 Welcome to the inaugural episode of the Mises Institute podcast, Historical Controversies. We stole this title from the book Economic Controversies, which is a collection of Murray Rothbard's economic essays, and we thought the title was so great that we needed to use it again. But this podcast will be devoted to looking at history from the perspective of libertarianism and Austrian economics. My name is Chris Calton, and I'll be hosting this podcast. So we decided to start off with a topic near and dear to the heart of every libertarian, the war on drugs, which will be devoting a handful of episodes to here in order to kick off this podcast because the drug war is a lot of terrible things, but it's never boring. So in this episode, we're going to look at the origins of drug prohibition and how the major three drugs, cocaine, opium, and marijuana gained a presence in the United States and then became stigmatized enough to lead to their criminalizations. So where did the stigma against these drugs come from? For most of the 19th century, there was very little stigma against drugs other than the temperance movement against alcohol, which was really the big one that obviously led to prohibition in the 1920s. And the big three, the cannabis, cocaine, and opium, which is the basis for heroin and morphine and was also smoked very commonly back then in its opium form, they were just coming into use in the mid-19th century. So morphine and cocaine could be purchased in the Sears catalog, for instance, just to give you an idea of how common these drugs were, not common, but accessible these drugs were at the time. And cannabis was added to the U.S. Pharmacopia in 1850, and it had already been added to various British Pharmacopias even before that. In fact, when marijuana was made illegal in 1937, it was still in the Pharmacopia and stayed there until the early 1904. I don't remember the exact year they took it out, I think it was like 1942. So it was still in the Pharmacopia for a few years after its criminalizations. So all three of these drugs were used as painkillers at a time when available and effective painkillers were really few and far between. So starting with cannabis, for instance, this was just an absolutely wonderful drug for the poor when they couldn't afford doctors' fees because cannabis was so inexpensive and you could buy it just at your basic pharmacy or in just about any grocery store at the time. So it's like I could go to Kroger and purchase some cannabis extract or something else that would help just treat basic pain very, very inexpensively. And it was also so widely useful that some doctors just began all treatments with a small dose of cannabis. One British physician, a Sir John Russell Reynolds, used cannabis on patients through most of his professional career and he highly recommended beginning any medical treatment with a small dose of cannabis and to gradually increase the dose over the course of a few days. So he wrote, just to give you an example here, he wrote, with these precautions, I have never met with any toxic effects and have rarely failed to find after a comparatively short time either the value or the uselessness of the drug. So he's saying that we might as well just start by giving all of our patients a little bit of cannabis and we're either going to find out that at worst it's useless and at best it's helpful but that there were no real negative side effects that he noticed. So he was a big advocate of cannabis use in medicine. Now cocaine had two popular forms. It had its patent preparations and its ethical preparations. So the patent preparations were the stimulating tonics. This would be like Coca-Cola, we all know that Coca-Cola had cocaine in it when it was first created. Another really common one at the time, the most popular one in fact at the time was not Coca-Cola. It was a French Coca-wine produced by a man named Mariani, so it was Mariani's Coca-wine and this wine was actually endorsed by Pope Leo XIII and Pope Pius X. In fact the first known purchase of Coca-wine in the United States was made by Abraham Lincoln in 1860 just a month before he was elected president. He purchased Mariani's Coca-wine. Ulysses S. Grant, in fact when he was writing his memoirs, Mark Twain urged Ulysses S. Grant to write his memoirs of the Civil War and while he was doing this he was suffering from throat cancer and so they sought the help of Mariani who encouraged him to drink his Coca-wine and Ulysses S. Grant actually credited the use of the Coca-wine as helping him get through the memoirs while he was suffering from cancer. The other form of cocaine at this time period were ethical preparations produced by pharmaceutical companies and they were sold as treatments for just any number of things. The toothache drops were some of the most common ones, they were used to treat hemorrhoids, dyspepsia, weight loss, just a whole host of problems that cocaine was being used to treat. And then of course the other one would be morphine which is the refined form of opium, the least potent refined form of opium I should say heroin didn't come about until 1898 and it's just a more refined form of opium so morphine is actually considered Class 1 heroin and then there's Class 2, Class 3 and Class 4 heroin and Class 4 heroin is the purest form and that's actually usually what we find in the black market today. But morphine really at the time it was a miracle drug of the 19th century and most of this was because of the Civil War so it was just substantially more effective as a painkiller than cannabis and cocaine and it was used heavily to treat the injured soldiers on both the Union and Confederate sides. So opium was grown in many states both in the