Smuggling: The Management of Scarcity and Trade of Penicillin as a Post-War Commodity

Abstract

Reflecting on archival material relating to smuggling—documented in personal memoirs for the 1940s and in public archives for the early 1950s—alongside the relevant historiography, enables an analysis of the cultures and social life of penicillin, and its relation to other scarce commodities of the time, such as tobacco and nylons. The practices which surrounded obtaining the drug demonstrate the relationship between official secrecy and public knowledge, and its embeddedness in the political strategies of Franco’s dictatorship. Penicillin will also be discussed in this chapter as both a border-crossing material and symbolic object, representing the on-going therapeutic revolution. The historiography on corruption suggests the illegal trade in penicillin might also be linked to the “business of power”, when, for example, gasoline supplied for official use was being sold on the black market.