Negative Space: opium
- America’s Drug Users
- Opium was prohibited because it was used by Orientals and cocaine because it was perceived as a Negro drug. More specifically, racist views of the time saw these peoples as less able to resist the criminalizing effects of drug use. Jazz was similarly stereotyped.
- Control
- Opium prohibition was part of a web of international treaties designed to give national governments some plausible deniability.
- Control—Miscellaneous Suggestions
- As above, it may have been their consensus, but I’ll bet it was also their consensus that they needed to receive and apply more resources to combat this crime, rather than back off and end the spiral of violence around it.
- Control—National
- The Harrison Narcotics Act destroyed all of the successes of the only “prohibition” act to ever work successfully—the labeling act of 1906. Instead, opium prohibition ended up with all of the success of alcohol prohibition.
- Control—State
- The Texas law, on the surface, appears to make some sense: why not reduce the violence of prohibition by making it illegal to carry weapons while dealing in prohibited drugs? But its an example of our inability to back down in the face of bad decisions. One law results in more violence, and rather than repeal that law we add more laws to it, much as if we were addicted to bad laws.
- Daru and Bhang: Cultural Factors in the Choice of Intoxicant
- G. M. Carstairs in 1951 researched the usage patterns between alcohol (daru) and marijuana (bhang) in Rajasthan, India. There was also some mention of opium among the respondents. Bhang tended to be used for worship, and daru (and opium) for driving away fear. Warriors preferred daru, and Bramin preferred bhang.
- Development of the Problem
- Patent medicines that were advertised as curing opium addiction might themselves contain opium. Heroin was advertised similarly. And, of course, the Harrison Act bolstered the black market and moved opium both underground and towards heroin.
- Drinking Patterns and Alcoholism in the Chinese
- K. Singer surveys alcohol use and the perception of use in China and Hong Kong during and after World War II. As the center of the illegal opium trade, narcotics were a bigger problem in Hong Kong than alcohol.
- Effects of opium, morphine, and heroin on addicts (partial)
- Neither physical nor mental deterioration are a necessary consequence of opiate use.
- Etiology
- Where physicians had no particular desire to spread heroin use, addicts apparently did.
- Extent
- For the most part, only if addicts are using extreme amounts would outsiders recognize that something was wrong, let alone that it was opium addiction.
- General Nature
- The personality changes in addicts can be attributed to their desire to hide their addiction from their friends and family, and a belief that no one will believe that their addiction is not merely a matter of not enough willpower. The prejudices of society against addicts tends to drive addicts into a mode of life that society then claims is caused by their addiction.
- Learning from alcohol prohibition
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If the people against ending drug prohibition had been around in the thirties, we would never have ended the prohibition of beer and cocktails, because of the dangers of pure alcohol and bathtub gin. One of the lessons of the alcohol prohibition era is that we don’t have to go from banning everything to allowing everything. There is a middle ground.
- The Narcotics: Opium, Morphine, Heroin, Methadone, and Others
- When drugs are inexpensive, we find better ways of dealing with them; when they are prohibited, we find the worst possible ways of dealing with them. Nowhere is this more obvious then with the opiates.
- Opiates information
- Effects, ubiquity, and dangers of opiates.
- Opiologia
- Written by Angelo Sala and translated by Tho. Bretner, M.M., 1618, London.
- The Opium Problem
- Charles E. Terry and Mildred Pellens. This was originally published in 1928 by the Bureau of Social Hygiene, Inc. shortly after opium became illegal (1914). Before Harrison, most addicts used under the supervision of their physician; after Harrison, most addicts used under the supervision of other addicts. The law appeared to have no effect on the number of addicts, except perhaps to increase them.
- Pathology (continued) Tolerance—Dependence—Withdrawal
- Tolerance—the ability of regular users to tolerate otherwise fatal doses— is “the only fundamental characteristic of opium intoxication that is generally conceded.”
- Rumsfeld worried about new terror in Afghanistan
- Rumsfeld worries publicly that Afghanistan’s terror quota will fail without renewed prohibition on opium poppies.
- Treatment
- Even among all of the prejudices back then, there were still people who realized—and put into practice—that removing the external forces that drive the addict into a downward spiral can end that spiral. A lessened use of the drug follows.
- Types of Users
- It is extraordinarily difficult to overcome the prejudices that people have regarding the kind of person a drug addict is. It would be nice to be able to say that researchers no longer do a survey and then extrapolate the basically random results into causation, but we still have major studies of the kind that reported that women with light blue eyes and flaxen hair are the most susceptible to addiction.
- Use of Alcohol and Opium by the Meo of Laos
- Joseph Westermeyer writes about the wonders of drug use among the Meo; his account seems a little too rose-colored, but I know nothing about Laos personally.
More Information
- The Royal Commission on Opium, 1893-95
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“Much to the dismay of anti-opium activists, many of whom were interviewed for the report, the Commission not only determined that the opium trade should continue, but also declared that ‘the temperate use of opium in India should be viewed in the same light as the temperate use of alcohol in England’.”