Union and the Confederacy and the largest opium producing states of course were in the South they were Virginia, Tennessee, South Carolina and Georgia just produced a ton of opium at this time. Opium itself in its unrefined form was used to treat dysentery which was quite common among Civil War soldiers but it was refined into morphine to treat pain so this was the first time that we had a war where we actually had something that could take the edge off of a gunshot wound or amputation. You know keep in mind this is when people are they get shot in the leg and they have to get an on-site amputation with a little like hacksaw essentially of their leg and it's an incredibly painful thing so having morphine for these people it's like a it was like a godsend to them at the time right I mean even with morphine that's still very painful but it was far more tolerable with this drug so it was used very heavily and it hardly needs to be explained why opium was so important in the 19th century. So these are the these are the good effects in the 19th century that made these drugs popular in the first place but the stigma still came about in the late 19th century for most of these drugs and you gotta wonder where did this come from well of course with opium it's the easiest to identify because it was really a double-edged sword in the Civil War. It was an important painkiller but it was also addictive we know that opium was addictive obviously that's not not questioned today and because morphine was new to the world people were taking it in very high doses because they weren't aware of these addictive properties at first so they were partly taking it in high doses because you just had such a need for it with the Civil War but it you also didn't know of the negative side effects and they didn't know of the addictive properties at the time so they were overusing it. So morphine addiction was so common among soldiers that it became known as soldiers disease so soldiers disease was opium addiction following the Civil War and a similar phenomenon actually took place in Europe so British soldiers had soldiers disease from the Crimean War and both the French and Prussian soldiers developed opiate addictions in the Franco-Prussian War so it was common in Europe common in the United States. So after the Civil War more than 63,000 soldiers continued to take opium for gastric upsets and many of them continued to use morphine which was injected of course and so Horace Day published a book called The Opium Habit in 1868 that noted the effect the war had on creating addicts. He wrote the events of the last few years being the Civil War have unquestionably added greatly to the number of addicts maimed and shattered survivors from a hundred battlefields diseased and disabled soldiers released from hostile prisons anguished and hopeless wives and mothers made so by the slaughter of those who were dearest to them have found many of them temporary relief from their suffering in opium so it's interesting to note here that he acknowledges not just the opium addiction among the injured soldiers but also people who were dealing with grief caused by the war more than a century after Horace Day wrote this there was a Holocaust survivor who is a physician I believe he's still alive if not he died very recently he was survived the Holocaust when he was just an infant he didn't remember it but his his mother helped smuggle him out of of Germany at the time when he was a baby his name's Gabor Matei I think I'm pronouncing that right and he's a physician working out of Vancouver who works with heroin addicts there and he started doing addiction studies there and identified the emotional trauma is one of the most common roots of heroin addiction so when the opium habit was published and he says that it's many of these wives and mothers made so by this made opium addicts by the slaughter of those who were dearest to them they're really identifying something that that still causes a lot of or at least according to Gabor Matei's research causing a lot of heroin addiction in people today which is just this deep emotional trauma it wasn't just used to treat physical pain even back then and it's also important to note that shortly prior to the Civil War in 1853 Dr. Alexander Wood perfected the hypodermic syringe so you had syringes for a few centuries before this but he's the one that really made it widely usable in a in a good medical setting in the 1850s and injecting a drug is by far the most potent way of consuming it so just when you're when you're looking at drugs for the most part with some exceptions ingesting it orally is the least potent way of taking it then smoking then snorting and then injecting each become increasingly more potent so by perfecting the syringe Alexander Wood was making opium ingestion substantially more potent it's essentially the equivalent to finding a new way of refining it in higher purities because it's so much stronger that way marijuana by the way would be the exception to that and I'll get to that a little bit later in the episode but when you eat marijuana it actually is stronger than when you smoke it but it's it's the exception to the rule everything else pretty much follows the the rule of thumb but injecting is always the strongest if that's possible so he effectively made opium more powerful so in an 1870 another british physician started warning people about the dangers of ejecting morphine and i'm going to write an excerpt of an article that he wrote he said injected morphia seemed so different to swallow swallowed morphia no one had any experience of ill effects from it and we all had the daily experience of it as a means of peace and comfort while pain on the other hand was certainly the forerunner of wretchedness and exhaustion gradually however the convictions began to force itself upon my notice that injections of morphia though free from the ordinary evils of opium eating which was actually causing some of that gastric upsets that they were trying to to treat at the time he said they might nevertheless create the same artificial want and gain credit for assuaging a restlessness and depression of which it was itself the cause in this case he's talking about the withdrawal symptoms so he goes on to say if this be so we are incurring a grave risk in bidding people to inject whenever they need it and in telling them that the morphia can have no ill effects upon them so long as it brings with it tranquility and well being so he's noticing one that the injecting injecting the morphium actually helped with some of the stomach problems that eating opium was causing which was the gastric issues so these guys were eating opium it was causing gastric upsets and then to treat the the pain of the gastric upsets they just continued to eat more uh to eat opium excuse me once they started injecting morphine it avoided the stomach problems caused by eating opium but then of course you had the addiction so if you stopped using it you would get these flu like symptoms which are what heroin withdraws are essentially the same symptoms you get with the flu you get that and so they treat those withdrawal symptoms by injecting more morphine which is of course is just feeding the addiction and so he was noticing this in 1870 so here we see one of the earliest acknowledgments of the addictive qualities of opium and he was correct in noting that people were using it to essentially treat the withdrawal symptoms caused by the addiction itself so when heroin was developed in 1898 by a german chemist working for Bayer this is the same Bayer that you would buy you know a seat of metaphine from or something like that they they came up with heroin in the 1898 it was advertised as a non-addictive miracle drug that made you feel heroic so the name heroin sounds like hero uh intentionally it was uh the german word is like heroish or i i don't know how to pronounce it uh but that's because it made you feel heroic they named it heroin uh to describe that and it was so it was very heavily marketed at the time and it was even marketed and sold as a cure for morphine addiction and the reason that they thought it did that of course was the same thing as uh the use of morphine to treat the withdrawal symptoms it made you feel better when you were dealing with morphine withdrawals because of course it fed the addiction because it was just a more powerful more refined form of opium than morphine was so by 1900 reports were being published about the dangers and addictiveness of heroin in 1906 when the council of pharmacy and chemistry of the american medical association added heroin to their annual publication which was called new and non-official remedies they added the warning that the habit is readily forming and leads to the most deplorable results so we can see obviously how quickly and why heroin and opiates in general started becoming stigmatized but with the stigma in place the medical use of opiates started to decline by 1910 so heroin wasn't criminalized until 1914 but it was already on the decline without the government having to regulate it so regardless with public sentiment moving against opiates there was very little resistance to the legislation regulated regulating it in 1914 but it doesn't really look like the legislation was necessary because the physicians and the medical association were already moving in that direction voluntarily so in addition to the fear of addiction that was starting to surface we'll also see and i'm going to talk about this in another episode uh really not not so much in this one but we'll also see that racism against the chinese also played a very significant role in the criminalization of opium uh and but i'm going to devote an episode on heroin specifically and i want to talk about that there because it's it's a pretty big aspect of the criminalization of opium at the time so cocaine was very similar much of the scare of cocaine came from the stigma against opium so that was related actually both to cocaine and cannabis most cocaine users were either consuming it in a drink which is much more comparable to caffeine than snorted cocaine because as i said before when you ingest it orally it's it's just going to be a lot more innocuous and the doses in the drinks were usually very mild so it was almost like drinking a cocaine or i'm sorry a caffeine drink than it was like snorting cocaine that we think about today so doctors and dentists were also a major source of cocaine abuse due to its use as an anesthetic the use i mentioned earlier about patent preparations was the first popular version of cocaine but it truly exploded in popularity in the 1880s after an austrian doctor named carl kohler used cocaine to numb the surface of an eye there was an american ophthalmologist in vienna at the time who observed this and he wrote a letter about kohler's use of cocaine as a local anesthetic to the new york publication medical record that's what it was called ophthalmologists across the country started adopting cocaine as an anesthetic very rapidly and before long other doctors started using it as a local anesthetic as well so most notably this would be dentists who still use a synthetic version of this novocaine which we're all pretty much familiar with today it wasn't long before physicians started noticing some negative side effects of using cocaine as a local anesthetic though the 1880s and 1890s saw great interest in the danger