Drugs are bad. So bad that they have shaped the course of human history for the worse and served to enable some of the worst waves of imperialism in human history. Large scale opium addiction in the United States was facilitated and to an extent created by early modern clinical medicine, or what we would now colloquially refer to as ‘real’ medicine. This situation came out of 19th and early 20th century conflicts between professional and practitioners of allopathic (again, ‘real) medicine and unlicensed purveyors of alternative medicines such as chiropractors, also known of as quacks or snake oil salesmen. Allopathic medicine was faring badly in this contest by the mid-19th century due to a combination of horrible patient relation skills by formally educated doctors compared to the simple and easy to understand explanations provided by less (or un) educated populist doctors and the lack of an institutional foundation for a hierarchy putting formally educated doctors at the top of the medical pyramid as in Britain. Medical opium, and later heroin, became a weapon in this battle because it was so much less misery inducing than some of the other pharmaceutical tools in the allopathic doctor’s toolbox such as purgatives and emetics. This was facilitated by the isolation of the morphine chemical component to opium and the invention of hypodermic needles. The latter first came into popular usage as a delivery mechanism for medical opium.
The popularity of doctor-prescribed opium naturally led to a sharp upswing in opium addiction. “Addiction itself was not new—doctors’ role in addiction was.” Opium wasn’t the first drug to have a heavy influence on American society and politics, or even the first legal one. Much of Great Britain’s earliest footholds in the Americas, and by extension America’s earliest history, were part and parcel with the tobacco trade. “English imports of Chesapeake tobacco, after reaching a million pounds in 1640, soared to more than thirty million by century’s end.” This represented a huge influx of wealth for the British government and economy, especially “since revenues from customs charges were usually easier to raise than land or excise taxes.” And since much of the British Empire’s major inroads into the Caribbean such as Jamaica were driven by the pursuit of more profits in that vein and by “the interests of men who made their fortunes in tobacco and sugar, one might argue that the British Empire owed its life to plantation crops.” Thus, the British Empire and its colonial imperialism and the horrible slave plantation system that reigned for centuries in America and the Caribbean can all be traced directly back to the cultivation and sale of recreational drugs.
China is another part of the world that was messed up badly by European imperialism aided and abetted by drug trafficking. The Opium Wars were a pivotal step in European imperialists’ program to compromise the sovereignty of the Chinese state and force the Qing empire into an unequal economic and political relationship with first Great Britain and later a number of other Euro-American countries in a dominant position. The opium used to batter down the proverbial doors of the Chinese market was grown primarily in India, specifically in Indian states such as Goa.
Another drug which India is less known for is cocaine. Cocaine trafficking and use in India also goes back to the colonial days. It stands out here because cocaine usage managed to become both “socially diverse” and “geographically wide” despite the efforts of the colonial state rather than because of them. Like the United States India was an early adopter of cocaine in the 19th and early 20th century and “one of the first areas, outside the United States, to develop a serious problem with the overuse of cocaine.” Like tea in Great Britain on the eve of the Industrial Revolution “the drug was originally used because it stimulated physical effort and minimized fatigue,” which lead to it being supplied to workers by their employers. From there it spread to throughout the various professions and social classes of Indian society and came to be used for a variety of reasons, including supposed health benefits and recreation. This led to great concern on the part of English moralizers about the horrors of addiction, but in practice its usage became far too diverse to generalize. Reasons ranged from Hindu clergy who used it as a means of facilitating religiously mandated fasting to a young man who used it as a means to escape the horrors of opium and marijuana addiction. This last case should be of particular interest to contemporary Americans, who have come to know first-hand the evil specter of marijuana legalization and decriminalization. All drugs are dangerous. But some are worse than others, and while cocaine may kill you it can also save the user from fates far worse than death.
Bibliography
Aurin, Marcus. “Chasing the Dragon: The Cultural Metamorphosis of Opium in the United States, 1825-1935.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 14, no. 4 (2000): 414-441.
Campbell, Howard. “Female Drug Smugglers on the U.S.-Mexico Border: Gender, Crime, and Empowerment.” Anthropological Quarterly 81, no. 1 (2008): 233-267.
Hanes, Travis and Frank Sanello. The Opium Wars: The Addiction of One Empire and the Corruption of Another. Naperville: Sourcebooks Inc, 2002.
Menard, Russel. “The Plantation Empire: How Sugar and Tobacco Planters Built Their Industries and Raised an Empire.” Agricultural History 81, no. 3 (2007): 309-332.
Mills, James. “Drugs, Consumption, and Supply in Asia: The Case of Cocaine in Colonial India, c. 1900-c. 1930.” The Journal of Asian Studies 66, no.3 (2007): 345-362.
