Smuggler Nation (43 page)

14
America’s Century-Long Drug War

THE USE OF MIND-ALTERING
drugs—whether for ceremonial, medicinal, or recreational purposes—has existed throughout human history.
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What have varied over time are the particular substances, the location and methods of production and distribution, consumer tastes, societal tolerance, and laws and their enforcement.
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The previous chapter focused on America’s short-lived, failed experiment in prohibiting an especially popular drug—alcohol—and the smuggling boom it unleashed. We now turn our attention to the other drugs that were prohibited in the early decades of the twentieth century—opium and its derivatives (morphine and heroin), cocaine and other coca products, and cannabis (marijuana)—but that remain criminalized a century later and are the main targets of a U.S.-led global “war on drugs.”
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Drug prohibition sharply accelerated and expanded the broader trend of using federal powers to police vice trades. New and more punitive laws were passed, new and more expansive bureaucracies were created to enforce them, new and bigger prisons were built to house violators, and arm-twisting drug diplomacy became a new and increasingly prominent component of U.S. foreign relations. Yet despite this sustained drug war buildup, the illicit drug business not only survived but turned into one of the most profitable sectors of global trade, with the United States as the world’s leading consumer. Through the
century-long enforcement-evasion game between “narcs” and “narcos,” illicit drugs became the smuggled commodity most closely associated with crime, corruption, violence, and the underside of America’s transformation into a consumer society.

Prohibiting Drugs

To many Americans, certain ideas about drugs such as cocaine and heroin seem commonsensical: use of these drugs is simply wrong and dangerous, distributing and ingesting them is criminal, seeking to eliminate their supply is sensible, and relying primarily on suppression is the most effective way to stop trafficking and dealing. But this set of ideas has not always held sway. Indeed, many nineteenth-century American merchants viewed opium no differently from any other commodity. For instance, Warren Delano II, the grandfather of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the creator of the family fortune, profited from shipping opium to China, calling it a “fair, honorable and legitimate trade; and to say the worst of it, liable to no further or weightier objections than is the importation of wines, Brandies & spirits into the U. States, England, &c.”
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But he failed to also mention that the Chinese authorities considered him an outlaw and a smuggler; the opium trade had been banned by imperial edict since 1729.

In 1900 opium, morphine, heroin, cocaine, and marijuana were all legal and readily available in the United States. They were prescribed by doctors to relieve pain and sleeplessness, and they could even be purchased in grocery and general stores as well as by mail order. They were found in numerous unregulated patent medicines, claiming to cure everything from stomachaches to toothaches. Cocaine, synthesized from the coca plant, was a favorite ingredient in Coca-Cola, medicine, and wines. Historian David Musto reminds us that the Parke Davis Company “sold coca-leaf cigarettes and coca cheroots [cigars] to accompany their other products, which provided cocaine in a variety of media such as a liqueur-like alcohol mixture called Coca Cordial, tablets, hypodermic injections, ointments, and sprays.”
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The 1897 Sears, Roebuck catalog offered hypodermic kits—a syringe, two needles, two vials of morphine, and a carrying case—for $1.50.
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In 1898 Bayer and Company promoted its own synthesized version of morphine as a wonder drug, under the brand name “heroin” (from the German word heroisch, meaning heroic and powerful).
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Figure 14.1 At the turn of the century, Bayer Pharmaceuticals promoted heroin as a cough suppressant (Granger Collection).

Figure 14.2 An 1885 medicine ad for “cocaine toothache drops” was clearly meant for children as well as adults (Granger Collection).

The common use of such drugs led to problems of abuse. There were no hard data, of course, but informed estimates placed the number of American morphine addicts at 2 to 4 percent of the population in 1895.
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A small percentage of drug users—especially those who were black (in the South) or Chinese (in the West)—were considered social pariahs and were feared. But most users in the latter half of the century were middle-or upper-class, with women outnumbering men. They were not stigmatized and certainly not treated as criminals. The idea that this was a matter for the federal government to deal with was nowhere in evidence.

All this changed within a few decades. By the 1930s, drug use was publicly condemned. Support was widespread for strict controls, and for punishing those who sold and used heroin and cocaine. Drugs and crime were tightly linked in the public mind; drug users and dealers were seen as threats to society. Stopping drug use and stemming the supply of drugs were unquestioned goals of government policy.

