Opium

by Martin Booth

Opposition to opium did not just rest with religious or social organisations. Mahatma Gandhi ran a campaign against opium in Assam in 1921 and instituted a 250,000-signature petition with Ramanamdra Chatterjee and the poet Rabindranath Tagore which was presented to the first of the 1924 international conferences. At the same time, sympathisers on the All-India Congress Committee condemned the opium policies, Gandhi remarking: ‘It will be no defence to urge that the vice has existed in India from time immemorial. No-one organised the vice, as the present government has, for the purposes of revenue.’

  For a while, running as a strand through the conferences, an argument simmered as to which was more harmful, opium eating or smoking. In the past many had held the opinion eating to be the less deleterious but the argument arose that it had to be more harmful than merely inhaling fumes, some of which would not reach the mouth from the pipe but drift into the air. The government of India, which produced mostly eating opium, was of the former opinion which it maintained to the 1930s. Their argument, however, was succinctly put down at the 1924 conference by one delegate standing up and declaring to a pro-eating speaker: ‘Very well, I have two cigars. I propose to demoralise myself by smoking one of them, while you eat the other.’

  Gradually, throughout the 1930s, the influence of the League of Nations Advisory Committee began to take effect. Poppy cultivation in India in 1935 was down by 90 per cent over the figure of a decade before, although there was a government-held opium mountain and the drug was still a substantial revenue contributor. Yet opium’s days seemed numbered. Gandhi’s message, linked to that of the international conferences, was informing public opinion against drug taking.

  Not all nations were in favour of international controls and some deliberately flouted them, Japan in particular. Wherever there were Japanese businesses or consular offices in China, there was opium, morphine or heroin. A Chinese delegation went to Geneva to try and press their case with the Advisory Committee: they even had film footage of Japanese drug dealings but they were not allowed to screen it in the name of international co-operation.

  The film showed opium refineries in the Japanese concession in Hankow, discovered after the Imperial Japanese Army was routed from the city. It was not all it seemed. Certainly, the Japanese were refining opium into morphine base and heroin, but what the film did not go into was the source of the raw opium which was provided by Tu Yueh-sheng, a share of the profits going towards Chiang Kai-shek’s army which, in turn, was fighting the Japanese.

  As well as continuing to encourage opium usage and addiction in those areas of China she controlled, Japan also secretly encouraged and even financed drug smuggling as a form of passive international terrorism in the run up to Pearl Harbour. Later, during the Second World War, Japanese involvement in opium was to continue: officials in the administrations of Japanese-controlled territories, such as Hong Kong, joined with local underworld figures and war profiteers, obtaining their co-operation by bribing them with opium.

  In the years leading up to the Second World War, international co-operation in Geneva broke down as the League of Nations itself began to disintegrate. International smuggling increased further and legal opiate production was stepped up as countries gradually began to prepare for the inevitable conflict ahead.

  The anti-narcotic organisations which had been put in place by the League of Nations were retained when the United Nations (UN) was set up after the war, the Advisory Committee being continued as the Commission on Narcotic Drugs, which formulated international agreements and controls whilst co-ordinating the drive against narcotics abuse and sale.

  The first new control, the Paris Protocol of 1948, provided for new drugs to be included under international control measures. This was followed by a protocol in 1953 which sought to limit world opium output to medical or scientific use, a group of only seven producer nations being allowed to export opium: they were Bulgaria, Greece, India, Iran, Turkey, the USSR and Yugoslavia, in which poppy farmers were obliged to be licensed and strictly overseen. Other countries were permitted to produce domestically used, non-exportable opium. The acreage of poppy farming and opium production would be calculated by the UN according to estimated international pharmaceutical demand.

  The protocol meant well but ran into problems: the proviso allowing domestic production was a huge loophole through which the bandwagon of illicit opium could be driven unhindered. Only fifty-three countries signed the protocol: those who were already opium producers, such as Thailand, Burma, Laos, Afghanistan and Pakistan, rejected it. Afghanistan went so far as to request permission to be a legitimate exporter, arguing opium was a vital cash crop supporting up to 90 per cent of the peasant farming population. The request was denied, the Afghan question remaining on the agenda for some years but doomed never to be resolved.

