Rather than vanish, cocaine divided into a trio of more politically-constructed and geographically-defined global commodity chains. The first was an unexpected Dutch colonial-mercantilist Java-European chain, which by 1915 swiftly displaced Peruvian producers. The second was Japan’s state-promoted and shadowy pan-Asian circuit, launched in the 1920s-30s in response to League and industrial imperatives.
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The speed of the Dutch rise to predominance in world coca and cocaine trades took the world by surprise, especially the Peruvians, who in 1900 still felt they enjoyed a natural (Incan) birthright to the global coca market. In 1904 Dutch Java (now of Indonesia) exported only 26 tons of coca leaf; this soared to 800 in 1912 and a mass industrial supply of 1,700 tons in 1920, to a glutted world market. The Dutch built an especially productive and integrated industrial cocaine regime, yet it was also dismantled by decree almost as quickly as it arose.
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Dutch scientific-commercial interest in coca dates to the 1850s, but plantings began in the mid-1880s when such botanical experiments spread among the European colonial powers. One advantage was accidental: the abnormally high-alkaloid coca-bush Javan planters got from the colonial botanical gardens at Buitenzorg descended from one strand of Peruvian Erythroxylon novogranatense, originally from Kew. It contained twice (up to 1.5%) the cocaine content of quality Huánuco leaf but in a tricky to refine ecgonine crystallized form, practically useless for herbal coca products. Given Peru’s rapid move into crude cocaine in the 1885-1900 era, not much interest was evinced in Javan coca, though small lots reached European markets.
After 1900, several factors suddenly focused Dutch interest in coca/cocaine, spurred on by national botanical specialists like de Jong and Reens. One was establishment in 1900 of Amsterdam’s large state-bank subsidized “Nederlandsch Cocainefabrieck (NCF), based on copying advanced German patents for ecgonine-cocaine extraction. The second were steady investments in plantation productivity and quality. Cheap Chinese field labor, four-crops yearly, economies of scale and technical rationalization, inter-cropping with colonial rubber and tea projects, all made Javan plantation efficiency dwarf the haphazard peasant-style coca culture of the Andes. By 1911 they captured a quarter of the world market, filtered through Amsterdam into a high-margin fully-integrated cocaine industry World War I spurred further European reliance on this coca corridor. Dutch industrial-grade coca also made it to Japan, Belgium, France and even to the United States; in the 1920s, impressed by its reliable quality, New Jersey Merck acquired its own Javan plantation, which performed well into the 1930s. Three world “cores”of cocaine now existed: Darmstadt, northern New Jersey and Amsterdam, with an enlarged NCF the biggest single producer. Together, they dramatically reduced prospects for Peruvian coca (wiped off of European markets from 1908-15) and crude cocaine (confined to a now struggling German sector). Peruvian coca/cocaine export values dropped by some 95% by the 1920s. Peruvians watched these developments helplessly, without the time, capital or technical expertise to respond.
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By 1920, Japan itself produced more than 4,000 lbs. of cocaine, which then doubled to 8,000 by 1922. Officials figures for the 1930s shrunk to just under 2,000 lbs., if considered by some historians and contemporary League officials as doctored for international consumption. (This is a hard charge to prove, though Karch has tried by putative estimates of coca-alkaloid capacity.) Exports across Asia officially dropped to negligible levels, though complaints registered about Japanese firms and reporting, as well as cases of deliberate smuggling (such as the “Fujitsuru” and “Taiwan Governor” brand vials in India). Other specialists have noted growing diplomatic cooperation between Japan and international drug officials, at least until the invasions of Manchuria and China, when opiates became a major issue. The firms making cocaine and morphine were among Japan’s largest: Hoshi, Sankyo, Koto and Shiongo Pharmaceuticals, and enjoyed growing links to major trading trusts (such as Mitsui and Mitsubishi) and to interlocking governmental, colonial and military officials. In 1934, we know that Taiwan’s Kagi district kept 694 acres under intensive coca cultivation (by Taiwan Shoyaku and Hoshi); earlier plots on Iowa Jima and Okinawa fall off the record. About 300,000 pounds of Formosan leaf were harvested annually in the late 1930s. Peruvian imports were officially discontinued in 1938 (in fact, Peru nationalized Tulumayo, which had a colorful subsequent history of its own).
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