About Benjamin Smith
Professor of Latin American history at the University of Warwick. Has written about nineteenth and twentieth-century politics, land, indigenous groups, Catholicism, journalism, violence, and the war on drugs.
Where to find Benjamin
The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade
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.
Few have been as chilling as Benjamin T. Smith’s prodigious overview “The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade,” a century-long chronicle crammed with as much violence and mayhem as a Don Winslow border novel. It ditches drama as such and presents the war on drugs in all its grubby, often grisly, detail.
Written with a journalist’s eye and a historian’s perspective, “The Dope” begins with the 1908 arrest in Mexico City of José de Moral, a toothless marijuana wholesaler known as “the King of the Stoners.” It concludes in 2019 with the galling decision by Mexico’s current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to call off soldiers who were about to arrest El Chapo’s son in order to avert an all-out war with the cartels.
In between these nefarious milestones, Smith, a professor of Latin American history at the University of Warwick in Britain, weaves sordid tales of Mexican traffickers, frustrated antidrug crusaders on both sides of the border, and Mexican authorities who tolerated, exploited and protected the narcos.
The way Smith sees it, mythmaking and storytelling have served to “demonize the drug traffickers and cement the narrative of the drug war as a struggle between good and evil.” Despite the inescapable truth that the illicit trade feeds America’s unending demand for narcotics, this portrayal of Mexico has tilted American political realities. “Drug war myths provide the essential background for the upsurge in U.S. nativism,” Smith writes, and with it “the expansion of a massive deportation industry, and the popularity of Trump’s demands for a wall.”
Smith spent nearly a decade panning for truth in the slurry of myth, paranoia and self-aggrandizement that surrounds the Mexican drug trade. He applies what he calls “a persistent cynicism” to calculations of the amount of money and narcotics that cross the border, and he levels with readers about questionable motives that underlie the way such statistics are collected.
He is comfortable telling precartel narco anecdotes that he uncovered in dusty archives, but he skims over some messy details of recent atrocities. For instance, he does not identify Cardinal Posadas by name but refers to the shooting of “the pope’s representative in Mexico,” apparently confusing the cardinal with Geronimo Prigione, the papal nuncio whom Posadas was reportedly meeting the day he was killed.
Smith makes a strong case that the awful escalation of violence is “not so much in the DNA of trading in narcotics as in the DNA of prohibiting the trade.” For decades, Mexican authorities treated narcotics as a source of revenue. As early as 1915, Esteban Cantú, the appointed governor of Baja California, collected a 3.5 peso tax on every kilogram of opium imported from China and demanded a share of protection racket payments, using the money to build roads, parks and a functioning postal service.
Such a morally questionable approach was considered justifiable because, until recently, Mexico had no drug-addiction problem of its own. So long as the drugs went north, what was the harm? In the 1940s, freethinkers got the Mexican government to experiment with legalizing marijuana and permitting dispensaries to give addicts morphine, until the United States quickly forced a reversal.
But as profits increased, competition for protection schemes intensified and eventually engulfed the federal government. The corruption and violence described in the book’s final section, “Into the Abyss, 1990-2020,” is apocalyptic. By early 1997, even the Mexican Army general in charge of the nation’s war on drugs was taking payments to protect the cartels.
It didn’t stop there. The biggest drug lords now run their own rackets, unleashing their armed wings against opposing gangs that try to muscle in on their territories. Mexico’s murder rate more than doubled during the tough-on-drugs presidency of Felipe Calderón. The cartels spread their infection to car theft rings, kidnappers and illegal loggers, and then demanded protection payments from legitimate businesses. They even stalked Mexican elective politics. Just this past June, 35 candidates for local office were killed as cartels ensured that their own candidates won.
Smith ends not with policy recommendations but with the bleakest of predictions: “A century and counting, the Mexican drug trade shows no signs of slowing.”