France, Germany, and the Origins of Drug Prohibition

Abstract

Long widely available, opiates and cocaine came under a raft of prohibitive laws in the United States and Europe from 1914 onward, paving the way for contemporary drug control. Explanations for this change remain fragmented, with limited overlap between cultural interpretations, mostly US or UK focused, and international histories. Taking a first step towards a synthesis, this article looks at the rise of medical theories of addiction in France and Germany and its interlink with the first drug laws. While emerging disease concepts of addiction were important in paving the way for prohibition, this shows, they could not predict the nature of the laws passed. Germany, notably, though a leader in addiction research, failed to criminalize the drug user when the time came. In neither country, secondly, can the impulse to legislate on narcotics be attributed to the medical body, which already possessed significant authority under their respective pharmacy laws. This, finally, throws the onus on international developments. France, like the US and the UK but unlike Germany, was through its possession of colonial opium franchises a front-rank participant in the early twentieth-century opium conferences, providing a crucial trigger for banning drugs at home as well as abroad.