Cocaine Nation

by Thomas Feiling

  The prohibition of potentially dangerous substances like alcohol, heroin and cocaine had its progressive as well as its reactionary champions. On the one hand, the campaign to ban drugs and alcohol was part of a programme of social and economic reforms that was supposed to improve the lives of the downtrodden. They included the end of slavery, free public education and women’s suffrage. But the temperance movement was also bolstered by the support of more self-interested Americans. Recent immigrants from Ireland, Italy and the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe were bringing boozier habits into the United States. Suspicion of their customs was bound up with worries about rapid urban growth, overcrowding, violence and the waning power of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants in American cities.18

  The smoking of opium, for example, was a habit that Chinese immigrants had brought with them when they came to the United States to build the railroads. Anti-opium campaigns only gathered steam when white workers in San Francisco started to protest at the competition they faced from Chinese labour. No sooner had the Chinese completed the Pacific railroad and been made redundant than they were collectively made the scapegoat for an anti-opium scare. In the Southern states too, mention of problematic cocaine use followed on the heels of redundancy. The sharecropping cotton economy of the Southern United States was in decline when whites first started hollering about cocaine-addled Negroes. The police complained that their .32 pistols weren’t powerful enough to stop a black man on cocaine. ‘Ordinary shootin’ don’t kill him,’ as one Southern police officer put it.19

  Heroin and cocaine were undoubtedly causing health problems in the United States. The first cocaine users had been predominantly middle-class professionals—a third were either physicians or dentists—and it was from this group that the first cases of abuse appeared.20 These ‘cocainomaniacs’ were mostly injecting cocaine, and were few in number. As the press became more critical of the unregulated drug industry, and the harm that cocaine and opiates could do became clear, the public became warier of using them, and use of both fell by up to half long before they were prohibited. But as cocaine use spread to other communities, white politicians found that drug scares offered them an opportunity to bond with their white electors, especially in times of recession or redundancy. The political gains to be made by scaremongering invariably outweighed whatever concerns over public health they might have had.

  The first scare stories about cocaine in American newspapers focused on its appeal to those thought least able to handle it. This was the era of the first full segregation laws, and the high point of the lynching of black men in the Southern United States. Much of the cocaine in the United States arrived on ships sailing north from the Pacific coast of Latin America, through the Panama Canal and north to New Orleans, where it seems to have found favour with the city’s dock-workers, as it helped them to work long hours with little sustenance, a habit their employers were keen to foster. In 1912, Dr Charles B. Towns opined that ‘When an overseer in the South will deliberately put cocaine into the rations of his Negro labourers in order to get more work out of them to meet a sudden emergency, it is time to have some policy of accounting for the sale of a drug like cocaine.’21 Nothing struck panic into Southern white Americans quite like the threat of black violence. Since cocaine use also led to binges and brawls, Southern voters were soon calling for cocaine to be banned outright. Dr Christopher Koch of the State Pharmacy Board of Pennsylvania testified before Congress that ‘most of the attacks upon the white women of the South are the direct result of a cocaine-crazed Negro brain’. America’s first drug Tsar, Dr Hamilton Wright, alleged that drugs made black men uncontrollable, and that they encouraged them to rebel against the authority of white people.22

  The United States Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 required that the inclusion of certain drugs in patent medicines be clearly indicated on the label, so that consumers would know what they were taking. Manufacturers had extensive ranges of products that they could not afford to see compromised by negative publicity over cocaine. Consumers could still buy pure cocaine, but most consumers of mild coca and cocaine-infused preparations simply stopped buying them, or switched to de-cocainized versions of Vin Mariani and Coca-Cola. Unfortunately, the authorities made little distinction between coca and cocaine, or between problematic and unproblematic drug use. As a result, legitimate concerns over public health and misleading advertising were hijacked by imaginary fears and generalizations.

