Censored Minds

A Short Outline of the Dope Wars

(part 1 of 4) by Gary Stimeling

 

Copyright 2004 Psychotropics Cornucopia, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

 

Today more than ever it is the duty of lawmakers and public officials to fight these poisons that are destroying our society, such as heroin, cocaine, and other narcotics. We must wipe out their sale and prevent their use in medical practice. The future health of our society diminishes as the number of physically ruined and mentally incompetent drug addicts increases.

 

      These are not the words of John Ashcroft or Barry McCaffrey. This hackneyed call to action was written by a doctor of the Third Reich in support of Hitler’s Rauschgiftbekämpfung, or War on Drugs.^[1]

      It’s tempting to suggest that the Nazi anti-drug campaign spawned the long-running American one, so similar in outlook and methods, but that notion is incorrect. America’s began first, and anti-drug hysteria is older than either the United States or Germany. Dope wars, with more false fronts than Main Street in a spaghetti western, have been a tool of repression for many centuries. We may never know how they started, but a look at some of the early ones can help us understand how we got into the mess we’re in today.

Before we begin, however, readers may be curious to know why I prefer the term “dope war” to “drug war.” Besides providing relief from constant repetition of “drug,” the word “dope” in common usage refers to a person not noted for intelligence, and “dope war” conveys the utter stupidity of institutionalized aggression against people who take drugs. Among users, moreover, “dope” is an affectionate term for substances that give pleasure. Borrowed in the 19th century from Dutch doop, sauce, it meant “gravy” or “syrup,” then was applied to the cocaine included in the original formula for Coca-Cola. Hence the phrase “dope war” reflects one of the campaign’s ulterior mean­ings, a war against pleasure. “Dope” also means information, and, in engineering, “doping” refers to addition of tiny amounts of a catalyst to a semiconductor, such as a silicon chip. The catalyst radically changes the chip’s electrical properties, just as a tiny amount of a drug can dramatically alter mental activity. Thus “dope war” expresses the chief purpose of the drug warriors, elimination of knowledge about how to modify one’s own consciousness. Doping and its suppression have a long history.

 

Apollo the Narc?

      Use of all the botanical drugs most demonized today—cannabis, opium, psilocybe, peyote, coca—began long before the invention of writing. Opposition came later. The first drug war may have been an attempt by followers of Apollo to suppress worship of Dionysus. Though in prehistoric times he was a patron of shamanic intoxication and prophecy, Apollo later became the law-and-order god of the ancient Greek aristocracy. Known as Bacchus to the Romans, Dionysus was the orgiastic god of nature and “divine madness,” i.e., visionary inspiration, who was beloved by the common people. He was worshipped at least from Mycenaean times, beginning about 1500 bc, to the religion’s elimination by Christianity about ad 500.

      According to surviving historical sources, wine was the sacrament used in Dionysian festivals. In earlier times, however, the sacramental food was a sacred mushroom, Panaeolus papilionaceus or other psilocybe species.^[2] The very name of the Mycenaean capital Mycenae means “mushroom place.” The Greeks may have adopted psilocybe from pre-Greek peoples as a local substitute for soma, the Amanita muscaria mushroom used by Indo-European invaders, of whom the Mycenaeans were the next-to-last wave. Seldom found in southern Greece, A. muscaria flourishes farther north, especially in the Indo-European homeland of the Volga valley and Central Asia. It is still used by Siberian shamans.^[3]

      Greek kings of the 9th to 6th centuries bc apparently made sporadic attempts to stamp out the Dionysus religion. One such attempt was famously dramatized by Euripides in his masterpiece, The Bacchae. In mythology Apollo had a habit of killing his rivals (the poet-gods Dionysus, Marsyas, and Orpheus), who always rose again as enlightening saviors of the people. Memory of this persecution may have been one reason that in classical times the goddess Demeter’s Eleusinian Mysteries were protected by a strict vow of silence, even though most of the population were initiates. The sacrament of the Eleusinian Mysteries was said to be an innocuous barley drink, but the initials of its ingredients spell out the word mykos, mushroom. In the arts, the conflict between cold Apollonian reason and hot Dionysiac passion has continued down to the present.

      The first known attempt to control trade in cannabis was made by Nabonidas, who ruled 555–539 bc, the last king of Babylon before it was conquered by the Persians. Throughout the Near East, cannabis was one of the most prized aids to magical communion with the gods, often used as a psychic purifier in incense-burning rituals called fumigations. It was so well known that its name in some languages was synonymous with “incense.” Nabonidas set up a garrison at Tayma, an oasis in the northwestern Arabian Desert some 600 miles southwest of Babylon and 200 miles east of the Red Sea. Babylon and Assyria had long traded for cannabis from the Hindu Kush by way of the Indus Valley, but apparently some traders wanted to bypass the Mesopotamian market. At Tayma, Nabonidas’s soldiers could intercept and tax caravans that carried the holy smoke from southern Arabia, where it had been shipped from the Indus, northward to Egypt and Phoenicia. Its popularity continued through the Roman period. The Latin poet Horace mentions an emotional rite in honor of the recently deceased, which consisted of mixing the ashes of the dead with “Assyrian scent” (cannabis) and inhaling the fumes from the censer.

