Legalisation: The First Hundred Years
What happened when drugs were legal and why they were prohibited
by Mike Jay

[excerpt]
The collapse of the American experiment with prohibition in 1932 left
America both internally ravaged by organised crime and corruption and
externally isolated from the rest of the world which had balked at
following its lead, and it was in this climate that much of today's drug
legislation was assembled, driven through League of Nations Conferences and
Geneva Conventions mostly by American initiatives (Davenport-Hines 2001).
There were many interest groups in America who had much to gain by
switching the focus from alcohol to drugs, and from rebranding traditional
medicines as 'new menaces'. The US Narcotics Bureau needed to shake off the
stigma which attached to the Alcohol Bureau by showing that their new
quarry was a genuine enemy, far more dangerous than alcohol, and that this
time their goal was one which every citizen should support and respect.
Medical opinion, too, was keen to backtrack from the less-than-credible
excesses of their anti-alcohol warnings and to reverse the
nineteenth-century consensus by insisting that substances such as cannabis
were, in fact, more dangerous than alcohol. The press and other media, too,
found their readers and listeners eager to believe that drugs might be the
slippery slope to hell which had been claimed of alcohol a generation
before. Drugs were still prominently linked with ethnic minorities, and new
anxieties led to the 'anti-narcotic' laws being extended to control the
sale of new substances such as cannabis, associated with the Mexican
immigrant population, which had previously been assessed (by a British
Royal Commission among others) as a minor public health issue.

The new legislation left a picture almost unrecognisable from the one which
had existed before prohibition. The thrust of the original drug
prohibitions - to protect the majority white population from the habits of
ethnic minorities - failed to stem demand as drugs flowed through the
emerging multicultural societies in much the same way as other culturally
specific tropes like fashion, music or food (Shapiro 1999). Medically, new
and serious problems emerged. The mild patent preparations, which had
proved the most popular forms of the now-illicit drugs, had vanished: now
opiates and cocaine were provided by illicit traffickers only in their most
concentrated, lucrative and dangerous forms. The health costs of drugs
increased in other ways, as risky procedures like injection moved away from
the ambit of doctors and chemists and into more dangerous and unhygenic
areas situated specifically beyond the reach of the law. Criminal
organisations, many with their origins in alcohol prohibition, filled the
vacuum left by patent and pharmaceutical companies, enforcing their illicit
trade with violence. Drugs were not without their problems before
prohibition, but the majority of the problems associated with them today
only emerged fully under the legislation of the twentieth century.

These problems may have been produced by prohibition but, although many of
them would not survive long without it, they cannot all be expected to
vanish overnight with its repeal. The last century of public policy has
transformed our traditional relationship with drugs into something new and
uniquely problematic, for which history offers no tailor-made solution. It
does, however, offer a reminder that the drug which presents the most
obvious public health problems is alcohol, and that although alcohol policy
remains highly problematic it has broadly proved to be best tackled not
with prohibition but with socialisation under an umbrella of statutory
regulation and education. History offers, too, an illustration of how a
society legally permeated by today's illicit drugs used to function, and
shows that high levels of overall drug prevalence can coexist with low
levels of problematic use. Finally, if offers a chance to evaluate the
tools of control and regulation which might form an alternative to our
present policy and which, once an outright ban has failed to prevent
availability of any drug, have historically proved the most effective response.

Mike Jay is a journalist and author of several books, among which Emperors
of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century (Deadalus 2001).

References

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Jay, Mike (2000), Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century.
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