-Caveat Lector- from: http://internettrash.com/users/qaz/opihis2.htm Click Here: <A HREF="http://internettrash.com/users/qaz/opihis2.htm">A Quick History Of Opium</A> ----- Opium A Quick History Of Opium by Alfred W. McCoy Opium as Folk Pharmacopoeia (Up to 1600) Dominant Trend: Over the space of some three millennia, opium spread from its home in the eastern Mediterranean to China, creating an extended Asian opium zone. For the first time in recorded history, opium became a recreational drug in the cities of Mughal India. Implication: The persistent role of opiates as folk medicine and recreational euphoric for nearly 4,000 years raises questions about the chances of effecting its eradication in the near future. Early European Opium Trade (1640-1773) Dominant Trend: In this period, there was a shift from a limited trade in opium though intra-Asian networks to an expanding European commerce that stimulated both supply and demand. Working separately, European mercantile companies commercialized both opium cultivation and commerce, making it the basis of a profitable long distance trade in low-weight, high-value goods. Implication: During this era, opium's extraordinarily profitability, combining the constant demand of a staple with the high price of a luxury, becomes manifest. As an addictive drug, opium requires a daily dose giving it the inelastic demand of a basic foodstuff. Long distance sea-trade in bulk foods was still beyond the capacity of the era's maritime technology, but opium had the low weight and high mark-up of luxury goods like cloves or pepper. Compounding its profitability, the Chinese emperor prohibited opium in 1729, thus denying China the opportunity to produce opium and inadvertently conceding British merchants a de facto monopoly over the trade. European Mercantilism (1773-1858) Dominant Trend: Under the doctrine of mercantilism, all successful European colonial ventures in Asia involved commercialization of drugs in some form--caffeine, nicotine, or opiates. This 18th century trade transformed these drugs from luxury goods into commodities of mass consumption, making them integral to the economies and lifestyles of both Asian and Atlantic nations. Within the monopolistic logic of mercantilism, the British East India Company achieved the highest profits from its export of Indian opium to China because, from 1773 to 1830, its strong controls over key aspects--production, export, and sales. Implication: From the late 18th century onward, opium became a major trade commodity. Under the British East India Company (BEIC), centralized controls accelerated the export of Indian opium to China--from 13 tons in 1729 to and 2,558 tons in 1839. High Imperial Opium Trade (1858-1907) Dominant Trend: During the latter half of the 19th century, opium became a major global commodity. Across the Asian opium zone, from the Balkans to Manchuria, there was a steady increase of local opium cultivation and consumption. Moreover, in the latter half of the 19th century, the modern pharmaceutical industry made opiates a drug of mass abuse in the cities of the West--Europe, the Americas, and Australia. Implication: By the early 20th century, opium and its derivatives, morphine and heroin, had become a major global commodity equivalent in scale to other drugs such as coffee and tea. Multilateral Control (1907-1940). Dominant Trend: Within the Protestant churches of England and America a moral reaction to the excesses of a market-driven expansion of drug abuse inspired a global anti-opium movement in the late 19th Century. For the first time in the modern era, the anti-opium movement, in alliance with the larger temperance crusade, succeeded in winning new laws from the state restricting the individual's control over the body. With the passage of the Harrison Narcotics Act in 1914, the American state, for the first time, imposed the force of law over the right to use or abuse the body as the individual saw fit. Through a complex diplomacy from 1909 to 1925, the League of Nations adopted restrictions on the recreational use of heroin and opium that produced a major drop in legal production. Implication: The prewar attempt at multilateral controls over narcotics had a mixed result. Although repression did reduce both production and consumption, the high profits inherent in the opiates traffic remained to sustain criminal syndicates which now acted as an unintended market response to limit state control over the drug trade. Despite all these considerable drawbacks, multilateral controls do have their successes. Through these efforts, the constant, century-long upward trajectory in drug abuse was finally broken, and, for the first time since the 18th century, both use and production began to decline. World opium production dropped from 41,600 tons in 1907 to 16,600 tons in 1934, while licit world heroin production fell sharply from an 20,000 lbs. in 1926 to only 2,200 lbs. in 1931. War & Transition (1940-1947) Dominant Trend: During World War II, restrictions on shipping and strict port security produced a marked hiatus in global opium trafficking. Denied illicit opiates from Asia, the United States drew limited supplies of low-grade heroin from Mexico that failed to meet even a fraction of consumer demand. By the end of the war, the US addict population had dropped to an historic low of some twenty thousand. Once smuggling resumed after the war, however, the US addict population resumed the habit. Implication: Under extreme circumstances, a reduction in drug supply can lead to a sudden, albeit ephemeral, decrease in consumption. Cold War Opium Expansion (1948-1972) Dominant Trend: The Cold War brought major changes to the world's illicit opium traffic. The Communist victory in China eliminated the world's major opium market within a decade, removing the globe's major producer and consumer of opiates from the market. Although the Asian opium zone contracted geographically, Cold War geo-politics, combined with illicit market forces, stimulated a steady increase in opium production in the remaining area, which now stretched from Turkey to Thailand. Supplied by the Asian zone, other markets--particularly in the United States and Iran--expanded their consumption of opiates steadily during this period. Implication: External intervention in the remote tribal areas along the Asian opium zone contributed to the rise of drug lords and their armies, allowing them to position themselves for a massive expansion of local opium production. By providing arms, logistics, organization, and political protection, external alliances created the preconditions for a later leap in opium production in Burma and Afghanistan. US Bilateral Suppression (1973-1979) Dominant Trend: Although repression disrupted the global heroin trade for several years, over the longer term Nixon's drug war stimulated both opium production and heroin consumption. Ignoring these lessons, the Reagan and Bush administrations later pursued parallel policies in Latin America with dismal results. In essence, all three drug wars extended a local law enforcement model into the international arena in a way that failed to reduce either drug production or exports. Stimulated in part by three US drug wars, Asian opium production increased from 1,000 tons in 1970 to 4,000 tons in 1989. Implication: When law enforcement is applied to such an elaborate commerce, drug syndicates usually react in ways not foreseen by enforcement agencies. Treating this global commodity trade as if it were a localized vice, U.S. drug agencies often apply repression without any awareness of the intricate dynamics of these worldwide marketing systems. For both legal and illicit commodities, a crop failure in one production zone--whether from war, drought, or disease--creates a shortage of supply and raises the price for producers elsewhere, stimulating increased production in the next crop cycle. Increase in Asian Zone (1979-1989) Dominant Trend: For the first time in opium's history, highland drug lords began to act as independent entrepreneurs, responding creatively to market opportunities for their product. In Burma, for example, opium production increased exponentially from 550 tons in 1981 to 2,500 in 1989, in large part through the efforts of leading warlords like Khun Sa. Similarly, the emergence of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar as the dominant rebel leader in Afghanistan created a parallel figure of power who could control much of the country's opium production, heroin processing, and export. Implication: The capacity of powerful opium warlords in Burma and Afghanistan to both produce and export has had a growing influence on Western heroin markets--sending vast new supplies of Burmese heroin to America and giving the Sicilian mafia a major new role as brokers for South West Asian heroin to Europe and the United States. Global Proliferation of Opium (1989-1994). Dominant Trend: In the early 1990s, heroin recovered its historic preeminence as a leading illicit narcotic and became something of a world drug. Expansion of established opium areas in Burma and Afghanistan, combined with introduction of the crop into Central Asia and Latin America, led to a steady increase in world supply. Increased opium harvests have led to a dramatic proliferation of heroin abuse around the globe--a phenomenon so vast that we can speak, without hyperbole, of a globalization of heroin consumption. Paralleling the rise of use in established consuming regions, heroin abuse shot upward in new areas of Europe and Asia. Implication: World opium supply is growing without any apparent restraint. Since all opium produced is always consumed, rising supply is now a powerful force driving a sharp increase in world heroin consumption, creating insatiable demand for the drug, not seen since early 19th Century China, that may, in turn, yield further production increases in Latin America or Central Asia. Changing Patterns in Opium Production Bilateral Suppression As demonstrated in Turkey in the 1970s and the Andes in the 1980s, bilateral suppression efforts can effect dramatic short-term reductions in supply that will, in the next crop year, lead to an increase in total global production of narcotics. Similarly, heroin supplies, when denied entry into one market, seek another, resulting in a proliferation of consumption and an overall increase in world demand for opiates. Should such bilateral operations, by some miracle, succeed in effecting a long-term reduction in supply, domestic dealers could turn to the manufacture of synthetics. In the US during the 1970s, for example, criminal syndicates reacted to a shortage of natural drugs by expanding domestic manufacture of synthetics, producing a speed or amphetamine epidemic. China's Perfect Coercion In the century past, the most important development in the global traffic was China's effective suppression of opium production and use after 1949. Judging by the success of these efforts, perfect repression under an efficient authoritarian regime can effect a dramatic reduction in both consumption and production of drugs. However, China's experience is historically unique and is not relevant as a model for the more open political systems that have begun emerging since 1989. State Power Even when drugs are produced in remote terrain and consumed in secret, the state plays a major role in their political economy. In circumstances where opium production or consumption are legal, an efficient state can effect a rapid change in drug supply and use. From 1906 to 1934, multilateral efforts by the League of Nations, working through its member states, succeeded in reducing global opium production from 41,600 tons to 16,600 largely because the states involved were regulating a legal production and consumption that was, in effect, under their control. Approaching the question of the state from another perspective, the lessons of the past century indicate that opium production cannot continue over the long term in a strong state committed to its eradication. Conversely, protracted, high-level opium production requires either the attenuation of state power in the producing regions, as in Burma and Afghanistan in the 1980s, or extensive official corruption, as Thailand in the 1960s, Laos in the 1970s, or Burma in the 1990s. Thus, any cluster of policies that increases state control over opium producing regions and simultaneously restrains official corruption over drugs will contribute to a long-term reduction in both cultivation and trafficking. Response to Repression Market response to all government control and eradication efforts is complex and unpredictable. Since the 1920s, syndicate response to all suppression efforts has been quick, supple, sophisticated, and often capable of compromising even the best attempts. Similarly, even the most effective multilateral opium suppression efforts have complex consequences. For example, the UN Drug Control Program in Thailand succeeded in reducing the opium cultivation, thereby raising the price of smoking opium to local addicts, producing an epidemic of HIV infection through needle sharing. Consequences of Long-Term Change Projecting the patterns of historical changes forward over the next half-century leads to some contradictory and inconclusive trends: (a.) as has already occurred in the Thai highlands, population pressures may tend to bring government services into the opium-growing zones, producing improved para-military access and increased state controls; and, b.) over the medium term, population pressures that reduce available arable land could drive highland population towards increased opium cultivation. With remarkable speed and facility, multi-national corporations and telecommunications are pulling us towards a global community that might promote a subtle sense of shared humanity, reducing the will of societies to inflict addiction upon another. Simultaneously, however, there is an equally powerful countervailing trend toward the assertion of primordial identities that may well have the opposite effect. For forty years, the Cold War imposed an artificial bipolar division over the globe that led rival superpowers to the defend the territorial integrity of their respective clients. With the end of the Cold War, there has then been a recrudescence of religion, regionalism, race, and ethnicity that may well lead to the fragmentation of the invented nations that were carved out of the colonial world at the end of World War II. The rise of new micro-states from the margins of established nations has several possible implications for future opium production: (a.) during a period of insurgency against an established state, rebel groups, like Khun Sa's Mong Tai Army, will become more dependent upon opium finance and resist drug repression; (b.) faced with the threat of regional secessionist movements, nations will become less able to impose unpopular opium-control programs upon volatile minority areas; and, (c.) once an ethnic group actually secedes, the new state will, in all probability, become more cooperative with UN and US drug control programs to win international aid and consolidate the new state's controls over its periphery. Policy Implications of Historic Patterns Multilateral Policy During the 20th Century, multilateral efforts have been more effective than bilateral initiatives in effecting narcotics suppression. From 1906 to 1934, multilateral efforts by the League of Nations reduced global opium production from 41,624 tons to an estimated 16,653. By contrast, between 1970 and 1990, an era of the intense US bilateral drug wars, world illicit opium production increased from 1,154 tons to 4,209. Since bilateral operations are, by their very nature, focused on a single producing country, market dynamics will mean that, over the long term, a successful eradication will stimulate illicit price and production elsewhere, leading to a net global increase in opium supply. Supply Reduction Any attempt at solving America's heroin problem by reducing global opium production is unrealistic. For the past two decades, three US presidents have waged a war on drugs with the aim of ameliorating America's narcotics problem by reducing global supply. Examined closely, this strategy seems unlikely to reduce global opium supply for several reasons: (a.) successful bilateral eradication has, over the past quarter century, stimulated both drug production and consumption; (b.) the elimination of US heroin supply would require that opium cultivation virtually disappear from the face of the globe; and, (c.) world supply will, in all probability, increase sharply in coming decades. Despite short-term success, Nixon's eradication of illicit opium cultivation in Turkey during the 1970s stimulated opium production elsewhere in the Asian zone, just as his interception of US-bound heroin shipments from Thailand stimulated narcotics consumption in Europe. Viewed historically, each short-term success in bilateral interdiction stimulates global opiates production and consumption, compounding the problem over the long term. Since America consumes a tiny share of world supply and pays the highest price, illicit market dynamics make a supply-side solution to the US heroin problem unlikely. In 1985, for example, the US consumed only 6 tons of opium out of a world production of 1,465 tons--just 0.4 percent of the total. Since the US pays the highest price and thus offers dealers at all levels the widest profit margin, it will consume the world's last 6 tons of opium. In effect, the drug war strategy requires that the US eradicate 99.6 percent of the world's opium before it gets to that last, critical 0.4 percent destined for the its market. Complicating the issue further, illicit opium farming is spreading rapidly to new areas in Central Asia and Latin America, raising total world supply. It is very possible that world opium supply will double in the next five years and then double again within the decade. Given declining US resources and rising world opium production, a supply-side solution to America's heroin problem seems an impossibility. Demand Reduction Looking back on the past 300 years of human history, there are only a very few societies that have succeeded in reducing their level of gross opiates consumption Between World War I and World War II, the United States managed to reduce its overall level of opiates consumption through a series of demand-side measures. By banning legal narcotics sales between 1914 and 1923, the US gained the instruments to suppress legal use, effecting a gradual gross reduction in use. Simultaneously, a mass campaign of education and moral injunction educated the American people to avoid opiates addiction, a phenomenon that was only gradually being analyzed and understood. During the decade following its revolution, the People's Republic of China used a mix of coercion, compulsory treatment, and mass education to eliminate the world's largest opiate addict population. During the late 1970s, the transitory effect of successful drug suppression in Turkey and Thailand combined with a drop in demand as Vietnam-era addicts weaned themselves from the drug combined to produce a sudden drop in the estimated number of American addicts from 500,000 to 200,000. Since the demand change was specific to the experience of a single generation and the supply reduction was ephemeral, the fundamental demand for heroin remained and abuse levels rose again in the 1980s as supplies increased. >From these experiences, we can determine some of the following attributes of successful attempts at demand reduction: (a.) all have been multi-faceted with a mix of coercion, voluntarism, education, and supply reduction; (b.) in both China and the US successful demand reduction efforts have occurred at times when narcotics supply, or availability, has also been reduced; (c.) both states have used coercion to punish dealers and recidivist consumers; and, (d.) coercion has been successfully complemented by mass movements that combine social disapproval and education to inspire individuals to end their abuse voluntarily. Policy Paradigms Over the past half-century, US drug policy has been framed, in succession, around two inappropriate paradigms of coercion. During the 1950s, the FBN used the classic 19th century police paradigm which applied localized coercion to the eradication of domestic vice trading. Since the 1970s, the executive has used a martial metaphor of war, applying the military logic of short, intense campaigns with fixed spatial or strategic objectives to an elusive global commodity. Recognizing the power of paradigms to shape concepts and thereby frame policy, it might be best to adopt a more appropriate health or disease paradigm for US drug policy. At the level of domestic drug abuse, our policy should be removed from the criminal justice system and returned to the realm of public health where it could be handled like a disease such as tuberculosis or influenza. Like a virulent disease, a global commodity such as opium can be best eradicated only through a cooperative world-wide effort. Customs Barrier Although strict controls at the national frontier are limited in their effectiveness, they do nonetheless serve as an informal customs barrier that can at least restrain the entry of drugs. Just as high protective tariffs discourage but do