Imperialism, Prohibition, and the Industrial Situation

Two historical formations have shaped drug history to date, and rightly so: imperialism and prohibition. The picture that emerges is one of an initially profitable drug trade under early modern and modern empires, followed by the almost complete illegalization of drugs under prohibition. As a result, however, drug historians have failed to systematically explore the rise of globally active European pharmaceutical manufacturers, sometimes operating with the support of state authorities and sometimes in defiance of regulations, the establishment of laboratories and drug factories in the Global South, and the spread of new drugs among the working class not only in Europe and North America, but also in colonial and semicolonial environments.

In relation to the first formation, imperialism’s relationship to drugs arose from economic reasons. Colonial governments in the Atlantic World, and South, Southeast, and East Asia were interested in tax revenues from the trade in tea, coffee, liquors, tobacco, and especially opium, to maintain themselves. Opium did for British India in the nineteenth century, what tobacco did for the Spanish Crown in the seventeenth century; it filled the treasury.Footnote ⁵ In the decolonization era, in 1978, Tan Chung summed up the role of opium: “No other commodity could replace a narcotic in its role of profit-creation, a source of huge revenues” to colonial interests.Footnote ⁶

More recently, historians have reminded us that imperialism was not hostile to innovation, on the contrary. Carl A. Trocki has argued that the opium trade between South Asia and China was crucial to the development of the British “banking and financial systems, the insurance systems and the transportation and information infrastructures.” Until the 1940s, the drug business promoted international trade investments and influenced price fluctuations and stock markets. Colonial administrators created favourable conditions for private trading houses that were active in the opium trade and other areas throughout Asia. The opium trade also led to the monetization of the subsistence economy of South Asian opium farmers, gave them access to markets with new goods and thus changed their everyday lives. In other words, the drug trade established through imperial networks was a part of global capitalism.Footnote ⁷

The second, prohibition, was due to a more complex political environment. A humanitarian reform that aimed at abolishing the opium trade in Asia was supported by various interest groups: transnational temperance societies, missionaries, doctors, metropolitan politicians, and, as recent historians have shown, colonial bureaucrats themselves who were interested in reforming tax farms.Footnote ⁸ By the 1910s and 1920s, processes within North America and Europe also legitimized the setting up of “drug-control formulas” that aimed at limiting drug production, distribution and sale—less often access for the end user.Footnote ⁹ The depression of the interwar period, general fears of disintegration, and new ideas of public health led to drugs being associated with racialized lower classes, bohemian intellectuals, and the underworld of big cities.Footnote ¹⁰

Recent historians have expanded the geographical scope and periods of enquiry and thereby have shown that political elites in Latin America, South Asia, the Middle East, or East Asia were not just passive recipients but active shapers of the drug trade and drug policies; they too participated in licit and illicit businesses, international prohibition, as well as the medicalization and criminalization of drug use.Footnote ¹¹ So, recent historians “may change or even ‘decolonize’ the dominant narratives that portray drug change … as a byproduct of Western drug imperialism or later Anglo-American anti-drug political campaigns.”Footnote ¹² However, recent historical research has not fundamentally changed the paradigm; the dyad of imperialism and prohibition remains of central importance for understanding the historical trajectory of drugs.

The industrial situation is a third historical formation that makes it possible to extend drug history into areas that have not been adequately covered in previous historiography. Together the articles of the issue shed light on three themes, in particular. One theme relates to the social history of drugs and two to their economic history. The first is the use of narcotic drugs among the global working class; pathways of drugs reflect the expansion and connectedness of extractive labour regimes, as drugs were carried by enslaved people, day labourers, and factory workers. The second theme is the extent of state intervention in industrial capitalism. As the articles show, the industrial application of science and the rise of big drug companies flourished at first, in the second half of the nineteenth century, because of a business-friendly environment encouraged by the state, and thereafter, from the 1900s, the drug manufacture and trade continued despite regulatory measures. The third theme is the degree of industrialization of the “global countryside.”Footnote ¹³ Drug history qualifies the idea of the diffusion of factory production in concentric circles from Europe and North America to the rest of the world, as well as points to the parallel development of factory work and agriculture.

