Both of these books are written by authors who seek to denounce injustice. The two authors, David Farber and Thomas Grisaffi, address the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people connected in various ways to the illegal cocaine trade. Attempting to be fair, both authors face the challenges posed by the actions of many players in this industry; most actors are responsible both for their own fate and victims at the same time. Fairness is even harder to achieve as information about the industry is scarce and not necessarily reliable. For attempting to inform us about these tragic but important events in a balanced way, both authors are worthy of our appreciation and both have produced books of interest to business historians.
Farber is Roy A. Roberts Distinguished Professor in the history department of the University of Kansas. An accomplished scholar whose writing commands the reader with simple, direct, and (appropriately for this book) streetwise prose, he has given us a great new book. In Crack, he depicts the American tragedy of crack cocaine: addiction for some, incarceration for others—with most being African Americans. The book is organized chronologically. The first three chapters review the history of the cocaine market and its politics to the 1970s and examine the emergence of crack producers, dealers, and consumers. The next three discuss social reactions in the form of hip-hop culture and policy. Finally, a slow partial recovery is described.
In Farber's account, U.S. president Ronald Reagan set the context for the rise of crack. Reagan's mid-1980s economic policies led to deindustrialization and high African American unemployment. Crack—a frequent-dose, low-price addictive drug, a “quick nickel” rather than “slow dime”—came in and became widely available at the same time, facilitating mass consumption but also reducing entry barriers to selling crack because little upfront capital was required and revenue flowed smoothly. Supply met consumption and generated an “entrepreneurial, capital accumulating, creativity celebrating, black bolstering hip hop culture” (p. 6). Crack became an epidemic, and with it, black youth homicide rates and the number of black children in foster care doubled.
The rise of crack was accompanied by the public's “punishment-begetting hysteria and sometimes racist charges” (p. 4). Politicians at that time preferred to treat the crisis as one of public security, condemning users and jailing thousands of African Americans. According to Farber, “The ways that powerful Americans responded . . . turned the ravages of the crack epidemic into a national tragedy of racial injustice” (p. 4). The story Farber presents is not so much novel as a well-researched interpretation—even if he overlooks most quantitative research on the topic. He flags our limitations to learning the truth about certain events in this illegal market and presents his best version of events based mostly on historical and ethnographical literature, checked against what the press reported at the time.
Grisaffi is lecturer in the Department of Geography and Environmental Science at the University of Reading. Being a young anthropologist, Coca Yes, Cocaine No is his first book. The story focuses on the relationship between coca producers’ unions and political party Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS; Movement to Socialism) that elected Evo Morales, Bolivia's first Indigenous president. (After attempting a fourth reelection, Morales flew out of Bolivia at the end of 2019 and is, as of early 2020, in exile in Mexico.) Grisaffi's is also a great book.
He wrote the book, an ethnography of life in a Chapare-region coca producers’ union between 2005 and 2016, after undertaking a patient and detailed decade-long participatory observation exercise and extensive local and national interviewing. In this way, he introduces the coca producers’ account of events into the mainstream description of the rise of Morales. The book is organized thematically. The first three chapters provide an overview of the story, and the next four chapters present the heart of the ethnography results as the author delves into specific dimensions of life in the coca union, including ethnicity, coca control, local government, and the communication network, particularly the local radio station.
Conceptually, the book revolves around two questions: How did coca unions organize through MAS to elect Morales president? And why did fissures open up between the unions and MAS?
In the 1950s and 1960s, colonization of Chapare was led by groups of men organized in peasant unions. Many produced coca for the domestic market for traditional uses, chewing and tea. As the demand for cocaine grew in the United States in the 1970s, coca unions increasingly sold it to intermediaries who refined it into cocaine. In the 1980s, agricultural droughts and closure of mining companies led peasants and miners to migrate, and coca production attracted many to Chapare. The late 1980s and 1990s saw increasingly stronger antinarcotics policies in Bolivia; coca producers found a common enemy in the state. At the same time, administrative decentralization took off in Bolivia. The result was a political coalition tightly knit around the coca producers’ unions. In 1998 Morales and the coca farmers formed their own political party, ultimately named MAS. He almost won the 2002 election and effectively won the 2006 one.
So what happened between the unions and MAS? Bolivians face an irresolvable internal dilemma. The domestic market (as opposed to that in other Andean countries) for coca is legitimate because it is based on shared customs regarding its consumption across social classes and groups, but the international market for cocaine is outlawed. Thus, it is very difficult for Bolivians to supply the domestic market while assuring no leaks to the international market. Morales started his presidency by making coca production legal, while accepting international law making cocaine illegal. But this was not enough. In Grisaffi's own words, and with his focus on the relationship between the coca unions and MAS, it is impossible for “the government [led by MAS] . . . to fully satisfy the coca growers’ . . . aspirations, because their livelihoods are intimately tied to an economy that is internationally outlawed” (p. 201).
Both books illuminate how people involved in producing, distributing, or consuming an outlawed product may organize (Bolivia) or fail to do so (United States) to influence lawmaking, based on their union, class, or race. This is interesting because it focuses on influence developed by a group of (mostly) underprivileged people organized through daily social interactions in the context of democratic processes, rather than by a powerful small ring that develops special sporadic relationships with decision makers through corruption. Business historians interested in the relationship between business and politics should pay attention to these two books, as they illustrate the success and failure of an outlawed business to influence lawmaking in the context of democracy. But I would also like to highlight the value of these two books in helping business historians to think about the motivations of individuals entering into and remaining in entrepreneurship. The ethnographic evidence presented in both books offers an opportunity to think about the role that culture plays in entrepreneurial decisions.
Why choose to become a producer or dealer of an illegal drug? An economic opportunity for a person who has few is certainly an important motivation in both stories. Farber also makes it clear that lack of opportunity should not be overstated, as a number of dealers came from what he associates with a relatively high-opportunity setting: educated, “middle-class, two parent” families (p. 45). Power (derived from guns and gangs) also plays a role in Farber's story. But more surprising, at least to me, are the challenges that urban inner-city African American males faced in the 1980s when attempting to perform work in legal industries. Many low-skilled manufacturing jobs had gone, with the alternative being more secretarial environments. Farber cites Philippe Bourgois arguing that “their macho-proletarian dream of working an eight hour shift . . . in a unionized shop had been replaced by a nightmare of poorly paid, highly feminized, office support” (p. 46). Economic structural change can lead to cultural mismatch that generates perceived low-status employment opportunities and can thus induce entrepreneurship in unexpected directions in search of higher status.
Grisaffi's book argues that the first Chapare coca producers were probably unaware that cocaine was illegal. But by the 1980s producers had become aware of the distinct nature of the two markets. Grisaffi's study points to the role that ideology played in legitimating the production of coca to sell to illegal cocaine intermediaries. A coca farmer tells Grisaffi that the U.S. government is immoral: “They attack us for growing coca, but it is Yanquis who want this stuff” (p. 81). Another notes that “everyone's involved somehow” (p. 79). In their view, the cocaine trade is a collective responsibility shared by most people in Chapare but also by the United States. No one can claim high moral ground. This belief downplays the illegitimate lower status that many societies attribute to illegal activities and motivates people to enter and stay in this illegal industry.
In making us aware of these important and dramatic events that shaped many lives, and in pressing business historians to think more carefully about the complexity of human business behavior and the relationship between business and politics, both books are worth our attention.
