RBG Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention Education Interactive Booklet

1. RBG Comprehensive Drug Abuse
Prevention Education & Discussion
Forum: 4 Lessons
Tutorials written and designed by RBG Street Scholar
Drug abuse and addiction and dope dealing are just one of the many faces of
New Afrikan oppression born in the U.S.A. It is a primary problem secondary to
more primary causes, i.e. white supremacy / racism and black escapism,
unconsciousness, feelings of hopelessness, helplessness and victim
perpetrator co-optation. Here we present the history of cocaine and heroin
leading right on up to the present day and time. Note that we open this tutorial
with a presentation on alcohol (a drug used by the Europeans in their holocaust
of Afrikan enslavement) this drug and tobacco are to date the most ominous
killers of Black folx, as so called legal drugs.
1

2. RBG Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention Education Interactive Booklet
Intro: Historical Backdrop
Atlantic triangular slave trade: Afrikan Slaves, Sugar Cane and Rum
(Companion reader The Triangular Trade and Prison Slavery)
The best-known triangular trading system is the transatlantic slave trade, that operated during
the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries, carrying slaves, cash crops, and manufactured goods
between West Africa, Caribbean or American colonies and the European colonial powers, with
the northern colonies of British North America, especially New England, sometimes taking over
the role of Europe.
http://africanhistory.about.com/od/slavery/tp/TransAtlantic001.htm
Depiction of the classical model of the Triangular trade.
The use of African slaves was fundamental to growing colonial cash
crops, which were exported to Europe. European goods, in turn,
were used to purchase African slaves, which were then brought on
the sea lane west from Africa to the Americas, the so called middle
passage.
http://www.nmm.ac.uk/freedom/viewTheme.cfm/theme/triangular
A classic example would be the trade of sugar (often in its liquid form,
molasses) from the Caribbean to Europe or New England, where it was
distilled into rum, some of which was then used to purchase new slaves
in West Africa.
The trade represented a profitable enterprise for merchants and
investors. The business was risky, competitive and severe, but enslaved
Africans fetched a high price at auctions, making the trade in human
cargo a lucrative business.
Diagram illustrating the stowage of African slaves on a British slave ship.
The first leg of the triangle was from a European port to Africa, in which
ships carried supplies for sale and trade, such as copper, cloth, trinkets,
slave beads, guns and ammunition.
When the slave ship arrived, its cargo would be sold or bartered for slaves, who were tightly
packed like any other cargo to maximize profits.
On the second leg, ships made the journey of the Middle Passage from Africa to the New World.
Once the slave ship reached the New World, enslaved survivors were sold in the Caribbean or
the Americas.
The ships were then prepared to get them thoroughly cleaned, drained, and loaded with export
goods for a return voyage, the third leg, to their home port.[4] From the West Indies the main
export cargoes were sugar, rum, and molasses; from Virginia, commodities were tobacco and
hemp. The ship then returned to Europe to complete the triangle.
Further study:
The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, a portal to data concerning the history of the
triangular trade of transatlantic slave trade voyages.
Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice
2

