Salt, Petroleum, War, and Drugs
Multinational oil companies & global drug markets are 2 sides of the same coin
Clockwise from top left: E. I. du Pont; Double UO Globe brand heroin from Southeast Asia; GIs in the Vietnam War swap drugs; an oil rig; a salt mine; in center, an opium poppy. See photo credits below.
The following is an excerpt from p. 69-74 of Chapter 1, “Precious Crystals: What Salt Teaches Us About Drugs” from my new book, Drugism (2022):
In last week’s excerpt, we learned about the gabelle, the deadly salt tax of premodern France. Unfortunately, the French brought this violently repressive tax system with them as they colonized much of the world. In their colonization of Vietnam, for example, the French placed heavy taxes not only on salt but also on opium and wine.[i] The revenue derived from these taxes was essential to the larger project of colonial occupation.
Later, when opium was prohibited across the globe, the French continued their Vietnamese opium racket but as a covert operation rather than the mundane civil bureaucracy it has been prior. When they eventually lost political control of Southeast Asia, it was picked up by the US. The covert opium business which had been integral to funding France’s colonial ventures there was also picked up by the US—specifically, by the CIA and its various associates. The subsequent boom in the production and consumption of heroin made from opium grown in Southeast Asia formed the basis of what has since become the global illicit drug market as we know it.
In this series of events we can see that there is some degree of historical continuity from France’s gabelle to the modern drug paradigm. A serious twist in the development outlined herein came from petroleum, which, before it became a leading global commodity, was a worthless byproduct of salt mining. And as we will see, petroleum has itself been a major—if rarely discussed—factor in the politics and economics of the global drug trade.
There is historical continuity from France’s gabelle to the modern drug paradigm.
Nothing illustrates these connections better than the history of DuPont, the two-hundred-year-old family business of the du Ponts, who themselves first came to the US from gabelle-era France. Indeed, all of these seemingly disparate factors—the gabelle, drug prohibition, the petroleum industry, and international conflict—have figured into DuPont’s story in one way or another.
The du Ponts originally hail from France, where they were part of the bourgeoisies. Eleuthère Irénée du Pont was given his name by his godfather, the French capitalist Jacques Turgot. As a young adult, E. I. du Pont learned how to make gunpowder from Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, a renowned chemist who ran France's royal gunpowder mills.[ii]
Gunpowder, originally a Chinese invention, is derived from a naturally occurring salt known as saltpeter, or potassium nitrate. After studying under Lavoisier, E. I. du Pont managed a saltpeter factory in France. Fleeing the violence of the French revolution, the du Pont family immigrated to the US in 1799.[iii] As they sought ways to maintain their (already considerable) wealth, it was E. I. du Pont who devised the idea to sell gunpowder.
Shortly after E. I. du Pont conceived the business idea that would become DuPont, he returned to France, his homeland, where he consulted with the government. There, he was given the best designs and methods for producing gunpowder that France had to offer, as a favor from their minister of foreign affairs, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand. French bureaucrats lent their assistance and produced the necessary legal documents for du Pont’s new business.[iv]
As we can see, the birth of DuPont was integrally bound up with the government and politics of gabelle-era France. In this way, the du Pont family’s wealth and political connections depended on the tight control of salt, of precious crystals. In the early days of their business, DuPont produced saltpeter for the US government as a contractor. That contract was the beginning of a long and lucrative relationship between DuPont and the US government.[v] E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., as the company was then known, soon became the leading supplier of gunpowder in the US.[vi]
Selling gunpowder was not the only idea of the du Ponts’ that bore fruit. Another: Irénée du Pont (a direct descendent of E. I. du Pont) gave a talk to the American Chemical Society in which he argued for the creation of a new class of laborers fueled by synthetic drugs. He suggested "injecting proper compounds into an individual" to "add some fifty percent to both our hours of production and our hours of pleasure." This, he surmised, would "greatly decrease the cost" of labor.[vii]
Irénée du Pont argued for the creation of a new class of laborers fueled by synthetic drugs.
Drugging workers for the benefit of the wealthy was not a new idea. For centuries, salt, sugar, tea, coffee, chocolate, opium, hashish, and more have been given to workers to boost energy, ease pain, and increase productivity. The twist added by du Pont, the chemical tycoon, was "injecting proper compounds" i.e. refined drugs. Salt, sugar, coffee, opium, and such already greatly enhanced the efficacy of labor, but du Pont was not satisfied. He wanted more profits, and less expenses. So, he advocated injecting people with highly refined drugs to boost productivity and pleasure. Countless drugs emerged to fill this role, among them heroin, cocaine, various amphetamines, and more, all of which are typically prepared in their salt forms. And such drugs are, to this day, controlled by policy which greatly resembles the French gabelle.
