In the leafy town of Taiyu, Shanxi, an inland Chinese province southwest of Beijing, the district magistrate Chen Lihe had a stele put up for public display. The date was 1817 and, four years earlier, the emperor had issued a raft of regulations against opium, including severe punishments for handling, selling or consuming it. The stele read:
Opium is produced beyond the seas, but its poison flows into China. Those who buy it and consume it break their families, harm their own lives, and violate the law. Treachery, licentiousness, robbery, and brigandage all arise from it. Both the young and vigorous and the old and weak die from it. Wealthy and luxurious houses are impoverished by it. Brave and bright sons and younger brothers are made stupid and unfilial by it. People who dwell in peace in their houses well stocked with delicacies feel the heavy blows of the bamboo and the weight of the cangue because of it; they also suffer strangulation, exile, and banishment at the hands of the law because of it.
As for its injurious effect on custom, opium destroys the five natural relationships, and its harmful effect on individual character is even more unspeakable . . . To eradicate a great scourge, its source must first be cleansed. If the district were without traffickers, from where would my people buy opium? If there were no traffickers outside its boundaries, from where would my district buy opium? . . . Henceforward, all merchants in the district who go to Fujian, Guangdong, Jiangsu, or Zhejiang to buy goods must pledge that they will not bring a single fragment of opium back to Taiyu for sale, to the great harm of its populace. If they render respectful adherence to their oaths of abstinence, the spirits will surely reward them. If they resume trafficking, the officials will certainly punish them! And if official law cannot reach them, the spirits will surely lend assistance.1
By proclaiming the severest penalties against everything to do with opium, including its possession, the Chinese imperial court had in 1813 launched an all-out campaign against the drug. It sent out orders for enforcement throughout the country, including to provinces, such as Shanxi, that lay far from the coasts through which opium flowed. The stele reveals motivations that ring surprisingly modern. Opium, like modern drugs, was identified as a potentially deadly ‘poison’, and the text suggests it made consumers dependent (making the brave and bright ‘stupid and unfilial’ and having an ‘unspeakable’ effect on character). Socially, it threatened to make its adepts downwardly mobile (‘Wealthy and luxurious houses are impoverished by it’). Beyond this, it was identified as a cause of crime and public disorder (‘Treachery, licentiousness, robbery, and brigandage all arise from it’). Its lyrical language aside, the epigraphical message rings much like any statement condemning drugs today.
Qing dynasty China was the first state to ban drugs, or at least the first to do so on the basis of justifications that remain relevant today. The stele’s appeal to the spirits, called on to lend a hand to officials in hunting down traffickers, sounds a quainter note. Yet religious agitation would also arise in Europe and the United States as a powerful force for drug prohibition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Moral stigma and religious imagery remain part of the vocabulary for condemning drug users to this day. Our Taiyu magistrate lastly made the point that ‘opium is produced beyond the seas’ and that ‘to eradicate a great scourge, its source must first be cleansed.’ China’s opium came from India and the Middle East. The belief that supply could more easily be cut off because it originated abroad was, and is, darkly seductive. States are forever prone to treat their drug problems through border policing or by placing pressure on foreign countries, avoiding the unpleasant business of confronting their own citizenry. No nostrum would feed the long war on drugs more consistently than the idea that intoxicants can simply be eliminated at source.
The emperor’s penalties for smoking opium, introduced in 1813, were a hundred blows of the bamboo cane and one month in the cangue – a type of mobile wooden pillory affixed around the head that prevented the prisoner from feeding him- or herself. Public officials caught smoking would be dismissed.2 Under provisions that had lapsed or been allowed to fall into neglect but were now revived, traffickers were liable to the additional penalty of transportation to the frontier for service as military labourers. As to the operators of opium dens – public houses whose chief business was to dispense opium for smoking – they faced the extreme punishment of death by strangulation.3
It is worth highlighting that at the time of these prohibitions, the Qing empire scarcely had a rampant opium problem. China’s opium smokers could not have numbered more than a few tens of thousands in 1813 – at most 10,000 to 20,000, if taken to mean addicts. This was a tiny proportion of its population of more than 300 million.4 Per capita consumption, at around 600 grams (1.3 lb) per thousand annually, was actually lower than that of England and Wales in a comparable period, at 725 grams (1.6 lb) per thousand.5 Opium was freely available in Britain, where it was routinely taken as a painkiller in pill or drink form.
It is from these humble origins that drug control has grown, over two centuries, to achieve the far grander proportions it has today. The war on drugs did not originate in the USA. Even less did it begin, as is sometimes believed, with Richard Nixon. Nixon was not even the first American president to declare such a war: in 1954 President Eisenhower had called for ‘a new war on narcotic addiction at the local, national, and international level’.6 Modern drug prohibition originated in China. Two Opium Wars ensued from the prohibition edicts, forcing the drug on the Qing empire. Yet the wars attracted moral censure in the United States and left a stain of guilt in Britain. At the beginning of the twentieth century, American, Chinese and European diplomats assembled at a set of conferences to reform the trade in the drug. These conferences established the norms for present-day anti-narcotics legislation, national and international. The Chinese and Americans were on the offensive, and the Europeans were eager to make amends, or at least to be seen to be doing the right thing: the result was drug prohibition. From there, controls over the narcotics trade passed on to the League of Nations and later the United Nations (UN), turning into a global endeavour.