 

Another Jealous God

      Cannabis prohibition began in ad 391 as part of Christianity’s war against all other religions. In that year, Christian mobs organized by Patriarch Theophilus gutted the Serapeum, the last remaining pagan place of worship in Alexandria. This huge, art-filled temple had held a large collection of Greek literature, including remnants of the great Library of Alexandria, the ancient equivalent of the Library of Congress, which Emperor Diocletian had obliterated in 296 while crushing an anti-Roman revolt. The Christians burned all of the Serapeum’s books in a huge bonfire.

      Also in 391, Emperor Theodosius I promulgated the first installment of a new law code, the Theodosian Constitution, written under direction of the fanatically intolerant Bishop Ambrose of Milan. It prohibited all religious beliefs and practices not endorsed by the convention of priests at Nicaea in 325. The Nicene Creed stated fundamental church doctrine so as to eliminate all but one of the numerous early variants of Christianity, and it remains the foundation of orthodoxy to this day.

      Under the Theodosian Constitution all prayers and sacrifices to pagan deities, hearth rites, libations, magical workings, sacred groves, decorated holiday trees—and incense—suddenly became illegal. Violators were subject to torture, loss of property, and often death. All pagan temples became church property, and Christians were legally entitled to beat and rob pagans at will. Informers filled the cities, and gangs of pious thugs roamed the countryside looking for pagan ceremonies disguised as picnics. Nearly all pagan (and many Jewish) temples, books, and art works were destroyed during the next 150 years. Banned practices occasionally reemerged later, as when crusaders brought knowledge of cannabis back from Palestine. Psychoactive incense was included in renewed Church prohibitions in the 7th, 12th, 13th, and 15th centuries. The practice known in today’s Dope War as asset forfeiture is not a recent invention. Confiscation of property from heretics and witches continued for a thousand years and was one of the chief foundations of the Church’s present wealth.

 

By their fruits ye shall know them.

— Jesus (Matthew 7:20)

 

      One traditional use of cannabis was as an ingredient in anointing oils, such as the recipe given in Exodus 30:23—two parts myrrh and cassia to one part cinnamon and cannabis, macerated in olive oil.^[4] The oils were massaged into the forehead or temples—or, allowing for wary circumlocution of users fearing reprisal, into the “head” of the penis, or introduced into the vagina with a dildo or “broomstick.” The active ingredients were absorbed through the skin or mucosa into capillaries and nerve endings. Such “flying ointments” and other visionary potions were among the most despised secrets of witches, so imagine the churchmen’s dismay on finding two new continents where thousands of tribes used dozens of drugs for recreation and for spirit journeys, often in ways just like those being so brutally suppressed in Europe.

      In orthodox belief, all psychic voyages were communication with devils, especially if aided by plants, and drug use by the “savages” was a routine justification for genocide. The Spanish Inquisition set up its Mexican branch office in 1541, just twenty years after Cortés’s massacre of the Aztec leaders, and Native American religious practitioners literally headed for the hills. A copy survives of an early-17th-century handbill announcing the death penalty for peyote use.

      Nor were colonists entirely immune from the sanctimonious. Cacao, an aphrodisiac euphoriant so esteemed among natives that it could be used as money from the Andes to the Rio Grande, became a hit among nuns in the Mexican district of Chiapas about 1550. In the next few decades, its use grew so widespread that local señoras were refusing to endure mass without it. After the bishop banned it, he was assassinated—by a cup of poisoned xoxo-atl (chocolate)! The conflict persisted for more than a century until the bishop of Rome gave in, declaring that “liquids do not break a fast.”

 

Working Drugs

      The 17th through early 19th centuries were relatively free of anti-drug hysterics. Dissident religions had been suppressed so thoroughly as to be all but forgotten. The few Europeans and Americans who still knew about banned psychoactives—certain Masonic lodges and the like—managed to keep their knowledge well hidden. On August 7, 1765, George Washington mentioned in a journal entry that he had pulled the male plants from his hemp field “rather too late,” indicating that he probably grew sinsemilla for personal use, but he never went public about it. Moreover, the newly popular drugs—tea, coffee, and tobacco—were perfectly adapted to the Industrial Revolution’s Protestant-capitalist work ethic that was transforming the non-wealthy individual from an independent farmer or craftsperson to a cog in a machine.

