A History of Drugs

Drugs and Freedom in the Liberal Age

Toby Seddon

• Publisher: Routledge-Cavendish
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781134019007
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia sociale

Why are some psychoactive substances regarded as 'dangerous drugs', to be controlled by the criminal law within a global prohibition regime, whilst others – from alcohol and tobacco, through to those we call 'medicines' –are seen and regulated very differently? A History of Drugs traces a genealogy of the construction and governance of the 'drug problem' over the past 200 years, calling into question some of the most fundamental ideas in this field: from 'addiction' to the very concept of 'drugs'. At the heart of the book is the claim that it was with the emergence in the late eighteenth century of modern liberal capitalism, with its distinctive emphasis on freedom, that our concerns about the consumption of some of these substances began to grow.And, indeed, notions of freedom, free will and responsibility remain central to the drug question today. Pursuing an innovative inter-disciplinary approach, A History of Drugs provides an informed and insightful account of the origins of contemporary drug policy. It will be essential reading for students and academics working in law, criminology, sociology, social policy, history and political science.

Chapter 1
Introduction Drugs, freedom and liberalism

Drug misuse wastes lives, destroys families and damages communities. (Jacqui Smith, British Home Secretary, foreword to the 2008–18 national drug strategy)

To punish the evil drug pushers who poison our children, I want the tough new powers. (Gordon Brown, British Prime Minister, speech to Labour Party Conference, September 2007)

The scourge of drug abuse spares no country, rich or poor. An estimated three to four per cent of the world’s population regularly consumes illegal substances, with devastating effect. (Kofi Annan, United Nations Secretary-General, message for International Day against Drug Abuse and Drug Trafficking, June 2001)

Introduction

The ‘drug problem’ has become perhaps the archetypal social problem of our time – cross-cutting, globalized and apparently intractable. Its complexity is daunting, requiring engagement with some of the thorniest domestic and international issues, from poverty and crime through to international development and terrorism. Political leaders line up to talk about the ‘scourge’ of drugs against which ‘society must be defended’, from the United Nations, to the European Union, to an array of national presidents and prime ministers. And nor is this just a ‘phantom’ played up by the political classes – there is public concern and anxiety about drugs too.

In response to this, governments by and large do not seem to have risen to the challenge with much obvious success. The ‘war on drugs’, as it is often (tellingly) described, is viewed by many as one of the least effective areas of public policy in recent decades. For some, this is a result of a failure to take tough enough action on either supply or demand. For others, more fundamentally, it is the entire system of international prohibition that is unworkable. Even the most ardent ‘drug warriors’ have some frustrations and dissatisfaction at how things are going. In a speech in late 2007 to an audience of drug law reformers, Antonio Maria Costa, Executive Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, in effect the head of the global prohibition regime, made this rather remarkable statement:

Let me begin with the slogan so many of you have ridiculed: a drug free world. Wait, wait: hold on to the tomatoes – I am not the author of this slogan. While in my lifetime I would certainly like to see a world without drugs, I have never used this slogan. Actually, you will not find it in any of my speeches, nor in any of the official United Nations documents, starting from the most relevant of them: the conventions (of 1961, 1971, and 1988) that created the UN drug control regime, and the General Assembly resolution about drugs. Yes, of course, several years ago (i.e. BC, before Costa) my Office put out posters with that slogan screaming across the page. While I never used this concept, personally I see nothing wrong with it. Is a drugs free world attainable? Probably not. Is it desirable? Most certainly, yes. Therefore I see this slogan as an aspira-tional goal, and not as an operational target – in the same way that we all aspire to eliminate poverty, hunger, illiteracy, diseases, even wars.

(Costa, 2007)

Simply put, even viewed in the most positive light, existing approaches to the problem are not working. This book is an attempt to introduce some fresh thinking. I want to challenge the whole way we think about this area, to question some of the taken-for-granted understandings and so to destabilize the ‘inevitability’ of the present. I will try to show that our contemporary ways of thinking about and dealing with the problem are not natural or self-evident. We can do things differently.

Why, then, write a history if my concern is with the present? Around twenty years ago, two of the most interesting and insightful British commentators on drug issues commented acerbically on the vacuousness of those studies which earnestly declare that psychoactive substances have been consumed by human beings since ‘times immemorial’ (Dorn and South, 1987: 10). They argued for the need to engage in a more direct and practical way with the here and now. I share their sense of urgency and their prioritization of pragmatic action but I think that to do this in a serious and thoroughgoing way we need to look at the matter from both a longer and a broader perspective. I will explain briefly what I mean by this.