3. RBG Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention Education Interactive Booklet
Of all the discipline of study history is best qualified to reward all research...The first video is
very telling in that respect. Keep in mind, white folk commented every crime on the books first
and engaged in every vice under the Sun. Then they were smart enough to know how to use
the same death-walks against those whom they would oppress...And yes everyone becomes
slave to the dope, but when amerikkka sneezes, New Afrikan people convulse... War and
oppression abroad has resulted in heroin making a comeback at home once again. Generations
of our young folk are having their lives destroyed by jails / prisons, insanity and death, by taking
and selling crack cocaine. It is my hope that by your reading, viewing and discussing these
lessons you will be in a better position to pull some else's coat in the interest of us stopping
cooperation in our own genocide.
Just the Facts RBG:
Fact: The more things change the more things stay the same. The War on Drugs is the United
Snakes of Amerikkka's way of fully reconstituting slavery. How you ask. Well, quite as it is kept,
slavery really was never completely abolished: The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution reads: neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for
crime where of the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United
States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. With its ratification in December 1865, this
amendment put an official end to the injustice of slavery as it was then practiced while at the
same time paving the way for a new slavery that flourishes to this day; namely, the prison
industrial complex (PIC).
African Americans constitute about 12% of the American population, and around 13% of drug
users, nearly the same number, which is what you'd expect. Additionally, 9.7% of Blacks use
drugs, compared to 8.1% for whites, again similar numbers, in line with expectations. So you'd
expect that the rates of incarceration for drug possession for Blacks and whites to be similar.
But they're not. Blacks make up 35% of those arrested for possession, 55% of those convicted,
and 74% of those sentenced. How, exactly, in a fair society, would 13% of drug users make up
74% of those sentenced for drug violations? And how can 35% of arrests make up 74% of
inmates? This is nothing but socio-structural and institutionalized racism.
In South Africa during Apartheid 851 per 100,000 black males were incarcerated. Currently in
the United States, under the banner of the "War on Drugs" 4,919 per 100,000 black males are
incarcerated. Nearly 1/3 of black men in their 20s are in prison, on probation or parole. Our
institutionalized racism is worse than the worst post-slavery institutionalized racism. More New
African are presently in jail than were enslaved in the 19th century.
3

4. LESSON 1
Illegal Drugs & How They
Got That Way:
Cocaine / Crack
RBG PhotoStory Mini-Lecture: The Dope
Game-f. T-K.A.S.H. and Paris- Made in
America
This is an ongoing learning series, including power points, photo slide shows,
videos and essays.
By series end the learner will be clear on who the original dope addicts were and
how dope is presently used as a tool of New Afrikan oppression / the re-
constitution of slavery.
Narcotization of the Black Community:
CIA Ties, White Lines & Mo White Lies
4

5. Play Minister Malcolm X — You Got Whites Disease
RBG on What is Black
Oppression in
Amerikkka, f. Paris
Presents Hard Truth
Soldiers Vol. 1
5

6. "For decades, the CIA, the Pentagon, and secret organizations like Oliver North's
Enterprise have been supporting and protecting the world's biggest drug dealers....
The Contras and some of their Central American allies ... have been documented by
DEA as supplying ... at least 50 percent of our national cocaine consumption. They
were the main conduit to the United States for Colombian cocaine during the 1980's.
The rest of the drug supply ... came from other CIA-supported groups, such as DFS
(the Mexican CIA) ... [and] other groups and/or individuals like Manual Noriega." (Ex-
DEA agent Michael Levine: The Big White Lie: The CIA and the Cocaine/Crack
Epidemic)
"The CIA functionally gains influence and control in governments corrupted by
criminal Narco-trafficking. Politically, the CIA exerts influence by leveraging Narco-
militarists and corrupted politicians... This is really NEO-Narco-colonialism, whereby
local criminal proxies do the bidding of the patron government seeking expanded
influence. But because of the quid-pro-quo of protecting the criminal proxies' illicit
pipelines, the result is still a functional Narco-colonialism, involving a narcotics
commodity in the actual practical execution of policy, with the very different twist of covert action."
-- from the analysis section of this web site: (http://ciadrugs.homestead.com/files/analysis.html)
For more see The C.I.A. & Drugs Narco-colonialism in the 20th Century
GNN's award winning documentary on the CIA's
involvement with selling of narcotics. Tracking the
covert history of CIA drug smuggling from Nicaragua
to Arkansas and South Central Los Angeles, GNN
sheds light on the darkest secret of the Agency's
operational directorate. Cut to the ambient Hip Hop
loops of DJ Trek-e, Crack The CIA features explosive
footage of Mike Ruppert's historical televised
confrontation with CIA Director John Deutch. Don't
blink! More at GNN(site has been removed)
6

7. Leaving the unsupportable arguments aside, is there a supportable case that CIA directly
intended for African-Americans to receive the cocaine which it knew would be turned into crack
cocaine and which it knew would prove so addictive as to destroy entire communities?” The
answer is absolutely, yes."
Blacks Were Targeted for CIA Cocaine It Can Be Proven
By Michael C. Ruppert
7