Accompanying this process, the set of regulated drugs expanded to involve an increasingly broad array. Opium is an addictive drug derived from a plant, a white-flowered variety of poppy, whose seed pod yields the juice from which it is made. Chemically refined, it can be transformed into a range of compounds collectively known as opiates, among which are morphine and the even more potent heroin. Consumers of opiates numbered 29 million worldwide in 2017.7 Yet patterns of drug use and the list of prohibited substances have changed out of all recognition since Qing times. According to estimates compiled by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), over a quarter of a billion people used illegal drugs of any kind in the same year, or around 5 per cent of the world’s adult population.8 The schedule now includes cocaine, a drug invented in the nineteenth century, but also a paraphernalia of stimulants and hallucinogens which, though often sold under the labels of LSD or Ecstasy, are constantly evolving in composition. Consumers of the synthetic stimulants known as amphetamines now outnumber opiate users worldwide.9 Amphetamines have become the drug of choice in several Asian countries, including China, Japan and the Philippines.10 Finally, the prohibited list includes the plant-based cannabis or marijuana, whose use is as ancient as opium’s – though its recent legalization in a number of U.S. states and in two countries, Uruguay and Canada, suggests that it may one day leave the group of illicit drugs.
It is the story of this transformation that this book presumes to tell: how an ever larger group of mind-altering products came to be prohibited throughout the world, for what reasons, and with what effects. Why are such drugs illegal today? Should they be? Has drug prohibition worked? What have its consequences been? Two hundred years ago, the Jiaqing Emperor chose to launch a campaign against anyone among his subjects who dealt in or smoked opium. Today, the UN and its 190-plus sovereign members actively police and punish drug trafficking and use worldwide. How did one lead to the other?
Incidentally, this is a history of drug prohibition, not a history of drugs, and even less a history of intoxicants in general. It is the rise of prohibition that concerns this book, the ban on everything coming under the quaint term ‘narcotics’: not the drugs themselves, but the endeavour to suppress them. Nor is what ought to be considered a drug its preoccupation, and whether the list should include alcohol, tobacco, coffee or even video games. Rightly or wrongly, the legislator has made that choice. Like drugs, some of these substances or activities have been labelled addictive. But ‘addiction’ is a loose term whose changing meanings have themselves been part of the rise of control. All the best-known products coming under the label ‘drugs’ have in common that they began their modern-era careers as medicines. It is this common origin, not degrees of addictiveness, that has singled them out from other intoxicants, and it has been crucial in determining how and why they were banned.
Drug control was born of historical accident, not rational design. Colonialism, the backlash against it, and international affairs were the triggers for prohibition, interacting with often superficial beliefs about the drugs themselves. Marijuana’s route to prohibition has been just as circuitous as opium’s. Likewise originating in the paradoxes and mishaps of colonial interaction, it came about, in the mid-1920s, suddenly and as the afterthought to yet another anti-opium conference. But that opiates were the first drug to attract international attention was itself fateful. The drugs of abuse currently consumed throughout the world may be a diverse set, but the medical model for addiction was developed to describe opiates, substances that involve powerful habituation and withdrawal effects as well as high risks of overdose. Dumping all drugs in a common category with opiates has both fuelled the growth in the anti-narcotics system and made it especially difficult to reform. (Ask someone if marijuana should be legalized, and every so often the answer will be: what about heroin, then, should that be legal too?)
Varying cultural mores and social conditions have historically fostered differing methods for regulating drugs in different countries. There are many shades of prohibition, ranging from maximum penalties on anything drug-related, including cultivation, refining, distribution and consumption, to the tolerance or decriminalization of some of these activities, especially possession. In certain places, certain drugs are legal medically but not recreationally – and while the barrier between medical and recreational use is central to prohibition, it is sometimes as moveable as it is hard to police. Some drug regimes qualify prohibition by allowing ‘maintenance’: the provision of drugs to dependent users under medical supervision. The British regime as it emerged from 1916 onwards diverged from the American one. So did the French, German, Iranian and Bolivian regimes, to name but a few. To some extent these individual country frameworks continue to differ. Yet the system promoted by the community of nations and vested in the UN agency UNODC has been surprisingly successful in propagating itself, if more debatably so in its results. Drug suppression became, through its nineteenth- and twentieth-century history, a more or less uniform, internationally coherent effort. This book describes how this came about.
