Benjamin Smith

ven for Mexico’s federal government, such achievements trumped the potential public fallout from the racket. Mexican presidents were always looking for ways to grow public services while keeping taxes low. Taking a percentage of the drug profits seemed like a perfect solution. Furthermore, drug earnings were almost entirely in dollars. They paid off Mexico’s balance-of-payments deficit, and they propped up the country’s falling currency.

Yet, something had changed. The threat of state violence had achieved what had not happened organically. Mexico was starting to experience one of the rules of drug prohibition: the more aggressive the policing, the more secretive and violent the trade.

Nacaveva also goes to great lengths to describe the sheer tedium of the trade. (This is something for which he has a Proustian talent.) Getting hold of the opium in Culiacán involves long, exasperating waits only occasionally enlivened by drinking and gunplay. Getting hold of the opium up in the mountains is more time-consuming still—weeks of waiting for peasants to come down from their fields in the highland peaks. Converting the opium into heroin is the same. It is a lengthy, smelly, and exhausting process that basically involves stirring a pot of boiling chemicals nonstop for a week. Selling the drugs at the border is another wait. Only this time it’s accompanied by the nail-biting anxiety of getting caught.

This should not surprise us. Women have always done unpaid labor in the house, in the fields, and in the market. Women still do. Drug growing, drug producing, and drug selling were not formal occupations. These jobs didn’t have official contracts, hourly wages, and fortnightly paychecks. Compensation depended on the amount produced. So the entire family got involved. Women and children did a large proportion of the work.

In reality, women played—and still play—key roles. Men owned the poppy fields; but women (and children) did most of the harvesting.

La Nacha was a master of getting out of prison by securing what was known as an amparo.

In a country where import tariffs were still high and the world’s biggest manufacturer lay on the doorstep, being a goods smuggler was not a bad job. The Mexicans even had a name for it—a fayuquero—allegedly after an Arab word for a smuggling skiff.

But Mexico’s function was not simply to feed the hippie imagination. It also started to play a physical role in the lives of 1960s youths. What had been the place for the Beats to slum it now became the go-to vacation site for millions of young Americans. The sun was out and the peso was 12.50 to the dollar. As one student newspaper reminded its readers, a brief summer job could get you two weeks in the Mexican surf and as many “beaches, beers, bikinis and bargains” as you wanted. It was a “virtual Disneyland of drugs, booze, sex and other assorted vices.”

Mexico, then, was crucial to the development of both hippie myths and the hippie leisure industry. But Mexico’s most important role was as the source of the majority of the counterculture marijuana.

Despite their college educations, most U.S. smugglers did not speak Spanish.