Phobia is no basis for drug policy
By integrating policy with a sense of social reality, Britain's prestigious Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce might prompt a rational assessment of the modern use and abuse of drugs. Anthony King, a professor at Essex University and the author of a recent society report, blames drug policies on 'moral panic rather than a practical desire to reduce harm'.
Now Britain is following other western nations, like Canada and Sweden, in rethinking a century and a half of what Frank Dikottera, a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies, calls a 'narcophobic' drug policy. The report seeks to overturn policies that ignore the social context of drug use. It urges that, instead of seeing drugs as a criminal justice issue, they should be viewed as an issue for harm reduction.
The royal society's call for a 'more elaborate, more subtle, more flexible' drug policy recognises the difference between natural substances - which have always had a place in Asian culture - and modern, synthetic hard drugs that threaten society. It wants a consistent and comprehensive policy, treating illegal drugs alongside alcohol, tobacco, solvents and over-the-counter and prescription drugs.
The failure to develop a socially integrated drug policy goes back to the first war against drugs. China - the original 'patient zero' in a global drug epidemic - was where the belief took root that all drugs are bad and required suppressing. The cure was worse than the disease: the suppression of traditional substances led to the invention of dangerous, purified and synthesised drugs.
Understandably, the opium trade has been called 'the most long-continued and systematic international crime of modern times' perpetuated by the west on vulnerable Asians. But what were its actual health effects? Medical evidence points to only one: mild constipation. Far from suffering detrimental effects, British users enjoyed good health into their eighties. South Asians took opium pills without serious social or physical harm.
A 1930s League of Nations report confirmed Somerset Maugham's discovery of opium dens as clean and tidy places: in one, the only customers were an elderly, rubicund gentleman reading a newspaper, two friends chatting over a pipe and a family with a child.
So, why the narcophobic discourse? As modern medicine developed, the new European medical associations sought moral and legal power by transforming opium from a folk remedy into a controlled substance. At the same time, narcophobia became an effective scapegoat for China's rulers. Opium was both the enemy within - those morally depraved and physically weak addicts - and the enemy outside - the conniving foreign powers bent on enslaving Asians. Smokers held in detoxification centres died within days, after relying for years on opium to combat disease.
The ban encouraged the smuggling of synthetic drugs like morphine and heroin. Moral panic and politics destroyed China's ancient and sophisticated smoking culture.
Europeans introduced tobacco in the 16th century, the Chinese laced it with opium in the 18th century, and dropped the tobacco in the 19th century as the quality of British opium improved. The circle closed in the 20th century with a return to tobacco, in the form of cigarettes.
The society seeks to end the divorce between law and social reality, which produces a modernity that clamps down on innocuous substances while permitting dangerous alternatives, and encourages synthetic substances. 'Patient zero's' example must be studied to produce a truly effective policy to protect public health without counterproductive alarums and excursions.
Deep Kisor Datta-Ray is a London-based historian and commentator on Asian affairs