In summarizing the articles in chronological order from before 1800, through the nineteenth century, to the twentieth century, we address one of these three themes for each period and place them within the larger drug historiography.

Drugs and Industrialism

The social history of opium, coca, and cannabis cannot be separated from the one of drug foods and stimulants, which spread on a global scale and supplanted local habits among the working class in different world regions in the nineteenth century: sugar, tobacco, coffee, tea, and distilled spirits. The trajectory of narcotic drugs and other intoxicants must be considered together, though the special nature of narcotics also requires some comment.

Classical studies have shown that industrialization ran parallel to European colonial expansion and that new ideas of productivity were closely linked to new patterns of consumption in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Wolfgang Schivelbusch linked new drinking habits with capitalism; early modern Dutch and British elites ingested hot beverages, such as coffee and tea, to pursue their activities. At the same time, according to Schivelbusch, the potato introduced to Europe during the famines of the late eighteenth century had another function besides serving as food; the working class drank potato gin not for social intoxication, but stupefaction to make forget the unbearable life caused by industrialization. Gin was the pharmacological and social inversion of coffee; new qualities of intoxication parodied new qualities of sobriety.Footnote ¹⁴

Similarly, Sidney Mintz pointed to the parallel mechanization of the plantation economy in the Caribbean and factory work in England and indicated that both were made possible by the calories provided by sugar.Footnote ¹⁵

Other authors have shown that colonizers not only used intoxicants, especially tobacco and alcohol, as a means of exchange to open up new markets but also accepted their use among workers. According to them, plantation workers integrated the new stimulant rum into social occasions after colonial authorities cracked down on ganja in Trinidad; and miners increased the use of the familiar drug coca in the Andes.Footnote ¹⁶ Intoxicants also spread in European settler colonies and Europe. Drugs helped farmers and factory workers—and related occupations such as sailors, soldiers and prostitutes—in distant but interconnected regions to endure their work conditions.Footnote ¹⁷

At the same time, as Marcy Norton has shown, early global capitalism already bore the seeds of an ambivalent attitude towards intoxicants. In the seventeenth century some elites condemned the devil of chocolate and tobacco, others praised the positive effects. In any case these new stimulants were, as Norton’s puts it, “catalysts for … modern transformations.”Footnote ¹⁸ In the nineteenth century, the upper classes viewed the habits they often shared with factory workers with concern when it came to the latter. This was not just about the consumption of liquor, which was seen as incompatible with machine work pace and discipline—another case was drinking on plantations—but also about the panacea opium and even the stimulant tea. Elites overlooked the fact that the poor used opium-compounded concoctions or tea to self-medicate against chronic hunger, pains, diarrhoea, and cough.Footnote ¹⁹ In other words, attitudes to the use of intoxicants reflected ideas of productivity and bodily health, as well as moral anxieties and social norms; they were the result of status, class, and racial politics.

Nevertheless, in the nineteenth century, there was a divide narcotic between drugs and other intoxicants. On the one hand, tobacco, coffee, and alcohol were perceived as social stimulants. On the other hand, the use of narcotic drugs for medical purposes was accepted, even after over-the-counter-drugs, compounded with opium, cannabis, or morphine, were withdrawn from the market and prescription requirements were tightened.

Nor can the social history of narcotic drugs be separated from the one of psychoactive substances, such as peyote, khat, mate, kava, kola nut, or areca nut, which were used locally or transregionally. David T. Courtwright points to one reason why these substances missed the “historical windows of opportunity” for global distribution, even though rarities from far-flung regions attracted the attention of European naturalists and pharmacologists. The isolation of their bioactive compounds succeeded in the past five decades, but they now had to compete with synthetical drugs offered by multinational companies; in other words, they missed their “industrial moment.”Footnote ²⁰

Another reason is that the spread of substances remained unlikely if they were not integrated into transcontinental routes of trade and migration. Bioprospecting, that is, the search for commercially viable “magic bullets,” often amounted to a quest for Asian substitutes in American regions.Footnote ²¹ Drugs from the “East” and “West Indies” were evaluated together epistemologically because of the interconnected trade history of these two regions.

