The Real Dope: Social, Legal, and Historical Perspectives on the Regulation of Drugs in Canada ed. by Edgar-André Montigny (review)

Recently a few professors on the campus where I teach complained about the marijuana smoke that drifts into their department hallways while they are teaching or working in their offices. The Real Dope is an effort to explain how we came to have such a complicated attitude to pleasure that some students have to hide out in stairwells to enjoy one drug, while others can congregate in campus pubs to freely consume another.

The editor’s goal was “to bring together a broad range of recent writing on as wide a range of drugs as possible.” (x) The result is a collection of ten chapters, seven of which are historical and three of which address contemporary public policy. It is not clear whether these are all original essays. Of the ten main contributors, four have already published full-length monographs on the subjects they are discussing (Catherine Carstairs, Sharon Anne Cook, Erika Dyck, and Jarrett Rudy) and two will soon have books out (Dan Malleck and Greg Marquis). There is certainly usefulness in presenting excerpts from all that scholarship in one volume, even if most are only small slices of the larger studies. Two chapters are concerned with tobacco, two with alcohol, two with lsd, one with heroin, and one with an assortment of “club drugs.” Oddly, until lawyer and legal scholar Alan Young adds his “Afterword,” there is no extended discussion of the mostly widely used “illicit” recreational drug, marijuana. Nor does this collection consider the innumerable over-the-counter and prescription drugs that have made huge numbers of Canadians pleasurably high for many years (starting with the alcohol-laden patent medicines of the distant past and running through drugs like oxycodone of the early 2000s).

Ed Montigny’s introduction sets up the issues. When it comes to regulating the consumption of drugs, Canada has an irrational legal code. Some that are unquestionably harmful to the consumer (tobacco in particular) are merely controlled, while others with no significant harm evident in their normal use (marijuana above all) send thousands of Canadians to court every year. As the historical studies in the book attest, concerns about the impact of various drugs were not based primarily (if at all) in the properties of the drugs themselves, but rather in the kind of people who used them. The problem of drug use was (and is still) presented as cultural definitions of immorality among diverse disreputable populations. The early 20th-century racist attacks on Chinese opium use set the framework, which continued to operate with socially marginal heroin users in the 1940s and 1950s, hippies trying lsd and marijuana in the 1960s, and “ravers” and night-club patrons stoned on ecstasy at the turn of the millennium. The issues in each case were the hedonistic behaviour patterns of each group that defied the conventional moral expectations of industry, sobriety, and self-discipline, and that various social forces – usually some combination of militant interest groups, law-enforcers, politicians, and the media – set out to demonize. In these essays, the media play a major role in whipping up raging public panics.

Some of the essays here address the moral panics related to drug consumption that have exploded across the 20th century. They remind us that the propagators of the panics did not always succeed in repressing drug use. Rudy tells us how the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (wctu) was constantly frustrated with its inability to stamp out tobacco sales, and Cook traces the growing acceptability of smoking among young women by the 1940s. Malleck argues that the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (lcbo) was not prepared to crack down on non-Anglo-Canadian ethnic behaviour provided it fell within the lcbo’s expectation of order in the province’s beverage rooms. Martel tells us that the criminal sanction against lsd was left lighter than that against marijuana, and that the sale...