Benjamin Smith

But these protection rackets also had a crucial side effect. They introduced violence to the trade. New local governments asserted their authority over the protection rackets by arresting or murdering the old traffickers and putting their own smugglers in their place.

The laws were not overtly prodrugs. But they were resigned to the fact that “extirpating this vice” was “impossible.” What is more, the money was needed to “cover the most urgent necessities of the public services.”

Cantú’s response was the first example of a political maneuver that would cement the association between local governments and the drug trade. Rather than publicly tax the narcotics business, he imposed Mexico’s first off-the-books drug protection racket. Now the state would receive money for protecting the drug business and not implementing antidrug laws. It was a turning point—the first use of a trick that would be repeated by border governors for decades to come.

One U.S. agent, who visited Ensenada in September 1916, described how this new system worked.

Increasingly, many Americans and many Mexicans would term such protection rackets corruption. Strictly, they were. Yet in the early years of the twentieth century, many Mexicans, and, one suspects, some of the more pragmatic Americans, saw the system as an intelligent and productive solution to a problem that had been imposed on the region from the outside.

In fact, the only real difference between the two notions was that Leary—the protohippy individualist—believed a person could control both set and setting, whereas Salazar—the Marxist—believed that the bourgeoisie already controlled them.

The assistant chief of U.S. Customs described Salazar’s papers as the “outpourings of an educated nigger.”

Under Mexico’s radical 1930s president, Lázaro Cárdenas, the state repeatedly established state-run firms to compete with and undercut exploitative private companies. It was a classic economic policy of the Revolution, somewhere between communism and capitalism. By presenting the drug trade as just another form of capitalist exploitation, Salazar pushed radical medical ideas into the mainstream.

The real reason, however, was not quite so simple, or so anodyne. Since Mexico had announced the new law at the League of Nations, U.S. officials had been desperately struggling to find a means to shut down the plan. It contradicted the American assertion that addicts could and should be cured. It also risked the establishment of morphine dispensaries on the Mexican frontier. These could generate a transnational black market in Mexico’s cheap, state-sanctioned morphine.

So instead, they agreed to fudge the issue. The United States would quietly resume morphine exports. Mexico would back away from the regulations, citing global morphine shortages rather than American blackmail. Both would save face. The Americans would look magnanimous. The Mexicans would appear forced into a corner by a conflict they could not control.