TY - JOUR
AU - Frydl, Kathleen, J.
AB - A new addition to the growing body of scholarship addressing the U.S. government’s war on drugs, Matthew R. Pembleton’s Containing Addiction: The Federal Bureau of Narcotics and the Origins of America’s Global Drug War offers a close inspection of several foreign ventures of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) dating from before World War II up until Nixon’s formal declaration of war on heroin. Pembleton notes that his decision to focus on the bureau’s records departs from the diverse set of archival sources used lately by fellow practitioners in his field of U.S. diplomatic history, but he offers the hope that his targeted approach will yield insights on a generative moment in an overlooked agency. The result is a granular and at times beautifully rendered story of the FBN, the predecessor agency to what would eventually become the modern-day Drug Enforcement Administration. It is not, however, a comprehensive account, as Pembleton makes clear his decision to isolate the bureau’s international work for special attention. Though longtime bureau director Harry Anslinger dispatched only a small force abroad, its work bore great significance. Much of the virtue of Pembleton’s monograph can be found in the story of agents struggling to perform their duties in Turkey or Thailand—both places of enormous significance in the drug trade, yet neglected in the annals of U.S. diplomatic history. Pembleton shows a willingness to follow where the bureau records lead, but the advantages of this approach are diminished by his reluctance to expound on what the records illuminate. For example, Anslinger’s notorious instances of misattribution—none more important than his incorrect but adamant view that Communist China trafficked in heroin—strike Pembleton as indicative of error and not as leverage for critique. Elsewhere and throughout, the book suffers from a problem of perspective, leading a reader to suppose that Pembleton identifies with bureau agents: he refers to Anslinger by the agency nickname of “Old Man”; he uses shop talk like “intel”; or he relates at face value common conceits of the drug war, such as when he states that the “relationship between agent and informant was unavoidably coercive and ideally based on fear and respect in equal measure” (110). Most serious is his contention that the race and class dimensions of the government’s war on drugs came as a consequence and were “never [in] the explicit intent or design” (314). At this point, scholars have amassed enough historical evidence regarding the decisions to pursue only certain drugs, by certain methods, and only among certain people, such that we must view Pembleton’s characterizations as historically suspect, not merely an odd interpretative stance. I can say with no fear of contradiction that the U.S. government’s war on drugs features both race and class components in its very design, and that its innovators and early zealots give us every reasonable indication that such targeting was intentional. The problem of Pembleton’s historical credulity regarding official sources must be viewed in tandem with the absence of a historiographical or scholarly argument structuring the book. The book’s internal chapters, Pembleton’s best work, are bracketed by thematic discussions that do not meaningfully penetrate or reliably predict what follows or precedes them. An irresolute conclusion underscores the book’s struggle with its own intellectual apparatus: “absolute control over drugs are impossible to achieve,” Pembleton notes, “yet the United States keeps pushing that boulder up the hill—and rightly so, to some extent” (313). Nothing in the history Pembleton recounts or in the arguments he makes would prepare his reader to know why, or to what extent, the government’s war on drugs has been vindicated. We need not ask authors endorse our own arguments, but we ought to expect that they make serious work of mounting their own. That assertions adorn rather than animate this monograph makes it difficult to determine where it falls in terms of historiography. In fact, many of Pembleton’s explicit claims repeat those of my own work: that the U.S. government’s war on drugs began much earlier than typically supposed; that it tells us a lot about state building during a crucial time; and that it featured both inward- and outward-looking components. Nevertheless, my book on the drug war is cited only once, without any discussion. This passing reference is made even more strange by the fact that Pembleton addresses himself to the same time period, discusses many of the same people (to name a few: Harry Anslinger, Garland Williams, George White, Charles Siragusa, Henry Giordano, and Malachi Harney) and situates his story in many of the same places as my book on the drug war. Since Pembleton declined to place his book in conversation with relevant scholarship, his principal arguments—while presented as novel—must be regarded as derivative. Still other scholars, whose work does not bear so directly on the research on arguments put forward by Pembleton, deserve more than the passing nod. Especially recent work on policing and the carceral state—including field-changing books from Elizabeth Kai Hinton or Heather Ann Thompson—disrupts some of facile assumptions guiding Pembleton’s depiction of law enforcement. Though I am confident Pembleton’s work improves upon and revises what’s already been done, I am even more certain that his failure to meaningfully acknowledge previous contributions detracts from his own—and that, in general, the permissive attitude regarding the insularity of the field of diplomatic history weakens the entire discipline, depriving of us more, and more interesting, scholarly exchange. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Matthew R. Pembleton, Containing Addiction: The Federal Bureau of Narcotics and the Origins of America’s Global Drug War.
JF - The American Historical Review
DO - 10.1093/ahr/rhz021
DA - 2019-04-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/matthew-r-pembleton-containing-addiction-the-federal-bureau-of-xxLtiQ7FHC
SP - 704
VL - 124
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -