Essay Review

Drugs, opium in particular, have undergone a historical metamorphosis in the past few years. What once passed for the "history of opium" were some scattered references to Homer and nepenthe, Shakespeare and "drowsy mandragora", with the Chinese opium wars thrown in for good measure. There were no studies of drug use and the development of control policy in either Britain or the USA. Issues such as the introduction of hypodermic morphine and the establishment of disease views of addiction were seen simply as matters of medicine and technology, as harbingers of some contemporary understanding. The inadequacy of these approaches as the basis for an understanding of the relationship of opium and other drugs to society has been demonstrated, and is further underlined by Terry Parssinen's book on narcotic drugs in British society. Dr Parssinen covers the changes in the status of opium, both in society as a whole and in social policy, in the period 1820-1930. His survey moves from the open sale of opium at the beginning of the nineteenth century to the beginnings of public health concern, the advent of hypodermic morphine, and the establishment of drug control policy in the early years of the twentieth century, culminating in the 1926 Rolleston Report. This Report confirmed what became known as the "British System" of drug control, a medically based control policy often contrasted with the penal policy established in the USA at the same time, to the detriment of the latter. I found two sections of particular interest. Dr Parssinen surveys the extensive involvement of British morphine manufacturers in illegal morphine smuggling in the Far East in the first decades of the twentieth century. Britain was, for much of this period, the world's major manufacturer of the drug. The decline and ending of the Indo-Chinese opium trade in the early 1900s was replaced by a considerable increase in the export of morphine to China, much of it smuggled via Japan. The extent of this trade, illegal since the 1909 Mackay Treaty had prohibited the import of morphine into China, was revealed by the almost universal introduction of an import/export certificate system after the passage of the Dangerous Drugs Act in Britain in 1920. The Humphrey case in 1923 indicated the continued involvement of one British manufacturer, T. Whiffen and Son, which thereby lost its licence to manufacture and export morphine and cocaine. Britain thereafter, through the influence of …