The War on Drugs, Regional Drugs
The War on Drugs, Moral Panic
Power and Drugs
Power
Marx’s famous metaphor, reli gion as the opium of the people, would have worked just as well with alcohol or tobacco.
Next to proªts and taxes, the utility of drugs in acquiring, pacify ing, and ºeecing workers proved to be their greatest advantage to elites, at least until some of their number began to rethink the situation in the nine teenth and twentieth centuries Opium is the best known of the labor-palliating drugs, and the Chinese who ventured overseas during the nineteenth century are the best known of its devotees.
The typical coolie found himself doing mind-numbing work in a barbarian land, bored and homesick and without parental supervision.
He did what the junk crews and chair bearers back home did to soothe their trou bles: he turned to the opium pipe. This did not disrupt his labors, at least not initially.
“The opium smoking coolie,” as one British ofªcial put it, “is proba bly as reliable a workman as any in the world.” But he was often in debt, espe cially if he had journeyed far overseas.
Until the debt was cleared he could not return to China. Regular expenditures on opium and other bachelor vices such as gambling and prostitution effectively kept him on a labor tread mill, working for his creditors.
More than a few sick and despairing Chinese ªnally stepped off the treadmill by the same means used to keep them on it: they took an overdose of opium.1 Opium farms raked in proªts for the host nations.
Their rulers or, more of ten, colonial administrators auctioned the right to sell opium to the highest bidders, usually syndicates of Chinese merchants backed by strong-arm soci eties.
These societies kept rivals from infringing on the monopoly. The mer chants kept the coolie supplied with monopoly-priced opium, often siphon ing off half and in some cases as much as two-thirds of his wages in the process.
And the government enjoyed a stream of revenue from the periodic auctions. Singapore, as the historian Carl Trocki points out, literally lived on the back of the opium-smoking Chinese coolie. The colony derived half of its nineteenth-century revenue from opium
Chinese laborers were not the only victims. A physician in the Egyptian provinces in the early 1930s reported that dependent fellahin spent most of their wages on drugs.
A man earning ªve piasters a day allotted one for food, one for tobacco, and three for opiates. A landowner had to choose between sending his wife back to her parents and continuing to purchase drugs.
He chose the drugs. A contractor for a Nile transport company de cided to eliminate the element of choice altogether. He furnished his steve dores only rancid food and two packets of heroin a day.
When the police seized his books, they discovered that he had been making an extra 30 per cent proªt on the in-kind wages.3 Similar tactics are still used on large Thai ªshing vessels, 20 percent or more of whose crews are reportedly addicted to heroin.
Jamaican teenagers who weed ganja ªelds are sometimes paid in kind, and are not infrequently high when they chop and pull. Cannabis is a popular adjunct to agricultural labor throughout the lands of the ganja complex.
In the Punjab consumption increases by half during the harvest season. Colom bian peasants boast that cannabis helps them to quita el cansancio, or reduce fatigue; increase their fuerza and ánimo, force and spirit; and become incansable, tireless.
Critics of the marijuana complex have condemned the drug as leading to precisely the opposite state: lethargy, lack of motivation, and burnout. But how people behave under the inºuence of a particular drug is a matter of social and cultural circumstance as well as pharmacology.
Learning to smoke cannabis to get through a hot day in a cane ªeld is one thing; learning to smoke it to get through a long night at a rock concert is quite another. Different situations can lead to different sorts of intoxicated comportment.
Before the arrival of mechanized agriculture, alcohol played a similar role to cannabis in Europe and North America.
Workers drank to get through the harvest crisis, to celebrate after it, and to allay the fatigue and boredom of ru ral life. Alcohol, however, was more expensive than cannabis, and too fre quent indulgence ensured poverty.
Except for shtetl Jews and a handful of other religious minorities, eastern European peasants were notoriously prone to drinking away their money. Some landowners paid them in vodka for the potatoes and grain delivered to their stills.
“When I was a child,” the inter preter Juvenale Ivanovitch Tarasov recalled of his Russian village in the 1880s, “half the peasants would be drunk for days at a time.
There is no grand conspiracy about this. In fact, the use of drugs to cope with fatigue and obliterate misery is in many ways a by-product of civilization itself.
Humans evolved in itinerant band so cieties. Life in the sedentary peasant societies that succeeded them was less varied, fulªlling, egalitarian, and healthful. While hunter-gatherers prized certain drugs for shamanistic rituals, they rarely relied on them to cope with dawn-to-dusk manual labor.