  The Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961 sought to incorporate all nine of the drugs conventions tabled since 1912. To simplify matters further, the Permanent Central Opium Board and the Drug Supervisory Body were merged into the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) which was responsible for monitoring the licit narcotics trade and policing international agreements. Amongst its first moves were the tightening of control over cannabis and poppy straw, the international prohibiting of opium and hashish smoking and eating, and coca-leaf chewing, but ‘after a transitional period to permit the countries concerned to overcome the difficulties arising from the abolition of these ancient customs’, by which proviso, of course, the INCB created a massive catch-all, opt-out clause.

  In effect, the Single Convention was not much more than a compromise. Although eighty countries signed it, the register of official exporting nations was closed down in an attempt to address the Afghan problem, to be replaced by a stipulation that only countries which traditionally produced opium for export could carry on supplying world pharmaceutical needs. If other countries wished to join the exporters they had to gain INCB approval. This was not likely to be forthcoming. The INCB attitude was confirmed when Burma’s application to export was rejected in 1964, although the American demands for even stricter regulation were also turned down.

  Faced with a still increasing international drug problem, the UN began a Fund for Drug Control in 1971. Its purpose was to fight opium production on an economic front. Projects were proposed which covered addiction, the viability of crop substitution and drug enforcement in opium-producing countries. The fund target was initially $95 million but only just above $2 million were raised, most of it by the USA. Other countries sat on their hands: the richer governments said they were not funding what was basically a drive against America’s massive drug problems whilst the poorer saw little reason to pay to alleviate what was in their eyes a First World dilemma. UN involvement remains extant today in the UN International Drug Control Programme.

  The 1961 Single Convention was amended by the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances and, later, a 1972 protocol. In 1988, another convention, the Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, was introduced. The publishing of conventions and protocols was, and remains, all very well but it cannot really address the subject. In characteristic UN fashion, there has been much talk but relatively little result. Fine words have often not led to firm actions. Merely determining policies, making intentions to eradicate addiction, setting world quotas on opium production and suggesting ways of counteracting the trade do not necessarily achieve anything. To be effective, the UN has to flex its muscle, wave the stick of trade sanctions, institute trade and aid embargoes, even endorse military intervention. Yet it does not and it cannot. To be effectual, the UN has to have a series of criteria in place as a foundation: every nation must be effective against opium within its own borders and there must be an international regard to drug laws so they are more or less equal in every jurisdiction, closing cracks through which drug traffickers may squeeze. The UN must be given enough international diplomatic strength to override national political and economic interests.


  If the UN has lacked the clout to effectively address such problems as the war in the former Yugoslavia, the commitment to sort out political problems in Somalia, the means to prevent genocide in central Africa and starvation world-wide, what hope can one have that it will be of any use in the fight against opium and its derivatives?

  10

  Junkies and the Living Dead

  For centuries, addiction was regarded as an unavoidable inconvenience of opiate consumption and rarely considered a problem: 100 years ago doctors frequently referred to users, without any alarm or censure, not as addicts but as ‘habitués’. Addiction was not seen as evil but a minor social vice although there was often an underlying apprehension it might lead to worse. This misgiving very slowly grew as the notion of addiction came to be feared and the addict came to be regarded as a corrupted, perverted menace. This change of opinion, the addict metamorphosing from harmless misfortunate to loathsome criminal, came, as did the first moves for international control, from the USA.

