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Reviewed by:
  • Jailed for Possession: Illegal Drug Use, Regulation, and Power in Canada, 1920-1961
  • Dan Malleck
Catherine Carstairs . Jailed for Possession: Illegal Drug Use, Regulation, and Power in Canada, 1920-1961. Studies in Gender and History, no. 26. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. viii + 241 pp. Graphs. $55.00, £35.00 (cloth, 0-8020-9029-X); $24.95, £15.00 (paperbound, 0-8020-9372-8).

Catherine Carstairs, assistant professor of history at the University of Guelph, argues that Canada's heavy policing and increased scrutiny of drug users intensified the marginalization of this group. Increased surveillance and enforcement, she claims, led drug users to take increasingly dangerous risks, which in turn led to more invasive enforcement methods. For example, intravenous heroin replaced the more bulky smoking opium because it was harder to detect. Users began carrying their drugs in their mouths rather than in their pockets and swallowing them when they feared being apprehended, which led police to put suspected users in choke holds to stop them from swallowing. And so the riskiness escalated.

Carstairs bases much of her examination upon a rich collection of files and studies of convicted drug users from the 1930s to the 1960s. The bulk of this evidence comes from the Division of Narcotic Control case files that were reportedly made for every person whom the Division identified as a drug user, and from Royal Canadian Mounted Police records. She supplements this with an equally impressive set of sociological studies done in prisons and institutions (such as the Oakalla Prison Farm), and the records of the John Howard Society of British Columbia. Together, these records provide a valuable view into the policing of drug users, and the lives of apprehended and convicted drug users.

Drug users developed their culture, with its own coded language and even rites of passage, in conscious reaction to the increasing intensity of police surveillance. As police training and techniques expanded through the time under examination, so did the extent and indeed desperation of the users. As this culture developed, users found that they could not identify with "square johns" (non–drug users), and those who attempted to quit drugs found the square-john lifestyle difficult to live.

Much of this, of course, had to do with power. While poor, underclass users were the targets of much persecution, narcotics officials were less successful in policing physicians. In the 1920s and 1930s some futile efforts were made to convict physicians who provided opiates to users—yet drug-enforcement officials [End Page 483] remained lenient toward doctors who gave addicted patients maintenance doses; doctors' cultural authority was growing, and it was a fool's errand for enforcement officials to attempt to tell doctors how they should prescribe. This permitted an increased interest in treatment through methadone maintenance, and what was ostensibly the first methadone maintenance program in North America was opened by the Narcotics Addiction Foundation of British Columbia in 1955.

Policing is one way in which users interacted with mainstream society; social work was another. Social workers at the John Howard Society attempted to provide practical, nonjudgmental assistance to users who were trying to live the square-john life. While these social workers often made assumptions and observations that belied the paternalism of the liberal gaze, they did provide an example of how helping users might be better than convicting them. Since users might be less guarded in their interactions with social workers, these records further reiterate the effects that heavy policing had on the lives and culture of addicts.

While there is much here to be lauded, there are a few areas where the work seems to stretch a bit. Although Carstairs acknowledges that the records she is using are more apt to provide a view of policing practices than of actual usage rates and demographics, her general conclusions about the effects of policing on users seem to miss this point. Moreover, she has a tendency toward vague moralizing that seems unnecessary. At the end of her otherwise excellent and detailed chapter on policing that shows quite ably the escalating cycle of enforcement techniques and reactions to them, she observes that the "violence and invasiveness" of the policing practices...

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