8. LESSON 2
Illegal Drugs & How They Got That Way:
Cocaine / Crack
"Prevent the rise of a black messiah,"
"In time, the cocaine that flooded Los Angeles
helped spark a "crack explosion" in urban America
and provided the cash and connections needed for
Los Angeles's gangs to buy Uzi sub-machine guns,
AK-47 rifles, and other assault weapons that would
fuel deadly gang turf wars, drive-by shootings,
murders and robberies -- courtesy of the U.S.
government, according to the article.
8

9. RBG Blakademics June 2010
The Complete Archive of Gary Webb's Explosive Series:
"Dark Alliance" (NarcoNews)
Stories by Gary Webb
Mercury News Staff Writer
For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the
Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin
American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a Mercury News
investigation has found. This drug network opened the first pipeline between Colombia's
cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the crack
capital of the world.
9

10. LESSON 3
Illegal Drugs & How They Got That Way: The Opiate/
Morphine and Heroin Story
Note: My two videos on the topic were banned from You Tube, but are available on RBG
Worldwide for viewing and study.
PREVIOUSLY IN THIS LEARNING SERIES: We saw and read
how the CIA flooded our communities with drugs / thus gun
money--where there are no jobs and lots of hopelessness,
unconsciousness, frustration and confusion; they create the
power-keg...Then under the guise of upholding law and order,
they justify killings us and locking us down in the eyes of the
public. Consequently legitimizing 21 st century slavery in PIC
(Prison Industrial Complex) face. Please comment and e-mail to
a friend.
It clearly shows how racism and repression
pressed upon Blacks has always been part
and parcel to U.S. drug laws; in spite of yt
being the original users, abusers and
addicts. Like Dr Neely Fuller Jr. say "If you
don't understand white supremacy,
everything else will confuse you." However,
when you view these things in the context of
white supremacy / racism your vision
becomes shaper in the overall overstanding
of the science of oppression.
RECALL MY OPENING STATEMENT WAS:
Of all the disciplines of study history is best qualified to reward all research...The first
video is very telling in that respect. Keep in mind, white folk commented every crime on
the books first and engaged in every vice...then they were smart enough to know how to
10

11. RBG Blakademics June 2010
use the same death-walks against those whom they would oppress...And yes everyone
becomes slave to the dope, but when amerikkka sneezes, black people convulse...please
continue as to be brought up to date--oppression has resulted in heroin making a
comeback once again.
Washington's Hidden Agenda: Restore the Drug Trade
The Spoils of War: Afghanistan’s Multibillion Dollar Heroin
Trade by Michel Chossudovsky
www.globalresearch.ca 5 April 2004
The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO404A.html
11

12. War on Drugs (The Prison Industrial Complex)
(1999) and More
War on Drugs (The Prison Industrial Complex)
(1999)
The first few minutes of the film
below are in Dutch, but the rest is
in English. The war on drugs has
been going on for more than three
decades today; nearly 500,000
Americans are imprisoned on drug
charges. In 1980 the number was
50,000. Last year $40 billion in
taxpayer dollars were spent in
fighting the war on drugs.
12

13. RBG Blakademics June 2010
As a result of the incarceration
obsession, the United States
operates the largest prison
system on the planet, and the
U.S. nonviolent prisoner
population is larger than the
combined populations of
Wyoming and Alaska. Try to
imagine the Drug Enforcement
Administration erecting razor wire
barricades around two states to
control crime and you'll get the
picture.
According to the U.S. Dept of Justice, the number of offenders under age 18 imprisoned
for drug offenses increased twelvefold from 1985 to 1997. The group most affected by
this propensity for incarceration is African-Americans. From 1985 to 1997, the
percentage of African-American young people put in prison increased from 53 to 62
percent.
Today, 89 percent of police departments have paramilitary units, and 46 percent have
been trained by active duty armed forces. The most common use of paramilitary units is
serving drug-related search warrants, which usually involve no-knock entries into private
homes.
BIOPSYCHOSOCIAL AND CULTURAL CONSIDERATIONS:
RBG Member Only Access
PDF Docs for download and a PowerPoints on the Biology of Addiction
 ATOD-Pregnancy & Drug Use.pdf, 55 KB
 ATOD-Race & Prison.pdf, 62 KB
 ATOD-Race & HIV-AIDS.pdf, 51 KB
13

