PREFACE
MY INITIAL INTEREST IN illicit trade—and the early inspiration for this book—began as a smuggler’s accomplice. Shortly after graduating from college, I spent four months bumming around Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru. While crossing into Bolivia from Peru by bus, a nice elderly woman sitting next to me sheepishly handed me a large plastic bag filled with rolls of toilet paper and then pleaded with me to put it under my seat. I did what she asked; it seemed harmless enough, even if a bit peculiar. The Bolivian border guards then entered the bus, checking documents and belongings, and proceeded to confiscate large amounts of toilet paper. But they overlooked my hidden stash, perhaps because I did not fit the profile of the typical toilet paper smuggler. Later I learned that the inflated demand for toilet paper in Bolivia was partly due to the cocaine industry. Toilet paper was commonly used to dry and filter coca paste, which was then transported to remote jungle laboratories to be refined into powder cocaine—most of which would eventually end up in the noses of American consumers.
During the same trip, I caught a ride on a cargo boat—which turned out to be a smuggling boat—traveling down the Amazon River from Iquitos, Peru, to Leticia, Colombia. Leticia, a bustling town where the borders between Peru, Colombia, and Brazil meet deep in the jungle, owed much of its existence to smuggling. Some of my fellowpassengers were pisadores (coca stompers) with distinctive scars on their feet from exposure to the chemicals used to make coca paste. Late at night, before we departed Iquitos, I watched as several dozen drums of chemicals were quietly loaded onto our boat, and then off-loaded in what seemed to be the middle of nowhere before our arrival in Leticia.
I would later find out that many of the chemicals used by the Andean cocaine industry were actually imported from the United States. Leading American chemical companies were exporting vast quantities of precursor chemicals to the region far in excess of what legitimate industry could possibly absorb. Much of it was diverted to the black market and shipped to remote cocaine-processing laboratories—sometimes via Amazonian cargo boats like the one I was on. Even as America’s rapidly escalating war on drugs was trying to stop the northbound flow of cocaine, largely overlooked at the time was the equally important southbound flow of U.S. chemicals needed to cook the coke. I ended up writing a short piece about it for The New Republic . And this, in turn, led to an invitation to testify, alongside Gene Haislip from the Drug Enforcement Administration, before a Senate hearing on chemical diversion and trafficking (with industry lobbyists sitting nervously in the audience). I was hooked on drugs, or more precisely, hooked on trying to figure out the business of drugs and the politics of drug control. And this turned into a career-long interest in illicit economic flows and government campaigns to police them.
As we’ll see in the pages that follow, the drug story is just one particularly prominent and relatively late chapter in the much bigger story of America’s long and intimate relationship with smuggling—a clandestine economic practice that we can simply define as bringing in or taking out from one jurisdiction to another without authorization. It is also a far more complex and double-edged relationship than I first imagined, one characterized by intense confrontation but also by accommodation, toleration, and complicity.
In this book, I tell the story of how smuggling—and attempts to police it—have made and remade America, from the illicit molasses trade in colonial times to drug trafficking today. I highlight the profound but often overlooked role of clandestine commerce in the nation’s birth, economic development, geographic expansion, and foreign relations, as well as the role of anti-smuggling initiatives in vastly expanding the policing
MY INITIAL INTEREST IN illicit trade—and the early inspiration for this book—began as a smuggler’s accomplice. Shortly after graduating from college, I spent four months bumming around Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru. While crossing into Bolivia from Peru by bus, a nice elderly woman sitting next to me sheepishly handed me a large plastic bag filled with rolls of toilet paper and then pleaded with me to put it under my seat. I did what she asked; it seemed harmless enough, even if a bit peculiar. The Bolivian border guards then entered the bus, checking documents and belongings, and proceeded to confiscate large amounts of toilet paper. But they overlooked my hidden stash, perhaps because I did not fit the profile of the typical toilet paper smuggler. Later I learned that the inflated demand for toilet paper in Bolivia was partly due to the cocaine industry. Toilet paper was commonly used to dry and filter coca paste, which was then transported to remote jungle laboratories to be refined into powder cocaine—most of which would eventually end up in the noses of American consumers.
During the same trip, I caught a ride on a cargo boat—which turned out to be a smuggling boat—traveling down the Amazon River from Iquitos, Peru, to Leticia, Colombia. Leticia, a bustling town where the borders between Peru, Colombia, and Brazil meet deep in the jungle, owed much of its existence to smuggling. Some of my fellowpassengers were pisadores (coca stompers) with distinctive scars on their feet from exposure to the chemicals used to make coca paste. Late at night, before we departed Iquitos, I watched as several dozen drums of chemicals were quietly loaded onto our boat, and then off-loaded in what seemed to be the middle of nowhere before our arrival in Leticia.
I would later find out that many of the chemicals used by the Andean cocaine industry were actually imported from the United States. Leading American chemical companies were exporting vast quantities of precursor chemicals to the region far in excess of what legitimate industry could possibly absorb. Much of it was diverted to the black market and shipped to remote cocaine-processing laboratories—sometimes via Amazonian cargo boats like the one I was on. Even as America’s rapidly escalating war on drugs was trying to stop the northbound flow of cocaine, largely overlooked at the time was the equally important southbound flow of U.S. chemicals needed to cook the coke. I ended up writing a short piece about it for The New Republic . And this, in turn, led to an invitation to testify, alongside Gene Haislip from the Drug Enforcement Administration, before a Senate hearing on chemical diversion and trafficking (with industry lobbyists sitting nervously in the audience). I was hooked on drugs, or more precisely, hooked on trying to figure out the business of drugs and the politics of drug control. And this turned into a career-long interest in illicit economic flows and government campaigns to police them.
As we’ll see in the pages that follow, the drug story is just one particularly prominent and relatively late chapter in the much bigger story of America’s long and intimate relationship with smuggling—a clandestine economic practice that we can simply define as bringing in or taking out from one jurisdiction to another without authorization. It is also a far more complex and double-edged relationship than I first imagined, one characterized by intense confrontation but also by accommodation, toleration, and complicity.
In this book, I tell the story of how smuggling—and attempts to police it—have made and remade America, from the illicit molasses trade in colonial times to drug trafficking today. I highlight the profound but often overlooked role of clandestine commerce in the nation’s birth, economic development, geographic expansion, and foreign relations, as well as the role of anti-smuggling initiatives in vastly expanding the policing
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