  From its earliest years, America had an opium problem. It was used as a therapeutic medicine in the colonial era and was extensively relied upon during the War of Independence by both American and British forces, to the extent there was such a shortage some doctors, like Dr Thaddeus Betts, grew their own. In fact, at various times throughout American history, poppies have been cultivated in states ranging as widely as New Hampshire, Florida and California. As the post-colonial population expanded, and immigration increased, epidemics raged through the eastern states so that, by 1840, opium taking, both as a medicine and to maintain medically inspired addiction, was widespread. As well as laudanum, a Dr Barton invented what he called ‘The Brown Mixture’, a concoction of opium and liquorice similar to that of the ancient Assyrians, which also became a common medicine. By 1860, opium posed a major social issue in America, as it did in Europe, the American Civil War considerably magnifying the problem. An article by Fitzhugh Ludlow in Harper’s Magazine in 1867 stated:

  The habit is gaining fearful ground among our professional men, the operatives in our mills, our weary serving women, our fagged clerks, our former liquor drunkards, our very day laborers, who a generation ago took gin. All our classes from the highest to the lowest are yearly increasing their consumption of the drug.

  Furthermore, the patent medicine industry boomed with such opium containing concoctions as ‘Hooper’s Anodyne, the Infant’s Friend’ (a baby soothing syrup), although opiate usage was not as widespread as in Britain, for the people led different life-styles and the poor were not always so trapped in industrial ghettos but often living a more pastoral existence. Nevertheless, as opium began to gather a dubious reputation, the patent medicine industry held out against legislation for the publication of ingredients on labels. Many popular brands contained high levels of opium until 1906 when the Pure Food and Drugs Act came into force, after which people saw what they were taking and morphine and opium demand plummeted. It might be remembered not only opiates were involved. Until 1903 Coca-Cola contained cocaine: it was indeed ‘The Real Thing’ in those days. John Pemberton, its pharmacist co-inventor, was a morphine addict.

  Not only opium addiction increased. Amongst the well-off, morphinism spread with the introduction of the hypodermic syringe, many of the addicts being society ladies. Indeed, addiction was far more prevalent amongst Caucasians than coloured or native American Indian groups, no doubt because these latter lacked the financial resources to buy medicines or hire doctors. Their poverty protected them. By 1875, the southern states had a much higher addict population because of the prevalence of subtropical diseases and the after-effects of the Civil War.

  A typical southern addict was female, Caucasian, reasonably well off and addicted through medicinal use. Mrs Henry Lafayette Dubose in Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, is a fictional portrait of such a woman: widowed and living in a small Alabama town, she is a picture of discreet decay. As was the case with many well-to-do addicts, she was regarded sympathetically and ultimately died, weighing only 28 pounds, having kicked her habit: Atticus, her neighbour and lawyer, held her up to his children as an example of extreme courage, a woman battling addiction and winning against the odds.

  As the dangers of opium and morphine became more widely known, the reformers more vociferous and effective and the addicts created by the Civil War and medical ignorance died off, demand in America fell but, as long as they existed, opiates were seen as relatively devoid of evil and addicts not considered an evil threat but objects for compassion. It was not until the 1920s that public perception radically altered, when addicts who had become hooked through medical use were replaced by recreational drug takers of whom the public grew afraid. These were not the ill or invalids but self-indulgent, irresponsible, lower-class members on society’s periphery. By 1930, the likes of Mrs Dubose were out of date, to be replaced by less agreeable fictional characters like the hustling poker-playing addict in Nelson Algren’s novel, Man With the Golden Arm. This change of attitude was mainly caused by legislation brought in to address the increase in recreational drug taking.

  Recreational drug use in America was not new. Opium smoking had been known since the first Chinese coolies arrived, spurred on by the California gold rush of 1848—9. Over the next two decades, wave upon wave of southern Chinese labourers landed on the west coast, bringing with them the habit and the institution of the opium den. At first, it was contained within Chinese communities, where dens became more than just drug-taking shops. They evolved into iniquitous dives, offering an opium divan, gambling, prostitution, loan-sharking and Chinese food: in short, they became corrupt community centres and a further drain on the coolies’ meagre earnings, creating a vicious spiral. The coolie, whose dream was to return eventually to the land of his ancestors, earned a wage but lost much of it in deductions; of what he was left (about $1 a day was average) he spent half in the dens. This retarded his chances of returning to China and, made miserable by the thought, he smoked more. The coolies were in thrall to opium and, consequently, to the tongs, Chinese criminal secret societies which were the forerunners of modern Triad groups.

