WJU Historian at Work

WJU's Daniel Weimer, Associate Professor of History, recently published a monograph on American drug policy during the 1970s. In his Seeing Drugs: Modernization, Counterinsurgency, and U.S. Narcotics Control in the Third World, 1969-1976, Dr. Weimer highlights the interaction between American foreign policy and the opening rounds of the drug wars that have characterized American policy during the last three decades of the twentieth century. 

Published by Kent State University Press, Seeing Drugs explores how Thailand, Burma and Mexico were deemed the key opium and heroin producing and trafficking nations during the early and mid-1970s. The book also looks at how those respective governments tried to halt drug trafficking and production in those countries.

"I explain why the United States relied upon modernization and counterinsurgency theory to solve the drug problem," he said.

Dr. Weimer's book was the subject of a prestigious H-Diplo Roundtable review in May 2012. Various experts on 20th Century American foreign policy and American drug policy provided detailed reviews of the work. As the editors of the roundtable note, "Weimer's study highlights some absolutely critical and understudied aspects of U.S. Cold War policy, particularly the ways in which Cold War justifications were used to pursue highly intrusive social and economic policies in other countries, in this case ranging from crop substitution to counterinsurgency." They also add that the reviewers commend "Weimer's attention to linkages among narcotics control, nation building, and modernization, and find his argument about their intertwined nature to be persuasive." They conclude that "Seeing Drugs is an important book for all scholars of the Cold War, U.S. foreign relations, and U.S. drug policy."

Following on the heels of this important contribution to the the historiography concerning American foreign policy during the latter third of the twentieth century, Dr. Weimer is now examining the links between drugs, pesticides and the environment, especially during the late 1970s and early 1980s. By remaining at the forefront of historical inquiry, Dr. Weimer is able to provide his students at Wheeling Jesuit University with the most recent understandings of the drug war and American foreign policy.