Prohibitions and Psychoactive Substances in History, Culture and Theory

Prohibitions and Psychoactive Substances

Susannah Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367257637
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000011951
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume is a new contribution to the dynamic scholarly discussion of the control and regulation of psychoactive substances in culture and society. Offering new critical reflections on the reasons prohibitions have historically arisen, the book analyses "prohibitions" as ambivalent and tenuous interactions between the users of psychoactive substances and regulators of their use. This original collection of essays engages with contemporary debates concerning addiction, intoxication and drug regulation, and will be of interest to scholars in the arts, humanities and social sciences interested in narratives of prohibition and their social and cultural meanings.

1 Misconceptualizing Prohibition

Problems with American Cultural Explanations

Mark Lawrence Schrad

Introduction

The Prohibition Era of the 1920s in the United States—with its jazz, gangsters, and speakeasies—is both glamorized and misunderstood. What was alcohol prohibition, and what caused it? I shall argue that both popular and scholarly understandings of prohibition are fundamentally flawed by an over-reliance on the singular case study of the United States. Temperance and prohibition constituted a truly global, progressive movement against the harmful excesses of the liquor traffic, rather than a reactionary “thou shalt not” movement to curtail individual liberty. Rather than generalizing from a single case study, a better approach is to consider the American case in a global, comparative context. By examining temperance motivations around the globe, we can better understand the American historical experience and lay bare the shortcomings in our conventional wisdom.

What Happened: A “Dry” History of Temperance and Prohibition

The standard, historical narrative traces the roots of the United States’ “noble” but ultimately failed prohibition experiment—which culminated in the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1919—to the founding of early temperance societies in the early to mid-nineteenth century. Since prohibition was pushed by temperance organizations, the causal logic is that once you get “enough” temperance, prohibition is the outcome. Self-help organizations such as the Independent Order of Good Templars Order of Good Templars sought to reduce inebriety and consumption of strong, distilled spirits (though not fermented beers and wines) through an individual pledge of abstinence. Historical accounts often note temperance’s links to evangelical Christianity and the Second Great Awakening of American Protestantism.¹ Moving from suasion to legislation, in 1851 Maine became the first state to institute statewide prohibition. Temperance activism emerged with a renewed vigor after the Civil War: the Prohibition Party was founded in 1869, and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), established in 1874, linked temperance with suffragism in the United States, while its international arm—the World’s WCTU (founded in 1883)—made common cause with like-minded movements globally.² What would prove the most influential prohibitionist organization, the non-partisan Anti-Saloon League of America (ASLA) was established in 1893; a pioneering single-issue organization, it worked within the two-party system rather than fighting it. The ASLA successfully marshaled its material and propaganda resources behind any politician—Republican or Democrat—willing to champion the “dry” cause and actively opposed any “wet” candidate.³ It also made common cause with fellow “dry” travelers internationally, establishing the short-lived World League Against Alcoholism (WLAA) in 1919.⁴

Patriotic sacrifice and conservation accompanied the U.S.’s entry into World War I, producing a wartime prohibition on distilled spirits (September 8, 1917), and fermented beers and wines (May 1, 1919).⁵ Meanwhile, the Eighteenth Amendment passed the Senate on August 1, 1917. Prohibiting the manufacture, sale, or transportation—but not consumption—of “intoxicating liquors,” the amendment was ratified with unprecedented speed on January 16, 1919, coming into effect on January 16, 1920. Surprising even some temperance advocates who believed prohibition would exclusively target more harmful distilled spirits, Andrew Volstead’s legislation set the limit at 0.5% alcohol by volume, effectively outlawing even light beers. President Woodrow Wilson vetoed the Volstead Act on October 27, 1919, but his veto was overridden by Congress, paving the way for prohibition nationwide.

The immediate blossoming of bootleggers and speakeasies testified to prohibition’s lax observance and enforcement, and sensationalist images of corruption and Chicago gangland brutality eroded American support for prohibition. With the “dry” battle seemingly won with prohibition ensconced into the Constitution (from which no Amendment had ever been repealed), temperance support waned, while “wet” organizations such as the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment (AAPA) and Woman’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform (WONPR) pushed to modify the existing legislation.⁶ Just as World War I had opened a window for dramatic policy change in prohibition, the Great Depression added urgency to the question of repeal: the legalization of the liquor trade, it was argued, would generate both tax revenues and jobs.⁷ The defeat of “dry” Republican Herbert Hoover by “wet” Democrat Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 was the death knell of national prohibition. In February 1933, Congress introduced the Twenty-first (repeal) Amendment, and by the end of the year, repeal was ratified with even greater speed than prohibition, ending the American experience with national prohibition. This “dry” overview is uncontentious. Where things get interesting is when historians and social scientists go beyond simply describing what happened and try to explain why it happened.

