Pubdate: Wed, 02 Jul 2008
Source: North Shore News (CN BC)
Copyright: 2008 North Shore News
Contact:  http://www.nsnews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/311
Author: Jerry Paradis

DRUG HISTORY'S SAD CENTENARY

In a little more than a week, Canada will reach a milestone that will 
pass more or less unnoticed.

In the context of the continuing debate over drugs, it would be 
reasonable to expect some kind of recognition that, on July 11 1908, 
Parliament passed our first drug law.

It consisted of only two paragraphs and the title said it all: An Act 
to Prohibit the Importation, Manufacture and Sale of Opium for Other 
than Medical Purposes.

Before that, opiates and other now-illegal drugs were as freely 
available as alcohol and tobacco. The world was not going to hell in 
a hand basket. Those who smoked opium were almost exclusively the 
Chinese who had immigrated to provide the necessary labour for the 
railway and who had evolved a community of their own on the western 
frontier. They caused no trouble, showed up for work on time and were 
commended for their thrift.

So what led to this decision to clamp down on an activity that was, 
until then, on nobody's radar -- if they'd had radar?

That question is explored in detail in Panic and Indifference: The 
Politics of Canada's Drug Laws, by P.J. Giffen, Shirley Endicott and 
Sylvia Lambert. Published in 1991 by the Canadian Centre on Substance 
Abuse (a federal government agency, so it's hardly a manifesto from 
the anti-prohibition crowd), it is an essential reference for anyone 
who wants to understand how we got into this mess.

Their answer is a complex mix of three factors: a pervasive climate 
of moral reform in North America, particularly on the frontiers, 
assisted by a protestant-clergy-driven international movement to 
restrict the use of opium; racial hostility; and the involvement of 
Mackenzie King.

Moral reform was the inevitable offshoot of the conviction held by 
European colonizers that their very presence here was proof of their 
natural superiority. It was their duty to see to the moral well-being 
of the lesser races. The growing pressure against opium use, as the 
authors point out, created a situation in which "domestic action came 
to be defined as a necessary complement to international measures 
intended in the first instance to alleviate the [opium] problem in 
China." (If they had had irony way back then, they would have noted 
that the Chinese had been introduced to opium by their British colonizers.)

Racial hostility grew slowly but steadily, from the time of the 
arrival of the first Chinese looking for a new life in the Fraser 
River gold rush of the mid-1850s, until the anti-Asian riots in 
Vancouver in 1907. The many myths generated by white xenophobia were 
dominated by fears of sexual predation and perversion.

Enter Mackenzie King, no slouch as a moralist himself. As deputy 
minister of labour, he was sent here by Laurier to negotiate 
reparations for losses suffered by the Chinese and Japanese in the 
riots. While here, the local Anti-Opium League bent his ear and he 
returned to Ottawa with some very strong opinions about curbing opium 
use. Bolstered by the other factors, he was persuasive, and a bill 
was drafted. One concession was made: opium distributors would have a 
six-month grace period to unload their existing stocks. The "debate" 
in the House lasted less than five minutes and, in the blink of a 
strobe light, we started down our destructive path to nowhere.

As early as 1885, a Royal Commission had heard from some objective 
observers of B.C. society (as opposed to police officers and 
Presbyterian ministers, who also testified) about the comparatively 
benign nature of opium use. Chief Justice Matthew Bailey Begbie said, 
". . . all the evils arising from opium in British Columbia in a year 
do not, probably, equal the damage, trouble and expense occasioned to 
individuals and to the state by whiskey in a single month or perhaps 
in some single night." Mr. Justice Crease of the B.C. Supreme Court 
made the same point: ". . . white vice and depravity are far ahead, 
more insidious, more alluring, more permanently injurious" than opium 
smoking by the Chinese.

Never underestimate the power of righteousness. In full flower, it 
can lay low entire segments of a society in the name of some moral 
quest, one which usually translates into what the seeker has decided 
is best for everyone. That's what the moralists did with Criminal 
Code prohibitions against contraception, homosexuality, gambling and 
a number of other perceived "evils." Eventually, they had to 
backtrack and repeal those laws.

Five long years ago, a judge of the B.C. Court of Appeal was heard to 
say, with respect to a raid on a grow-op, that, "I have not yet 
abandoned my conviction that Parliament has a Constitutional right to 
be hoodwinked, as it was in the '20s and '30s, by the propaganda 
against marihuana, and to remain hoodwinked."

Very true. But when the damage flowing from being hoodwinked becomes 
and remains so manifest, that same government fails in its primary 
duty to protect the safety and security of its citizens if it doesn't 
act to undo the harm it has created.

This centenary is a good time to start undoing the destruction 
generated by a century of drug prohibition. In those 100 years, drugs 
have become more available, more potent and less expensive than they 
ever were. Their quality and distribution has been left in the hands 
of criminals; and the black market has led to an unstoppable wave of 
petty property crime to meet its demands and routine explosions of 
violence to maintain status within it. The percentage of users of all 
drugs who become addicted remains at around three per cent, the same 
proportion that was estimated in 1908. And all of that in spite of 
countless billions spent over the decades on enforcement and interdiction.

Let's end this.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom