Jim Crow's Drug War: Race, Coca Cola, and the Southern Origins of Drug Prohibition

Abstract

At end of nineteenth century, U.S. hunger for narcotics and cocaine was so notorious that one leading public-health official declared, are drug-habit nation. (1) Today, Americans lustfully--if schizophrenically--consume huge quantities of both illegal dope of stoners and street junkies and equally profitable products of high-tech bioresearch labs and multinational pharmaceutical corporations. We are now, as we were a century ago, a people torn between, as TV says, just say no and the miracle of medicine. But what do we mean by drugs? The public imagination struggles mightily to preserve stark distinctions between various kinds of drugs: heroin, cocaine, cannabis, alcohol, anabolic steroids, nicotine, caffeine, aspirin, Ritalin, Viagra, Prozac, and OxyContin, to name but a dozen. The history of drug prohibition, however, shows us that difference between a poison and a medicine, between drugs as scourge or salvation, is not so easily determined. Are those who become dependent upon drugs victims of a physical disease, or are they criminals and moral deviants? When do personal, medical, or recreational decisions become a social menace? And is it chemistry or social status of consumer that shapes these attitudes? After more than a century of on historical transformation of drug use in United States between 1890s and 1930s from free and largely unknowing use of any drug to strict regulation and criminalization of narcotics, cocaine, and cannabis remains largely misunderstood by public. At root of drug-prohibition movement in United States is race, driving force behind first laws criminalizing drug use, which first appeared as early as 1870s. In an era in which African Americans, Asian and Mexican immigrants, as well as most European immigrants--Jews, Slavs, and Catholic Irish and Italians--were considered racial others, white racial fears amplified sense of public menace posed by drugs and drug users. The belief of Gilded Age whites that racial difference marked a biologically determined predisposition to, say, deviousness, slovenliness, or lustfulness served to supercharge hazards posed by Catholic inebriation, black intoxication, or Chinese addictions. (2) The pleasure of drug taking not only endangered Protestant morality, but association of specific drug pleasures with individual racial groups raised dire threat of miscegenation and urban disorder. The nation's first drug laws had appeared in San Francisco in 1870s, unsuccessfully prohibiting whites from patronizing opium dens in Chinatown lest some white woman should fall into hands of yellow peril. Indeed, first bans on smoking opium only applied to whites, as race mixing and not health of Chinese immigrants was at issue. Organized nativism, including Ku Klux Klan, played a crucial role in pressing for federal alcohol prohibition in 1910s, marking 18th Amendment as a failed attempt by waning WASP establishment to curtail sinful pleasures of urban Catholics and immigrant working classes. One of America's favorite recreational drugs, marijuana, was banned in 1930s as a way of criminalizing tens of thousands of Mexican migrant farm workers who entered Southwest in search of work. These laws have remained persistently ineffective in curbing America's desire for intoxication and have instead served to demonize and outlaw entire populations. (3) In Jim Crow South, dynamics of race, gender, and growth of a mass consumer culture combined with reformist impulses of Progressive era to wage war on Negro cocaine fiend. (4) The changes in Coca-Cola in this time period illustrate this point. Marketed exclusively to middle class and professional whites, Coca-Cola contained a small quantity of coca extracts until 1903. When Coca-Cola was introduced, cocaine was championed by doctors and psychologists, including Sigmund Freud, as a medical marvel. …