 In 1980, on September 28, the Washington Post ran a story titled Jimmy's World, written by Janet Cook. The story was about an eight-year-old black child from the District of Columbia who had been addicted to heroin since the age of five. Jimmy's is a world of hard drugs, fast money, and the good life he believes both can bring. Cook writes in this article, Every day, junkies casually buy heroin from Ron, his mother's live-in lover, in the dining room of Jimmy's home. They cook it in the kitchen and fire up in the bedrooms, and every day, Ron or someone else fires up Jimmy, plunging a needle into his bony arm, sending the fourth grader into a hypnotic nod. The article goes on to offer several quotes from eight-year-old Jimmy. I want to have me a bad car and dress good, and also have me a good place to live, so I pretty much pay attention to math in school, because I know I got to keep up when I finally get me something to sell, as I'm talking about his time in school, according to this article. These are all direct quotes. And another quote, Jimmy says, It be real different from herb. That's baby shit. Don't nobody here hardly ever smoke no herb. You can hardly get none right now anyway. Cook also ran a quote from Jimmy's mother, saying, I don't really like to see him fire up, but you know, I think he would have got into it one day anyway. Everybody does. When you live in the ghetto, it's all a matter of survival. If he wants to get away from it when he's older, then that's his thing. But right now, things are better for us than they've ever been. Drugs and black folk been together for a very long time. So this article describes the horror story of this eight-year-old boy doing and selling drugs that he got from his mother's live-in boyfriend. The story was horrifying to everybody who read it. The mayor of Washington, D.C., Mary and Barry ordered a search of the city to find Jimmy. The Washington Post even assigned six other reporters to look for another child in Jimmy's situation, believing that he couldn't be the only one. There's got to be somebody that fits the description of Jimmy out there, because heroin is such a problem. This is the idea in people's heads when the story came out. Janet Cook even won the Pulitzer Prize for this story. The problem was that despite the city-wide search by both the government and the Washington Post, Jimmy was never found. Janet Cook was asked where she found Jimmy and his family, and she somehow couldn't remember. I don't remember where I told this story and spent time with his family, she said. When the search spread to looking for any child heroin addict, the city of Washington, D.C., was unable to find a single one. Cook was forced to return her prize. You can still read Jimmy's world on the website for the Washington Post, but now it begins with a disclaimer admitting that the article was a fabrication, such as the mania that the anti-opium crusade evolved into after prohibition. I'm Chris Cowton, and this is the Mises Institute podcast Historical Controversies. Today I'm going to be talking about opium, which probably is the richest and broadest history out of all the major narcotics involved in the war on drugs. This episode is going to be a bit all over the place because I don't think I would be doing justice if I didn't talk about Britain, China, and the United States. All of these countries have an interesting history with opium, so I think it'll be worth the time. We talked in the very first episode about the introduction of morphine in the 19th century, and how it was an incredible benefit to wounded soldiers during the Civil War in the United States, in other words in Europe. I also touched on the obvious negative consequences of the use of morphine at the time. This episode I'm going to dive deeper into the history of opiates, but I think for this it would be worth reviewing some aspects of the evolution of opium to heroin to better understand the political and economic history of this drug. For most of its history, even going back to ancient times, opium was extracted from opium poppies, and it was either smoked or eaten, and this was often done for medical purposes because of its use as a painkiller. These analgesic properties are still recognized enough to let most opiates enjoy a Schedule II classification in the United States, which essentially means that they're classified as dangerous, but they do have some medical use. Remember that marijuana is only a Schedule I, so it's considered even worse than morphine for instance. But opium is substantially less potent than the refined forms of morphine and heroin, and smoking and eating opiates are both less efficient ways of consuming the drug, so this practice was actually relatively harmless. I mean, opium, and I'm going to go over the negative thing, so just to make everything clear to everybody here, I'm not a drug user. I don't even really drink, so when I'm talking about these and their benefits and things like that, this isn't really an advocacy of doing any of these drugs. I'm not really a fan of intoxicants myself, but the narrative against these drugs is just so overwhelmingly exaggerated that it's hard to tell the truth about them without sounding almost like you're advocating them, so I don't want that to be misinterpreted, but smoking opium was relatively harmless compared to what we think about with opiates, and it was at least far less harmful than smoking tobacco or drinking alcohol just to put things into perspective. Now, from this, we saw the development of 19th century Western medicine, such as laudanum, and there were people who became addicted to these opiates, so I don't want to understate the addictive properties of opium. The most famous of these was the writer Thomas de Quincey, who wrote Confessions of an English Opium Eater in 1821 that was widely read, and it served as the inspiration for some of the writings on hashish I mentioned in the first episode. The first attempt at regulating opium was made in Britain as early as 1857, with the cell of Poison's Bill, it's called the Cell of Poison's Bill, but it wasn't heavily enforced because of the widespread use of laudanum, but just as we would see in the Civil War, opium had both positive and negative effects. Thousands of lives, probably tens or hundreds of thousands of lives were saved from dysentery and cholera, which were particularly common in the crowded and unhygienic London, and just as they were common on the battlefield. But on the other hand, there were many lives lost to overdose and even murder. Among the most horrifying uses of opium was the use of opium-based soothing syrups for children, which were common in what I've pretty much started referring to as opium daycares, that's my term, so you won't find that in any other literature. Anybody go googling that, you won't turn anything up. But these were places in which women would be employed to take care of up to a dozen children at a time while their mothers worked in factories or as domestic services, and they would keep the children quiet by feeding them these opium syrups. And when the mother got home, it was not uncommon for her to just do the same thing so she could get a decent night's sleep. So these infants, especially lower-class children, were just continually fed opium-based syrups. Now of course, much of this was due to the ignorance of the problems of opium at the time, since it wasn't until the end of the 19th century that people really started to become very aware of addictive qualities of opium. But accidental lethal poisonings of children was not entirely uncommon and intentional poisoning of infants also took place, especially poor women who had a bastard child or even more horrendously. There were women who worked in these infamous baby farms of the Victorian era, in which, and that is a term you can Google, that is not my term, baby farms are what they're referred to as pejoratively. They were used at the time basically to smear, I think rightly, smear these organizations, but these were baby farms in the Victorian era in which women were actually paid a lump sum to sometimes just fully adopt a child. And what they would sometimes do is they'd take the payment and then after the payment was received, they would use opium to essentially commit infanticide. And infanticide was not, it was kind of just what people did back then until abortion became common, even in Ireland, excuse me, poor women would commonly commit infanticide just because another baby was another mouth defeat and they couldn't deal with it. So that's not trying to justify this or condone this. I think this is a horrifying practice, but I do want to put it into context of the time. Now, how common actual murders were is incredibly difficult to determine because of the mixture of accidental infant deaths that were common at this time, but it is relatively undisputed that this form of infanticide did take place and it usually took place with opiates. Now, even as libertarians, we may be able to give plenty of good answers as to why drugs like these opiates should still not be regulated, but it's important to understand that unlike marijuana, opium did actually have truly harmful consequences that can serve as justification for regulation from the point of view of the average person. This never really was the motivation behind regulation, at least not the predominant one in many places, surprisingly enough, which I'll be discussing later in the episode, but we do want to keep these things in mind, especially when we're talking to people about these topics, I think. It's also worth noting that even before the 1857 sale of Poison's bill, people in Britain were becoming sufficiently aware of the dangers of opium. The idea that opiates were harmless started to decline as early as 1828, so I mentioned earlier that it was the late 19th century when this information became widespread and that's true, but we start seeing it as early as 1828 after the death of the Earl of Mar, who had been an opium eater for 30 years, and this caused his heirs to lose the life insurance that they would have otherwise been paid, because the insurance company actually determined that this habit shortened his life expectancy, so they didn't pay his heirs, any of his life insurance. Shortly after this, a Scottish professor named Professor Christison testified that opium did indeed shorten one's lifespan when he was testifying in a Scottish court, and additionally, there were famous penny tracks published by the Ladies Sanitary Association, entitled The Massacre of Innocence, which condemned the use of these soothing syrups on infants, so it's equally important to understand not just the dangers of opium and the fact that people might use these as justifications for prohibition, but from a libertarian perspective, we of course want to understand that the movement against certain forms of opium were taking place long before the government ever got involved, but there were private movements that did lead to the decrease in opium use before prohibition, in fact, decades before prohibition in this case. Morphine was first discovered in 1806 by a German pharmacist's assistant named Friedrich Wilhelm Adam Sutcherner, and if I'm pronouncing that right, it's because I asked our German fellow here, Carl Israel, because we have so many Germans inventing new forms of opium that I kept having to ask him how to pronounce all these German names, but I'm still probably getting them wrong, and so Sutcherner named his new product Morphium, named after Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams or sleep, because of morphine's sleep-inducing properties. In the 1820s, morphine was widely available in Britain and the United States, and so many people used it as a means to commit suicide, and this was actually so common that in his 1830 novel, The Devil's Comedy, this is a French novel, but that's the translated title, the author named, and this is another one I'm going to have trouble pronouncing, but it's Honoré de Balzac wrote that The Devil himself claimed that morphine was a primary cause for the sudden population increase in hell because of the suicides. When Dr. Alexander Wood perfected the hypodermic syringe in 1853, this was another innovation that increased the strength of opiates, because, and I mentioned this in an earlier episode, he made it possible to inject morphine rather than swallowing it, which remember, essentially increases its potency because injecting a drug is the most potent way to consume it. So by 1856, morphine injections had come to the United States, and this was just in time to be used during the Civil War. Now I don't want to repeat myself too much of what I covered in the first episode regarding the upsurge of morphine addiction from the Civil War, so if you haven't listened to that episode and you want to know how the Civil War boosted opiate use, make sure you go back and give episode one a listen. In 1898, another German chemist named Heinrich Dresser, who was working for Bayer, this is the same pharmaceutical company that developed aspirin, so it is that Bayer, he produced diacetylmorphine, which he named heroin from the German word heroisch meaning heroic, and Bayer mass marketed the drug under this name as being non-addictive cure for morphine addiction among other elements, and although it was administered in small doses through injections as well, it was most popular in the form of tablets, these were cough lozenges, or heroin elixirs. Within two years, the medical community was already publishing denouncements of the use of heroin for morphine addiction, and in 1906, the Council of Pharmacy and Chemistry of the American Medical Association was reporting on the addictive quality of this new drug. So again, we see the private movement against this and information spreading to disincentivize recreational use of this drug, or people to at least be conscientious of the use of it. So now I'm going to talk about the opium wars, which are going to be the bulk of this episode, I think, just because it's just absolutely, absolutely interesting history. So the real governmental conflicts with opium started because of the trade between British merchants and Chinese opium growers, and this was the result not of Britain, but of China's desire to outlaw opium. So again, we know these now as the opium wars. There were two opium wars, and I'm going to talk really just about the first one, just because of time constraints. So as early as 1729, Chinese Emperor Yong Cheng outlawed recreational opium smoking and licensed the medical use of it, and he imposed the penalty of 100 strokes of a bamboo cane in several days or even weeks in what's called a king, which was this heavy wooden collar that criminals had to wear around their necks. This is worth a Google. It's spelled C-A-N-G-U-E. It's this wooden square that people wore around their necks. But this punishment was only imposed on people selling opium without a license, so actual opium smokers were exempted, this is like the last line of the law, exempted opium smokers. But in 1799, Emperor Kai Qing outlawed opium entirely, which meant outlawing cultivation as well as trade with the British, but this was problematic for reasons that you might not expect. So the government chartered Monopoly. The British East India Company had a monopoly on poppy cultivation in India, and they were actually selling opium to China, so it was cultivated in China, but they were also importing opium from the British East India Company. What Britain was getting from China was not opium, since they were also supplied by India, but they were getting tea as Chinese tea had become incredibly popular in Britain. Once Kai Qing outlawed opium, he still wanted to trade with Britain, but now he only legally accepted silver bullion, which obviously was an undesirable exchange from the perspective of the mercantilist British government who saw any export of precious metals as being a loss of wealth for