The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade

by Benjamin T. Smith

Overview

A myth-busting, 100-year history of the Mexican drug trade that reveals how an industry founded by farmers and village healers became dominated by cartels and kingpins.

The Mexican drug trade has inspired prejudiced narratives of a war between north and south, white and brown; between noble cops and vicious kingpins, corrupt politicians and powerful cartels. In this first comprehensive history of the trade, historian Benjamin T. Smith tells the real story of how and why this one-peaceful industry turned violent. He uncovers its origins and explains how this illicit business essentially built modern Mexico, affecting everything from agriculture to medicine to economics—and the country’s all-important relationship with the United States.

Drawing on unprecedented archival research; leaked DEA, Mexican law enforcement, and cartel documents; and dozens of harrowing interviews, Smith tells a thrilling story brimming with vivid characters—from Ignacia “La Nacha” Jasso, “queen pin” of Ciudad Juárez, to Dr. Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra, the crusading physician who argued that marijuana was harmless and tried to decriminalize morphine, to Harry Anslinger, the Machiavellian founder of the American Federal Bureau of Narcotics, who drummed up racist drug panics to increase his budget. Smith also profiles everyday agricultural workers, whose stories reveal both the economic benefits and the human cost of the trade.

The Dope contains many surprising conclusions about drug use and the failure of drug enforcement, all backed by new research and data. Smith explains the complicated dynamics that drive the current drug war violence, probes the U.S.-backed policies that have inflamed the carnage, and explores corruption on both sides of the border. A dark morality tale about the American hunger for intoxication and the necessities of human survival, The Dope is essential for understanding the violence in the drug war and how decades-old myths shape Mexico in the American imagination today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324021827
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	08/23/2022
Pages:	480
Sales rank:	168,045
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Benjamin T. Smith  is one of the foremost historians of modern Mexico. A professor at the University of Warwick, his previous books have explored politics, violence, Catholicism, and journalism in modern Mexico. He also provides expert witness accounts for Mexican asylum seekers escaping gang violence.

Table of Contents

Acronyms xiii

A Note on Names xv

Prologue The Lookout 1

Part I First Puffs, 1910-1940

Chapter 1 The King of the Grifos 17

Chapter 2 White Lady, Black Market 33

Chapter 3 Pipes and Prejudice 46

Chapter 4 Vice and Violence 59

Chapter 5 Drugs in Depression 79

Chapter 6 The Revolutionary 92

Part II Coming Up, 1940-1960

Chapter 7 The Golden Triangle 113

Chapter 8 The Governors and the Gypsy 134

Chapter 9 The Cadillac Bust 148

Chapter 10 The New Status Quo 163

Chapter 11 Queen Pin 177

Part III The High, 1960-1975

Chapter 12 The Mexican Stopover 195

Chapter 13 Acapulco Gold 211

Chapter 14 Mexican Brown 231

Chapter 15 The Rackets 249

Part IV The Comedown, 1970-1990

Chapter 16 Narcs 265

Chapter 17 The Atrocities 285

Chapter 18 The Barbarians of the North 302

Chapter 19 The "Guadalajara Cartel" 323

Chapter 20 The Martyr and the Spook 342

Part V Into The Abyss, 1990-2020

Chapter 21 The Takeover 363

Chapter 22 Wars 377

Epilogue Drugs and Violence 395

Acknowledgments 409

Notes on Sources 413

Sources Consulted 419

Image Credits 443

Index 445

Editorial Reviews

"Benjamin T. Smith is a superb scholar. The Dope is breathtaking. It casts an unforgiving light on the dark corners of a sinister history, reveals the empowerment of Mexico’s drug traffickers, and the responsibilities of both U.S. and Mexican governments."

Sergio Aguayo

"The Dope offers an expansive and compulsively readable popular history that successfully upends more than a century of false rhetoric, shattering the most insidious and persistent myths about Mexico’s drug trade. By revisiting bygone drug panics and the dawn of narcotics criminalization, Smith reveals how today’s staggering cartel violence is rooted in militarized policing, US meddling, and the state’s unending thirst for power and wealth. A vital corrective."

Francisco Cantú

"With the skills of a fine historian and the verve of a true storyteller, Benjamin T. Smith unearths the twisted roots of the catastrophic drug war. A fascinating, surreal, and tragic tale."

Ioan Grillo

"Benjamin T. Smith dispels the myths with a much-needed dose of reality. Mexico’s drug wars are the bloody consequence of the United States’ voracious demand for drugs and simultaneous insistence on prohibiting them. The cost has been staggering, as Smith shows in this crisply written, deftly narrated book."