of cocaine poisoning they were worried about the toxicity of cocaine and this was despite the fact that cocaine related deaths were essentially non-existent i think there might have been a couple but they pretty much didn't exist but the therapeutic gazette gave an early list of symptoms as general intoxication nausea and vomiting lasting an entire day stumbling gay syncope pallor and sweating loss of consciousness and convulsions as just a full list of the dangers of using cocaine in their their publication so it appears that the part of the problem arose from the fact that physicians and patients did not have a clear idea of the time of the appropriate dose to use so one texas surgeon doctor ds booth gave cocaine to a patient with the instructions to inject half of the solution but the patient and i'm quoting booth's testimony here the patient led by the general belief that if a little does good the more will do better injected the entire solution so they're they're overusing it just like they overused opium so the negative aspects of cocaine use in medicine quickly revealed themselves and physicians adjusted accordingly all without government regulations governing them many physicians stopped using cocaine altogether and at least one pharmaceutical company owned by edward r squib who is a member of the american medical association and the american pharmaceutical association he stopped selling cocaine based products just entirely other physicians started moderating the use of cocaine in their medical practices more consciously trying to retain the beneficial aspects of it while reducing the negative side effects but there were rare cocaine maniacs as they were called and they did inject the drug recreationally which is again a much more potent way to consume it and the ejection made it recognizably similar to morphine in the minds of the masses because all you're seeing is the injection itself of course so if anybody is a fan of the sherlock holmes stories you may already be familiar with his depiction as a cocaine addict who injected both cocaine and morphine and the sign of four published in 1890 the opening scene depicts this i'm going to read a paragraph from it because it's interesting uh watson is narrating he says sherlock holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case with his long white nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle and rolled back his left shirt cuff for some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearms and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture marks finally he thrust the sharp point home pressed down the tiny piston and sank back into the velvet lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction so obviously this is kind of a negative depiction and in this case he was injecting cocaine he was injecting a seven percent solution of cocaine but when watson asks about it he admits that he alternates between cocaine and morphine and that he uses the drugs when he's bored from not having a case to solve so these were the images of cocaine use that people became familiar with through popular culture even though cocaine use in this form was was relatively uncommon at the time and like harrow and the social stigma that was generated against cocaine was enough to bring about a decline in usage without government intervention coca-cola for example they removed cocaine from their drink in 1903 uh which was three years before the pure food and drug act was passed which was the first federal law regulating cocaine uh cannabis i think the history of cannabis in the stigma against it is far more interesting and more complicated and it actually became stigmatized even before opium and cocaine but it was not used widely enough to garner a significant amount of attention at the time so in the mid 19th century cannabis use was popular among certain writers who consumed it as hashish which is a type of cannabis paste that you ate by the spoonful in paris there was actually a club called the hashish eaters club that existed for most of the 1840s i think it was 1844 to 1849 if i remember and it was just a bunch of writers and artists who got together in a room and would take a a spoonful of hashish and then he'll hallucinate off of it so it was a recreational activity didn't last very long though and unlike other drugs eating cannabis actually makes it more potent because your liver metabolizes the thc into another compound that is more effective in crossing the blood-brain barrier so the high is about four times as potent than it is when it's inhaled the first american writer to document his experience with cannabis was bayard taylor who tried it while he was in egypt and his experience his first experience was wonderful he wrote in his 1854 publication a journey to central africa i'm going to read an excerpt here he says the sensation it then produced were those physically of exquisite lightness and airiness mentally of a wonderful keen perception of the ludicrous in the most simple and familiar objects i noted with careful attention the finest sensations would spread throughout the whole tissue of my nervous fibers each thrill helping to divest my frame of its earthly and material nature till my substance appeared to be no grosser than the vapors of the atmosphere and while sitting in the calm of the egyptian twilight i expected to be lifted up and carried away by the first breeze that should ruffle the nile so he really enjoyed it his first time around and it seems similar to any other descriptions you hear of cannabis i'm sure nobody who's listening to this podcast has ever used illegal substances but if you read about it very similar sensation that people have his second dose of hashish