14. LESSON 4
 ATOD BRAIN ACTION OF COCAINE OPIATES AND MARIJUANA.PPT,
2.6 MB
In the artic where the indigenous people sometimes might hunt
a wolf they'll take a double edge blade and they'll put blood on
the blade and melt the ice and stick the handle in the ice so only
the blade is protruding. And that a wolf who smells the blood
and wants to eat will come and lick the blade trying to eat and
what happens is when the wolf licks the blade he cuts his
tongue and he bleeds and he thinks he's really having a good
meal and he drinks, and he licks and licks and of course he's
drinking his own blood and he kills himself. - Wolves (1st track
on "Let's Get Free").
Stic: That's the Chairman Omali from INPDUM (International
Peoples Democratic Uhuru Movement) speaking. It's about
brothers having to hustle because they don't have any money or
opportunities that we're aware of. The government pumps crack
into the community to keep brothers down, such as the Black
Panthers, etc. Brothers feel its a bright idea when they see they
could get $50 from this little piece of glass rock product. When
you're able to eat when yesterday you wasn't, thats a real self-
14

15. esteem booster. That's a really hard thing to come down on people, but they feel like their
actually doing something for themselves but the effect is like a wolf licking a blade, he's tasting
the blood but he don't realize that its his own blood. He's so blood thirsty, so hungry to eat. It's
not the wolfs fault, he got to eat just like everybody else, he's been tricked into thinking the
blade is opportunity. Brothers are tricked into thinking that Crack-Cocaine is our opportunity and
we're licking the blade and the blood we're tasting is us in prison, getting shot at parties and
living in a military state.
Chairman Omali says we need to blame the hunter, the CIA, government; the people who
set us up in these conditions and robbed us from Africa and have been living off of us since we
got here; the people who really benefit from the drug trade. The same crack-cocaine after a few
years don't start to look better, it looks fucked up. So the money is going somewhere, could it be
for more police officers? Weapons? And all the new sophisticated technology? That's what the
intro to the album is represents. To look at things for what they really are and stop licking the
blade and start using it.
Extracts from The RBG Melanins Paper
MELANIN, NEGATIVE MUSIC AND THE DOPE GAME
In their ongoing effort to physically, mentally and
spiritually destroy people of color, oppressors
(scientists, chemists) create “designer drugs” that
are specially structured to chemically bind with
the melanin molecule and cause melanin to
become toxic to Blacks! The molecules of these
drugs resemble the Melanin molecule. The body
is thus fooled and its balance is thrown off as it
relies on contaminated melanin in order to
function. Major culprits include heroin,
cocaine/crack, ecstasy and yes, marijuana.
If dopamine is depleted, such as in cocaine
addiction, the body will attempt to replenish
the dopamine by increasing its synthesis.
That mean tyrosine will now be shunted
away from melanin synthesis. So, in short,
for those of us that have brain functions that
are more dependent on neuromelanin
(people of Afrikan descent), those areas will become compromised.
Blacks get addicted faster, stay addicted longer, and suffer the worse...from these drugs which
are deliberately placed in Black communities. In his vital book, MELANIN: The Chemical Key to
Black Greatness, essential reading for all Melanated People, Carol Barnes clearly documents
this subject along with the wonders of Melanin. He shows how illegal drugs alter or change
Melanin‟s chemical structure and thus alter many life supporting functions. Toxic drugs and
chemicals are destroying the heart of the Black community and causing many deaths. Barnes
writes: “MELANIN can become toxic to the BLACK HUMAN because it combines with harmful
15