The movement of drugs into new environments was not only along scientific and commercial paths of colonizers. With the expansion of empires, drugs followed the routes of slaves and indentured labourers from Africa and Asia to the Americas. African slaves smoked tobacco pipes on ships during the Middle Passage; Chinese coolies brought opium as medicine for their journey to America.Footnote ²² Also, local societies reacted differently to new offerings. William Clarence-Smith has observed that the chewing of betel, consisting of areca nuts and slacked lime wrapped in betel leaves, declined in Southeast Asia due to the spread of tobacco and hot drinks. James H. Mills, on the other hand, has pointed out that local habits could pave the way for the integration of new drugs: in South Asia, betel leaves, chewed among the urban working class, were filled with new ingredients, including cocaine, in the early twentieth century.Footnote ²³

So, what opium, coca, cannabis, cocaine, morphine, and heroin have in common is that they spread globally among the working class between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. These drugs, now associated with dependence and illegality, were not only perceived as profitable mass products, but also as useful therapeutics to suppress weariness and enhance performance.

In the opening article, Chris Duvall explores a previously unknown aspect of the transatlantic movement of people, goods, and consumption patterns emerging with extractive labour regimes, by exploring the integration of cannabis in social-ecological systems. He uses biogeography as a historical archive that points to the invisible transport of cannabis. Together with humans and cattle, tsetse flies and sleeping sickness spread on ships. To sooth the pathological condition, as well as to endure destitution, enslaved people carried manioc and cannabis. Duvall reminds us of the parallel development of extractive labour, cramped living conditions, and epidemics on both sides of the Atlantic. The use of narcotic drugs characterized not only military barracks, and factory dormitories, but also slave trading posts, slave ships, and the backyards of plantations. At the same time, Duvall not only contributes to recent scholarship that points to the multidirectional routes of the Columbian exchange leading through Africa but significantly expands it. He shows that the “portmanteau biota” carried by migrating populations did not necessarily promote “ecological imperialism” that transformed indigenous societies. Rather, the socio-ecological interactions between humans and non-humans, that is, animals, pathogens, food and drug crops, also enabled resilience. So, this, that is, the consuming habits of the migrating masses in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is one explanation for the global spread of drugs, while also giving an idea of the hardship of their consumers.

Science, Industrial Capitalism, and the State

Previously ignored transport routes of drugs also tie in with the second theme, namely the intertwined history of science, capitalist growth, and the regulatory framework of the state. The industrial application of science developed in parallel in Europe and elsewhere, as knowledge transfer accelerated. Bureaucrats played a role in facilitating private enterprise, by negotiating import and tariff conventions, conducting consular investigations and organizing world’s fairs. The initiative of a new type of scientist who was financially dependent on his discoveries was also crucial; this applied to botanists and pharmacists who were in the service of universities and private companies in metropolitan centres or the colonial administration, or who had their own business. For commercial reasons, they experimented with crop varieties or the purification of active principles of plants through distillation and acetylation. Finally, European companies looking for new markets overseas encouraged the global spread of drugs. The turnaround is shown by the fact that the new industrial drugs of the nineteenth century, namely alkaloids, no longer fell under the monopolies of companies and crowns, as tobacco or opium used to, but were instead subject to market competition.

Some details on the development of the alkaloid industry are in order. In the 1800s, morphine was isolated from opium, the dried sap of the opium poppy, triggering the discovery of further alkaloids. In the 1810s and 1820s, caffeine was isolated from coffee, nicotine from tobacco, and quinine from cinchona bark. Next, in the 1850s, cocaine was isolated from coca leaves. The second half of the nineteenth century saw the expansion and intensification of commodity chains between resource-providing agricultural areas, laboratories, and factories. For instance, a lucky hand in the selection of the coca variety imported from Peru to Java and plant-breeding programs of colonial botanical gardens led to “colonial agro-industrialism” of the Dutch.Footnote ²⁴ By the end of the nineteenth century, pharmaceutical manufacturers succeeded in the synthetization of drugs. A semisynthetic derivative of morphine, diacetylmorphine, was patented under the brand name Heroin by Bayer in 1898.Footnote ²⁵ In other words, by the late nineteenth century, the chemical-pharmaceutical industry engaged in the manufacture of a few potent pure drugs from opium poppy and coca, sold globally.

It should be added that hemp had a different trajectory. In the northern hemisphere, hemp was grown industrially for fibre until the twentieth century. The cannabinoids CBD and THC were only isolated in the 1940s and 1960s; the impact of this discovery has only recently become apparent through the breeding of cannabis strains and the production of synthetic cannabinoids. But cannabis grown in India, the Southern Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds, like coca and opium, was discussed for its therapeutic use by European doctors, and entered the patent medicine market in the nineteenth century. Scientists then also investigated its active principles, albeit unsuccessfully. Discursively, “Indian hemp” entered a definite connection with opium, coca, cocaine, morphine, and heroin, when it was included into the list of drugs, regulated by the opium convention of 1925.Footnote ²⁶

Despite the integration of drugs in global commodity chains, they have tended to be neglected by commodity histories, because drugs contradict the idea of unequal, but free markets, directed by the “invisible hand.”Footnote ²⁷ Recent authors have argued that between the 1850s and 1970s the “industrial commodity regime” first depended on “technological fixes,” that is, rationalization, later followed by “state-led fixes,” that is an “expansion of state capacity.”Footnote ²⁸ The history of drugs can be used to explore the extent of state intervention in the market: on the one hand, drugs attracted attention from the state from the early modern period onwards; for most of modern history, drugs largely circulated along licit but highly regulated commodity chains. Nevertheless, the regulatory power of the state on the pharmaceutical market can be qualified for the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century. The state only intervened sporadically in the development of pharmaceutical business; companies asserted their commercial interests partly with the support of the political elites and partly against government policies, as Tomás Bartoletti, James H. Mills, and Peter-Paul Bänziger show through the commodity histories of cocaine and opiates.

Tomás Bartoletti’s article focuses on the first phase of cocaine’s “industrial moment.” Contingency played a part here: the choice of the coca variety, access to fresh coca leaves, or, as Bartoletti indicates, failed testing methods, determined the success of experiments and thus trade prospects. Bartoletti, however, shows that the composition of political, commercial, and scientific networks was even more crucial. He reveals that the Italian pharmacist Enrique Pizzi searched for the active principle of coca in La Paz in Bolivia in 1858 at the suggestion of the Swiss naturalist Johann Jakob von Tschudi (1818–89). Samples of Pizzi’s cocaine arrived at the laboratory of Friedrich Wöhler (1800–1882) and his student Albert Niemman (1834–61) through Tschudi. But the samples were discredited thereafter. A year after Pizzi, Niemman repeated the experiment with coca leaves obtained through an Austria-German expedition to Peru. The German pharmaceutical company Merck began to manufacture cocaine less than two years after Niemman’s discovery. The story could have ended here. But Bartoletti indicates that the discovery by Pizzi was advertised by his successor and compatriot Clemente Torretti (born 1836), who also established commercial relationships to Italy; through his connections “true coca” from Bolivia was sold in pharmacies in Milan and Pavia. Ultimately, the networks between naturalists, laboratories, and the pharmaceutical industry enabled by the union of Austria, Germany, and Latin America under the Habsburg Empire, proved more efficient than the criollo knowledge that circulated through Italian Bolivian individuals.