though was substantially more powerful and his experience was much less positive he wrote about this in his 1855 work the land of the seracans or pictures of palestine asia minors sicily in spain a good 19th century overly long title and he said that he felt like he had been plunged into the fiercest hell and he described his hallucination in which his tears turned into loaves of bread and then he was burning up from the heat and water could not quench his thirst and when he tried to cry out for help blood poured out of his mouth and ears it was just a horrifying horrifying experience for him and he genuinely believed that he was lucky to have survived the incident at all and he warned people who might experience with hashish to be careful to avoid overdose so he believed that you could overdose on cannabis which is effectively impossible we know that today but he didn't know that at the time of course and he thought that that overdose could kill you he thought that he narrowly escaped death by this overdose on cannabis so this established early on this idea that cannabis could be very dangerous but it was mostly just based on this ignorance and anecdotal experience there was another writer named Fitzhugh Ludlow who discovered medical hashish in the united states at around the same time and like taylor Ludlow had a horrifying experience during his first use of hashish but when he came down from the high even though it was terrifying to him he was fascinated by the experience so his curiosity drove him to try it again and his second attempt was much more pleasant he wrote that his experience ended in and i'm quoting here again a delirium which unlike all that had preceded it was one of an alter unutterable calm excuse me clarifying of all thought and the flowing in of the richest influences from the world around me without the toil of selecting them i looked at the stars and felt kindred with them i spoke to them and they answered me i dwelt in an inner communication with heaven while he was attending the college of new jersey which is now princeton he continued to experiment with higher doses of hashish but after another bad experience he eventually swore off the drug entirely but it wasn't long before he broke that vow and when he started using again he convinced himself that he was addicted so with taylor we established the misconception that you can overdose and die from cannabis and with Ludlow we established the belief that it can be addictive and a lot of this later on would also be related to the addictive qualities of opium and cocaine or we're just kind of assuming by nature that all these things are addictive even though there wasn't real scientific research that demonstrated such so he believed that he was addicted um and it probably was true in a sense because we do know of psychological addictions like a gambling addiction so there are those elements to it we just know that marijuana is not chemically addictive but he he probably did have what we would recognize as a psychological addiction so so we don't want to dismiss it too out of hand so in 1856 Ludlow found an article that taylor had written for Putnam's monthly magazine entitled the hashish eater which taylor had published anonymously Ludlow wrote to the magazine and got the name of the author and he started a correspondence with taylor and Ludlow asked taylor for advice on breaking his habit and they developed a friendship and with taylor's encouragement Ludlow wrote his own article for the same magazine entitled the apocalypse of hashish and in the next year in 18 so that article was written in 1856 the same the same year not not very far after taylor had written his article in fact so in 1857 Ludlow wrote his memoirs entitled the hashish eater being passages from the life of a pythagorean so Ludlow was convinced that men of genius such as pythagoras were drawn to hashish and in his memoirs Ludlow describes hashish in almost religious terms they remind me more of uh uh timothy leary's description of lsd a century later when he was proselytizing lsd usage after being fired from harvard than the typical marijuana experience so Ludlow claimed for example that cannabis use proved the existence of the soul so it's a very very religious tone almost through this just here's why all these geniuses are drawn to it and i'm drawn to it too because i'm kind of a genius and in Ludlow's view so he kind of saw himself along the same lines as as pythagoras and in these memoirs and the book was popular enough to make Ludlow a very famous writer so this started his is fame and in 1868 after opium had exploded in usage Ludlow wrote another article called the opium habit and in this article he claimed that cannabis extract was useful for mitigating the withdrawal symptoms of opium addiction and there's actually a great deal of evidence today to corroborate this so he's probably right about that so even though taylor and Ludlow pinned early writings warning of the dangers they believed were associated with marijuana the popular attention it received was for Ludlow's glorification of it after Ludlow's success cannabis showed up more often in popular literature and it often was portrayed positively however there were some publications that presented a darker narrative of cannabis to try to make quick sells essentially so one example i've got two examples here one example was in 1876 there was a tabloid journal that printed a what i think is an apocryphal report entitled secret dissipation of new york bell's interior of a hashish hell on fifth avenue so it has this very ominous tone this title that wants to grip people in this horror story and the article describes five upper class women passed out in a sleazy