the country. The East India Company started instead illegally smuggling opium into China. Incidentally, starting in 1811, some American merchants also started smuggling Turkish opium into China, but I only mentioned that because I think it's an interesting aside, but it really has little to do with the opium wars. The India Company conducted their smuggling trade through proxy merchants known as country firms who would buy the opium from the company from opium depots stationed in Calcutta and then smuggle it into China, allowing the merchants of the East India Company to claim ignorance, though of course they knew what was going on. In 1820, China started enforcing the 1799 edict with the execution of any Chinese citizen caught in possession of opium. This made some of the British merchants nervous, so they moved their base of operations to a small island called Linton Island. This was just a three-mile island off the coast of China that served exclusively as an opium port. It was ideal because it allowed merchants to position more than a dozen clippers at any given time. Clippers were the very new ships at the time that were the fastest ocean vessel until 1868, and China didn't have anything to compete with these, so they were perfect for smuggling opium and evading the authorities. From Linton Island, we have accounts of Chinese officials battling against Chinese opium smugglers not far off the shores of China. One account from 1836 offered by a British doctor named C. Too Good Downing observed, and I'm quoting here, the Mandarin's rush to attack without hesitation, Mandarin's referring to the Chinese officials, without hesitation and laid about them in right good earnest with their swords and pikes, frequently cutting and wounding in a dreadful manner, but the poor smugglers appeared to act on the defensive. Many of the defeated jumped overboard, and as they struggled in the water to gain the shore, formed excellent marks for the spears and javelins of the conquerors. Of course, it's no surprise that the smugglers risked their life to avoid capture, considering that the minimum sentence for them was a lifetime of hard labor, and many of those caught would simply be executed. Nonetheless, the opium trade in China just continued to grow, and this probably provides our first lessons about the dangers and the futility of a war on drugs. The Chinese government, aware of British involvement, started to become more hostile towards foreign merchants, and the East India Company withdrew in 1834. So the British government appointed three superintendents of trade to oversee British business in China. Now, meanwhile, the British government still pretended like the opium trade was not being conducted illegally in China at all. They knew they were just kind of ignoring the issue. One of these superintendents, a man named Sir George Robinson, after he observed the goings-on at Linton Island, he advocated for the prohibition by Britain of poppy cultivation in India. Now, again, from a libertarian perspective, it seems absurd that he would observe the negative consequences of the Chinese prohibition and think that the solution to this would be a British India prohibition, but this is not uncommon logic in the drug war. So Robinson was actually dismissed from his post for this recommendation, and he was replaced by a man named Captain Charles Elliott. Elliott took the job in the middle of the tensions between Britain and China, and he was faced with the difficult task of protecting British merchants. Now, this job technically only required him to enforce licit trade, which meant that he was not obligated to protect black market opium interests, but the Chinese interpreted his position as doing exactly that, so he was faced with really no small amount of hostility. The merchants who did want to have their opium interests protected, though, were actually flouting the Chinese pretty brazenly, and the majority of them wanted Britain to threaten China with a war, which they believed would be a show of strength that would get the Chinese government to submit to Britain on the matter. So some of these British merchants were cutting out the Linton Island middleman and taking, which were just Chinese smugglers, and they were taking their opium directly into China without the Chinese smugglers, which pretty much gave the middle finger to the Chinese government and put them in a position to have to enforce their laws against British citizens. The viceroy of Canton in China, where the opium merchants were doing all this, he ordered the nine largest British dealers to leave Canton. So the viceroy was in a difficult position where he had to flex his own muscles, but he still didn't want to rile up the British government, so he arrested all of the Chinese contract laborers employed by the British merchants, which were known as Koolies. These were very similar to the Indian Sepoys I mentioned in the last episode on marijuana, and the viceroy had all of the Koolies publicly executed via strangulation. Another public execution took place in the American and British gardens, which was on Chinese soil, so both the British and Chinese considered themselves to have sovereignty over the area. An official marched a chained prisoner into the garden and started executing him in the merchant's park. Now, the method of