At the turn of the 19th/20th Centuries most of the illicit drugs that today are regarded as the biggest threat were perfectly legal, or at least unregulated. Cocaine in various forms, from medicinal solutions designed to stimulate energy, to coca-based wine, to even syringe-and- sample packages, was legally purchasable across the counter or by mail-order catalogue (Feiling 2009, p.17). However, advances in the chemical refinement of opiates and cocaine by the mid-19th Century yielded heroin and concentrated cocaine powder respectively. The concurrent increase in addictive quality saw medical and moral concerns grow for both the physical and spiritual health of individuals and the impact that this would have on American society.
Though the inherent moral driver of American establishment distain for illicit drugs would have played a role – as trailed by the banning of opium in the U.S. controlled Philippines (Bewley-Taylor 1999, p.11) – the first broadly international counter-narcotics initiative piloted by the U.S. was the Shanghai Opium Commission in 190933. However, this and the Hague Opium Commission held three years later in 1912, were more regulatory than prohibitive. They sought to restrict the use of opium to medical and scientific purposes, and there were no serious measures to make production or use of such drugs illegal (Bewley- Taylor and Jelsma 2012, p.73). Gradually, however, the focus moved to illicit rather than licit drug markets and the 1936 Conference for the Suppression of Illicit Drugs, held in Geneva, was the first to make drug trafficking an international crime (Bewley-Taylor and Jelsma 2012, p.74).
Domestically, in December 1914, the U.S. Congress passed the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act. This attempted to control the manufacture and distribution of opiates and cocaine in the U.S. through licensing and special taxation rather than outright prohibition or enforcement. However, several abuses where some clinics simply became wholesale narcotics distributors to supply all-comers resulted in the Supreme Court declaring such clinics illegal, whatever the medical intent, leading to the closure of some forty facilities and the arrest of 25,000 doctors between 1914 and 1938 (Epstein 1977, p.30 & p.104). While drug treatment would always be part of the counter-narcotics policy mix in later years, it would often be dwarfed by an emphasis on enforcement, as predicted by this episode, thanks
33 It was also a shrewd way for the U.S. to gain commercial access to the Chinese market by helping it to oppose
to the growing view that narcotics vice was something to be combatted rather than managed or indulged.
In the U.S., temperance and fear played significant roles in the politicisation and ultimate securitisation of that vice, principally consummation and use of alcohol and illicit drugs, before the former was de-securitised while the latter remains so34. Possessing an
underlying social bedrock of strong Christian values, it is not surprising that the U.S. proved to be such a fertile environment for the growth of various interest movements in the later 19th
and early 20th centuries. Whether out of a sense of righteousness or social conscience, groups
such as the Anti-Saloon League and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, played a role in influencing the political process and policy-thinking of the American government through their lobbying activities and overt campaigns (Behr 1998, p.45-47 & 55-56).
A good example of the influence of the temperance movement comes in the form of Captain Richmond Hobson, an elected political figure whose reputation was already enhanced by his status as a military hero of the Spanish-American War. Hobson launched a moral crusade against heroin from the mid-1920s, aided by the temperance groups mentioned above, as well as other entities such as the Moose, the Kiwanis, the Knights of Columbus and various Masonic orders (Epstein 1977, p.28). Hobson created the World Narcotic Association and Narcotic Defence Foundation to ‘defend society’ against the perils of narcotic addiction. In addition to distributing substantial amounts of educational material to schools and media, he took to the radio waves to lecture millions of Americans. All of this, in the absence of concrete scientific studies at the time, “created for a large segment of the American public the stereotype of an addict as a vampire-like creature with an insatiable appetite for crime and destruction and a need to infect with his disease all who came into contact with him” (Epstein 1977, p.29).
