Chronicle Book Review: Opium's Orphans

Submitted by Phillip Smith on

Chronicle Book Review: Opium's Orphans: The 200-Year History of the War on Drugs by P.E. Caquet (2022, Reaktion Books, 400 pp., $35.00 HB)

[image:1 align:left]The history of drug prohibition is increasingly well-trodden territory, but with Opium's Orphans, British historian P.E. Caquet brings a fascinating new perspective embedded in a sweeping narrative and fortified with an erudite grasp of the broad global historical context. Although Asian bans on opium pre-dated 19th Century China (the Thai monarchy announced a ban in the 1400s), for Caquet, the critical moment in what became a linear trajectory toward global drug prohibition a century later came when the Qing emperor banned opium in 1813 and imposed severe penalties on anything to do with it, including possessing it. Precisely 100 years later, after two Opium Wars imposed opium on the empire followed by decades of diplomatic wrangling over how to suppress the trade (and for moralizing Americans, how to win favor with China), the 1913 Hague Opium Convention ushered in the modern war on drugs with its targeting not just of opium (and coca) producers or sellers but also of mere users for criminal prosecution. It urged countries to enact such laws, and they did.

What began at the Hague would eventually grow into an international anti-drug bureaucracy, first in the League of Nations and then in United Nations bodies such as the Commission on Narcotic Drugs and the International Narcotics Control Board. But it is a global prohibition regime that has, Caquet writes, straight-jacketed itself with an opium-based perspective that has proven unable or unwilling to recognize the differences among the substances over which it seeks dominion, reflexively resorting to opium and its addiction model. Drugs such as amphetamines, psychedelics, and marijuana don't really fit that model -- they are the orphans of the book's title -- and in a different world would be differently regulated.

But Opium's Orphans isn't just dry diplomatic history. Caquet delves deep into the social, cultural, and political forces driving drug use and drug policies. His description of the spread of opium smoking among Chinese elites before it spread into the masses and became declasse is both finely detailed and strangely evocative of the trajectory of cocaine use in the United States in the 1970s, when it was the stuff of rock musicians and Hollywood stars before going middle class and then spreading among the urban poor in the form of crack.

Along the way, we encounter opium merchants and colonial opium monopolies, crusading missionary moralists, and early Western proponents of recreational drug use, such as Confessions of an English Opium Eater author Thomas De Quincey and the French habitues of mid-19th Century hashish clubs. More contemporaneously, we also meet the men who achieved international notoriety in the trade in prohibited drugs, "drug lords" such as Khun Sa in the Golden Triangle, Pablo Escobar in Colombia and El Chapo Guzman in Mexico, as well as the people whose job it is to hunt them down. Caquet notes that no matter how often a drug lord is removed -- jailed or killed, in most cases -- the impact on the trade is negligible.

For Caquet, drug prohibition as a global phenomenon peaked with the adoption of the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. Coming as it did amidst a post-World War II decline in drug use around the world, the treaty criminalizing coca, cocaine, opium and opioids, and marijuana seemed to ratify a successful global prohibitionist effort. (In the US, in the 1950s, when domestic drug use was at low ebb, Congress passed tough new drug laws.) But before the decade was over, drug prohibition was under flamboyant challenge from the likes of LSD guru Timothy Leary and a horde of hippie pot smokers. The prohibitionist consensus was seeing its first cracks.

And the prohibitionist response was to crack down even harder, which in turn begat its own backlash. Drug use of all sorts began rising around the world in the 1960s and hasn't let up yet, and the increasingly omnivorous drug war machine grew right along with it, as did the wealth and power of the illicit groups that provided the drugs the world demanded. As the negative impacts of the global drug war -- from the current opioid overdose crisis in the US to the prisons filled with drug offenders to the bloody killing fields of Colombia and Mexico -- grew ever more undeniable, the critiques grew ever sharper.

In recent years, the UN anti-drug bureaucrats have been forced to grudgingly accept the notion of harm reduction, although they protest bitterly over such interventions as safe injection sites. For them, harm reduction is less of an erosion of the drug war consensus than all that talk of drug legalization. As Caquet notes, perhaps a tad unfairly, harm reduction doesn't seek to confront drug prohibition head-on, but to mitigate its harms.

The man is a historian, not a policymaker, and his response to questions about what to do now is "I wouldn't start from here." Still, at the end of it all, he has a trio of observations: First, supply reduction ("suppression" is his word) does not work. Sure, you can successfully wipe out poppies in Thailand or Turkey, but they just pop up somewhere else, like the Golden Triangle or Afghanistan. That's the infamous balloon effect. Second, "criminalization of the drug user has been a huge historical blunder." It has no impact on drug use levels, is cruel and inhumane, and it didn't have to be that way. A century ago, countries could have agreed to regulate the drug trade; instead, they tried to eradicate it in an ever-escalating, never-ending crusade. Third, illicit drugs as a group should be seen "as a historical category, not a scientific one." Different substances demand different approaches.

Opium's Orphans is a fascinating, provocative, and nuanced account of the mess we've gotten ourselves into. Now, we continue the work of trying to get out of that mess.

Permission to Reprint: This content is licensed under a modified Creative Commons Attribution license. Content of a purely educational nature in Drug War Chronicle appear courtesy of DRCNet Foundation, unless otherwise noted.

