Illegal Drugs

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

History Has A Habit Of Repeating Itself

The War On Drink

Voters--and governments--change their minds about ways to deal with
activities they disapprove of. Governments used to ban gambling; now many
run their own lotteries. Prostitution, although still generally illegal, is
rarely the target of police campaigns. Attitudes to alcohol have changed in
the past century-and-half. So have attitudes to drugs.

In 19th-century America, campaigners talked of the demon drink in much the
same way that they now talk of drugs. The temperance movement blamed booze
for crime, "moral degeneracy", broken families and business failure. In
America, this led to Prohibition, with its accompanying crime and
bootlegging. In England, campaigners won restrictions on access, in the
shape of the pub-closing hours that have puzzled foreign visitors ever
since. It may have been a bore, but it was a less socially costly way of
dealing with an undesirable habit than a ban.

Today's illegal drugs were patent medicines in the 19th century. Morphine
and opium were freely available in both Europe and America. Victorian
babies were quietened with Godfrey's Cordial, which contained opium.
Cocaine was the basis of remedies for the common cold. When Atlanta
prohibited alcohol, John Pemberton, producer of a health drink called
French Wine Coca, developed a version that was non-alcoholic but still
contained traces of coca, thereby creating the world's best-selling soft
drink. As for marijuana, Queen Victoria reputedly used it to soothe the
royal period pains.

Far from opposing the drugs trade, the British and the Americans
notoriously promoted it in the 19th century. In 1800 China's imperial
government forbade the import of opium, which had long been used to stop
diarrhoea, but had latterly graduated to recreational use. British
merchants smuggled opium into China to balance their purchases of tea for
export to Britain. When the Chinese authorities confiscated a vast amount
of the stuff, the British sent in gunboats, backed by France, Russia and
America, and bullied China into legalising opium imports.

Initial efforts to stamp out drug use at home had little to do with
concerns about health. One of America's first federal laws against
opium-smoking, in 1887, was a response to agitation against Chinese
"coolies", brought into California to build railways and dig mines. It
banned opium imports by Chinese people, but allowed them by American
citizens (the tax on opium imports was a useful source of federal revenue).
The drafters of the Harrison Act of 1914, the first federal ban on
non-medical narcotics, played on fears of "drug-crazed, sex-mad negroes".
And the 1930s campaign against marijuana was coloured by the fact that
Harry Anslinger, the first drug tsar, was appointed by Andrew Mellon, his
wife's uncle. Mellon, the Treasury Secretary, was banker to DuPont, and
sales of hemp threatened that firm's efforts to build a market for
synthetic fibres. Spreading scare stories about cannabis was a way to give
hemp a bad name. Moral outrage is always more effective if backed by a few
vested interests.