James H. Mills explores the dynamics of the chemical-pharmaceutical industry through the second phase of cocaine’s “industrial moment,” when states shifted from the promotion to the prohibition of narcotic drugs. Mills shows that German cocaine spread not only in Europe and North America, but also in South Asia through the intermediation of doctors embedded in transnational knowledge networks, salesmen of pharmaceutical companies, and migrant day labourers. In the 1880s, just as British coca crop trials in Ceylon were discontinued, the properties of cocaine as local anaesthetic were discovered and demand for the drug soared. Merck’s cocaine thus immediately found markets in South Asia. Colonial hospitals and dentists adopted the drug for surgeries, while local drug stores advertised cocaine voice tabloids for throat complaints. But British colonial administrators refrained from including cocaine in the health care system when they observed that cocaine displaced opium as a stimulant among urban wage labourers. Still, in the 1900s, salesmen aggressively pursued their business despite colonial administrator’s effort to stop the cocaine market through regulation, even before the United Kingdom included cocaine in the Poisons and Pharmacy Act of 1908. When the German product finally disappeared from the market, illicit cocaine from Japan filled the gap. Mills thus indicates that British colonial administrators shaped the industrial moment of narcotic drugs, since they first opened the market for new pharmaceutical products of European companies. Thereafter, they moved towards regulation but were unable to eradicate new habits among the South Asian working class.

Like James H. Mills, Peter-Paul Bänziger combines the themes of consumption, industrial capitalism, and state intervention. He explores the opium retail trade in Switzerland between the 1800s and 1950s. In Switzerland, the drinking of home-distilled spirits among the working class was condemned by the bourgeoisie throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In contrast, the use of opiates was hardly problematized, even though the drug retail trade moved to the forefront of the state’s regulatory measure. In the 1800s, itinerant peddlers sold the opium-based panacea theriac. In the subsequent decades, pharmacies successfully claimed the exclusive right to the retail trade of opiates. The tendency was facilitated because pharmacies only had access to then new manufactured drugs, such as morphine. By the end of the century, problematic aspects of pure drugs became apparent. But they revolved around misuse not dependence, as Bänziger shows with a sad example, the death of two women in childbed in a hospital after the administration of morphine from Merck. It was not until 1924 that the Swiss government, under international pressure, ratified the First Opium Convention and introduced a federal narcotics law. In the same period, the number of convictions of small-scale manufacturers, patients in possession of fraudulent prescriptions, and drug-using doctors increased. Still, iatrogenic “addiction” was tolerated, and drug use itself was not criminalized until the 1970s; the prevailing opinion was that there was no drug problem in Switzerland. Alcohol remained at the centre of political and social anxieties. Bänziger thus shows that the regulation of the drug market was not necessarily due to the medicalization of drug dependence. Rather, it resulted from the competition between suppliers, in which pharmacies and big companies were the winners. The structure on the supply side shaped the demand, which was seen as medical; opiates thus remained accessible to drug users even after the introduction of regulatory policies.

Prohibition and Industrial High Productivity

The drug-control formulas laid down in international conventions (Shanghai 1909, The Hague 1912, Geneva 1925 and 1931) ended capitalist ventures of pharmaceutical companies. But at the same time as the rise of prohibition in the decades before and after the First World War, concerns about self-sufficiency also grew. The result was the formation of national closed drug markets and, paradoxically, the spread of drug factories. The U.S. market had already functioned independently from Europe before the First World War. By the early 1920s, the Soviet Union and Japan developed an alkaloid industry that covered domestic medical demand, with the result that big pharmaceutical companies such as Merck lost market share. In 1930, the League of Nations endorsed an international cartel of German, Swiss, French, British, and Dutch pharmaceutical manufacturers, that is, manufacturing-exporting countries of opiates and cocaine, to limit the worldwide production of narcotics. But the monopoly situation prompted other countries to set up drug factories, including Turkey, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Belgium, Hungary, Norway, and Denmark.Footnote ²⁹

In the same decade, drug factories expanded to colonies under the omnipresent ideology of “self-supporting empire,” anticipating what the Second World War was all about, access to resources, including narcotics.Footnote ³⁰ For instance, in the late 1920s, the opium factory in Ghazipur in India began with the manufacture of alkaloids.Footnote ³¹ The drug industry was a profitable branch for colonies because productivity was achieved through cheap resources, simple machines, and abundant semi-skilled labour.Footnote ³²