  This tangled combination of high-mindedness and bigotry also informed the government’s policy on opium use. By 1900, British merchants were supplying opium to 27 per cent of the people of China, a trade in narcotics on a scale never rivalled before or since. American Christians were revolted by the way the British turned the drug dependency of their colonial subjects to their commercial advantage. When the Americans bought the Philippine islands after the Spanish American War, they found opium smoking to be widespread there too. Charles Henry Brent, the first Episcopal bishop of the Philippines, was determined to put an end to the opium trade, and led the anti-opium movement in the United States. State Department officials concurred with people like Brent for their own reasons, principally their desire to appease the Chinese government. Hamilton Wright, the department’s Opium Commissioner, thought the anti-opium movement could be used ‘as oil to smooth the troubled water of our aggressive commercial policy there’.

  Restricting opium and coca production would require worldwide agreement, so in 1911 Charles Henry Brent presided over an international conference in The Hague. The twelve nations represented signed a convention which gave the producing and consuming nations control over their boundaries, while requiring each to enact domestic legislation to control the drugs trade. The goal was a world in which drugs would be restricted to medicinal use.23 The campaign to ban these drugs was framed in terms of protecting public health, but the medical profession in the United States was slow to put its weight behind it. Doctors saw what excellent medicines opium and cocaine were for the treatment of pain. Laudanum was widely prescribed for all kinds of ailments, and cocaine was recognized to be an effective local anaesthetic, as well as a stimulant, albeit one with potential for abuse. Most drug addicts at the time were opiate users, but doctors recognized that most of them were productive citizens with jobs and homes.

  However, the medical profession’s attitude to intoxication was turned on its head by changes in the perceived purpose of medicine itself at the end of the nineteenth century. Many doctors were keen to expand their original mission of healing the sick to become the defenders of physical and mental health, the priest class of a modern, secular civilization, which turned ‘good health’ into a moral and political imperative. The psychiatrists, meanwhile, saw cocaine use not just as deviancy, but as a disease, on which they foisted their exciting new theory of addiction. This theory of ‘addiction’, allied to the legislation passed in the wake of the conference in The Hague, forms the bedrock of drug policy around the world to this day.

  There has been no better popular exposé of the failure of drugs policy in the United States than the HBO television series The Wire. Set entirely in Baltimore, Maryland, the series was devised by a former journalist with the Baltimore Sun and a former narcotics detective with the city’s police department. Its storylines are grounded in the writers’ shared experience of the crack epidemic that swept through the East Coast cities of the United States in the 1980s. Kurt Schmoke, who has a cameo role in the series, was mayor of Baltimore from 1987 to 1999. When I met him in November 2007, he told me that he shared the writers’ frustration at the state of local and national policy-making on the issue of drugs. ‘One of the things I had noticed as mayor is that for a city of 750,000 people we had a significant homicide problem that was related to drug sales and distribution. I had been a prosecutor for five years, throwing people in jail, and fighting the war on drugs as a traditional drug warrior, but the more we prosecuted and incarcerated, the less impact we seemed to be having on the problem. Unfortunat
ely for me, the crack epidemic had hit Baltimore just about the time that I came into office. The homicide rate hit 300 a year and a lot of that had to do with crack. I started to look at the problem from the economic side. We had a whole lot of people who were hooked not on drugs, but on drug money. I thought about the era of alcohol prohibition in the United States and this era of drug prohibition, and it led me to think that prohibition, in the way that we were going about it, was doing more harm than good.’

  Eric Sterling was a legal counsel to Congress in 1986 and was instrumental in drafting that year’s Anti-Drug Abuse Act, the cornerstone of Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs. He too has gone on to become a trenchant critic of how the law has been manipulated to serve the war on drugs. ‘Historically, federal law enforcement was limited to smuggling, robbery of the mails, and counterfeiting money,’ he told me. ‘The Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914 was the first federal drug law. It was styled as a tax law. It created a tax of $1,000 per ounce of drugs, and if you didn’t have the tax stamp, you were violating the law.’ The 1914 Act permitted the presence of opiates, including heroin, in small amounts in non-prescription remedies such as cough medicines, but forbade any trace of cocaine in patent remedies. This was the most severe restriction on any drug to date. Nevertheless, the Act never proposed that drug users should be dealt with in the criminal justice system. ‘It assumed that there would be government regulation,’ Kurt Schmoke told me, ‘but not blanket prohibition. It assumed that states would be allowed to let physicians distribute drugs. But it was changed over time by the forces of politics and the courts, by J. Edgar Hoover and the early heads of the Bureau of Narcotics.’