While the du Ponts expanded their gunpowder business, the French began their century-long occupation of Southeast Asia. In 1858, the same year that the British launched the second Anglo-Chinese War—or Opium War—the French invaded Vietnam.[viii] To support their colonial ventures there, the French relied on revenue raised from salt, opium, and wine taxes.[ix] The grouping of salt together with opium and wine is a specific point at which we can see how salt’s history overlaps with that of drugs more broadly. These colonial monopolies in salt, opium, etc., were maintained for many decades, and would themselves function as precursors, so to speak, to what has since become an expansive and complex global drug industry.
To finance their colonial ventures, the French relied on revenue raised from salt, opium, and wine taxes.
And while all of this unfolded, here in the US a new industry was born: the oil industry. But before it became a leading global commodity, petroleum was a worthless byproduct of salt mining. Eventually, its utility as a combustible fuel drew popular attention toward the pungent, sticky stuff. In the mid-to-late nineteenth century, savvy entrepreneurs developed petroleum into a leading commercial fuel source.
Although petroleum has been known of since ancient times, it was primarily used as a medicine, according to historian Robert Multhauf.[x] (In a way, petroleum’s use as a medicine prefigures gasoline’s later use as a recreational drug, which we will get to shortly.) Petroleum was most often encountered as a byproduct of salt mining, and typically discarded. It was not until the dawn of the Industrial Age that people learned of petroleum’s combustible qualities which made it useful as fuel.
The beginning of the modern petroleum industry is often traced to a region outside of Titusville, Pennsylvania.[xi] This is where Edwin Drake and Billy Smith dug the so-called "Drake well" on behalf of an investor acquaintance, George Bissell, who hoped to make money on the emerging industry. Bissell suspected that commercial quantities of petroleum could be obtained with salt mining methods.[xii]
Drake hired Smith, an "experienced salt well driller" to help him with the project.[xiii] In August 1859, using salt drilling technology, Drake and Smith encountered the petroleum they sought. They stored it in whiskey barrels. Within a few days of their discovery, their oil was selling for sixty cents a gallon.
It was soon found that there are geologic reasons for petroleum's proximity to salt. This prompted people to look for petroleum in places where there was known to be salt, and vice versa. In this manner, petroleum was found in Ohio, New York, Kansas, Louisiana, Texas, and elsewhere.[xiv] Drake has since been called the "father of the petroleum industry," and while there are some who may admire the title, I can think of few reputations less desirable.[xv]
Unfortunately, the environmental effects of fossil fuel emission were unknown at the time, except perhaps to the brainiest of scientists and mystics. Soon, the enormous industry which developed around petroleum became dominated by figures like the Rockefellers.[xvi] Additionally, derivative industries based on petrochemicals also developed and were monopolized by the du Ponts and a small handful of others.[xvii] From this emerged a class of extremely rich capitalists whose wealth came from petroleum.
The Rockefeller fortune traces back to John D. Rockefeller, a merchant and bookkeeper from Cleveland, Ohio. Rockefeller astutely observed that petroleum was quickly gaining value, and in 1862, just three years after Drake and Smith’s discovery, he bought an oil refinery. Within a decade he started the Standard Oil Company, which soon became a holding company for other oil businesses. Rockefeller then expanded his business interests into mining, shipping, and banking. The Rockefeller family would eventually assume ownership and management of Chase Manhattan Bank, or Chase, and National City Bank, or Citigroup, two of the largest banks in the US.[xviii]
Petro-capitalists restructured the US and global economies around their products.
The petro-capitalists proceeded to restructure the US and global economies around their products. Agriculture, medicine, transportation, and ultimately our entire social structure and planet have all been deeply impacted by the interests of the petroleum industry in the process. As they gained more and more power, policy was written and rewritten to favor petroleum over regenerative fuels, which threatened the profits of the petro-capitalists. Hemp, itself a source of regenerative fuel, was prohibited in 1937 as part of this process.[xix]
The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, which was the first federal law to result in a de facto prohibition of cannabis, was not just a drug law, per se. The bill was the cornerstone of the political transformation of cannabis from an everyday, multipurpose material into a “bad drug.” This demonization of cannabis was the public face of the petro-capitalists’ campaign to eliminate hemp as competition to their own products, something which Jack Herer meticulously documented in his now legendary The Emperor Wears No Clothes.
The public most likely could not be convinced that they should use expensive foreign gasoline rather than cheap domestic hemp fuel, but they could be taught to fear a drug that supposedly caused insanity, violence, and interracial mingling. Cannabis was thus redefined in the public imagination. Its economic potential as a fuel source was suppressed for generations. Although cannabis is commonly referred to as “gas” in casual contexts (due primarily to its diesel-like odor), most people today think of cannabis as a drug rather than a fuel source. What if it what the other way around?