The long view: a ‘history of the present’

Taking the long view of an issue or problem has an obvious attraction – uncovering its historical roots or origin may be seen as the only way to recover the pure, primordial truth or essence of the matter. But Foucault (and others) deny such claims and oppose the search for origins:

History also teaches how to laugh at the solemnities of the origin … We tend to think that this is the moment of their greatest perfection, when they emerged dazzling from the hands of a creator or in the shadowless light of a first morning … But historical beginnings are lowly: not in the sense of modest or discreet like the steps of a dove, but derisive and ironic.

(Foucault, 1984: 79)

So why write a history then? Foucault (1977: 31) answers: ‘Simply because I am interested in the past? No, if one means by that writing a history of the past in terms of the present. Yes, if one means writing the history of the present.’ What does this mean though? Much ink has been spilt on debating the relationship between Foucauldian approaches to the past and more conventional historical scholarship. I will not test my readers’ patience so early on by discussing this debate in any great detail. Those who are interested are referred first of all to the collection edited by Goldstein (1994) and then, for the very keen, to Mitchell Dean’s excellent book Critical and Effective Histories (Dean, 1994). With his usual acuity, Garland (2001: 2) points us to the heart of the matter when he observes that the purpose of a ‘history of the present’ is ‘analytical rather than archival’. In other words, it is not concerned with writing a comprehensive account of the past in the way that a historian would. Rather, it seeks to use the investigation of the past to illuminate and problematize the present. However, there is considerable debate here about what exactly such an approach should involve as a ‘mode of reading history’ (Castel, 1994). Voruz (2005) nicely captures one perspective on the matter in her critical review of Garland’s (2001) The Culture of Control where she takes him to task for being insufficiently Foucauldian. For the purposes of my project, I am less concerned than Voruz about ‘fidelity’ to Foucault’s work, although I do not dismiss in any way that her argument may be significant for other projects. At the risk of further annoying Foucauldian scholars for whom this quotation has become something of a cliché, I could pray in aid here his own comments on this matter in an interview in 1974 about his hopes for the publication of Discipline and Punish:

I would like my books to be a kind of tool-box which others can rummage through to find a tool which they can use however they wish in their own area … I would like the little volume that I want to write on disciplinary systems to be useful to an educator, a warden, a magistrate, a conscientious objector. I don’t write for an audience, I write for users, not readers.

(Foucault, 1974)

From my perspective, to write a ‘history of the present’ involves starting with the way the question or problem is formulated today and establishing its genealogy (Castel, 1994: 238) or, in more straightforward terms, where it has come from. A genealogy centres on the examination of two things: initial emergence and subsequent descent (Foucault, 1984: 80–86). In other words it involves tracing the complex and multiple lines of development from first emergence to the present, with the critical purpose of rethinking the present. The distinction between this approach and the more conventional ‘search for origins’ may seem subtle but it is important. In a nutshell, the latter focuses almost entirely on initial emergence and assumes that this is the best place to uncover the real ‘truth’ of the matter. In contrast, genealogy examines both emergence and descent and assumes that the place to look is in the complex unfolding over time of the elements which make up the present. Furthermore, rather than clinging to the perhaps rather dubious idea that it is possible to find the absolute ‘truth’ about things of this kind, it is more concerned with understanding the changing ‘regime of truth’ (Foucault, 1980a). In other words, how does it become possible to say what is ‘true’ and what is ‘false’ about a given matter in any given historical time and place? How could it be, for example, that habitual or frequent use of opiates was considered as a ‘bad habit’ or vice in 1809 but as the ‘disease’ of addiction in 1909 and then as something else again in 2009? Does this simply show scientific progress over time in our understanding of drug-taking? Or does it reflect instead that there have been broader paradigm shifts in the past 200 years in how we view and govern social and economic life (what Foucault calls ‘governmental rationalities’)? The book is premised on the idea that it is these changing paradigms of governance that provide a key to understanding some of the otherwise puzzling directions taken in this area.

In an important historical sense, however, to talk in this way about the ‘drug problem’ prior to the twentieth century is misleading. As the historian Roy Porter (1996: 3) observed:

If you’d talked about the ‘drugs problem’ two hundred years ago, no one would have known what you meant. There was no notion then of ‘drugs’, in the sense of a small group of substances scientifically believed to be harmful because addictive or personality destroying, the availability of which is restricted by law. The term ‘drugs’ as a shorthand for a bunch of assorted narcotics is in fact a twentieth-century coinage: if you’d mentioned ‘drugs’ to anyone in George III’s time or in the Victorian era, they’d have thought you were referring to the remedies physicians prescribed and apothecaries made up.