  The effects of the habit were known but largely ignored by both medical and social circles unless they impinged upon the community at large outside the embryonic Chinatowns. The general opinion was voiced in 1874 by Dr J.P. Newman, Chaplain to the United States Senate, who said:

  The Chinese come in great numbers as domestic servants, washermen, labourers, miners etc. We are doing what we can to civilize and Christianize them – for we are giving them schools of learning and temples of religion – but they have come to us debilitated, they have come enervated by the influence of opium. We need them as labourers, need them as servants, we need them as citizens; for in that great region from the Missouri to the Golden Gate there is less than one million of white inhabitants. We therefore bid them welcome, but we cannot bid them welcome as opium smokers.

  In other words, they were welcome as minions but only so long as they could work: and there was no mention of helping them kick the habit.

  As they frequently do to this day, the Chinese communities kept to themselves in self-imposed ghettos, often on the rough side of town where other racial groups spurned them. It was therefore inevitable the only non-Asians they met were other outcasts, those of the criminal underworld.

  The first white man to smoke opium is said to have been a gambler called Clendenyn, in San Francisco in 1868. Presumably as a saloon gambler and perhaps a petty criminal, he was working the Chinese dens. The practice soon gained popularity. The exclusivity of the dens gave a sense of protection and identity to these minor outlaws, shunned by their own kind but willingly hosted by the Chinese. The dens, colloquially known as ‘dives’ or ‘joints’, became centres of criminal activity. The origin of the words is interesting: ‘dive’ is an abbreviation of divan and therefore directly related to opium whilst ‘joint’ derives from an Anglo-Irish word for a low ante-room, such as was found in brot
hels where prostitutes entertained their clients.

  As the American West opened up eastward, the Chinese spread and established their communities, each with at least one den providing not only a smoking base and meeting place but also a network of safe houses for the non-Asian criminal fraternity. Some dens were elaborate multi-bunk houses – of the twenty-six operating in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1885, most catered for twenty-four smokers at a time and were located mainly in an area bounded by Stockton, Washington, Dupont and Pacific Streets. Others were just rooms of chop-houses or Chinese laundries, stores or lodging houses.

  Opium smoking reached its summit in 1883 with the importation, mostly through San Francisco, of 208,152 pounds of smoking opium. The actual size of the addict population was unknown but the San Francisco Evening Post estimated in 1875 there were 120,000 opium addicts in the United States, but said the figure excluded the Chinese.

  From the late nineteenth century, opium dens were to become more than just houses of addiction and crime. They were the birthplace of the American drug subculture, a cosmopolitan fusion of Oriental and Occidental mores, myths and values. An esoteric argot developed: ‘the long draw’ was an ability to inhale an entire opium pill with one breath, those who prepared opium pills and pipes were called ‘chefs’ and the smoking habit was known as ‘yen’, from the verb ‘to smoke’ in the Peking dialect. Many of these words later entered the general vocabulary, carried by non-criminal bohemian smokers such as actors and writers who imbibed: today, ‘to have a yen’ means to possess a longing for something.

  Although opium smoking was nothing like as widespread as morphine injecting, it was viewed by the public with horror. This was not based upon the fear of addiction but upon racial hatred: the Chinese were regarded as the Yellow Peril and to be avoided.

  This racial attitude affected not only public but official opinion. It was said, without much foundation, that respectable women were visiting the dens to engage in sexual intercourse with the dreaded Celestials, their sexual appetites having been aroused by opium. That opium was a narcotic was conveniently overlooked by the xenophobes. None the less, reports of debauchery circulated: a San Francisco doctor, Winslow Anderson, claimed he saw the ‘sickening sight of young white girls from sixteen to twenty years of age lying half-undressed on the floor or couches, smoking with their lovers. Men and women, Chinese and white people, mix in Chinatown smoking houses.’ Probably one of the first instances of the association of race, drugs and sex, it was surely inaccurate: any woman to be found in such a state in an opium den was likely to be a prostitute.