches to alcohol and other
drugs over several centuries. At the center of Shievenini’s analysis is Ar-
ticle 73 of the Constitution of 1917, which authorized Mexico’s public
health bureaucracy to pursue a campaign against substances that “poi-
son the individual and degenerate the race.” Long-term analysis demon-
strates little difference between discourses and anxieties related to alco-
hol and other drugs, yet only the latter would be prohibited in Mexico
on the federal level. Furthermore, the antidrug campaign that Article 73
authorized, especially when aimed at drug possession, in some ways
contradicted other constitutional protections, a circumstance that led to

Drugs in China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); James H. Mills and Patricia
Barton, eds., Drugs and Empires: Essays in Modern Imperialism and Intoxication, c.1500–
c.1930 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007); Miriam Kingsberg, Moral Nation: Modern Japan and
Narcotics in Global History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); John F. Richards,
“Opium and the British Indian Empire: The Royal Commission of 1895,” Modern Asian
Studies 36, no. 2 (2002): 375–420. James T. Bradford, Poppies, Politics, and Power: Afghani-
stan and the Global History of Drugs and Diplomacy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2019); Steffen Rimner, Opium’s Long Shadow: From Asian Revolt to Global Drug Control
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). For Africa, see Gernot Klantschnig, Neil
Carrier, and Charles Ambler, eds., Drugs in Africa: Histories and Ethnographies of Use,
Trade and Control (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Chris S. Duvall, The African
Roots of Marijuana (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). For the Middle East, see
Haggai Ram, “Hashishophobia and the Jewish Ethnic Question in Mandatory Palestine
and the State of Israel,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (2019): 1–17. See also
Maziyar Ghiabi, ed., Power and Illicit Drugs in the Global South (London: Routledge, 2018).
 MEXICO, SHANGHAI, AND DRUG HISTORY’S GLOBAL TURN 13

inconsistent rulings on the legality of drug policy by Mexico’s Supreme

Court during the 1930s.
Nathaniel Morris’s “Serrano Communities and Subaltern Negotiat-
ing Strategies: The Local Politics of Opium Production in Mexico, 1940
to the Present” demonstrates how inquiries into Mexican drug history,
when informed by the broader historiography of modern Mexico, can
provide deep insights. While popular histories often glorify the suppos-
edly all-powerful cartels of the drug trade, Morris shifts our focus to
the thousands of independent peasants who, without formal affiliations
to those cartels, have for decades provided the raw materials of the drug
traffic. His examination demonstrates that these peasants, far from being
the feeble lackeys of powerful traffickers or the state, have used drug pro-
duction as a tool in their perennial quest to protect their own communi-
ties from outside threats, whether from the state, or capitalist develop-
ment, or the traffickers themselves. In this Morris recognizes familiar
patterns that were also critical to the course of the Mexican Revolution
(1910–20), variations of which have even been seen in other parts of
the world.
In “Taking the War on Drugs Down South: The Drug Enforcement
Administration (DEA) in Mexico (1973–1980),” Carlos A. Pérez Ricart
explores the familiar theme of US involvement in Mexico but deepens
our understanding with a finely grained analysis of the DEA’s role in
Mexico’s drug war during the 1970s. This was the period that saw an in-
tensification of Mexico’s efforts to fight drug production at the same time
that it was engaging in a “dirty war” against leftist guerrillas. Using re-
cently declassified documents, Pérez Ricart demonstrates with consider-
able precision the size, nature, and geography of DEA involvement in
Mexico in the years leading up to the notorious kidnapping and murder
of agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena.
Sarah Beckhart’s “The History of Inhalant Use in Mexico City, 1960–
1980” returns us to the subaltern realms of Mexican drug history, though
in an urban context and involving a category of “drugs” that have so far
gone mostly unnoticed by historians—toxic industrial inhalants and sol-
vents. These materials, so critical to the modernization process, were
mass produced and widely available to the subaltern working class of
Mexico City. They then became a dangerous drug of choice for young,
poor, and deeply marginalized urban children. Beckhart’s research both
reveals a darker side to Mexican midcentury modernization and brings a
new category of “drugs” into focus for historians.
14 THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF ALCOHOL AND DRUGS F V34N1 (2020)

Finally, Alexander Dawson’s “Sacred Places, Sacred Plants, and Sa-

cred People: Carving Out an Indigenous Right Amid the Drug Wars”
brings us back to the rural context and one of the most traditional of
all drugs in Mexico. Among the earliest drugs prohibited in the colonial
period, peyote was one of the last to be banned by modern legislation,
largely because its use was confined to the apparently “premodern,” in-
digenous corners of the country. Since then, the story of peyote in Mex-
ico demonstrates how indigenous Mexicans have defended their own
peyote use and rights to the lands where this cactus grows by resorting
to the notion that this substance, these lands, and even they themselves
are “sacred,” a designation that, Dawson points out, has been a double-
edged sword, often pushing these people and their practices to a discur-
sive realm outside of modern rights and legal protections.
We are very pleased to present this special issue, the first installment
of SHAD ever dedicated to Mexican history. We hope that, just as devel-
opments connected to Shanghai 1909 made Mexico a key node of the
global drugs traffic, this issue, inspired at Shanghai 2019, can help to ad-
vance drug history in both Mexico and the rest of the world.