this execution here was just gruesome. China actually occasionally crucified criminals by putting an X-shaped cross into the ground, and the cross would have another piece of wood across the top to support the victim's head. And then they would nail the palms of the victim to the board and leave them to die, not entirely unlike the biblical description of Jesus' crucifixion in ancient Rome. There's actually an article from the Sacramento Daily Union in 1860 that describes a similar crucifixion that took place in South China. This crucifixion was for just a couple dozen kidnappers, but it gives a good description of what these British opium merchants were actually witnessing in their American and British gardens. So the person who observed this 1860 execution, he wrote, and again I'm quoting, To my horror, I saw at the entrance gate side crosses with the still living bodies of the culprits writhing in torture. The site was altogether indescribable. Sickening as such a scene would be at any time, the bright moonlight made the expression of the countenances even more awful and startling. And this person goes on to say that by the next morning, only three of the 24 criminals executed this way had died. So the remaining 21 were ordered to be strangled after basically spending their last night being tortured. So even though this report is of a different execution, it gives us just a useful description of what these merchants were having flaunted in front of them right in their place of businesses. So you can imagine that it was met with a lot of anger. After the execution was already well underway, some drunk British sailors started just wrecking the place. They destroyed the cross and the other equipment that the Chinese officials brought with them to transport the prisoners. And they tried to free the prisoners, but the officials simply retreated with the prisoner and completed the execution elsewhere. So they didn't save the guy. The behavior of the British sailors actually upset the Chinese people, not just the government, but the citizens themselves. So much that a mob of 10,000 people ended up amassing and started rioting and destroying factories and other buildings used by these British merchants. And the Chinese government actually had to come in and suppress this as well. And even after this, the Chinese government continued to host public executions in front of the British. So by this point, tensions were peaking between the British merchants and the Chinese government. And this is exactly what Captain Elliot was thrust into the middle of when he was assigned to his new position. The Chinese government also appointed a new person named Lin Se-su, and he was given the orders to eradicate opium in China completely. So now we have three parties, British merchants who were openly flaunting the Chinese because they believed they were backed by the British military might. We had Captain Elliot, who was not obligated to protect British opium interests, but the Chinese believed that this was his mission. And we have Lin Se-su, who had been ordered to put a stop to all of this. So in 1839, Lin started arresting not just Chinese opium dealers, but also British dealers. He had the product confiscated and he ordered the dealers to sign a bond promising that they would cease opium dealings. And Lin also made it clear to them that the British presence in China was just a courtesy. The British really did not take him seriously at first until the merchants were held, effectively as prisoners in Macau. And by prisoners, I really just mean that they weren't allowed to leave the city and Chinese troops were on constant patrol, so they weren't actually locked up. Lin also threatened the merchants at Hong Kong, what we know is before it was modern Hong Kong because the opium wars are going to lead to that. But he threatened the British merchants at Hong Kong, who ceded to him more than a thousand chests of opium, hoping that it would pacify him, but it really didn't. So Captain Elliot arrived in Macau and he heard about Lin's goings-on and he immediately took action. Lin allowed Elliot to enter the factories in Hong Kong where the British merchants extracted the opium and then Lin ramped up the Chinese blockade which cut off the food supplies, but this really didn't matter much in the short term since merchants were just smuggling food in and there was still a pretty decent stock of food in the city, so the blockade wasn't like a heavy constraint at the time. But Elliot surprised a lot of the British by ordering that the merchants comply with Lin's demands and they handed over their entire stock of more than 20,000 chests of opium. Elliot really didn't expect the merchants to be as compliant as they were. They were actually pretty comfortable with the deal because they had been importing so much opium that prices dropped to ridiculously low levels and they were having trouble moving it. And Elliot wasn't aware of this, so he promised that the British Crown would reimburse the merchants for their loss to the tune of two million British pounds. So the opium was destroyed and Lin ended the blockade and allowed legitimate trade to recommence between Britain and China, but this proved to be a mistake because he never got the British government to agree to end the opium trade in China while he had the