16. drugs such as cocaine, amphetamines, hallucinogens, neuroleptic (tranquilizers), marijuana,
„agent orange‟...parquets, tetracyclines...”
Toxic drugs such as cocaine, LSD, and even marijuana are very similar to Melanin and the sub-
units that make up the Melanin substance. Many health-conscious Blacks consider marijuana to
be a safe healthy herb, not realizing that once this (or any herb) is “cooked,” it becomes a drug
as far as your body is concerned!
Even legal drugs (tetracyclines, neuroleptics, etc.) have a remarkable affinity for reacting with or
binding to Melanin and may be toxic to all Melanin centers in the Black human.
Other culprits which bind with Melanin and cause death for Blacks are aromatic and lipid
compounds. Melanin shows extreme affinity for binding with “aromatic and lipid compounds.”
Lipid means fat. Lipid or fat compounds (fatty acids) are animal and vegetable oil /fats used for
frying and cooking. Examples are shortening and corn oil. Aromatic compounds contain
benzene, a major component of gasoline.
Herbicides (parquets, agent orange, etc.) bind irreversibly with Melanin and remain in the Black
human throughout life causing many disorders. Hence Blacks especially, should buy organically
grown food.
Most Blacks test positive in the urine test for marijuana! People having high levels of Melanin or
a high number of pigmented centers, such as the Black human, tend to show a positive test for
the use of marijuana because the chemical species found in the urine which indicates
someone‟s use of marijuana is also found in the urine of Black humans.
16

17. APPEDIX
Nineteenth-century America - a "dope fiend's paradise"
Source: http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/library/studies/cu/cu1.html
The United States of America during the nineteenth century could quite properly be described
as a "dope fiend's paradise."
Opium was on legal sale conveniently and at low prices throughout the century; morphine came
into common use during and after the Civil War; and heroin was marketed toward the end of the
century. These opiates and countless pharmaceutical preparations containing them "were as
freely accessible as aspirin is today." 1 They flowed mostly through five broad channels of
distribution, all of them quite legal:
1) Physicians dispensed opiates directly to patients, or wrote prescriptions for them.
(2) Drugstores sold opiates over the counter to customers without a prescription.
(3) Grocery and general stores as well as pharmacies stocked and sold opiates. An 1883-1885
survey of the state of Iowa, which then had a population of less than 2,000,000, found 3,000
stores in the state where opiates were on sale--- and this did not include the physicians who
dispensed opiates directly. 2
(4) For users unable or unwilling to patronize a nearby store, opiates could be ordered by mail.
(5) Finally, there were countless patent medicines on the market containing opium or morphine.
They were sold under such names as Ayer's Cherry Pectoral, Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup,
Darby's Carminative, Godfrey's Cordial, McMunn's Elixir of Opium, Dover's Powder, 3 and so on.
Some were teething syrups for young children, some were "soothing syrups," some were
recommended for diarrhea and dysentery or for "women's trouble." They were widely advertised
in newspapers and magazines and on billboards as "pain-killers," "cough mixtures," "women's
friends, "consumption cures," and so on. 4 One wholesale drug house, it is said, distributed
more than 600 proprietary medicines and other products containing opiates. 5
Most of the opium consumed in the United States during the nineteenth century was legally
imported. Morphine was legally manufactured here from the imported opium. 6 But opium
poppies were also legally grown within the United States. One early reference--- perhaps the
earliest--- was in a letter from a Philadelphia physician, Dr. Thomas Bond, who wrote to a
Pennsylvania farmer on August 24, 1781: "The opium you sent is pure and of good quality. I
hope you will take care of the seed." 7 During the War of 1812, opium was scarce, but "some
parties produced it in New Hampshire and sold the product at from $10 to $12 per pound." 8
17