The story begins with the Qing edicts because it is from them that a straight line can be drawn to contemporary control. The first anti-drug laws were not actually enacted in China, and even in China they did not date from 1813. In the United States and Europe, there were no or almost no restrictions on narcotics until at least the mid-nineteenth century, and no meaningful controls until the twentieth. But earlier bans or debates have been documented in Thailand, Vietnam, Persia, on Java, and in colonial Peru. The Thai laws were probably the most intriguing. As early as 1360, King Ramathibodi I of Ayutthaya promulgated a ‘Law of the Three Seals’ that forbade the sale and consumption of opium. Offenders would be paraded around the city, on land and on water, for three days each, then jailed until they were detoxified.11 Opium use was inimical to Buddhist religious practice because it was an obstacle to concentration and by extension to meditation and righteous behaviour. Among the Buddha’s fundamental precepts was an injunction against intoxication.12 Thai kingship was meanwhile steeped in Buddhist symbolism and spirituality: Thai kings traditionally claimed descent from an incarnation of Buddha, and they relied on legendary texts and rituals to underpin their legitimacy.13 The Thai laws thus anticipated, in their condemnation of opium, the modern state’s paternalistic interest in its citizens’ good behaviour, combined with its concern for that behaviour’s sociopolitical ramifications. At the same time, unlike the later Qing regulations, the Law of the Three Seals remained somewhat narrowly rooted in religion. It would not prove of much consequence outside Thailand.
The Vietnamese emperor Canh Tri III may have prohibited opium in 1665, calling for the eradication of crops and stores, though with what effect is not known.14 On the island of Java (Indonesia) the seventeenth-century Sultanate of Bantam likewise banned the drug, the tentative evidence being that the law condemned addicts and even their families to slavery.15 Dutch colonizers later respected Bantam’s opium-free status, though this did not stop the drug from becoming entrenched on the rest of the island.16 In Persia Shah Abbas I issued a decree in 1596 giving his courtiers the choice between quitting opium and exile. In 1621 he banned its use among his soldiers. Decrees of a similar nature against opium and hashish, the cannabis resin, and bhang, a drink made from the same plant, were promulgated by the Persian shahs in 1694, 1729 and 1796. None of these appears to have been very long-lasting, or to have found much purchase beyond court circles.17
The Peruvian coca leaf – the plant from which cocaine is derived – offers a rare example of an early-modern drug debate. After the Spanish conquistadors had snuffed out the Inca empire in the early sixteenth century, they quickly found the leaf a valuable commodity. Coca was both profitably farmed and taxed, and it was supplied to native Peruvians to sustain them in hard labour in the silver mines.18 The Church, though, became offended at the leaf’s association with pagan rituals and sacrifices. Missionaries asserted that coca was the invention of the Devil, and they petitioned viceregal officials to proscribe it. A lay criticism was that coca cultivation and chewing fostered malnutrition and disease. In the mid-century the Spanish viceroys decided to regulate and limit the expansion of coca plantations. Yet the Church itself was divided, and at the council of Lima of 1567–8, some prelates held that the leaf was only fortifying. In the end, King Philip II gave priority to his silver-mine revenues. The leaf continued as an income-generating commodity, and the debate eventually died out. The argument, in any case, had focused more on coca in its agricultural incidence and as an obstacle to missionary efforts than on its dangers or merits as a drug.19
In China, the first anti-opium edict was issued in 1729. It was at that time that traffickers and den operators became liable to military exile or death. This could not quite yet be described, though, as a declaration of war on the drug. The edict of 1729 belonged to a period of reforming zeal, triggered by a change of monarch, in which many activities deemed subversive were denounced. The opium edict was ‘just one of a series of edicts in which [the emperor] condemned those who harmed public morality by seducing or confusing others – a series that also included bans on prostitution and the teaching of martial arts’.20 Harsh penalties may have been placed on the statute books, but there is no evidence that they were applied during the rest of the century.21 In the same year, for example, a governor of the coastal Fujian province condemned a suspected trafficker to the cangue, his torment to be followed by military exile. The culprit appealed, arguing that his opium had been for medicinal use. Not only was his condemnation overturned, but the imperial court ordered the confiscated drug to be released back to him.22
The foreign merchants who brought opium to China were aware of its status as an illicit article, suggesting that a degree of enforcement may have applied in coastal provinces in the late eighteenth century. The first documented prosecution under the 1729 edict nevertheless occurred in 1806. From that date, a succession of smuggling cases alerted the emperor to the drug’s progress into the interior of China. An indictment was brought on smuggling and refining charges on the island of Haitan in 1806, and two more provincial prosecutions attracted Beijing’s attention between 1808 and 1810. Another case, dated 1811, confronted the authorities with the practice of smoking opium in pure form, not mixed with tobacco, as had hitherto been the custom.23 In 1810 the sentinels at one of the gates of the Forbidden City had stopped a young man trying to smuggle in a set of opium cases, and in 1813 it was the guards themselves who were caught with the pipe.24
At last the emperor responded with his new, draconian set of laws. Unlike earlier measures, they were wide-ranging and designed to be long-lasting. They would also have a deep foreign impact. China’s opium came from colonial India, and the merchants responsible for shipping it into Canton flew the British flag. The Chinese realization that ‘opium is produced beyond the seas’ would prompt the emperor, all else having failed, to take the axe to the drug’s foreign supply line. The merchants, though, could count on the support of the world’s most powerful navy, and they depended on the aggressive reflexes of an increasingly assertive home nation. Its prohibition of opium had set Qing China on a collision course with imperial Britain.