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Egzoset (not verified)

The present government of my canuck province recently passed a law in parliament which denies parental authority pretending this shall fix our Child Protection Services ("DPJ") problems, for example while under the previous political mandate Québec's Liberals (which are the ones who actually performed our initial bigot cannabis legislation at this level) couldn't somehow prevent recruting pims to hire minor prostitutes residing at the DPJ youth center of Laval in 2016 exactly... The CAQ party claims the infantilization of all caring/loving adult parents at priori can save the government's kids from falling this badly, but the past being a hint for the future i feel we can predict that cannabis/adult/minor (up to 21!) triangles will now expose to 14 years imprisonments (thanks to Trudeau's premise). Which to me says a lot about politics based on public "images" and symbols considering the blatant lack of a fair sense of proportionality although cannabis in itself doesn't kill; as for the drama queens "suffering" by fault of cannabis (...), i vaguely recall the L.E.A.P. founder once explaining these individuals represent less than ~2.2 % (in USA) and such figures typically prove being statistically contaminated by external vilifying factors the moment Marie Huanna can be sent to the sacrificial hotel of self-serving politi¢ian$ & friend$, quick to mesmerize unsuspecting masses with victorian-age "science": the new religion. If it were mine to decide i'd start voting this Cardinal Law instead: to NEVER allow immature adults in panick (in public or in front of cameras because of cannabis...) to get anywhere near a legally vulnerable minor, leaving parental authority where it belongs unless a court declared 1 or 2 specific persons "unworthy" of parenting on moral grounds. So please lets also consult anthropologists and philosophers first! Of course it would be easy enough to argue a kid's life may be at risk during legal procedures against unfit parents (or tutors) so now we have amnesic politicians who seem to have forgotten the Laval recruting pims affair, e.g. by assuming all parents are guilty unless proven innocent. Imagine family dynamics at the DPJ after that potentially toxic installment... Egzoset is no expert in anything except perhaps i believe a society of loving/caring adults could be convinced to change the environment so to sanitize it WITHOUT ever risking inter-actions with a minor that are based on the authority of an incompetent adult - and these people exist even at the highest levels if we recall the previous sinister of "healty ways" (also responsible of the DPJ in Laval, by the way!) expressing an irrational fear on TV that her grand-children might end up eating raw (non-decarboxylated) cannabis grown in neighbour gardens, spoken on our national french-speaking network « A Mari Usque Ad Mare »!! So that's how she banned home grows allowed everywhere else in the country except Manitoba, another province with strong french-speaking sacrificed communities, a convenient political coïncidence which Trudeau instrumentalized by failing to properly translate "incidental" for ~2 years once elected, despite the significant legal difference(s) when talking about "possession simple" as defined by our civil legal specificities, in french. The thing with politicians is that they typically revendicate a right to do worse than their predecessors after a while... We've got a "légaleezation" designed by the same type of toxic guys who created a crisis out of a plant that was unknown to honest citizens, half of them dispersed in a humble rural environment with 1 major risk to youth: ALCOHOL, which sort of reminds me of a grand-father who started working at 14 with adult lumbers living in shacks, in the woods... But today TV gets flooded by alcohol glorification even via full dedicated programming that can last between 15 minutes to half an hour easily, while M.A.D.D. ads remind us via public networks of the multiple ways cannabis can "hurt" our most vulnerable members of society. E.G. far from fixing errors of the past our politicians magnified them and now pretend it's safe to rely on total strangers who's "science" is rooted into that of John Warnock (director at the El Abbasyïa "lunatics" assylum of Cairo/Egypt), hoping they shall somehow know better... M'well, try talking with orphans of Duplessis and/or aboriginal childs kidnapped thanks to "expert$"/"spe¢iali$ts", possibly after a vulnerable mother possibly even in pain got discriminated if not sexually sterilized "for their own good" - hence that's hardly "fixed" despite public investigations revealing institutional bigotry still going on. Actually the Joyce Echaquan tragedy was an eloquent and most shocking reminder of this all. And we're supposed to trust the system In the Name Of Children? M'well that's how i concluded to a need for some Cardinal Law concept designed to keep misguided endoctrinated gourous at a safe distance unless absolutely necessary, instead of infantilizing parents at priori. Nobody has perfect solutions but i say if our parliament could work TOGETHER with the adult's complicity then perhaps we can start modifying our youth's environment without a risk to cause permanent prejudice from the trauma actually serving predatory "spe¢iali$ts"/"experts" only more "spe¢iali$ts"/"experts" can talk to, because "science" declared us *ALL* incompetants. Yet i remain convinced if we could just, for example, cause rolling-paper inventories to plumet and disapear from a free market then real advancement would get performed at last as those minors waiting to be saved would eventually live their childhood and adolescence without ever being exposed to chronic self-poisoning by combustion of wood & glue + cannabis again. But to do that honesty and respect are certainly mandatory as i'm never going to support prohibitionnists, meaning we can wait for the last smoker generation to quit or transition in peace. Certainly not shame them with public-paid advertisement. Too bad politicians can't afford to wait for natural demographic attrition, it's still so easy to manipulate the masses these days and make political gains on it!!
Fri, 07/22/2022 - 7:25am Permalink

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