Discuss how criminal laws which prohibit drug use are about power, control and contradiction.
Ashley Nasir 06/02/2009
Discuss how criminal laws which prohibit drug use are about power, control and contradiction.
Drug use within the UK has become the normal thing to do within some crowds of people although most people do not understand what policies the government have tried to implement in order to try and control the drug problem that exists. For example out of the 2640 drug poisoning deaths in the UK in 2007, 829 of these involved opiates such as heroin and morphine. This is a startling amount considering these kinds of drugs are illegal within the UK. In order to come to some conclusions on this discussion I am going to look at the history of opium trade and the policies which the government brought in to try and tackle the problem which this trading had caused. I will pay close attention to conflicts between doctors and government officials leading up to the Rolleston Committee being formed which set out protocols for issuing drugs to addicts. I will then explain the current law relating to drugs and then come to some conclusions on my findings.
Even since the early 1700’s the government’s norm towards new products being brought into the UK was taxation rather than prohibition. This was the case with drugs such as tobacco, chocolate and opium as they realised that these were addictive substances which people in the UK and abroad would always want. Rowntree (1905: 285) and Owen (1934:52) argue that by 1839 opium had become the world’s most valuable single commodity of trade. According to John Newsinger (2002: 125), this provided ‘massive profit for London companies and substantial revenues for the state’. Blackman (2004) British merchants with support of the British government illegally supplied opium to China, against the wishes of the Chinese emperor. During the nineteenth century Britain fought two Opium Wars with the aim of gaining access to Chinese markets by overthrowing Chinese sovereignty. China lost both of these opium wars and as a result Britain made China open up additional ports to foreign trade through the Treaty of Nanjing and the Treaty of Tianjin. As a result of this Johnson (1975) states that ‘Britain forced opium upon China’; because of this action Britain then became the ‘biggest drug pushers in history’ (Himmelstein 1978). Western Governments were relatively unconcerned with the emergence of drug use abroad, as the colonies were thought of as ‘primitive’ due to their lack of an apparent democracy or rational utilitarian principles of social progress. Encouragement of drug use amongst so-called ‘foreigners’ supported imperialist assumptions about their underdevelopment and served to justify colonial domination (Blackman 2004).
Contemporary anti-drug and anti-alcohol movements have a long ancestry. The first financially viable anti-drug group was the (Anglo-Oriental) Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade (SSOT). It was formed in 1874 in Birmingham. The SSOT claimed it had a mandate for the public surveillance of society’s morality (Johnson 1975). This, however, argue Berridge and Edwards (1987) was pure fiction. The movement did not have a broad public opinion base, but rather it was the opinion of the influential elite of society.
During the nineteenth century Britain and the USA introduced legislation to restrict access to the consumption of drugs, including the 1868 Pharmacy Act and the 1906 Food and Drugs Act, but these measures were largely piecemeal and dealt with the prescription system and poisons. (Blackman 2004). The period 1900 to 1926 marks the birth of our present system of drug control, it also represents the era in which substance use and misuse came to be recognised by the state as a serious social, political and economic problem. It is also important to note that the attitudes which under-layed control were already formed. These attitudes can be best understood as a continuum along which substance misuse is seen as a medical problem in need of treatment at one extreme, and substance misuse seen as a vice in need of control via law and order at the other. The British government was still reluctant to become involved with any policy initiatives relating to the use and control of substances, beyond a general concern over poisons. This was because the government were making so much revenue for the state through the sale of opiates. However the seventeen years between 1909 and 1926 witnessed a massive shift from the laissez-faire approach to a situation which saw the stringent control of a number of substances (Berridge 1987). This was partly due to the pressure being put on from other countries to regulate opiates, mainly America, and also because of the falling sales. The advent of international concern forced Britain to take action to control certain substances and secondly, the development of moral panics concerning the use of substances during the First World War. Global drug prohibition started with the 1909 Shanghai drug conference ‘World War on Opium Traffic’, Britain became one of the thirteen attendees at the 1909 Shanghai Commission, which resulted in the Hague Convention of 1911. The cornerstone of global drug prohibition began with the Harrison Act in 1914, introduced by Francis Burton Harrison as a result of intensive lobbying by Dr Hamilton Wright (Blackman 2004). But there was reluctant British response to this commission, not only the desire to protect the Indian opium trade at all costs; it was more sophisticated assessment of whether such a meeting was really necessary. British civil servants and politicians were already well aware that opium had been, since the 1890’s, a declining proportion of the Indian budget (Berridge 1987). Britain only ratified the Convention in 1914, although somewhat reluctantly. The result of the convention was that by means of which signatory states pledge to curb the production, distribution and consumption of opium, morphine, heroin and cocaine, and to restrict the use of these materials to 'legitimate medical purposes.' The convention stipulated, in addition, that signatories enact domestic legislation designed to 'stamp out' the abuse of narcotics.