With the establishment of factories in metropolitan centres and colonial peripheries, agriculture was also promoted. The world opium production dropped according to official statistics in the early 1930s, reflecting the gradual ending of the opium trade between South Asia and China.Footnote ³³ But this trend was compensated by a surge in output in other world regions. According to one observer in 1944, opium was “grown over huge areas, by innumerable farmers mostly working and living under primitive conditions.” Producing countries he mentions are “China, Iran, India, Turkey, the USSR, Yugoslavia, Korea, Japan, Afghanistan, Indochina, Bulgaria and Chile.” Footnote ³⁴ So, it would be wrong to associate drug cultivation only with “illicit crop frontiers” in the first half of the twentieth century. State-led rationalization processes ran parallel in industry and agriculture.Footnote ³⁵

The stocks of narcotics resulting from the limitation of trade after the First World War and the distribution of factories and cultivation areas across different countries make it difficult to quantify the narcotic drugs flooding the market. Although official figures suggest a decline in the manufacture of drugs, the opposite was probably the case.

The USA abandoned the manufacture of heroin in 1924. But the decision led to an increase in imports of raw opium because “codeine substituted for heroin must be about two to six times the weight of the quantity of heroin originally used if a similar medicinal effect is to be obtained.”Footnote ³⁶ Writing in 1947, one author wondered why the world production of morphine rose from about 27 to 42 tons between 1934 to 1937: “We know little about the reasons for this increase.” From 1939 and until the end of the war, statistics of the League of Nations were interrupted, but the same author indicates that the demand for narcotic drugs during the war effort caused another increase in production.Footnote ³⁷

With prohibition, illicit trade also developed. Stocks of legally produced narcotics found their way onto the black market and as state-run factories expanded, so did illegal ones. Clandestine laboratories were discovered in the Shanghai international settlement, Turkey, New York, and France in the 1930s.Footnote ³⁸ Black markets, which emerged over the early twentieth century, shared their production and marketing strategies with licit economies, including the exploitation of labour, mass distribution, and product branding.Footnote ³⁹

In sum, regulatory policies in the interwar years were frustrated by the difficulty to control national closed markets, the gradual conversion to a war economy and the formation of black markets under prohibition.

The black markets that emerged in the early twentieth century shaped the drug trade in the Cold War era. Alfred McCoy has shown that the illicit trade routes at that time adapted flexibly to national regulations; production sites and destinations simply shifted. According to him, the global black market in the second half of the twentieth century was partly fuelled by cooperation between drug traffickers and the CIA.Footnote ⁴⁰

Judith Vitale’s article qualifies the idea of commodity-processing cores and resource-producing peripheries in the era of industrial high productivity, using the example of the Japanese morphine industry. Poppy cultivation first expanded into rural areas of the Japanese mainland due to low wages and agricultural innovation before and after the First World War, before it reached Japanese overseas territories. Agricultural work processes were aligned to the industrial manufacture of drugs, as both benefited from rationalization and homogenization; the breeding of new crop varieties mirrored the introduction of factory machinery. At the same time, drug factories, with considerable workforce, size, and equipment, emerged not only in Japan but also in its colonies. They produced a large proportion of drugs, when Japanese authorities stepped up their efforts to secure drug supply after the outbreak of war with China in 1937. In other words, Vitale suggests that the Japanese morphine industry is one example of the uneven and fluctuating distribution of raw material extraction and product manufacturing within empires in the early twentieth century, shaped by government efforts to self-sufficiency, ideas of medical modernity and the conversion to a war economy.

