Opium, Coca, Race, and Public Health in Early Twentieth-Century Peru

This paper compares medical and public health debates about the perils of opium smoking and coca chewing in early twentieth-century Peru. During the 1910s and 1920s doctors and politicians saw both drugs as hindrances to the country’s modernization, but their consumption varied by region and by ethnic group. Opium smoking tended to be seen as an urban problem prevalent for decades within Lima’s Chinese community, while coca chewing was a centuries-old, widespread practice among indigenous peoples in the Andean highlands. Scholars such as Paul Gootenberg have argued that public health concerns over opium had little effect in shaping more recent and widespread outcry about the deleterious effects of coca consumption, which he suggests resulted from longstanding elite prejudices and international uproar about the newly discovered dangers of cocaine. Yet, the same doctors in Lima became outspoken authorities on both opium and coca consumption. Drawing on public health archival materials as well various medical texts including the work of Carlos Enrique Paz Soldán, the director of Lima’s Institute of Social Medicine and an outspoken eugenist, this paper examines how doctors employed the discourse of narcotics and the language of race to assess the fitness of Chinese and indigenous populations in Peru. It asks what themes and tropes connect the practices of racializing these populations as narcotics using degenerates. It argues that scientists used medical discourse and public health interventions to construct both groups as threats to the country’s progress and as unsuitable for full citizenship barring dramatic efforts by the state.