  In the wake of the First World War, the United States acquired a much greater presence on the world stage, and it used this power to put pressure on other governments to extend the limits of the existing legislation against opium. The stage was set for an international drug-control regime, based not on regulation but outright prohibition. Banning drugs also seemed logical to other governments struggling to impose some order in the aftermath of the First World War. During the war, it had been alleged that imperial Germany was promoting the distribution of cocaine, a charge based on Germany’s pioneering role in manufacturing cocaine since the 1880s.24 Despite the tiny number of cocaine users in the UK, the British government worried that its fighting ability would be undermined by imports of foreign drugs, so it amended the Defence of the Realm Act in 1916, to prohibit the use of drugs during wartime. This was the United Kingdom’s first anti-drugs law. The same emergency provisions limited pub opening hours to two hours at lunchtime and three in the evening, watered down the beer, and jacked up prices three-fold, as a result of which alcohol consumption fell by half and convictions for drunkenness by three quarters.

  Britain won the war, but emerged from it an exhausted nation, more suspicious of alien influences than ever. In 1920, Parliament amended the Aliens Act of 1914, which for the first time required visitors to Britain to fill in landing and embarkation cards. With the passing of the Dangerous Drugs Act 1920, the wartime ban on drugs was made permanent, as were the restrictions on pub opening hours, which were not lifted for another eighty-five years. Cocaine had been popular among London’s nascent demi-monde, as noted by the columnist ‘Guinevere’ in the Daily Mail in July 1901. ‘The habit grows rapidly: a mild 10 per cent solution obtained at a chemist’s to cure a toothache has given many people a first taste of the joys and horrors of cocaine. The first effect of a dose is extreme exhilaration and mental brilliancy. The imagination becomes aflame. The after-effects—reaction, utter loss of moral responsibility, a blotched complexion, and the lunatic asylum or death. Yet any chemist will tell you that it has been increasingly in demand by women of late years.’25

  In 1922, a Chinese Londoner by the name of ‘Brilliant’ Chang became the first drug dealer to make the headlines of a British newspaper. The press revelled in the story of how Chang had enchanted an actress called Freda Kempton with cocaine powder, which promptly killed her. According to an article in the World’s Pictorial News, Chang was a purveyor of exotic sexual practices as well as of drugs. It described how ‘half a dozen drug-frenzied women joined him in wild orgies’.26 Seduction by an exotic foreigner is a long-established source of fear and fantasy in British literature. In Shakespeare’s Othello, when the Senator Brabantio discovers that his daughter Desdemona has eloped with the black general from Morocco, he says that Othello must have lured his daughter with ‘charms’, by which he refers not to Othello’s charisma or good looks, but to what we would today call drugs. In 1894, George du Maurier’s best-selling novel Trilby had introduced British readers to Svengali, a musician of purportedly Hungarian Jewish origin, who exercised his sinister prowess over the young heroine. The popular press was happy to hitch the threat posed by new, still more exotic potions to these popular tales. The post-war generation was uncomfortable in many regards, not least in regard to pleasures. Many believed that feminine pleasures in particular had to be kept under a watchful eye. In 1920, a British woman wasn’t allowed to vote until she was twenty-seven; it was hoped that, by then, she would be able to count on the good counsel of her husband to navigate the complexities of adult life. Until such time, she was judged to be too prone to the sway of emotion to take charge of such responsibilities. This unease with the freedom that many British women found during and after the First World War is evident from an article that appeared in the Daily Express in 1922, which described the ‘predominating type’ of female cocaine user as ‘young, thin, underdressed, and perpetually seized with hysterical laughter’.27

