by Lucy Inglis
In 1815, the Spanish galleon trade with Mexico had been abolished, followed by Mexico’s declaration of independence in 1821. The Manila–Acapulco galleons that had hoved back and forth so reliably for 250 years were suddenly a thing of the past. In centuries of trade, Mexico had received mangos, rice, water buffalo, silk, tea and fireworks; the Philippines, the avocado, guava, papaya and pineapple, and above all, silver. Spain had gone from one of the ocean-going Titans of the Renaissance to a country in deep financial trouble, in the space of just a few years. By 1843, the Spanish Bourbon government had realized that the opium trade was not only profitable, it was confined largely to the Chinese and Chinese-Filipino population as a habit. They were desperate to boost the Philippine economy and to pacify the Chinese element of the population, and so auctioned the rights to an opium monopoly.
The effects of what was happening in the Philippines were amplified by the fact that they weren’t only a magnet for Chinese immigrants and traders. Many European merchants and businesses had seen the opportunity to work with, or exploit, a nation that was emerging from the age of galleons. British and American businesses, and often individual merchants working hand in hand with those businesses, already so dominant in the East, were innovating at a remarkable speed and keen to collaborate across the world in the interests of making money, and the Philippines presented an excellent proposition. Two prominent British firms, Ker & Co. and Wise & Co., were trading items such as alcohol, knives and combs, as well as tobacco, salt and essential oils, but all from within the British possessions. Spain also allowed British merchants into the Philippine sugar trade, and in return received new technology developed at the beginning of Britain’s Industrial Revolution, such as steam power for mills, and iron-working, all of which improved Philippine agricultural practice significantly.
Rich Chinese merchants were subject to government policy. Historically, the main trading market for luxury goods was the Alcaiceria, or silk market, of San Fernando, the southernmost of the two San Fernandos in the northern Philippines. The Chinese were allowed to unload and warehouse their goods there, and take lodgings for as long as it took to sell on, but it was all for a price, and in 1756, restrictions on business had become tiresome in San Fernando. Don Fernando Mier y Noriega offered to put a substantial sum towards the costs of building a new exchange, in return for him and his descendants reaping the benefits in perpetuity, and it passed on 15 July 1758. But the new Alcaiceria had proved a chaotic, criminal disaster. Not only was it full of gambling establishments, ruffians and houses containing ‘opium divans’, it had been burned down twice in a short space of time.15 The Philippine government came to associate this kind of dissolution with both the Chinese and opium smoking, and after the first fire in 1810, passed a law on 1 December 1814 by Madrid Royal Decree that banned opium smoking. The Madrid decree is interesting because of the three-strikes aspect to it: caught once and it was fifteen days in prison; twice, thirty days; the third time was four years of hard labour. Those caught with intent to deal were instantly in for six years of hard labour.16 But by 1828, the government had experienced a surprising change of heart when they allowed the cultivation of opium. They realized they were missing out on the revenue reaped by other South-East Asian governments from the institutionalizing of opium smoking, particularly those with a large Chinese immigrant population.
Chinese agricultural workers were an important part of Philippine society, and the move towards opium cultivation was not only about helping the economy, but was also about creating a social system of recreation in more remote areas. In 1835 the Chinese community asked the government to build a centre where they could manufacture decent quality opium and requested that it had an attached venue for smoking it. But home-grown opium wasn’t nearly enough to supply the demand, and this resulted in the 1843 monopoly auction.
The high level of organization rapidly implemented in the Philippine opium importing, manufacture and smoking culture indicates how deeply entrenched it was. The taxation system was detailed and highly structured, and it appeared to work efficiently with only minor infringements, such as a Spanish tavern owner, Luis Velasquez, who withheld his payments because he believed that his establishment, the Alhambra, was being blighted by the stench from a local opium den. The owner of the den was instructed to sort out his chimney, which was done within twenty-four hours, and order restored.
Two key points to the opium-smoking culture and laws of the Philippines were that the Chinese were banned from smoking in their own homes, or outside of the government-approved houses, and that no Spanish or Filipinos were allowed into the opium dens. Gambling and drinking were banned, and the opening hours were late in the evening so that smoking had minimal effect on the working day.
The scale of the opium trade in the Philippines is shown in the records for 1867 when sixty-two ships brought in 13,027 kilograms of opium purchased from Chinese, English and German merchants.17
As the century progressed, there was an increasing amount of agitation for Philippine independence. The sophisticated Filipino middle classes wanted a progressive, self-determining nation, and saw Spain as an ageing force, reliant on old glory.