upper hand. The events and the destruction of the opium caused opium prices to skyrocket in China because all the government power in the world can't stop basic market processes and this quickly meant the return of the opium trade in China. So trying to recover from his mistake, Lin had a British sailor arrested after he and a group of other drunk sailors had destroyed a temple in the Kowloon Peninsula which was just across from Hong Kong and in their destruction they accidentally killed a Chinese peasant. So Lin ordered that one of the sailors involved named Thomas Titter be charged according to Chinese law with murder and he should be tried in a Chinese court. Elliot already financially compensated the dead man's family which was part of the common law tradition at the time and he privately punished each of the sailors involved in the affair and furthermore while it seems clear that all of the sailors were guilty Titter was being charged by Lin to be made an example of as there was really no evidence that he was the person individually responsible for the death of the citizen. Nonetheless, Lin demanded that he be executed according to the Manchu Penal Code. Now I don't want to like defend these sailors, they destroyed private property or they destroyed a temple, I don't know if it was private, they're government but they did kill a guy, obviously they were in the wrong. So I'm not trying to pass judgment on what was right or what was not right to do as punishment for them but it is important to know that Lin was not really interested in justice he was interested in making an example of the British so that's the important point I want to drive home. This time, Elliott would not comply and so Lin saw this as an affront against the Chinese Emperor and he ordered them to cement and basically threatened war if they did not. He halted trade with the British and actually marched Chinese troops into Macau and laid siege against the Canton factories. Lin blocked the English merchants with Chinese war junks which were their primary naval vessels and Elliott after issuing an ultimatum to Lin that was ignored had his men open fire on one of these Chinese junks. This led to the battle of Caloon and on April 25th, 1840 the New York Times referred to this as the Opium War which would be the name for this and the subsequent war that would come a little bit later. One of the important and often overlooked elements of this opium war was the fact that after British victory in a battle that took place in January of 1841 Elliott devised a treaty called the Convention of Chun Pai which put Hong Kong in the possession of Britain effectively founding Hong Kong as we know it today which is a semi-independent city state and it's ranked as the freest economy in the world according to both of the free market indices. Sovereignty over Hong Kong wasn't transferred back to China until 1997 and when it was done an agreement was signed that would not give full governing control over Hong Kong to China for another 50 years which is why it's still the freest economy in the world but Elliott has almost completely overlooked regarding his pivotal role in the establishment of Hong Kong in the history books so he's a much more important figure than people give him credit for. The opium war was ended in August of 1942 after Britain took control of Shanghai with their technologically superior navy floating up the Yangtze river followed directly by merchant ships who had opium on board when they reached Nanking the Treaty of Nanking was signed which the Chinese still referred to as the unequal treaty because it ended the war with British hegemony over China and pretty much just forced them to pay an indemnity of 21 million silver dollars as compensation for the lost product including opium though this was pretty much just implied it also ceded Hong Kong to Britain in perpetuity of course this would again end in 1997 but that was not put in the treaty so it was considered to be perpetual at the time and it required the reopening of trade including the opium trade in fact the only vague reference to opium in the treaty was a clause that read it is to be hoped that the system of smuggling which has heretofore been carried on between English and Chinese merchants will entirely cease but by leaving out explicit reference to opium Britain avoided having to establish an official policy so this basically amounted to the tacit approval of British opium merchants operating illegally in China I'm not going to go into detail about the second opium war which is also known as the Arrow War because we are running short on time in this episode but it took place between 1856 and 1860 over the official legalization of opium and of course the British won again which more completely opened the trade with Britain so it's an interesting episode there's a lot of interesting history in the world of opium that I am leaving out of this episode just for length reasons but if you're interested there are just again some wonderful history books on the history of opium that are just absolutely fascinating so I do encourage people that are interested to check those out so now I'm going to look at how this kind of all culminated in western criminalization by the 1870s British opinion was turning against opium groups like the society for the suppression