hashish house so it's trying to oh look these rich white women were just they started using hashish and look how it upset their dignity and you know it's this horrifying horrifying element and there was a similar article that was titled a hashish house in new york city the curious adventure of an individual who indulged in a few pipe fools of the narcotic hemp which was written anonymously by a doctor named hh kane and this told the story of wealthy individuals of both sexes smoking cannabis in oriental outfits and like oriental masks and they were obviously playing on the anti-chinese sentiments that i'm going to talk more about in the heroin episodes because these kinds of scenes actually generally took place in opium dens there was a lot of fiction or exaggeration about the the opium dens in the united states that was used to try to drum up anti-chinese hostility in uh in the during the gilded age in the united states so these stigmas were unique to the us at the time and britain cannabis was not really used recreationally very often it was much more pervasive just as a medicinal product but in the 1890s and into the 1900s recreational hashish users did pop up and it became most common among people who were interested in the occult so among the occult interested hash users uh was a luster crowley who eventually wrote a two-part article and the first part was titled a pharmaceutical study of cannabis sativa the herb dangerous so again we have this very gripping ominous title uh even though he viewed it positively but he you know i guess it was part of this occult mentality and this was published in 1906 and other occult writers followed and they focused their message of hashish being psychologically addictive or the phrase psychical invasion so they're seeing it in in their view as uh occult members essentially as as this being a positive thing but of course it was terrifying to to people that weren't familiar with it and it was being associated with these seedy characters who were interested in the dark arts and all this uh very very demagogic stuff that helped drum up um sentiment against cannabis and even before this as early as the 1870s because of the opium wars between britain and china the british government started questioning whether or not indian hemp caused insanity and in 1871 they officially investigated indian cannabis use and concluded that there were no distinguishable consequences of cannabis use so all the official studies and we'll see this in the marijuana episode all the official studies that pretty much ever been published even into the 20th century and the present pretty much say that it's a harmless substance and it shouldn't be criminalized and it's always it always just goes ignored it's a common pattern we're going to see over and over again throughout the history of marijuana they they commissioned another study in 1877 and came to similar conclusions but the administrators in the british colony of india continued to push against cannabis because they believed it made their sepoys lazy a sepoy being the indian employees of the british who were for all intents and purposes they were slaves that's how a lot of historians will describe them they were paid for their work but they were kind of coerced that you really have a whole lot of option in this so like don't don't think of them as free market employees they were they were exploited in the libertarian sense and and the british thought that they were lazy because they were using cannabis and so this led to a very famous commission called the indian hemp drugs commission of 1893 which questioned more than a thousand witnesses about the effects and dangers of cannabis this was doctors they questioned native farmers they even questioned christian missionaries in india about this so this commission yielded a 3500 page report and the report came to three conclusions one cannabis use was actually a lot more widespread than they previously thought two there was no evidence at all of it being dangerous or of it causing crime or insanity as had been claimed and three banning cannabis in india would lead to civil unrest especially because cannabis was used in some religious traditions at the time but the stigma was established the push against it even though the all three of these commissions pretty much concluded that cannabis use was very innocuous the stigma had already been generated and with the association of the cd occult groups the public sentiment was turning against cannabis especially in recreational use in britain and the us by the early 20th century and we'll we'll go into some more of the you know the racist elements that that went into criminalizing these drugs and the the other episodes devoted to cannabis and cocaine and opium there was racist elements and there were also political motivations so this isn't the only thing but it is the environment that made it very easy to pass through criminalization laws with very little resistance so we will look at that in future episodes we're going to look at the four drugs individually marijuana cocaine heroin and lsd also all just deserve their individual episodes lsd mostly not because it's super important but because it's just a very interesting very amusing history so you're really going to enjoy that episode and we're also going to look at the political aspect of the war on drugs for the 20th century so this will end the first episode of the mises podcast historical controversies i hope you like it we hope to hear some feedback and do subscribe to this podcast so you can hear the rest of the episodes on the war on drugs and the other topics that we will be coming after this thanks for listening for more content like this visit mesis.org