      The situation gradually changed in the 19th century, however. Though long used to silence unruly (hyperactive) children, opium became more widely used to treat the industrial-strength pains of adults. Artists rediscovered its visionary properties, as well as those of cannabis. The two became the most common medicines of the time. As of 1842, hemp resin was included in half of all remedies sold in the United States. No problems were reported from its use.

 

Prohibition makes a crime out of things that are not crimes.

— Abraham Lincoln, 1840

 

 

      Americans drank enormous quantities of alcohol, however. Rum flooded the market as part of the colonial triangular trade in sugar, rum, and slaves. (Slave labor also made cheap tobacco plentiful, leading to a pattern of addictive consumption quite unlike native use of the drug.) Drunken violence gave focus to the temperance movement. Arising from tent-meeting fundamentalism in the 1830s and 1840s, and augmented by reformers among women suffragists, the movement embraced the goal of prohibition by force rather than the actual meaning of the word “temperance,” namely moderation.

      The Opium Wars (1839–1860) began a new chapter in drug history. China had banned opium in 1799, but English merchants bribed officials to continue the trade, importing the narcotic from several Asian colonies. In 1839, patriots burned 20,000 chests of the drug in Canton warehouses, an Asian version of the Boston Tea Party. The British invaded. The Chinese, who had invented gunpowder but forsworn its use in war, suffered a series of humiliating defeats. Britain annexed Hong Kong and later Kowloon, took the equivalent of $50 million in reparations for their lost merchandise, and set up protected trade zones in Canton, Amoy, Fuchow, Ningxian, Ningpo, and Shanghai. France, Russia, and the United States joined the British in subsequent attacks, forcing similar concessions from the defenseless country. The emperor pleaded with Queen Victoria but was forced to relegalize opium in 1857. Until the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, China was ruled by foreign commercial attachés working with corrupt locals. In the intervening years Western merchants and Christian missionaries profiteered on opium, tea, real estate, silk, and artifacts looted from Chinese temples. Rebels murdered some of them, and honest judges executed some of them when possible. Pope John Paul II canonized 120 of the “martyred” missionaries en masse in 2000. The Opium Wars began the modern era of Third World drug exploitation by Western overlords.

 

For Our Own Good

      More thunder began rumbling on the horizon after the American Civil War. Advances in chemistry fed a trend to isolate and synthesize the “active principle” of a drug rather than use its “crude” natural form. Morphine, heroin, cocaine, and mescaline all made their appearance by 1900, along with chloral hydrate and barbiturates. The Civil War had produced a huge market of injured veterans hooked on morphine, and heroin at first was sold as a cure for morphine addiction. Experimenting with the manufacture of the new drug, a Sicilian gang called Our Thing (Cosa Nostra) discovered that sodium morphate was a useful poison, undetectable at autopsy, which simulated death from a heart attack. Cocaine became very popular, partly as a result of its inclusion in a new “soft drink” catering to rising anti-alcohol sentiment—Coca-Cola. With the exception of mescaline, all of the new drugs (as well as cannabis) could be cheaply purchased over the counter at any pharmacy, yet few problems were noted until racism entered the picture.

      In 1875 California had passed a law prohibiting Chinese people (but not whites) from smoking opium. The effect was to close down the large, safe, cheap, comfortable opium parlors that had flourished till then and force clientele into more dangerous, furtive, corrupt dens, which became the norm thereafter. As Anglos began to fear the spread of the “vice” among their own kind, Congress responded, first in 1883 with a heavy tax on the drug, then in 1888 by banning imports of opium by Chinese (but not whites).

 

Petty laws breed great crimes.

— Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramée), English feminist writer,

in “Pipistrello,” from Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos (1884)

 

      The ironically named “yellow” journalism of the newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer began the first great American drug scare as domestic counterpoint to their agitation to start a war with Spain. Hundreds of articles and editorials warned that opium brought to our shores by yellow men was enslaving our fine citizens, but they almost completely ignored the drug’s powerful derivatives purveyed by whites. Cocaine had understandably become popular among blacks working their endless days in white fields and kitchens. Cocaine use among whites likewise went relatively unremarked, but allegedly it made black men superhuman powerhouses of sexual predation.

      The tabloids wielded another double-whammy. In some articles, an opium habit made Chinese people shiftless and lazy, unwilling to work and contribute to society. In others, however, it made them tireless, able to work 18-hour-days for a pittance and thus take jobs away from whites. Cocaine seemed to have the same paradoxical effects on blacks.