Daniel Immerwahr

"Fascinating ... Smith tells of the forgotten men and women who have shaped Mexico's narco trade. He brings these ghosts back to wild and violent life."

Toby Muse

06/14/2021

The evolution of the Mexican drug trade over the past century is a sordid tale of murder, torture, corruption, and political opportunism fed by America’s thirst for narcotics and the poverty of Mexico’s drug-producing provinces, according to this doggedly researched history. Smith (The Mexican Press and Civil Society, 1940–1976), a professor of Latin American history at the University of Warwick, documents shifting market trends and the many ways drugs are smuggled into the U.S. (including via drones, GPS-guided submersibles, and “massive catapults”), and details corruption on both sides of the border. Staggering statistics (one estimate suggests that as many as 65,000 Mexicans were killed in “drug-related murders” from 2006 to 2012) are reinforced by harrowing descriptions of assassinations and kidnappings. Smith also depicts atrocities committed by Mexico’s drug enforcement agencies, and the complicity of U.S. agents who failed to intervene. Forcefully arguing that the “war on drugs” has been a failure, Smith believes that little in Mexico will change as long as narcotics remain illegal. Though the relentless back-and-forth of cartel violence grows numbing, Smith’s depth of knowledge astonishes, and his pointed critiques of U.S. drug policy hit home. This searing history leaves a mark. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

"A roiling, rambunctious trek through all that created the modern Mexican drug trade—populated by Cadillacs and barbarians, godfathers and presidents, border dope queens and chatuma kings, and, lining the way, a tawdry cavalcade of Mexican federal officials. Forget ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán. This book makes clear that the pioneers who forged the trafficking industry were employed in the Mexican government. Really great stuff, really great reading."

Sam Quinones

"A compelling narrative that at last gives us a history-for-all of Mexico’s all-out drug war."

Ed Vulliamy

"At last, a history that truly makes sense of the sound and fury of the Mexican drug trade."

Hector Aguilar Camín

"[A] magisterial and immensely readable new history of the Mexican drug trade. ... Drawing on a decade of research, Smith traces the roots of Mexico’s multiple drug wars from indigenous remedy to the solace of soldiers during the 1910-20 revolution, to the present day. His pacy narrative is true crime at its historical best, replete with all the larger-than-life characters and thrills and spills of a Netflix narco drama. … The Dope is gripping and revealing."

Financial Times - Jude Webber

"[A] prodigious overview…a century-long chronicle crammed with as much violence and mayhem as a Don Winslow border novel."

Anthony DePalma

2021-05-20
A decadeslong survey of the Mexican drug trade and the myths surrounding it.

The pipelines that bring illicit narcotics from Mexico have been flowing since the late 19th century, writes historian Smith, a time when “between 2 and 4 percent of the U.S. population was addicted to morphine.” A century later, “America was consuming up to 70 percent of all the world’s cocaine.” Some of the myths that have arisen paint the drug trade as an evil assault on an innocent America, perpetuated by the worst of humankind against a cadre of honest cops, a tide that provides “the essential background for the upsurge in U.S. nativism, the expansion of a massive deportation industry, and the popularity of Trump’s demands for a wall.” The truth is more nuanced, but it centers on economics. Without the ever voracious American market, there would be no drug trade—and the current trend toward legalizing at least marijuana and the decline in cocaine consumption are forcing the trade into new product lines, including fentanyl, methamphetamine, and opioids. Meanwhile, writes Smith, the drug trade was long intertwined with the Mexican state; since almost all of the traffic passed through to the north, who would object to politicians skimming off the top? But the politicians have given way to the drug traffickers themselves, who now “decide the rules of the game,” which Smith describes as “state capture.” With a few exceptions (such the Sinaloa cartel kingpin Chapo Guzmán), the bosses escape punishment even as the trade has turned increasingly violent. Smith does a fine job of piecing all these elements together, showing how the American market led to the boom of border towns such as the once-sleepy hamlet of Tijuana and how hard-line anti-drug policies do not bring down consumption rates. Meanwhile, the tens of thousands of dead and disappeared in Mexico, collateral damage of the drug war, can be laid at the door of the U.S.—where, as Smith notes, the guns that the gangsters employ come from.

A well-researched, sobering view of the damage that Americans’ need to get high wreaks on our neighbors.

Kirkus Reviews