Such encouragement of fear would be repeated for political effect several decades later by actors in the same vein as Hobson, seeking to legitimise emergency measures by securitising such a threat. The policies of various presidential administrations are discussed below, but another prominent example of an influential actor with a visible platform was Nelson Rockefeller, Governor of New York from 1959 to 1973 and future Vice-President under Gerald Ford. Using his vast family wealth, political savvy, and experience as a
34 Alcohol prohibition in the U.S. during the 1920s was a prime example of an issue becoming politicised and
securitised, at least in the realm of law enforcement. I have chosen not to explore this phenomenon and instead focus on the kinds of illicit narcotics that have developed negative social connotations, i.e. opiates, cocaine, and the like. Alcohol may also be a potentially addictive substance with the capacity for social harm, but its consumption has been a generally accepted social practice in Western society for centuries, and even if frowned upon in certain circumstances, does not meet with the same taboo, fear and hostility as solicited by drugs.
propagandist in Latin America during World War II, he was able to latch onto the supposed epidemic of heroin addicts in his state to encourage public fear. Embracing the earlier view of drug addiction as an infectious disease spread by addicts, Rockefeller declared that the problem had “reached the proportions of a plague and was threatening the lives of middle- class children”, and he “demanded an all-out war on drugs and addiction” (Epstein 1977, p.38-39). This involved rushing through emergency measures providing for the involuntary confinement of addicts for up to five years of treatment, even if they had not been found guilty of a crime35, and despite the fact that no effective treatment or rehabilitation actually
took place (Epstein 1977, p.38-39). 1966 was an election year and such measures burnished Rockefeller’s law and order credentials that aided his re-election. Subsequent statistics were suitably flexible to encourage public security concerns on some occasions (e.g. rocketing increases in addicts to demonstrate the need for greater police measures and more judges) or to show that such measures were working (e.g. the number of addicts plummeting when referenced in important public speeches) (Epstein 1977, p.40-41).
Examples such as Hobson and Rockefeller demonstrated the inherent hard line taken by the American political establishment against activities and mind-sets that deviated from the perceived ‘correct state of mind’ (Van Duyne and Levi 2005, p.3). Such pursuits, when encountering the intolerance of a temperance position, or portrayed as a threat to middle-class values and youth, will solicit a form of fear, prevalent in the securitisation of an issue, for:
"Fear is a state of mind which can be aroused, strengthened, nursed and maintained, not as a self-propelling autonomous process, but by interested parties, like the church, the bureaucracy and the ruling elites (if any) which are their main stakeholders. An example is fear of deviant or non-conforming behaviour or attitudes […] considered a subversive challenge to social stability." (Van Duyne and Levi 2005, p.1-2)
Returning to the international response to such perceived threats, it was the UN Single Convention on Narcotics Drugs in 1961, heavily influenced by U.S. input, which highlighted the moral and social motivators that underlie American drugs policy. In its preamble, the parties involved expressed their concern “with the health and welfare of mankind” and recognised “that addiction to narcotic drugs constitutes a serious evil for the individual and is fraught with social and economic danger to mankind” (United Nations 1961, p.1, emphasis
35 Similar emergency measures exist today, as with the forcible roundups of crack addicts for enforced treatment
added). The use of the word ‘evil’ renders the text with a quasi-religious, moralising tone, portraying illicit drugs and associated trafficking and addiction as a threat to the health and welfare of mankind. Protecting people and society went to the heart of its reasoning for prohibition. The Single Convention went further than its predecessor treaties had, coming close to establishing a fully-fledged international prohibition regime, had negotiations not allowed for national authorities to decide on their own which narcotics to ban, or allow for medical purposes (Bewley-Taylor and Jelsma 2012, p.80). Indeed, the consequences of the Single Convention would extend down the decades, for it also introduced:
“Widely accepted penal obligations for signatory states to criminalise, under their domestic law, unlicensed production and trade and extended the pre-existing control regime to the cultivation of opium poppy, coca and cannabis. In this way, the Convention provided the international legal basis for the ‘war on drugs’ approach against drug-related crops and farmers that developed later.”
(Bewley-Taylor and Jelsma 2012, p.80, emphasis added) The approach would focus on producing countries, which preserved the American perspective that supply was the main issue above that of domestic demand (Crick 2012, p.410). It was a view that would heavily influence counter-narcotics strategy towards Latin America when the drug war gradually began to militarise from the Reagan Administration onwards. Firstly, however, the drug war had to be declared.