The Pre-Colombian Origins of Drug Trafficking in the Americas: Illicit Cocaine, 1945–1973

A historian who has studied the global emergence of cocaine out of Latin American will give a free public talk. Paul Gootenberg will present “The Pre-Colombian Origins of Drug Trafficking in the Americas: Illicit Cocaine, 1945–1973.” A professor of history at Stony Brook University, Gootenberg is the author of “Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug.” Based on more than a decade of research in international archives, including declassified documents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and its predecessors, the book demonstrates the existence of a close long-term relationship between the United States and Andean cocaine. He claims that over time the “war on drugs” has actually created a global menace out of what had been local trades in indigenous coca leaf and a boom in medicinal cocaine at the turn of the last century. Gootenberg serves as co-director of Latin American Studies at Stony Brook and is one of the coordinators of the Initiative in Historical Social Sciences and the New York Latin American History Workshop. His talk is sponsored by the Marjorie Fortunoff Mayrock Lecture Series in History, which is funded by Elliot Mayrock ’73 in memory of his mother.