The revolution began in August 1896. Emilio Aguinaldo was a sensible twenty-eight-year-old revolutionary, and assumed leadership on 23 March 1897. The following August, with the Philippines still in turmoil, the Americans invaded and captured Manila. It was an extraordinary situation: just as it seemed the Filipinos had extricated themselves from centuries of colonial rule, they were landed with an invading nation that had no notion of what it was to be a colonial power. Compared to later American deployments, the US campaign to the Philippines was modest: no more than 70,000 troops at its height, and later no more than 40,000. The extensive Philippine archipelago had a population of over 7.5 million at the time.18 Its scattered, yet intense trading communities are what made it both vulnerable, and allowed it to subvert colonial authority. In addition, the young US troops were born of parents who had witnessed a land war, they had been raised well versed with guns, and they were supplied with copious ammunition. The Filipino troops, such as they were, were none of these things: two-thirds of them fought with traditional bolo knives and the large American cavalry horses frightened them.
On 10 December 1898, the Treaty of Paris saw Spain hand over the Philippines to the US for $20 million. Aguinaldo and his revolutionaries were not consulted in the negotiations. However, they were undeterred, and continued to rouse their fellow Filipinos with the reasons they needed, and must have, independence. Aguinaldo was also convinced of the necessity to keep the opium dens going, not least because they would be a precious source of revenue for a government in its infancy.
Between the Treaty of Paris and the beginning of the American–Philippine War, there was a lull in which US President William McKinley published the charmless proclamation of 21 December 1898, that became known as Benevolent Assimilation. Theoretically, it was meant to placate the Filipinos ‘by assuring them in every possible way that full measure of individual rights and liberties which is the heritage of free peoples, and by proving to them that the mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation substituting the mild sway of justice and right for arbitrary rule’.19
America’s prior record of assuring the full measure of individual rights and liberties of free people, let alone benevolent assimilation, is hardly something that could be expected to comfort the Filipinos. Hostilities were kept just about under control, until the night of 4 February 1899 when an American shot a Filipino sentry, known as the San Juan Incident, triggering the American–Philippine War.
Aguinaldo fled, and skirmishes continued throughout the summer, but on 7 August the Philippines – with the exception of some notable guerilla fighters – handed over power to a new colonial master.
In terms of the opium trade, the American–Philippine War presented America with a unique conundrum. Domestically, it was facing a level of morphinism that was threatening to r
un out of control. Yet it had taken control of a foreign nation with a highly sophisticated and entrenched opium culture, and crucially for America, it was a Chinese opium culture. The American hostility towards Chinese migrants, and their proclivities, was already written into the US constitution by the Chinese Exclusion Act, yet now they were in charge of a brisk, Chinese-run colonial opium trade. Politically and morally, it was a mess.
Yet the money was a concrete fact, and the tax revenues payable to Manila continued to rise under American occupation, quadrupling in the first four years.20 Contrary to their alleged ideals, American free-spending and capitalist culture was bringing more Chinese migrants to the Philippines, despite the problematic international relations.
Added into this potent mixture was the concept that empires owed it to their primitive charges to civilize them. In South-East Asia at the time, the main powers were French, Dutch, British and now the USA. America had yet to coin a term for their self-imposed obligation, while the French termed it, charmingly, their mission civilisatrice; the Dutch, pragmatically, ethische koers; and the British, ‘the white man’s burden’.
Charles Brent, the ambitious American bishop of the Episcopal Church in the Philippines, revealed the global extent of the opium trade to the American government, and the impossibility of controlling it without international cooperation. A series of meetings were organized, culminating in the Shanghai Convention of 1909, in which Brent played a prominent role on behalf of the US, along with United States Opium Commissioner and anti-narcotics zealot Hamilton Wright, at the beginning of the global attempt to control the opium trade. And like the missionary Peter Parker in the Opium Wars, it was also another important moment in the involvement of religion in American foreign policy, where it has continued to play a part ever since. Brent’s rise to success played a large part in the organization of the Shanghai Convention and the consequences. The world had moved on after the Opium and Arrow wars, and Great Britain was no longer the force it had once been: her empire was shrinking.
Harrison and Volstead
‘The opium and morphine habits have become a National curse, and in some way they must certainly be checked, if we wish to maintain our high place among the nations of the world and any elevated standard of intelligence and morality among ourselves.’21
Hamilton Wright, 1911
The International Opium Commission, proposed by the United States and ‘accepted by Austria-Hungary, China, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Persia, Portugal, Russia, and Siam’, met on 1 February 1909 to discuss what to do about their respective, and common, opium problems.22 The USA also proposed to impose a special tax on all persons who ‘produce, import, manufacture, compound, deal in, dispense, sell, distribute, or give away opium or coca leaves, their salts, derivatives, or preparations’.23
The USA had also attempted to steal a march in public relations with China by banning opium smoking during the conference. The Opium Smoking Exclusion Act came into force during the commission on 9 February 1909. In reality, the 1875 Act against smoking opium, aimed at the San Francisco Chinese population, was more or less the same thing, and the 1909 Act had the effect of turning younger white smokers onto heroin instead, whilst the Chinese carried on smoking opium as they always had; it was now just illegal, again, to do so.