  On the other side of the Atlantic, the US government was as confident in its belief that alcohol posed a terrible threat to its citizens as it was in its ability to drive alcohol consumption out of existence. In 1919, Congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment and then the Volstead Act, which prohibited the production, sale and consumption of alcoholic drinks. Initially at least, it seemed that supplies of alcohol could be curtailed: alcohol consumption fell sharply at the beginning of the Prohibition Era, to about a third of its pre-1919 level. But as Americans learnt to circumvent the new laws, illegal supplies rose to meet the demand, and alcohol consumption rates went back up, to about 70 per cent of what they had been before the Volstead Act was passed. Dismayed but not deterred, pragmatists then argued that if supplies could not be entirely cut off, at least they might be made sufficiently scarce to drive prices up, which would put the booze out of the reach of those intent on consuming it. In the Prohibition years, drinks prices shot up to three times their pre-1919 levels. But this only made the business more lucrative. Having passed from the hands of legal brewers and distillers into those of illegal bootleggers and gangsters, the trade in alcoholic drinks became the subject of a vicious struggle for dominance which the authorities proved unable to quash. The homicide rate in the United States went through the roof, peaking at 9.7 per 100,000 people in 1933. Such high murder rates wouldn’t be seen again until 1980, when at the height of the ‘war on drugs’ homicides in the United States hit 10 per 100,000.28

  The inability of the federal government to contain either the illegal trade in alcohol, or the violence and corruption of officialdom that it created, led to widespread public disenchantment with Prohibition. Ultimately, neither higher prices, respect for the law, social pressure, nor the muck that passed for alcohol had put people off drinking, and the Dry Law was repealed in 1933. Many feared that the nation would drown in a torrent of cheap legal alcohol, but the repeal of Prohibitionist laws had a surprisingly mild slight on how much the public drank. Consumption levels remained virtually the same immediately after the era of Prohibition was brought to an end, although they gradually returned to their pre-Prohibition level in the course of the following decade.29 With the restoration of standardization to the trade, drinkers were better able to gauge what and how much they were drinking, and the death rate from alcohol poisoning, which had increased sharply during Prohibition, fell back.30 Murder
rates fell sharply too, as disputes between rival traders could now be settled in court, instead of on the street.

  The parallels between the Prohibition Era and today’s war on drugs are instructive. Both demonstrate how difficult it is to ban intoxicating substances, the resilience of demand for them and the violence that stirs when highly profitable trades are made illegal. The Prohibition Era also had a huge social impact. It cast immigrants as criminals, not just in the imagination of newspaper editors, but in reality. Communities of recent arrivals were the first to lose their jobs when the legal economy went into a tailspin in the late 1920s, and the first to latch on to illegal sales of alcohol as an alternative. Prohibition Era mobsters like Al Capone, Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky had struggled to get by in a new country in the face of constant prejudice from locals. They saw bootlegging as a good opportunity and were not daunted by the fact that it was illegal. Discrimination, powerlessness and recourse to illegality defined the working lives of other ethnic groups too. The numbers game was an illegal lottery in which money was wagered on a certain combination of digits appearing at the beginning of a series of numbers published in a newspaper, such as share prices or sports results. In the 1940s, the numbers game in Chicago employed more African-American men than any other industry.31

  Mike Jay, author of Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century (2000), calls the Prohibition Era ‘the irrational aberration of a young and immature country under the sway of fanatical religious impulses and an intolerant zeal for racial purity’. Prohibition failed because it stoked the very fires it was intent on quenching.32 The prohibition of popular vices creates gangsters, whose existence in turn justifies the incessant appeal for a return to order and authority, and provides the bedrock for relations between politicians and white voters. Instead of defusing this conflict, the press and politicians feel compelled to turn it into a theatre piece, in which caricatures of good and evil do battle. Questions of public policy are dramatized and become plot-shifts that strive for public approval on the nightly news instalments. Once away from the public gaze, politicians have had to be much more level-headed in how they deal with gangsters, sometimes accommodating the very criminals that their laws have created, and on occasion being corrupted by them.