Elife Biçer-Deveci directs attention to the attempts of Turkey to advance to a manufacturing country but focuses on the development towards the medicalization of drug users in the interwar period. The Turkish government established three alkaloid factories in Istanbul with the help of French and Japanese investors in the late 1920s. But unlike other countries, which did not give up their newly established drug factories, the Istanbul factories were closed within a few years. The factories were said to be operating under harmful conditions, as workers exposed to the air were becoming dependent on opiates. But the closure also shows that the nationalist government gave in to international pressure. At the same time, a massive anti-drug campaign directed against morphine, cocaine, and cannabis users, said to be found among the urban poor, peasants, Russian émigrés, and Armenian and Sufi minorities, served to construct the image of a modern purified nation. Biçer-Deveci reconstructs this campaign led by Mazhar Osman (1884–1951), a prominent representative of the temperance movement, Turkey’s state delegate to the League of Nations Advisory Committee on Trafficking in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs, and a psychiatrist who founded a state-approved mental hospital. His convictions and methods suggest that the desire of Turkish elites to distance themselves from colonial regions in the Middle East went hand in hand with the Turkification of European colonial racist psychiatry and eugenics in the 1930s.

Haggai Ram’s article points to the legacies of imperialism and prohibition through cannabis traffic and consumption in Israel from the 1950s to the 1980s. At the time, first- and second-generation Jewish immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa, were stigmatized in Israel for their habit of smoking hashish. Media reports and police operations drew on obsolete colonial racist knowledge. The association of cannabis with the habits of a racialized working class marginalized unwelcome immigrants. At the same time, authorities overlooked that the hemp these population groups grew in their backyards reflected the poverty, they endured in their new home country. Ram indicates that in the same decades as authorities cracked down on cannabis consumers, the Israeli military was involved in clandestine trafficking of drugs to Egypt. While one aim might have been to immobilize the Egyptian armed forces, hashish and other narcotic drugs also provided considerable revenues to those involved in the traffic. Ram thus points to the ongoing alliance between criminal cartels and government agencies. Public discourse directed against immigrants, as well as the reliance on the profit from the drug traffic by the military likely delayed the advertisement of the discovery and commercialization of THC by an Israeli scientist.

Zooming in and Zooming out on Drug History

The industrial situation is a lens to revisit the place of drugs in modern societies and to reintegrate drugs into the recent field of commodity histories and the history of global capitalism. Together the seven articles of the issue emphasize the economic dynamics from nineteenth-century bioprospecting to twentieth-century mass-manufacturing and shed light on the regulatory power or inability of the state to intervene in the market. They also point to the influence of the economic order on social norms. The problematization of drugs between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries targeted socially underprivileged, and politically discriminated groups, including ethnic and cultural minorities, and margin groups. Precisely because of the association of drugs with subaltern groups, drugs refer to wider economic and social inequalities, arising from the industrial situation.

The decline in the production and consumption of narcotic drugs in the late twentieth century occurred partly because of a perceived change in the “addict” type. Transnational moral panics about hedonistic drug cultures originated in the decades during and after the First World War. Nevertheless, despite the tightening of prescribing practices, narcotic drugs were not removed from the medical armamentarium. Iatrogenic “addiction” among the white working class, opium smoking among Chinese coolies in French Indochina, or the “ganja diaspora” of Indian indentured labourers in Trinidad and British Guiana remained tolerated to a certain extent. Only, when narcotic drugs came to be associated with the “tuning in, dropping out” of the 1960s youth counterculture, did a political elite declare the “war on drugs,” in the literal sense of military operations, largely conducted in the Global South. This was the era, by when most countries shifted attention from the regulation of the supply-side to the criminalization of users. In this context, Alexandre Marchant has pointed out that “the prohibition of narcotics in France really began in 1970,” which is true for most democratic countries.Footnote ⁴¹

Since then, opium, coca, cannabis, cocaine, morphine, and heroin have been substituted by other therapeutics. Pharmaceutical companies have developed synthetic drugs that are adapted to new ideas of work performance and are still legally sold today. At the same time, there is no doubt that we are now facing a new drug crisis due to the recent legal and illegal marketing of opioids and cannabinoids. Their spread reflects today’s neoliberal order, which promotes a convergence between the active commodification of highly profitable, habit-forming products, and a state-approved call for individual self-responsibility. As the potency of drugs has increased, global production regimes and social expectations have also reached a new stage.