An important part, therefore, of what the ‘long view’ reveals to us is that the very ideas of ‘drugs’ and of the ‘drug problem’, in the sense that we understand them today, are relatively recent creations. As Hammersley (2008: 16–42) notes, even today our usages of the term ‘drug’ are less than stable and unambiguous and there is considerable room for imprecision and lack of clarity. I will say a little more here about this definitional issue.

As Ruggiero (1999: 123) observes, ‘there are no drugs in nature … “drug”is not a descriptive but an evaluative concept’. In its contemporary usage, it refers most often to two categories: medicinal preparations (whether used by medical professionals or self-administered) and substances taken (at least initially) for the purpose of pleasure. Both categories are largely regulated by law, the second typically by the criminal law. As we will see, some substances have moved between these two categories over time. For example, heroin was initially in the first (it was marketed in 1898 as a ‘sedative for coughs’) but is now in the second. Even here the picture is, however, a little ambiguous. Going by its chemical name of diamorphine, heroin at the same time is still widely used today in British medical practice, usually as a painkiller (see Gossop et al., 2005). The term ‘psychoactive substances’ is sometimes used as an all-encompassing category, seeking to sweep up not only the ‘illegal drugs’ like heroin and cannabis but also their ‘legal’ counterparts like alcohol and tobacco (and I am aware, of course, that what falls under the ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ banners is different in some countries). This is more useful as a category in certain respects. But as Sherratt (1995: 2) argues, it perhaps fails to capture the sheer breadth of the ‘range of preparations with psychoactive properties that form part of everyday consumption: either as food, or drink… or as other “habits”’. The simple categories of ‘food’, ‘medicine’ and ‘mind-altering drug’ may obscure more than they illuminate (see also Schivelbusch, 1992). For the purposes of my project in this book, the central point is that ‘drugs’ is an ‘invented’ governmental category, in the sense of one actively constructed by human beings for specific governmental purposes, which has arisen relatively recently in the context of the emergence of modern industrial capitalism.

The broad view: a genealogy of regulation

In an extremely insightful review article, John Braithwaite (2003) sets out a rather different criticism of Garland’s use of Foucault in The Culture of Control. He suggests that one central difficulty with the ‘history of the present’ approach is that it can tend towards a myopic or truncated view of the issue being investigated. He observes how Garland develops his account of contemporary penal strategies by tracing their genealogy primarily through criminal justice lines of development. Yet, he argues, equally significant are some of the business regulatory branches. Garland’s genealogy is thus one in which some of the most important branches are sawn off. He suggests that what is needed is a more integrated analysis of regulation (2003: 24).

Helpfully for my purposes here, he takes drug policy as one example of how fruitful this broader view could potentially be. He refers to a chapter in his earlier joint book with Peter Drahos, Global Business Regulation (Braithwaite and Drahos, 2000), which offers what is in my view a highly original but rather overlooked analytical perspective on the drug issue. Braithwaite and

Drahos (2000: 360–98) argue that over time, five separate regulatory regimes have been created for different types of drug:

• a (globalized) illicit drugs regime;
• a (globalizing) prescription drugs regime;
• national non-prescription (‘over-the-counter’) drugs regimes; national alcohol regimes;
• linational alcohol regimes;
• national tobacco regimes.

They argue that no adequate consideration of the illicit drugs regulatory regime can proceed without understanding and contextualizing it as simply one regulatory branch within a much broader domain of drug or pharmaceutical regulation. The explanatory challenge is therefore to understand how these five sub-divisions came into being and how they have developed since then. This involves an ‘integrated explanation of both illicit and licit drug regulation’ (Braithwaite, 2003: 17). To put it another way, the task is to explore how the term ‘drugs’ came to take on its contemporary sense, the ‘twentieth-century coinage’ to which Porter refers.

An integrated account of these five regulatory regimes would be an extremely complex and difficult undertaking and is certainly beyond my capabilities. My focus in this book is more modest, as I am not attempting such a comprehensive and all-encompassing account. Rather, my objective is to trace out a genealogy of how the ‘drug problem’ is defined, understood and responded to today. Clearly, as Braithwaite’s approach implies, this will require reference throughout to this broader context of alcohol, tobacco and other drugs (both prescribed and ‘over-the-counter’) but they are not the direct object of my study.