Three Generations of Prohibition Studies

One virtue of the present volume is that it brings together diverse perspectives from scholars in widely different disciplines, countries, and cultures—divisions which would otherwise bedevil the task of reviewing the prohibition-studies literature. Still, it is possible to differentiate between three “generations” of American prohibition historiography, based on different timeframes, ontological assumptions, and methodological approaches: focusing varyingly on individual, cultural, and institutional factors. The first generation of temperance histories extends from the 1920s to the 1940s and often attributed prohibition to individual temperance leaders,⁸ or some conspiratorial cabal that “put over” prohibition on the American people while “the boys were fighting overseas.”⁹ Even those that addressed repeal focused on individual activists, politicians, and businessmen with little concern for the institutional or cultural factors.¹⁰ Following World War II, the second generation of prohibition scholarship largely explained prohibition as the consequence of a tumultuous cultural context, pitting social groups against one another. Separately, venerated historian Richard Hofstadter (1955)¹¹ and sociologist Joseph Gusfield (1963)¹² forged a new conventional wisdom that prohibition embodied a backlash of conservative, rural, native-born Protestants against increased immigration and urbanization. This scholarship recast temperance as a reactionary, Bible-thumping aberration, while repeal became the natural consequence of increased immigration and the rising importance of urban voices and votes.¹³

One noteworthy exception is James H. Timberlake’s Prohibition and the Progressive Movement (1963), which argued that, by confronting “the growing power of big business on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the mounting discontent of the lower classes,” prohibition was consistent with the moral, economic, social, and political idealism of American progressivism rather than being antithetical to it.¹⁴ “If progressivism desired to curb the power of an industrial and financial plutocracy,” Timberlake claimed, “prohibition aimed to remove the corrupting influence of one branch of that plutocracy—the liquor industry.”¹⁵ Unfortunately, Timberlake’s corrective is overshadowed by the popular portrayal of temperance and prohibition as touchstones of reactionary bigotry “from sin-obsessed Puritan, to evangelical extremists and Know-Nothings, to nativists and Klansmen, and most recently to McCarthyites and anti-abortionists,” as Aaron and Musto described it in the early 1980s. They lamented that such portrayals, “established by dint of repetition, have achieved a kind of incantatory truth and ultimately have been enshrined as pieces of political folk wisdom.”¹⁶ Indeed, these second-generation, culturalist understandings inform even contemporary prohibition histories, including James Morone’s Hellfire Nation (2003),¹⁷ Daniel Okrent’s Last Call (2010),¹⁸ and Lisa McGirr’s War on Alcohol (2016),¹⁹ which expand upon the notion of prohibition not just as culture clash, but as a weapon against marginalized urban, immigrant, poor, and African-American communities themselves.

An important shift occurs with second-generation prohibition scholarship: the disappearance of the word “traffic.” Just as it is possible to be in favor of diamonds and be against diamond trafficking, or be in favor of humans but oppose human trafficking, it was entirely consistent for prohibitionists to oppose big business profiting from trafficking an addictive substance, without opposing liquor or those who consumed it.²⁰ Also, since the old generation of temperance advocates had largely died off, it became easier to vilify them as reactionary zealots. Even today, writers use the same derisive adjectives for prohibitionists that they use to describe international terrorists: they are “ruthless,”²¹ “extremists,”²² “cranks,”²³ “deeply antidemocratic,”²⁴ “fanatics and fools”²⁵ who pose a “threat to individual freedoms.”²⁶ Moreover, we are told they are motivated by “obscurantism, narrow-mindedness, and fanaticism,”²⁷ they “stirred Americans’ worst fears about race, class, and religion, all while manipulating scientific studies.”²⁸ Prohibition was a “wrongheaded social policy waged by puritanical zealots of a bygone Victorian era.”²⁹

Even beyond the “traffic” question, culturalist/reactionary explanations must confront a bevy of inconsistencies. What are the mechanisms by which culture is translated into policy? How do we understand the “reactionary” roots of the temperance movement in the “progressive” abolitionist, suffragist, and labor movements? How do we account for other, non-absolutist alcohol-control policy options of the day? How does cultural backlash explain the widespr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Misconceptualizing Prohibition: Problems with American Cultural Explanations
• 2 From Universal Relaxant to Oriental Vice: Race and French Perceptions of Opium Use in the Moment of Global Control
• 3 A Medicine for the Soul: Morphine and Prohibition in the French Cultural Imagination, 1870–1940
• 4 “To Save the Mexican Race from Degeneration”: The Influence of American Protestant Groups on Temperance and Prohibition in Mexico, 1916–1933
• 5 The Formation of the Levant Hashish Trade and the Rise of Illicit Hashish Consumption in Interwar Palestine
• 6 The Dialectics of Dope: Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra, the Myth of Marijuana, and Mexico’s State Drug Monopoly
• 7 Reassessing the “Drug-Free Country”: Drug Abuse, the Soviet State, and Contemporary Russian Drug Policy
• 8 Re-thinking the “War on Drugs”: Reagan’s Militarization of Drug Control
• 9 Drug Prohibition and the End of Human Rights: Race, “Evil,” and the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, 1961
• 10 Drugs Decriminalization: The Art of Governing Drug Using Populations
• 11 Prison Everywhere? The Imbrication of Coercive and Pastoral Governance in the Regulation of “Chemsex” and New Psychoactive Substances
• 12 From Harm to Psychoactivity: The Clarity of Morality in the 2016 Psychoactive Substances Act
• 13 Honor’d in the Breach: Contravention and Consensus in the History of Substance Prohibition
• Index