Most people today think of cannabis as a drug rather than a fuel source. What if it what the other way around?
So we see how petroleum was a major, if hidden, factor in cannabis prohibition. But this is not the only way that petroleum, the industrial offspring of salt, impacts modern drug policy. There is another way, equally profound.
Two years after the Marihuana Tax Act passed in the US, World War II broke out in Europe. The war and its aftermath fundamentally reshaped the global order. During the war and in the years immediately afterward, everything from political regimes to supply chains were drastically altered throughout much of the world.
One of many changes was that the French began to lose power in Southeast Asia. We mentioned above that they had instituted monopolies on salt, opium, and wine in their colonial occupation of Vietnam. In the mid twentieth century, as prohibitive drug laws grew in popularity throughout the world (due in large part to treaties and trade agreements shared by numerous nations), the French had to officially terminate their colonial opium monopoly.
But while the French publicly insisted that they ended the trade after World War II, they did not actually stop it. Instead, the opium business was transferred to the control of a French intelligence agency, the Service de Documentation Extérieure et du Contre-Espionage, or SDECE. For several years, the SDECE collaborated with the Hmong, one of many indigenous populations who live in what is known as the Golden Triangle to produce, process, and distribute massive quantities of opium. The business, no longer a public monopoly but instead a covert intelligence project, was dubbed Operation X according to historian Alfred McCoy.[xx]
While the money made from Operation X was crucial to the larger project of French occupation, ultimately they were unable to maintain control in the region. By the mid-1950s the French retreated from Vietnam. But it was not the end of western imperialism in that country.
Fresh on the heels of the French came the US, who launched the Vietnam War before the French had even completely left the country. And while this war, like many others, was ostensibly waged to fight communism, it was also part of a broader effort to secure control of the world’s oil reserves.[xxi]
The system crafted by the French through Operation X was replicated by the US intelligence forces, particularly the CIA. The agency even worked with the same Hmong tribes that had produced opium for the French.[xxii] However, while the French opium racket had primarily served Vietnamese clientele in the form of smokable opium and only occasionally exported their product to syndicates based in Hong Kong or Marseilles, under US control the trade grew enormously, and heroin came to dominate over opium as the region’s premier product.[xxiii]
The basic pattern established by Operation X and expanded upon by the CIA created a template for what has since become a worldwide phenomenon: wars fought for control of oil reserves, financed with illegal drug sales. And both the oil and the drugs as well as the way the drugs are used as sources of revenue all owe their existence to the legacy of salt.
If this connection between petroleum and drugs seems a bit too abstract, consider the following. Gasoline, or refined petroleum, has itself been used as a recreational drug.[xxiv] The fumes of gasoline are sometimes inhaled for the intoxicating effects they produce which can include excitement, giddiness, and hallucinations, among other things.
The connection has further crystallized, literally, with the use of petroleum to produce various synthetic drugs. In recent years, both legal and illegal drugs have been chemically derived from petroleum. Among them are the illegal drugs trafficked by the various Mexican cartels as well as the legal MDMA given to veterans (and likely active-duty troops) in the US.[xxv] These are just some of the many ways that salt and its industrial offspring petroleum have profoundly influenced the parallel worlds of drugs and warfare.
The basic pattern established by Operation X and expanded upon by the CIA created a template for what has since become a worldwide phenomenon: wars fought for control of oil reserves, financed with illegal drug sales.
Endnotes
[i] Ladenburg; McCoy, 111.
[ii] Colby, Ch. 2, Sec. 1.
[iii] Ibid., Ch. 2, Sec. 2.
[iv] Ibid., Ch. 2, Sec. 3.
[v] Ibid., Ch. 2, Sec. 4.
[vi] Ibid., Ch. 2, Sec. 5.
[vii] Ibid., Ch. 9, Sec. 9.
[viii] McCoy, 110.
[ix] Ladenburg, 3; McCoy, 111.
[x] Multhauf, 181.
[xi] Ibid.
[xii] “Edwin Drake.”
[xiii] Ibid.
[xiv] Multhauf, 213-214.
[xv] “Edwin Drake.”
[xvi] Zinn, 301.
[xvii] Colby, throughout.
[xviii] Zinn, 256-257; Rockefeller, 125.
[xix] Although it has been cultivated for millennia, in the nineteenth century hemp was difficult for US farmers to produce at an industrial scale, due in large part to the intensity of labor required for its processing. In the early twentieth century, technology was developed to process hemp at an industrial scale. By the 1930s this technology became accessible and affordable to working farmers.