not eliminate legal imports, so an efficient customs operation can serve as informal market factor that discourages, within limits, unrestricted narcotics imports. Similarly, dropping the custom shield might serve as informal invitation to illicit drug imports. As noted above, no society has ever been able to implement demand reduction when opiates are in ample supply. Conversely, all opiates imported into a consuming society have eventually, in some way, been consumed, leading to the inference that the level of supply sets the level of demand. Scenarios for Future Policy Options Continued Repression If the United States continues its current policy of repression--with international bilateral operations, Customs controls, and domestic policing--then the probable outcome will be over the long term might be as follows. 1.) Projecting current patterns forward, heroin use will continue grow both domestically and globally, the crime rate will climb, and the US prison population will increase without cease. 2.) Assuming that the US continues current attempts at eradication, bilateral repression, where attempted, will continue to stimulate opium cultivation, contributing to a rapidly increasing global supply of drugs. 3.) Even if the US withdraws from international suppression operations, over the medium term there is every indication that world opium supply will continue its current rate of rapid increase. 4.) US Customs will fail to slow the import of drugs into the US, allowing the increased world opium supply to enter America and stimulate a rising level of heroin consumption. Legalization If the United States were to abandon all attempts at drug suppression and legalize narcotics, the reaction in the market would likely be far more complex than advocates of this radical policy alternative have suggested. 1.) Assuming that drug use is legalized only for adults and not for minors, then legalization, with unrestricted legal sales to adults, might increase US consumption of narcotics. 2.)If we adopt a strict clinical control system to distribute legalized heroin and cocaine to adults, then, as happened in the United Kingdom in recent decades, a parallel illegal traffic might spring up beside the legal clinics, servicing those who wish to control their own consumption. 3.) If we adopt a laissez-faire system of legal narcotic sales, then impoverished adult users may avail of the opportunity to earn survival income by diverting supplies to underage users. Policy of Regulation Instead of the drug war with its doomed attempt at a total eradication of drug use, there are several policy alternatives the US could adopt to improve the narcotics situation. If America's drug problem cannot be solved, then at least it can be managed rationally. 1.) By forcing the DEA to abandon its unreflective buy-and-bust approach, the US government can restrain the DEA from inadvertently stimulating global opium production with its bilateral interdiction. 2.) After abandoning the DEA's bilateral enforcement effort, we can shift a portion of our international interdiction funds to the UN's long-term, multilateral crop substitution efforts. Over the long-term, simultaneous, coordinated efforts at opium control might actually reduce world supply instead of stimulating it as bilateral operations have. 3.) Given the complexity of the global drug trade, there is no bilateral, short-term, supply-side solution to the US drug problem. Consequently, we must divert much current drug war budget from repression to education and treatment. 4.) Since all drugs imported into the United States are somehow consumed, we should maintain an effective Customs barrier to minimize the smuggling of illicit narcotics. 5.) As a part of this putative strategy of regulation, we might seriously consider decriminalization of narcotics possession of small quantities for personal use or petty sales. Instead of mandatory prison terms for possession of small amounts of drugs, reformed laws might mandate compulsory treatment, relieving the mounting pressure on our prisons and the public purse that supports them. 6.) Under the critical review of existing drug laws that will accompany this policy of regulation, the benefits of banning the free purchase of hypodermic syringes should be examined. Although the policy has been in place for decades, there is little evidence that these restrictions have in any way reduced the level of drug addiction. 7.) Rather than letting drug sales rise to their natural level through legalization or seeking a sudden reduction in supply by short-term repression, the logic of this policy aims for a gradual diminution in narcotics and hard drug consumption over long-term. To avoid repeating the experience of the late 1970s when a sudden heroin shortage stimulated domestic production of synthetic drugs, the US and UN policy should be coordinated to affect a slow, steady decline in world opiates supply. 8.) Ultimately we must realize that there is no quick fix to the US drug problem. Through this policy of regulation we can stop the American state from using its considerable power to compound the problem. Then we can slow and stabilize the level of domestic drug use, working over the long-term for a gradual amelioration. ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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