of the opium trade were fighting against the Indian opium agency which had a government charter so little came of this until the early 20th century China once again outlawed poppy cultivation in 1908 and this was finally accompanied with an agreement from Britain to decrease Indian exports to China by 10% per year and shortly before this in 1898 the United States annexed the Philippines after the Spanish-American War and they found through the Philippines opium commission formed in 1903 that Filipinos had an opium problem and this led to a 1908 law regulating opium imports there to only medicinal uses so this is only two years after the United States passed the pure food and drug act which mildly regulated cocaine and opium domestically as I mentioned in previous episodes Spain was also dealing with a similar opium problem in addition to the French and Germans and various other countries and the international opium commission was formed in 1909 but this commission had essentially no enforcement powers but any restrictions it might agree on in many countries particularly those like Turkey who produced a lot of opium and Germany who had pharmaceutical interests in opiates they were reluctant to impose restrictions on such an important element of their economy Turkey in fact refused to even send a delegate so they pretty much just agreed to investigate the source of opium addiction which was probably little more than these governments trying not to look useless in 1912 the International Opium Convention which was basically formed out of the commission from three years earlier so one was the commission the second was the convention is the distinction in the name they did agree to try to restrict opium to its medical use only but this was little more than an on paper decrease since each country would have to enforce the rule individually so this agreement pitted along for another two years with only 11 countries ratifying the agreement and the last meeting of the convention took place in 1914 only three days before the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand which plunged Europe into World War I as we all know and the war meant that the demand for opiates skyrocketed morphine addiction which remember was called soldiers disease at least in the United States it consequently ballooned and opium smoking in the east pretty much continued unaffected the agreement of the convention of 1912 was implemented only by five countries the US, the Netherlands, China, Norway and Honduras but the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 would impose this agreement globally in the United States the Harrison Narcotics Act was passed which did restrict opiates to exclusively medical use in 1914 if you remember from previous episodes but it wasn't until the 1920s that you started seeing heroin users who got started from explicitly recreational experimentation prior to this it was addiction driven by medical treatment but one of the biggest driving forces in US criminalization was very similar to what we saw in the last episode regarding marijuana which was racism and anti-immigration sentiments in this case it was racism against the Chinese specifically who were known for their opium dens in the United States anti-immigration sentiments were most heavily levity against the Chinese especially in the far western states where they were most common and this led to the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 which wasn't even repealed until 1942 so it was in place for 60 years and this was the only anti-immigration act that specifically prohibited immigration against an entire race of people so there were other immigration acts that limited immigration from different nationalities or just a blanket limitation but this is the one that just completely prohibited immigration from the Chinese the Chinese just faced a great deal of hostility from Americans it was said that at the time in the Gilded Age that all Chinese men were slaves and all Chinese women were prostitutes this is a common narrative and the opium dens were depicted in very similar terms as the marijuana dens described in the marijuana episode just like with marijuana one of the horror stories about the opium dens was the fact that they had whites intermingling with the Chinese engaging in sexual intercourse between the races and Chinese men were using opiums to seduce well-to-do white women now in reality it's unlikely that there were any white women in opium dens who weren't actually working prostitutes which were very common in California following the gold rush and you had the gold miners go out there looking for gold and they really never got rich but the people who actually did very well over there were the prostitutes who sold their services to the gold miners so prostitutes were very common in California at the time and many of them did work in opium dens but the narrative about the corruption of respectable white women appealed to the racial biases common in the country at the time so just like with marijuana, California led the way in opium prohibition specifically with San Francisco this time most of these laws prior to the Harrison Narcotic Act were city laws so San Francisco criminalized opium in 1875 or they restricted it just a medical treatment to be more specific and other cities with large