18. RBG Blakademics June 2010
In 1871 a Massachusetts official reported:
There are so many channels through which the drug may be brought into the State, that I
suppose it would be almost impossible to determine how much foreign opium is used here; but it
may easily be shown that the home production increases every year. Opium has been recently
made from white poppies, cultivated for the purpose, in Vermont, New Hampshire, and
Connecticut, the annual production being estimated by hundreds of pounds, and this has
generally been absorbed in the communities where it is made. It has also been brought here
from Florida and Louisiana, while comparatively large quantities are regularly sent east from
California and Arizona, where its cultivation is becoming an important branch of industry, ten
acres of poppies being said to yield, in Arizona, twelve hundred pounds of opium. 9
Opium was also produced in the Confederate states (Virginia, Tennessee, South Carolina,
Georgia) 10 during the Civil War--- and perhaps thereafter. Though some states outlawed it
earlier, Congress did not ban the cultivation of opium poppies nationally until 1942. 11
The nineteenth-century distribution system reached into towns, villages, and hamlets as well as
the large cities. A New England physician-druggist wrote about 1870:
In this town I began business twenty years since. The population then at 10,000 has increased
only inconsiderably, but my sales have advanced from 50 pounds of opium the first year to 300
pounds now; and of laudanum [opium in alcohol] four times upon what was formerly required.
About 50 regular purchasers come to my shop, and as many more, perhaps, are divided among
the other three apothecaries in the place. Some country dealers also have their quota of
dependents. 12
A correspondent for the Portland (Maine) Press had this to say about opium users in 1868: "In
the little village of Auburn ... at least fifty such (as counted up by a resident apothecary)
regularly purchase their supplies hereabouts; and the country grocers too, not a few of them,
find occasion for keeping themselves supplied with a stock." 13
A survey of 10,000 prescriptions filled by thirty-five Boston drugstores in 1888 revealed that
1,481 of them contained opiates. Among prescriptions refilled three or more times, 78 percent
contained opiates . 14
One Massachusetts druggist, asked to review his opiate sales, added a picturesque detail. He
had only one steady customer, he reported - and that a noted temperance lecturer." 15
Nor was the Middle West different from New England. The Annual Report of the Michigan State
Board of Health for 1878 reported three opium eaters in the village of Huron (population 437),
four opium eaters and one morphine eater in the village of Otisville (population 1,365), 18 opium
eaters and 20 morphine eaters in the town of Hillsdale (population 4,189), and so on around the
state. 16 Some children were included in the statistics.
Though called "opium eaters" in the medical literature, most nineteenth century opium users
(including Thomas De Quincey, author of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater) were in fact
opium drinkers; they drank laudanum or other opiate liquids. Similarly "morphine eaters"
included many who took morphine by injection or in other ways. In a number of the quotations
which follow, "opium eaters" refers generally to morphine as well as opium users. Opium
smokers, however, were considered to be in a separate category (see Chapter 6).
18

19. RBG Blakademics June 2010
The nineteenth-century use of opiates was more or less the same in Britain. A classic report on
the English industrial system, The Factory System Illustrated (1842), by W. Dodd, noted that
factory workers of the time used opiates--- notably laudanum--- to quiet crying babies. 17
In the official Report of the Medical Officer of the Privy Council for 1864 it was observed: "To
push the sale of opiate ... is the great aim of some enterprising wholesale merchants. By
druggists it is considered the leading article." 18 The report also noted the giving of opiates to
infants; 19 Karl Marx, citing this report in Capital (1867), spoke of the English working-class
custom of "dosing children with opiates ." 20 In 1873 an English physician reported:
... Amongst the three millions and three-quarters [people in London] there are to be found some
persons here and there who take [opium] as a luxury, though by far the greater number of those
who take it in anything like quantity do so for some old neuralgia or rheumatic malady, and
began under medical advice. Neither is it to be found over the agricultural or manufacturing
districts, save in the most scattered and casual way. The genuine opium-eating districts are the
ague and fen districts of Norfolk and Lincolnshire. There it is not casual, accidental, or rare, but
popular, habitual, and common. Anyone who visits such a town as Louth or Wisbeach, and
strolls about the streets on a Saturday evening, watching the country people as they do their
marketing, may soon satisfy himself that the crowds in the chemists' shops come for opium; and
they have a peculiar way of getting it. They go in, lay down their money, and receive the opium
pills in exchange without saying a word. For instance, I was at Wisbeach one evening in August
1871; went into a chemist's shop; laid a penny on the counter. The chemist said --- "The best?" I
nodded. He gave me a pill box and took up the penny; and so the purchase was completed
without my having uttered a syllable. You offer money, and get opium as a matter of course.
This may show how familiar the custom is....
In these districts it is taken by people of all classes, but especially by the poor and miserable,
and by those who in other districts would seek comfort from gin or beer. 21
Godfrey's Cordial--- a mixture of opium, molasses for sweetening, and sassafras for flavoring---
was especially popular in England. Dr. C. Fraser Brockington reports that in mid-nineteenth---
century Coventry, ten gallons of Godfrey's Cordial enough for 12,000 doses--- was sold weekly,
and was administered to 3,000 infants under two years of age.
Even greater quantities of opium mixtures were said to be sold in Nottingham.... Every surgeon
in Marshland testified to the fact that "there was not a labourer's house in which the bottle of
opium was not to be seen, and not a child, but who got it in some form." . . . Wholesale
druggists reported the sale of immense quantities of opium; a retail druggist dispensed up to
200 pounds a year-in pills and penny sticks or as Godfrey's Cordial.... To some extent this was
a practice which had been taken on during the years when malaria was indigenous in the Fens
and when, a century before, the poppy had been cultivated for the London market. 22
The nonmedicinal use of opiates, while legal in both the United States and England, was not
considered respectable. Indeed, as an anonymous but perceptive and well-informed American
writer noted in the Catholic World for September 1881, it was as disreputable as drinking
alcoholic beverages--- and much harder to detect:
The gentleman who would not be seen in a bar-room, however respectable, or who would not
purchase liquor and use it at home, lest the odor might be detected upon his person, procures
his supply of morphia and has it in his pocket ready for instantaneous use. It is odorless and
19