Taking drugs to get through the daily grind (or to treat the intestinal and parasitic diseases attendant to settled life) is peculiar to civilization. So is the stupefying of infants to free the labor of harried par ents and caregivers.
Quieting young children with opium or cannabis or al cohol was a common expedient of working people before the early twentieth century and persists in many developing regions. Such practices are further clues, if any are needed, that our social circumstances are out of sync with our evolved natures.
The use of alcohol for fatigue duty persisted into the nineteenth century. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark rewarded their men with whiskey after a hard day’s portage, at least until their supply ran out.
Despite reformers’ at tempts to substitute coffee and sugar for spirits, alcoholic rations remained common during the Civil War. Union and Confederate soldiers seldom drank heavily before battle, but they did receive whiskey before undertaking such tasks as building bridges while waist-deep in cold water.
Frontier garri sons were paid in the same liquid coin. Seventy-ªve enlisted men went through eight barrels of whiskey building Fort Cottonwood, situated where the North Platte joins the South If any drug allayed anxiety during the Civil War and other nineteenth-cen tury conºicts, it was tobacco.
“Fear creates a desire for tobacco,” Benjamin Rush perceptively observed. “Hence it is used in greater quantities by soldiers and sailors than by other classes of people. It is used most profusely by sol diers when they are picket guards, or centinels [sic], and by sailors in stormy weather.”
And by their anxious commanders. Louis Napoleon continuously smoked cigarettes, expertly rolled for him by an aide-de-camp, during the 1859 battle of Solferino. Common soldiers had to wait, though, until Duke’s revolution before they had ready-made cigarettes of their own.
World War I forged the decisive link between soldiering and cigarette smoking. Ofªcers in all branches of the military, writes the historian Cassan dra Tate, regarded tobacco rations, especially cigarettes, as a valuable aid to morale and discipline.
Troops with smokes were easier to control—a belief underscored by reports that tobacco shortages had contributed to widespread mutinies by French soldiers in 1917. Aid workers made similar comments.
Millions of young men were thus exposed to cigarettes under conditions of unparalleled physical and psychological stress. A horror of mutilation runs through the more candid letters and diaries. “Poor kids,” wrote nurse Ethelyn Meyers, “I’d a thousand times rather be shot to pieces than gassed like some of these boys.”
An American sergeant, William von Kennell, suffered a recur ring nightmare in which he saw himself lying on the ground, face gone, blood pumping from his dismembered body. Pilots not yet twenty looked forty, exhausted by the strain of high-altitude patrols and the ªery deaths of too many comrades. Practically everyone who could do so smoked cigarettes, the quickest and most convenient means of achieving nicotinic relief.
#“Ciga rettes were as important as ammunition,” recalled British machine gunner George Coppard. “A Tommy would ask for a fag when near death, as if it was some kind of opiate that relieved pain and soothed the path to oblivion. I’ve no doubt at all that it did.” Coppard got part of his precious supply from relatives in England.
Ofªcials frowned on shipments of other sorts of drugs, however. When Harrods and Savory and Moore offered morphine and cocaine gift packets (described without irony in a Times advertisement as a “useful present for friends at the front”), the ªrms found themselves in court.
It was, the prosecutor said, ex ceedingly dangerous to provide soldiers with drugs like morphine, which might make them sleep on duty or otherwise endanger their safety. Ciga rettes, when prudently smoked out of sight of the enemy, presented no such risk.
Nazi priorities and ideology—Hitler was a fanatical anti-smoker—were quite different. The regular cigarette ration for German troops was just six a day.
However, local commanders issued extra cigarettes and alcohol under “special” circumstances, in both the literal and euphemistic senses of the term. One SS Standartenführer (colonel) gave each of his men a pack of cig arettes and a pint of cognac before their last-ditch defense of Paris.
Soldiers and military police who took part in Aktions against Jews, shooting them at mass burial pits, earned supplementary rations of vodka. Sometimes the exe cutioners became too drunk to shoot straight.
SS doctor Johannes Paul Kremer noted in his Auschwitz diary that volunteers for execution details re ceived a ªfth of a liter of schnapps, ªve cigarettes, and 100 grams of salami and bread. “Because of the special rations,” he added, “the men all clamor to take part in such actions