Chinese populations followed suit with local regulations being passed in a majority of states I think it was 27 states prior to the Harrison Narcotic Act the popularity of opium smoking began to drop by the end of the 19th century but this actually was mostly due to the anti-immigration laws that targeted the Chinese more than it was because of the anti-opium laws so by restricting Chinese immigration they effectively reduced opium smoking but really you can't credit this to the opium laws or even the movement against opium it was just the movement against the Chinese that saw this phenomenon so I want to wrap up here but there's one more important bit about the enforcement of the Harrison Narcotics Act that cannot go unmentioned when the law was passed opium was still legal in all its forms for medical purposes but the interpretation of the law was still in question doctors and the government officials were not really sure if the prescribing of morphine to an addict constituted treatment or not and even though we had heroin at the time this was still predominantly morphine we weren't dealing much with heroin at this time so it was still morphine addictions and doctors would prescribe morphine to addicts as a form of treatment and the idea of treating addiction in this way sounds like an athema to most people today but this method has been adopted in countries like Switzerland and Portugal in recent years and they've seen remarkable success Switzerland for example has literally not had a single heroin overdose since they adopted this practice and the addicts are actually able to function quite well as productive citizens and we have also found that the average cycle of heroin addiction this was the most impressive finding to me the average cycle of heroin addiction only lasts about 10 years in a legal environment with addicts actually voluntarily weaning themselves off the drug despite having no legal incentive to do so and the theory is mostly just that when you look at more modern addiction theories that aren't touted very much in this country still because of the drug war but you have addiction theories coming out of Canada and Britain that are really just overturning the old narrative is a lot of people are really addictive as a to cope with social isolation and emotional trauma and things like that and so as they start to get jobs and families and establish substitutes for the heroin that are much healthier substitutes like families and they get older people actually just start voluntarily reducing their need for heroin now of course this is not true for every heroin addict but it's a really interesting cycle that just flies in the face of the addiction theory that were taught in this country in elementary school so it's worth mentioning so this paints a very stark comparison between the legal and illegal environments for these products but in 1919 the Supreme Court actually took up the question of how to interpret this law and they ruled that prescribing opiates to an addict was not a valid treatment these were justices, these were not doctors so we almost wonder why they're ruling on how doctors are supposed to be conducting their practice in the first place even though this might just be appalling practice to most of us here it should still bother you that judges are telling doctors how to practice medicine this is one of the arguments against socialized medicine we see these problems in 1919 with the war on drugs and many doctors actually disagreed on ethical grounds and they continued prescribing opiates to addicts simply because they thought this was the most prudent way to help their patients and they believed that it was their moral obligation to do so so over the next 25 years more than 25,000 doctors were arrested and prosecuted for treating their patients in the way whether correct or not it was the way that they believed to be best aside from this injustice committed against medical doctors the biggest effect that this had was that it pushed morphine addicts out into the black market and this essentially is what led to the replacement of morphine by heroin because heroin was stronger and therefore a more efficient and inexpensive way to feed their addiction in a criminal environment which demonstrates what is termed the iron law of prohibition and anybody who's read Mark Thornton's Mises Institute's scholar Mark Thornton's book The Economics of Prohibition should be familiar with this in the 80s when he wrote this he first identified what we now call the iron law of prohibition as an economic phenomenon and he explained it basically demonstrating that when you make a substance illegal it will become more potent, so very interesting economic phenomenon that he wrote about so I'm going to end this episode here because we've ran a little longer than I'd like to but make sure you subscribe to this podcast in the next episode I'm going to be talking about the history of cocaine which has just some absolutely interesting episodes in it and especially have some economic overtones because the history of cocaine actually deals with a lot of cronyism the marriage of these big companies with the government so definitely appeals to the economic interests that Mises Institute fans will likely find interesting so don't miss it subscribe to the podcast and thanks for listening