20. RBG Blakademics June 2010
occupies but little space. . . . He zealously guards his secret from his nearest friend--- for
popular wisdom has branded as a disgrace that which he regards as a misfortune. . . 23
Opiate use was also frowned upon in some circles as immoral--- a vice akin to dancing,
smoking, theater-going, gambling, or sexual promiscuity. But while deemed immoral, it is
important to note that opiate use in the nineteenth century was not subject to the moral
sanctions current today. Employees were not fired for addiction. Wives did not divorce their
addicted husbands, or husbands their addicted wives. Children were not taken from their homes
and lodged in foster homes or institutions because one or both parents were addicted. Addicts
continued to participate fully in the life of the community. Addicted children and young people
continued to go to school, Sunday School, and college. Thus, the nineteenth century avoided
one of the most disastrous effects of current narcotics laws and attitudes--- the rise of a deviant
addict subculture, cut off from respectable society and without a "road back" to respectability.
Our nineteenth-century forbears correctly perceived the major objection to the opiates. They are
addicting. Though the word "addiction" was seldom used during the nineteenth century, the
phenomenon was well understood. The true nature of the narcotic evil becomes visible, the
Catholic World article pointed out, when someone who has been using an opiate for some time
attempts to give up its use. Suddenly his eyes are opened to his folly and he realizes the
startling fact that he is in the coils of a serpent as merciless as the boa-constrictor and as
relentless as fate. With a firm determination to free himself he discontinues its use. Now his
sufferings begin and steadily increase until they become unbearable. The tortures of Dives are
his; but unlike that miser, he has only to stretch forth his hand to find oceans with which to
satisfy his thirst. That human nature is not often equal to so extraordinary a self-denial affords
little cause for astonishment. . . . Again and again he essays release from a bondage so
humiliating, but meets with failure only, and at last submits to his fate a confirmed opium-eater.
24
The terms "addicting" and "addiction" will be further discussed later.
Our nineteenth-century forbears also perceived opiate use as a "will-weakening" vice--- for
surely, they insisted, a man or woman of strong will could stop if he tried hard enough. The fact
was generally known that addicts deprived of their opiates (when hospitalized for some illness
unrelated to their addiction, for example) would lie or even steal to get their drug, and addicts
"cured" of their addiction repeatedly relapsed. Hence there was much talk of the moral
degeneration caused by the opiates.
Nevertheless, there was very little popular support for a law banning these substances.
"Powerful organizations for the suppression ... of alcoholic stimulants exist throughout the land,"
25
the 1881 article in the Catholic World noted, but there were no similar anti-opiate
organizations.
The reason for this lack of demand for opiate prohibition was quite simple: the drugs were not
viewed as a menace to society and, as we shall demonstrate in subsequent chapters, they were
not in fact a menace.
See source for full footnotes and references to this paper
: http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/library/studies/cu/cu1.html
20

21. 21

22. 22

23. 23

24. 24

25. RBG Blakademics June 2010
25