      Propaganda took precedence over information about the actual dangers of pure heroin and cocaine sold over the counter as miracle drugs. The drug scare produced two far-reaching laws. The 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, as amended in 1912, gave the federal government the power to determine medical questions and to restrict or ban the sale of foods or drugs that it deems harmful. In 1938 the Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act “shifted the burden” of proving a product’s safety to manufacturers, but thus gave them the ability to select and manipulate the data presented. In 1976 the act was amended to include all medical devices. As top positions in the Food and Drug Administration came to be filled by appointees from the pharmaceutical and food-producing corporations, these companies acquired the power to ban products that threatened their collective profits.

      Then in 1914 Congress passed the Harrison Anti-Narcotics Act, which prohibited all opiates and cocaine. It encoded into law the tabloid practice of lumping all stigmatized drugs together as “narcotics,” regardless of their actual effects, and categorizing all use as “abuse.” Many doctors were arrested for continuing to prescribe the drugs. Nationwide smuggling networks were in place by the end of World War I, and property crimes increased as users began to obtain their drugs on the black market at vastly inflated prices.

      Alcohol Prohibition, set in motion by passage of the Volstead Act in 1918, went into effect in 1919. Though it lasted only 14 years, Prohibition caused a severe hangover. It powered the Mafia’s rise from small foreign-connected street gangs in a few cities to a multinational cartel with proxies in the highest levels of government. Prohibition yielded a decline in cirrhosis rates and drunken-brawl violence, but it increased the murder rate tenfold and caused thousands of deaths from incompetent bootleg laced with methanol. It also promoted distrust of the police, both because it encouraged corruption among them and because it made them enforce a law most people hated. And overnight, Prohibition made alcohol cooler than it had been in a long time. Drinking became a badge of rebellion, a way to separate oneself from the “booboisie,” as H. L. Mencken termed uncritical adherents of the “national party line.”

      Prohibition was called the “noble experiement,” but some of its supporters may not have been concerned about public health. There’s some evidence that oil companies promoted passage of the Volstead Act as a way to forestall development of alcohol fuels made from hemp and other cheap biomass sources.

      Military spy units, private detective agencies like Burns and Pinkerton’s, and the General Intelligence Division of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI collaborated against progressive politicians, journalists, and labor unions during the Red Scare of 1919–1926. Alcohol agents applied their methods to the general population. Inspired by their effectiveness at instilling fear, Hitler made American-style surveillance, smear campaigns, entrapment, blank warrants, surprise raids, evidence planting, and indefinite detention for “criminal intent” the foundation of his own police techniques.

 

In the name of loving God, we hate.

In the name of protecting Health, we ruin lives.

— Thomas Szasz

 

      Third Reich drug policies are an uncharted realm of historical research, but apparently there wasn’t a large “drug problem” in Germany. Opium had been banned in 1929 (though barbiturates and codeine were still over-the-counter items), and the nation’s borders were more easily sealed than America’s. Still, drug users were classed among the “mentally defective,” and the Nazis kept card files on several thousand of them. Those from well-connected families were given treatment, but most probably were murdered by 1940 in the roving gas vans of the genetic-purification program.

      Instead, the chief focus of der Rauschgiftbekämpfung was an intense propaganda program against alcohol and tobacco, based on the “performance principle,” an extension of the work ethic under which no individual had the right to do anything that might diminish his productivity to the state—or her ability to bear future workers, soldiers, and mothers. Advertising championed the Führer as the model of sobriety. As the American journalist A. J. Liebling later put it, “Hitler was the epitome of the abstemious man. When the other Krauts saw him drinking water in the beer hall, they should’ve known he was not to be trusted.”

      But, like many drug warriors, Hitler wasn’t really against drugs. As the war turned against him, he turned increasingly to amphetamines and barbiturates to keep functioning. For soldiers he supported development of a synthetic heroin derivative, named dolophine in his honor, later renamed methadone. Amphetamines were issued to important military units, and a nitrous oxide system was built into the Nazis’ late-model fighter plane, the Focke-Wulf 190. And I. G. Farben, the Nazi chemical monopoly, reaped enormous profits on huge clandestine shipments of heroin, many of them distributed by fascists in Buenos Aires, as late as 1943.

      Furthermore, at the beginning of mescaline’s heyday during the Weimar Republic, Hitler probably used the psychedelic as a conditioning agent à la Charles Manson. Between 1919 and 1923, the Thule Society, a pseudo-occult fraternity and death squad led by Hitler and his mentor, Dietrich Eckhart, murdered some 300 left-wing politicians and labor organizers in Bavaria. During the same years, several hundred Jews, communists, and homeless persons disappeared. Though definitive evidence is lacking, there are suggestions that Hitler and Eckhart repeatedly took their proto-Nazi cadres deep into the forest, dosed them with mescaline, and coached them to take sexual gratification from slowly torturing these victims to death.^[5]