This concept of regulation, as used by Braithwaite and others, has a distinctive meaning that is worth clarifying here. There is much definitional wrangling amongst regulatory scholars (see Black, 2002) but for my purposes I adopt a broad definition of regulation as attempts to ‘control, direct or influence behaviour and the flow of events’ (Crawford, 2006: 452) in desired directions. There is considerable overlap here between this definition and the Foucauldian concept of ‘government’ as the ‘conduct of conduct’ (Foucault, 1991a). For example, Rose (1999: 3) defines government as ‘all endeavours to shape, guide, direct the conduct of others … [and] the ways in which one might be urged and educated … to govern oneself’. Despite their theoretical differences, I agree with Vincent-Jones (2002) that there is merit and value in drawing on both these perspectives and that will be my approach throughout this book. In this, I follow, in particular, in the footsteps of Clifford Shearing who has demonstrated in perhaps the most sustained and imaginative way the fruitfulness of marrying new regulatory scholarship with Foucauldian ideas of governmentality (e.g. Shearing, 2001; Wood and Shearing, 2007).

At this point, some readers may be unconvinced of the value of these notions of ‘regulation’ and ‘government’. Surely definitions of such a broad kind cannot possibly be of much analytical use? In my view, it is precisely its breadth of scope that makes regulation such a powerful intellectual tool. It provides a conceptual framework for viewing activity in diverse fields and at different levels which is not constrained by existing boundaries of knowledge or action. For a cross-cutting issue like drugs, regulation is a particularly appropriate tool as it offers an integrative perspective which can generate new ideas and insights that synthesize and sweep across different intellectual disciplines and policy domains. John Braithwaite has argued that not only are there ‘few projects more central to the social sciences than the study of regulation’ (Braithwaite and Drahos, 2000: 10) but, further, that regulatory scholarship is in the process of leading a fundamental transformation of the social sciences (Braithwaite, 2000). Accordingly, throughout this book I will be drawing on a wide of range of disciplines and literatures, from history, philosophy and sociology right through to criminology, law and politics.

Internationalism and globalization

Taking a long and broad view in the way described above opens up a further important question about the scope of this book. One of the striking features of the history of drug control is its international nature and indeed, as Berridge (2001) suggests, in certain respects this dimension is more significant than the domestic side. The current drug prohibition regime, for example, is enshrined in United Nations Conventions and its origins can be traced back to an international conference on the opium trade held in Shanghai in 1909. Going back even earlier, the two Anglo-Chinese OpiumWars in the middle of the nineteenth century are an important part of the story. Similarly, the drug situation today cannot be fully understood without setting it in the context of the globalizing processes of the past thirty or forty years (see Seddon, 2008a). Despite this, my primary focus in this book will be on the British situation. This is partly a pragmatic choice to make the project a manageable one within a single volume. It also allows for an analysis which can provide the empirical specificity and detail required for the ‘gray, meticulous and patiently documentary’ (Foucault, 1984: 76) genealogical method. It is in this sense what Garland (2001: vii) calls a ‘focused case study’ rather than a generalized account. Nevertheless, the vital international and global backdrop will be referred to throughout the book.

Although this broader international backdrop will be significant, it is important to clarify that the book is not attempting a comparative inquiry in which the British approach is measured up against how things are done in other countries. Rather, it seeks to examine the British experience by understanding how it has been shaped partly by international and globaliz-ing forces and processes. It engages, in other words, in the enterprise of

attempting to trace the ‘dialectic between national particularity and inter- or trans- or supra-national mobilities’ (Newburn and Sparks, 2004: 1) which has become an increasingly pressing task right across the social sciences and in diverse fields of study. This, in turn, requires some consideration of the idea of globalization. Despite its near-ubiquity in both academic and public discourse, conceptual clarity...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• A History of Drugs
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Introduction Drugs, freedom and liberalism
• Chapter 2: A conceptual map Freedom, the ‘will’ and addiction
• Chapter 3: Opium, regulation and classical liberalism: The Pharmacy Act 1868
• Chapter 4: Drugs, prohibition and welfarism: The Dangerous Drugs Act 1920
• Chapter 5: Drugs, risk and neo-liberalism: The Drugs Act 2005
• Chapter 6: Drugs as a regulation and governance problem
• Chapter 7: Conclusion Drugs and freedom in the liberal age
• Appendix 1: Pharmacy Act 1868 (selected extracts)
• Appendix 2: Dangerous Drugs Act 1920 (selected extracts)
• Appendix 3: Drugs Act 2005 (selected extracts)
• References