One of the primary uses for hemp through history was its seed oil, which was used for lighting, lubrication, and more. When hemp processing technology emerged in the 1930s, it meant that working class US farmers would be able to grow and refine combustible fuel from hemp seed oil on their own farms. If domestic farmers could produce adequate fuel supplies, the entire business model of the petroleum and petrochemical industries would be threatened. According to cannabis historian Jack Herer, the du Pont and Mellon families, whose financial interests lay in the petrochemical industries, were aware of this and wanted to stifle the competition before it had a chance to develop. This was the political context in which the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act was created and passed.
If you find this hard to believe, that is because the architects of the Act went to great lengths to obscure their motives, so as not to draw protest from the agriculture and pro-labor sectors of the public. The explanation that DuPont gave to their investors at the time is revealing, however. DuPont's annual stockholder report in 1937 informed investors of impending changes that would benefit DuPont economically. The report anticipated "radical changes" from "the revenue raising power of government" (i.e., the Treasury Department). It wrote of "forcing acceptance of sudden new ideas of industry and social reorganization" for the benefit of DuPont and their stockholders. Such "social reorganization" doubtlessly required strategy. The 1937 Marihuana Tax Act was part of that strategy.
The bill was introduced by Herman Oliphant on April 14, 1937. Oliphant sent the bill to the House Ways and Means Committee, which was chaired by Robert Doughton, an ally of the du Pont family. Needless to say, Doughton approved it. The Act required anyone who legally handled hemp to register with the Secretary of the Treasury, who at the time was Andrew Mellon. Mellon also managed the du Ponts’ money. Harry Anslinger, the infamous poster child and co-architect of US drug prohibition, soon married a niece of Andrew Mellon, but not before being appointed head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. All of the above information is taken from Herer, The Emperor Wears…, 52 and 55-59.
[xx] McCoy, 130-131 and 133-134.
[xxi] US petroleum tycoons had expressed interest in the area since the 1950s, when the Rockefellers hosted South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem as well as Thai officials on visits to the US. Throughout the 1960s and early '70s, oil drilling expanded tremendously in Southeast Asia. Oil was found "off the shore of Thailand and Cambodia" and in the sea floor around Java and Sumatra; much of the corresponding territory was then "allocated in concessions to the international oil companies.” See Scott, Drugs, Oil, and…, 113 and 115.
[xxii] McCoy, 195.
[xxiii] Ibid., 134-135.
[xxiv] Brecher, Licit & Illicit…, 318-319.
[xxv] Hernandez, 100, Hausfeld, “Forget Plant-Based…”
Sources
Brecher, Edward, and the Editors of Consumer Reports. Licit & Illicit Drugs: The Consumers Union Report on Narcotics, Stimulants, Depressants, Inhalants, Hallucinogens, and Marijuana—including Caffeine, Nicotine, and Alcohol. Little, Brown and Company, Boston, MA. 1972.
Colby, Gerald. Du Pont Dynasty: Behind the Nylon Curtain. Open Road Integrated Media, Inc., New York, NY. 2014 [originally published in 1974].
“Edwin Drake.” Encyclopedia.com, May 18, 2018. https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/social-sciences-and-law/business-leaders/edwin-laurentine-drake
Hausfeld, Russell. “Forget Plant-Based Medicine, MDMA is Now Made From Crude Oil.” Psymposia, Aug 4, 2020.
Herer, Jack. The Emperor Wears No Clothes. AH HA Publishing, Austin, TX. 2010 [originally published in 1985].
Hernandez, Anabel. Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers. Verso, New York, NY. 2014.
Ladenburg, Tom. “The French in Indochina,” from “Critical Issues and Simulations Units in American History.” Digital History. University of Houston, 2007.
McCoy, Alfred. The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. Lawrence Hill Books, Chicago, IL. 2003.
Multhauf, Robert P., Neptune’s Gift: A History of Common Salt. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD. 1995 [originally published in 1978].
Scott, Peter Dale. Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Lanham, MD. 2003.
Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. HarperCollins Publishers, New York, NY. 2015 [originally published in 1980].
Photo credits
E. I. du Pont portrait from the Science History Institute: https://www.sciencehistory.org/historical-profile/eleuthere-irenee-du-pont
Double UO Globe brand heroin photo from Drug Testing and Analysis: https://analyticalsciencejournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/dta.2238
Photo of GIs swapping drugs in the Vietnam War from The History Channel: https://www.history.com/news/drug-use-in-vietnam
Oil rig photo from B.O.P. Products: https://www.bop-products.com/blog/drilling/offshore-drilling-pros-and-cons/
Salt mine photo from American Mine Services, LLC: https://americanmineservices.com/top-10-largest-salt-mines-in-the-world/
Opium poppy photo from the Native Plant Trust: https://gobotany.nativeplanttrust.org/species/papaver/somniferum/
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