What happened? By the early 1900s concern about drug use was rising, though it did not generate the same sort of organized fervor as alcohol consumption.
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There was nothing like the Anti-Saloon League leading the antidrug charge. However, groups in the medical community, reformers in the Progressive movement, moralistic antivice crusaders, muckraking journalists, and racist and nativist groups who feared that America would be mongrelized and contaminated by drug-consuming “inferior peoples” were all intent on establishing some kind of regimen for drug control. Their various struggles merged in the early decades of the twentieth century to forge a new public consensus on drug use.

Physicians began to pay attention to problems of addiction in the aftermath of the Civil War, when wounded soldiers who were given morphine for pain became addicted in large numbers. Of particular concern were the problems that resulted from the casual prescription of drugs to relieve aches and pains and from consumers’ unwary exposure to these substances in popular patent medicines with unlabeled contents. The emerging medical professions, anxious to protect their members’ interests, argued that medical officials should regulate
the supply of drugs and decide what treatments were appropriate. In 1903 the American Pharmaceutical Association said that cocaine and opium derivatives should be given only under prescription and that laws should regulate—but not prohibit—drug use. Pragmatic reformers in the Progressive movement joined the doctors and pharmacists. Seeking to protect the public interest against greedy corporations and corrupt politicians, they echoed the medical community’s call for close regulation of patent medicines. Their efforts paid off in the enactment of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which required that all narcotic ingredients, as well as cannabis, be listed on the labels of any patent medicines shipped in interstate commerce. The legislation dramatically reduced the patent-medicine market.

Health and professional interests were not the only concerns that motivated drug reform. An explicitly antidrug crusade also emerged as part of a broader movement against vice, including drinking and prostitution, at the turn of the century. It was rooted in a puritanical strain in American culture that demanded that public control be exercised to foster moral and upright behavior. The antivice crusade was intensified by concerns that rapid urbanization in the early twentieth century was corrupting the family and undermining traditional values.

The antidrug crusade was also linked to deep-seated racist and nativist fears. The campaign against vice and urban immorality at the turn of the century was fueled in part by widespread anxieties that the wave of immigration from eastern and southern Europe threatened America’s moral (and economic) well-being. In its less genteel form, anxiety about drug use by immigrants combined with violent prejudice against blacks, Chinese, and Mexicans to spur the enactment of local antidrug laws aimed specifically at these minorities.
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In the South, for example, cocaine was linked to deep-rooted prejudice against blacks. Its euphoric and stimulating qualities were feared for their presumed ability to make Negro cocaine users “oblivious of their prescribed bounds” and to lead them to “attack white society.”
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There were even accusations that cocaine use “gave blacks superhuman strength, improved their marksmanship, and made them difficult to kill.”
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There was a parallel campaign against Chinese immigrants in the West. In 1875 San Francisco forbade opium smoking, a practice closely
identified with Chinese Americans. Between 1877 and 1900 anti-opium legislation was enacted in eleven western states. A 1902 American Federation of Labor (AFL) pamphlet foreshadowed what decades later would become a widely accepted “contagion” theory. Chinese smokers had spread the “deathly habit” to “hundreds, aye thousands, of our American boys and girls,” the AFL declared.
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Despite the widespread antidrug rhetoric and local bans, opium smoking and the use of other drugs did not disappear. Users either went underground or were tolerated in limited locations. Antinarcotics groups reacted by pressing Congress to restrict supply at the national level. In 1883 the tariff on opium was raised; four years later restrictions were imposed on the importation of some forms of opium, and Chinese immigrants were prohibited from any importation of the drug. In 1890 the manufacture of smoking opium was limited to American citizens. Not surprisingly, these efforts also failed to stop the trade; instead they stimulated smuggling.
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The push for drug control was propelled by other developments abroad. American missionaries in China were appalled at what they saw as the moral and social degeneration resulting from the British opium trade. They circulated horror stories of opium’s impact back home and began to urge the government to take a leadership role in an international effort to curb the drug trade.
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The full impact of missionary diplomacy became evident after 1898, when the United States gained control of the Philippines. The United States was suddenly faced with the question of what to do about narcotics addiction in the territory: under Spanish rule, addicts had been licensed and opium was legal. The War Department turned to the Right Reverend Charles H. Brent, the Episcopal bishop in the Philippines. Bishop Brent convinced President Theodore Roosevelt to call an international conference on regulating the opium trade in 1906.
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The State Department backed the request, recognizing that it served other foreign policy interests as well. In particular, it allowed the United States to increase its influence in the Pacific, notably against its major competitor, Britain, and to strengthen its relations with the Chinese government, which was strongly opposed to the British trade.
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Perhaps more important than their impact abroad, the resulting meetings (in Shanghai and The Hague) became vehicles for organizing a campaign for stricter drug control in the United States.