<![CDATA[This week the UK Home Office published a report examining the effectiveness of international drug laws. The report is a groundbreaking challenge on traditional political rhetoric that the criminalisation and heavy punishment of drug use is the most effective way to tackle the problems caused by it. What makes the report so significant is that it has been signed off by the UK's Home Secretary, Theresa May. The notion of legalised drug trade and consumption might seem completely alien, but this is a reflection of a set of beliefs that have been instilled into Western Society fairly recently. From childhood most people alive today will have been raised and educated with the ideas that drugs are bad for your health, a cause of criminality and punishable by imprisonment. Undoubtedly this is true, but it is worth considering the history of the relationship between drugs and society. Opium's painkilling properties have been known since prehistoric times. The Ancient Greek scholar Theophrastus mentioned opium in connection with the myths of Ceres and Demeter, and wrote about the Greek's consumption of opium through poppy juice. The Ancient Greeks, Romans and Egyptians were all aware of the medicinal properties of opium. They used it as a painkiller, relaxant and sleeping pill. Images of the poppy are present on a host of ancient artefacts, highlighting the importance it held in these societies. It wasn't purely medicinal in use however. Great Greek academics like Hippocrates used opium as a means to alter their mood and remove inhibitions. Drug use was also apparent amongst the Ancient Chinese. Again, marijuana and opium were initially smoked for their medicinal properties, but they soon came to be used recreationally. The use of recreational drugs escalated dramatically after the seventeenth century, when the Dutch and Portuguese began to trade opium from Europe and Africa throughout Asia. By 1830 the British Empire had become the world's biggest drug dealer, with an economy that relied heavily on the exporting of opium to China. Indeed, two major conflicts dubbed the Opium Wars were started purely to keep this drug trade open. In early Nineteenth Century Britain, it was possible to buy opium from a local chemist. As before, opium was legally consumed for both medicinal and recreational purposes. A host of the Romantic poets, such as Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Percy Shelley consumed the drug as a source of inspiration as much as a painkiller. By Victorian times opium was widely available and taken by the working classes as well as the wealthy in industrialised cities. As the main drug trafficker throughout the world, it was easy for Britain to supply cheap highs to the majority of its population. Until the 1860s drugs had been considered a habit rather than a damaging addiction in England. Things started to change when the popular press began to produce sensational articles on opium dens in East London, and the depravity that was beginning to form around those who used drugs. Politicians and religious groups responded with campaigns to restrict opium trafficking, and by 1868 the Pharmacy Act restricted the trade of dangerous drugs to doctors and pharmacists. Around the same time similar legislation started to appear in the United States, and over the next century the Western World reached the common consensus on the dangers of drugs that still dominates today. It is of course beyond doubt that drug addiction is terrible for individuals and those around them. It is also beyond doubt that the illegal drug trade is dangerous and linked to various other forms of crime. As the debate over drug legislation returns to the fore and politicians consider reforms in the law, it is interesting to view the debate within the broader history of attitudes towards recreational drugs. This helps us to understand the origins of the opinions on drugs that have dominated mainstream opinion for the last century, but are now starting to be questioned.]]>
A History of Drugs Legislation
