Do As I Say, Not As I Do

PETER: We’re back with BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf.

ED: I’m Ed Ayers.

BRIAN: And I’m Brian Balogh. We’re talking today about how Americans’ ideas about illicit drugs have evolved through time.

PETER: A little over a century ago, in the 1890s, you could buy cocaine for $1.50 in a Sears and Roebuck catalog. Opium was available from most corner pharmacies. There were no federal restrictions, at all, on the sale of either. 0 by 1914, both drugs were illegal. How did things change so fast?

ED: To answer that question, we have to take a detour, oddly enough, to the Philippines. In 1898, the United States emerged victorious from the Spanish American War and took control of the Philippines. For the first time, the US had an overseas empire, and empire in which opium use had been legal.

PETER: Spain hadn’t been the only imperial power that permitted opium use by its subjects. Other colonial governments in Southeast Asia, like the British and the Dutch, also allowed it. In fact, most of them made a tidy profit off the drug trade.

ANNE FOSTER: In the European colonies, most of them, between 15 and 50% of their tax revenues came from opium.

PETER: This is Anne Foster, an historian at Indiana State University.

ANNE FOSTER: So they were deeply embedded in this legal consumption of opium, on which tax revenue rested. So they could not just easily give that up and say, oh, well, this is increasingly seen as an addictive and problematic product. This is the basis of their governments.

ED: The US government stepped into this world and figured, why change the status quo? Opium use didn’t see like that big a deal. Under Spanish law, it had been limited to ethnic Chinese, so relatively few Filipinos used the drug anyway. So the US figured that if legal opium worked for everybody else in the region, it should work for them too.

PETER: The new administration did make a couple of changes. The Spanish had maintained a monopoly on the import of opium and restricted its sale to specific sellers. The US decided to get rid of that system and impose a steep import tax instead. They also rolled back the restrictions banning opium use by indigenous Filipinos. This way, the government could keep the revenues rolling in, but the tax would prevent opium use from getting out of hand within the Filipino population. At least, that was the idea.

ANNE FOSTER: It did not have that effect, actually. Not usually, with addictive substances, it doesn’t always work that way. So what happened was, actually, because they removed all the restrictions on who could purchase opium– and I have to say, statistics, of course, are very shaky at this time period. And especially, the Spanish government did not keep a lot of really strong statistics on this. And the US government did not keep a lot of strong statistics either.

But it it appears, anecdotally, that the usage of opium spread to the entire population. And definitely, the quantity of opium being legally imported was going up. And there was a concern, even under the high tax system, that the quantity of opium being smuggled into the country was also high.

ED: This rise in opium consumption was a major problem for one group in the Philippines, American missionaries. A lot of them were deeply opposed to intoxicants in general. And opium was one of the most visible ones out there.

ANNE FOSTER: They said this is spreading to the indigenous population. They really used that argument of the duty of the United States to care for and sort of that paternalistic, benevolent assimilation policy of the United States, to take care of the Filipinos, that it was our duty.

And so they begin to agitate against this laissez faire approach to the opium imports that the United States had. They wanted to move away from this notion of just having an import tax, saying that that’s not sufficient amount of control and that the United States should indeed ban opium in the Philippines all together.

PETER: So the missionaries got to work. They wrote articles. They lobbied. They networked with colleagues back home. They swamped the White House with telegrams, each one demanding that the US government ban opium in the Philippines.

ANNE FOSTER: In the archives, I saw, just literally, three boxes full of these telegrams that had been sent to Teddy Roosevelt. They were sort of the precursors to the form letters, though. They’re really, always saying exactly the same thing. So I didn’t read all of them. But there’s hundreds if not thousands of these. One historian estimated about 2,000 of them were sent.

And so that really made an impact on Roosevelt. He did not want to be defending the use of opium under an official US government seal, by indigenous Filipinos. And soon after that, indeed, the government changed from the high tax policy to– in 1905 passed the law. And then by 1908, prohibition was complete in the Philippines.

ED: This was a huge victory for the anti-opium crusaders. But it also opened up a new problem. How do you enforce prohibition in a region that is awash with the drug? The Americans realized that unless they wanted every outlaw in Southeast Asia to start smuggling drugs into the Philippines, they needed to also tamp down the supply of opium in nearby countries.

PETER: So the US organized a series of international conferences with its neighbors in the region. And little by little, Americans worked the moral argument. Sure, opium was bringing in critical revenue, revenue these countries needed to run their governments. But it was also addictive, corrupting, a menace to society. How could these government’s claim to be decent and forward looking if they refused to protect their colonial subjects from the drug’s scourge.

ED: There was just one small problem, as the US began moralizing against opium, there was not a single federal law against the drug on the books back home. And that put American negotiators in an awkward position. So just before the final conference opened in 1914, Congress pushed through a face saving measure, sponsored by a congressman named Frances Burton Harrison. It was effectively the first federal narcotics ban in American history.

ANNE FOSTER: The Harrison Act, which is the act which does, in the end, put a prohibition on all forms of narcotics, except under doctor’s prescription, for specific medical purpose, that act is passed, directly, so that the United States will not go to the 1914 opium conference having no law against opium. It’s explicitly done for that purpose saying, we will be embarrassed if we come to this conference.

So when Harrison and the others who introduce this legislation talk about it, they’re actually saying we have been a moral leader in this regard. We have been out front in creating these conferences. We have the most restrictive law in the Philippines. And yet, here at home, w have no restrictions, effectively, at all. We can’t go to this conference with that circumstance. Pass this legislation.

PETER: And Congress did it, on December 14, 1914. For the US, it was the end of several embarrassing years of preaching one thing and practicing another. And it was also the moment when much of the drug trade was forced underground, the beginning of a new era of criminal addicts, increasing smuggling, and the black market.

ED: Helping us tell that story was Anne Foster. She’s an Associate Professor of History at Indiana State University.