James Martin was a prime example of a typical young white opium smoker turned onto heroin by the Act. In 1908 he was a music-hall worker on Coney Island who smoked about $4 of opium a week, but the Act put his ‘can of hop’ up to an impossible $50, which made him look to morphine for a cheap fix, then heroin for an even cheaper one.24
In Shanghai, the combination of Hamilton Wright and Charles Brent must have been powerfully persuasive if unappealing, both of them so anti-narcotics and so sure of their own righteousness. Wright, however, was accurate in a lot of what he said, laying the blame primarily at the door of the patent-medicine manufacturers, and over-prescribing physicians. The 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act may have removed opiates from over-the-counter medicines, but morphine, heroin and hypodermic kits were still freely available for a few dollars.
The meeting was little more than a series of proposals, although China did propose to support existing addicts, while preventing new ones from taking up the habit. The meeting led to the International Opium Convention in The Hague in 1912. For Great Britain, this must have been a somewhat awkward interlude, having as it did three major pharmaceutical companies in the form of T. Whiffen & Son, T&H Smith and J. F. Macfarlan Ltd, who were exporting morphine and heroin straight to China. Macfarlan’s was, apparently, the connoisseur’s choice of morphine in China: ‘the Chinaman buys his morphia by the pound, and it must be Macfarlan’s, which he must have in the original pound bottles’.25 Even more embarrassing was that nine years later Whiffens’ were stripped of their licence for smuggling.
The outcome of the meeting was that all ‘The contracting Powers shall use their best endeavours to control, or to cause to be controlled, all persons manufacturing, importing, selling, distributing, and exporting morphine, cocaine, and their respective salts, as well as the buildings in which these persons carry such an industry or trade’.26
The US were quicker to act than most, owing in part to agitation by groups similar to the Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade. There was also a racially motivated series of articles run in the New York Times, designed to both prey on and drum up anti-Black American feeling associated with cocaine in order to win over the South to the Act. The paper published stories about ‘negroes’ on cocaine, written by one Edward Huntington Williams, MD. One story from 18 February 1914 ran:
a hitherto inoffensive negro . . . was ‘running amuck’ in a cocaine frenzy, had attempted to stab a storekeeper, and was at the moment engaged in ‘beating up’ various members of his own household . . . Knowing that he must kill this man or be killed himself, the Chief drew his revolver, placed the muzzle over the negro’s heart, and fired – ‘Intending to kill him right quick,’ as the officer tells it, but the shot did not even stagger the man . . . He had only three cartridges remaining in his gun, and he might need these in a minute to stop the mob. So he saved his ammunition and ‘finished the man with his club’.
All the stories involve violence, and most involve the idea of an unstoppable, raging, cocaine-fuelled black man. They were very successful in helping to get the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act (named after its proposer Francis Harrison) and the Opium and Coca Leaves Trade Restrictions Act through, and they were both passed on 17 December 1914, with them becoming totally prohibitionist by 1922 through a series of amendments, ultimately called the Jones-Miller Act. Maintenance for addicts was banned by the Supreme Court in 1919. A further convention was held in Geneva in 1925 to update the rulings from The Hague, which the League of Nations would uphold and enforce. Britain had introduced the Dangerous Drugs Act in 1920, and over the next couple of decades, the signatories of the League of Nations and other countries followed. Turkey was a notable exception.
The ceaseless voices of the lobbying missionaries, as well as America sending its young troops into war overseas, played a significant role in driving the international drugs network underground, almost overnight. The medical fraternity continued to use heroin but began to call it medical diamorphine, and the term heroin came to mean the illegal product, except in the US, where the terms are routinely confused.
Logically, the Harrison Act and the National Prohibition Act – also called the Volstead Act (after Andrew Volstead, the chair of the committee that oversaw it), which enacted the Eighteenth Amendment prohibiting intoxicating beverages – were a natural part of vice reform during what is known as the Progressive Era of the United States, from the late nineteenth century to 1920. On the surface it was a good thing, a cleaning up of a society at the end of one century and the beginning of another. Yet the reality of these laws was far different. America – which, after Keeley’s absurd Gold Cure, led the world in terms of addiction rese
arch under Dr Lawrence Kolb, head of the US Public Health Service’s experimental hospital for treating drug addicts in Lexington, Kentucky – began to shut down its public health services. By the time ‘junkie’ had passed into American dictionaries in the early 1920s, referring to the ever-growing hordes of young male addicts who used to scavenge scrap metal in Manhattan to sell in Brooklyn yards in order to get high, New York’s first and best public clinic had been shut up. Research into addiction was handed over to bodies such as J. D. Rockerfeller’s Bureau of Social Hygiene, which cast addiction as part of criminology and over the course of the 1920s increasingly aligned itself with federal drug policy. Attempts to clean up prostitution saw women forced from houses with a matriarchal system to end up working for pimps on the streets. These men, post-Harrison, sold drugs because it was cheap and easy to get into, and addicted women were easier to control, thus establishing an indelible link between heroin and prostitution. On the day the Harrison Act was passed, the opiate ward of Philadelphia Hospital had to turn dozens of people away.