Social Poison: The Culture and Politics of Opiate Control in Britain and France, 1821–1926 (review)

In Social Poison, Howard Padwa explores “what has led different countries to tackle the drug problem in different ways” (5). To answer that question, he studied the approaches of Great Britain and France, as both countries strengthened their drug policies in the early twentieth century. Britons addicted to morphine and heroin were given access to maintenance programs, but maintenance was illegal in France—even some amputees were denied morphine. Padwa explains that the nations’ policies differed so greatly because their citizens “had different ways of conceptualizing the questions brought up by the unregulated flow of opiates and its possible effects on their national communities” (6). British drug policy was shaped by “concerns about economic well-being,” whereas French policy was driven by “the goal of creating a citizenry that did not overindulge in narcotics” (137). Because British and French concerns and perceptions differed, their resulting policies differed as well.

The policies focused on opiates, including semisynthetic variations such as heroin. They had been around long enough to acquire “social and cultural meanings” (3) in Europe, and Padwa begins his study almost a century before the policies were established, in order to trace the evolution of those meanings. He sees Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, published in 1821, as establishing an enduring perception of opium addicts as elitist, inwardly directed, and somewhat foreign.

As Padwa notes, “moral biases” influenced “medical theories of addiction” (4). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many doctors—seeking an explanation as to why some people became addicted to drugs while others did not—concluded that addiction was a sign of “Abnormal character” (47). They believed that people most susceptible to addiction had an unbalanced nervous system, poor self-control, or were intellectual and bored.

Both nations were concerned with the impact of drug addiction on citizenship. Many in France saw drug addicts as aloof, unproductive, and potentially disloyal, and thus as weakening themselves and their country. Of greatest concern was addiction among soldiers. Could they defend France in wartime? In their enervated state, might they reveal classified information? The 1907 case of Charles Ullmo, an opium user accused of trying to blackmail the French military, increased the anxiety. During World War I, some saw the illicit opiate trade in France as “a Teutonic plot to compromise the French war effort” (128).

The British were also concerned with the effect of drug use on citizenship but were more sanguine. In the nineteenth century, they feared opiates’ impact on “independence, self-sufficiency, and industriousness— characteristics essential to British understandings of citizenship” (173). When the British government did restrict domestic use, however, they were motivated not by concern with the consequences of addiction but by the threat that drug smuggling posed to legitimate commerce by inconveniencing major shippers. Light regulation had made the nation a hub of illicit traffic, and Britain’s trading partners pressed the nation to suppress the trade more assiduously. In the 1920s, the Rolleston Committee concluded that British opiate addicts were few in num-ber and, in general, posed no threat to society. The committee concluded that maintenance programs could enable users to remain productive. Therefore, “opiate use and good citizenship were not necessarily irreconcilable” (173).

Repeatedly in Social Poison, Europeans see opiate use as a foreign invasion, even when users were themselves European. Some expressed the belief that opium use would eventually cause a European addict to look Chinese. Many Frenchmen feared that their soldiers who became addicted in Indochina would identify more with the Indochinese than with their own countrymen. Some Britons saw opium dens in their nation as “Oriental outposts stationed on the British homeland” (55).

British willingness to support maintenance policies was enhanced by the popular perception of the nation’s addicts as few in number, middle-aged, and middle class. French addicts...