HEROIN prohibition in canada

adapted from
Peaceful Measures
By Bruce Alexander

Canadian opposition to opium gathered force in western Canada during the end of the nineteenth century in the context of growing racial tension between white society and Chinese immigrants.

Many of the Chinese were single men who would work for lower wages than Caucasian workers would accept. The Chinese were therefore bitterly resented. Opium was resented because the hated Chinese consumed it and because some whites who used it mixed with the Chinese.

However, smoking opium was not considered physically harmful. In fact, such a judgement would have been absurd- the opium-using Chinese worked harder and longer with less raucous misbehaviour than the whites who despised opium.

In the aftermath of the 1907 `Anti-Asiatic Riot' in Vancouver's Chinatown, and in response to persistent pressure from the British Columbia government, the federal government enacted the Opium Act in 1908. For the first time in Canada, the sale, importation, and manufacture of opium was prohibited. This law provided penalties ranging from a $50 fine to a maximum of three years in prison. It allowed merchants six months to sell off existing stocks before enforcement began.

In eastern Canada, the main impetus towards opium prohibition came from the medical establishment, which feared competition from the purveyors of patent medicines, especially in view of the outrageous claims made in patent-medicine advertising.

In 1908, the same year as the Opium Act, parliament passed the Proprietary and Patent Medicine Act, which required that patent medicines containing heroin, morphine, opium and other drugs must list their contents on the label and that medicines must not contain more alcohol than was necessary as a solvent. The use of cocaine in patent medicines was prohibited entirely. Infractions of these rules were punishable by fines of up to $100 and loss of registration for the medicine involved.

Both of these enactments were amazingly mild by modern standards. Obviously, parliament did not feel they were responding to a crisis, in spite of the plentiful, low-cost narcotics that were available to the public. However, public sentiment changed quickly once the first prohibition laws had passed. Extravagantly moralistic testimony about drugs became common in parliament and in the popular press. Punitive legislation followed.

The 1911 Opium and Drug Act banned cocaine entirely and created penalties for using opium or being present when it was smoked. Tobacco was considered for adoption to the act in parliament, but was excluded, the House apparently accepting MacKenzie King's argument that it was not a habit-forming drug.

By 1921 amendments to the Opium and Drug Act provided a maximum seven-year penalty for the importation, manufacture, and sale of opium or any other drug mentioned in the act. It also shifted the burden of proof so that it was an offence to be in a building that contained narcotics, unless the accused could prove `the drugs were there without his authority, knowledge or consent'. In 1922 whipping and deportation were added as penalties.

In 1922 both the full-fledged War on Drugs mentality and the American influence that inflamed it were spelled out in a highly influential book entitled The Black Candle. This book, and the series of Maclean's articles on which it was based, were written by a remarkable Canadian. Emily Murphy, an early feminist, Edmonton police magistrate, and juvenile court judge, was reportedly the first woman jurist in the British Empire. Her book is a thorough introduction to the War on Drugs mentality in its modern form. For example, in her chapter War on the Drug Ring she declares total war:

Any one who starts out to seriously enforce the law against the [drug] Ring finds he is combatting large financial interests and that these are in the hands of dangerous and unscrupulous persons. It means if you are getting anywhere with law enforcement, that your character is assailed and even your life threatened...

Resolution, however well framed, mean nothing in this fight which is going to be a fight to the finish. Unless the forces of civilization strangle the Rings - choke them to death, the Rings are going to choke civilization.

Mrs. Murphy did not soft-pedal the military and racist underpinnings of her convictions. For example:

It is hardly credible that the average Chinese pedlar has any definite idea in his mind of bringing about the downfall of the white race, his swaying motive probably being that of greed, but in the hands of his superiors, he may become a powerful instrument to this very end...

Naturally, the aliens are silent on this subject, but an addict who died this year in British Columbia told how he was frequently jeered at as a `white man accounted for.' This man belonged to a prominent family and, in 1917, was drawing a salary of six thousand dollars a year. He fell victim to a drug `booster' till, ultimately, he became a ragged wreck living in the noisome alleys of Chinatown, `lost to use, and name and fame.'

This man used to relate how the Chinese pedlars taunted him with their superiority at being able to sell the dope without using it, and by telling him how the yellow race would rule the world. They were too wise, they urged, to win a battle but would win by wits; would strike at the white race through `dope' and when the time was ripe would command the world...

Some of the Negroes coming into Canada - and they are no fiddle-faddle fellows either, have similar ideas, and one of their greatest writers has boasted how ultimately they will control the white men.

The Black Candle aroused national sentiment to demand stringent penalties against drug users and traffickers, with many of Mrs Murphy's punitive recommendations eventually becoming law. The racist component was prominent in public debate. The increasingly punitive drug legislation of the 1920s was made acceptable to the public by assurances that it would be used against Chinese rather than white citizens.

Out of 853 convictions in 1921-22, 634 were against Chinese. In 1929 this legislative action culminated in the Opium and Narcotic Drug Act, one of the country's most punitive pieces of criminal legislation.

In the process, the drug user's image had been changed from that of a morally weak, but otherwise benign individual to that of a fiendish criminal, obsessed with the need to addict and motivated by lust and greed. Moral reformers, all clamoring for stern action against these particularly loathsome dregs of humanity. Public acceptance of the dope-fiend mythology permitted the virtually unchallenged passage of legislation that defined addiction as a law enforcement problem, extended the range of the criminal sanctions, increased the punitive consequences of conviction, and encroached on traditional civil liberties.