The “war on drugs “ — one hundred years of failure

Click above to go to the video

Here is another entry to the list of “things I did not know”. 

I didn’t know that the “war on drugs” began, not in 1971, but in 1914.

It became the capitalised “War on Drugs” by President Nixon’s proclamation only in 1971 and that’s what I always thought had been its beginning. But the prohibition — and its attendant vast harms — had begun nearly 60 years earlier, on the cusp of the First World War, and maybe we ought call it the First War on Drugs, as its effects matched, and likely exceeded, the industrial slaughter of that “war to end all wars” (hah).

Neuropharmacologist and previous government advisor on drugs policy, professor David Nutt, explains this to the Triggernometry lads, in the video above. His explanation of that begins at about 5’45”, but the whole talk is worth listening to.

I thought I’d double-check Nutt’s claim, that the 1914 prohibition was due to pressure from pharmaceutical companies, and he is correct. However, it’s  only part of the story. Yes, the pharmaceutical companies lobbied for opium to be banned, because they wanted to sell their patented opium derivatives, opioid tablets and morphine, as analgesics. 

But in addition their push to criminalise “natural opium” (and later other drugs) coincided with wider international pressure to ban opium— Britain had been pushing opium on China for centuries, and had fought two Opium Wars defending the trade (a trade which made Britain the largest drug dealer in history). By 1914 a groundswell in opposition the opium trade had risen. At the same time, the United States was dealing with the challenges of having “inherited” the Philippines after the Spanish-American War, and its opium-related problems.

All this and more is set out in the fascinating article “The Harrison Narcotic Act (1914)”. Read and enjoy. Please note the contemporary critics of the policy and its awful consequences, note their recommendations to abandon it in favour of a return to the earlier and successful medical interventions policy (instead of the newly-minted criminal ones). Then note the response of politicians, which was to ignore the advice and double down on a failed policy. 

Heavens above! We do exactly the same 100 years later! And the obdurate idiocy is bipartisan. 

How long must we go on with a policy that’s failed for so long? On such catastrophic scales? Another hundred years? Another hundred million wasted lives?

Three cheers and two thumbs up to Konstantin and Francis for highlighting the insanity of the War on Drugs, yet again. And for the good work of professor Nutt.