Past drug policy

The attitudes about drugs which circulate in our present cultural life—the association of the Chinese with opium, of Jamaicans with Cannabis or black people with crack cocaine — stem from events and themes which took place and were constructed in the historical past.

The overarching central principle of contemporary drug policy is claimed by its supporters to be public health. An examination of historical sources, however, reveals that, while public health may have been one of the factors involved in the evolution of the drug control regime, it was clustered with a host of others which are much less lofty: racism is one of the chief amongst them, fear of modernity and female emancipation another.  Combine these fears with economic greed and imperial power, and with an overwhelming drive to control and order the spontaneity of both the natural world and the human mind, and one has a recipe for the disaster that has issued in the War on Drugs.

If some of these claims sound overstated or overly abstract, the following set of explorations examine some specific cases which illustrate these general points.

If you would like information on how the current prohibition regime has evolved, please visit our Drugs Through Time pages.