Today, the media preaches to adolescents to live above the influence. TV commercials often portray youth lost in their abusive habits that suddenly, thanks to a picture sent through a cell phone or a disappointed
pet, realize their mistake and quit before anything too terrible happens. Shows like Cops reinforce the idea that criminals are junkies and should be locked up rather than treated. The perpetual cycle of marginalizing minorities has been prevalent for centuries. It continues today, just as it always has, and drives our modern “War on Drugs.”

Recreational drug use is common in most cultures and in this country is as American as apple pie. The consumption of American crowd pleasers (opiates, alcohol, etc.) is not deemed dangerous until a particular minority becomes targeted for economic, social, or racial reasons. Following is the first in a three-part series on the history of drugs in San Francisco.

In the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, opium eased pain but secured its place in history as a recreational narcotic. It was predominantly used as a patent medicine, and the industry grew in the U.S. due to mass advertising. Morphine, known as “the universal cure,” was prescribed for anything from depression to the common cold.

In 1850, the hypodermic needle emerged in America. Heavy metal syringes coupled with small glass bottles of morphine and heroin were packaged in brown paper and sold through mail-order catalogues. At this time, the FDA placed no regulations on the use of opiates, and soon the addictive drug became popular with bored, white, middle-class women—the pressures of Victorian society left men to pass their time at the saloons while their spouses pursued the pleasures of drugs like opium at home.

As the Chinese immigrated to the States to work on the expanding Trans-Continental Railroad, they also brought their opium-smoking traditions with them. The drug flourished throughout San Francisco in
the early 1900s, where it became an infamous element in the city’s turnof-the-century Chinatown. The Chinese population in the Golden State increased rapidly from roughly eight-hundred in 1849 to twenty-five
thousand in 1852.

The U.S. government’s concern about the opiate trade only arose after the railroad construction was completed in 1869 and San Francisco’s gold supply diminished. Americans were experiencing an economic
recession, known as the Panic of 1873, and in turn racially motivated violence thrived in Chinatown. The government was acutely aware that the majority of the population was furious about having to compete for
valuable jobs with Chinese immigrants who suddenly flooded the job market.

The U.S. government backed the ideals of working and upper-class white men, and the Chinese were exploited—used for cheap labor and then racially discriminated against. As a result, in 1881 the California
Legislature passed a law making it a misdemeanor to maintain an establishment in which opium was sold, given away, or smoked. The bill only applied to commercial places, most notably opium dens, targeting
immigrant Chinese laborers. Smoking opium at home, however, was not covered by the legislation, according to writer Elaine Casey.

“The first law against opium smoking in the U.S. was much more the result of anti-Chinese agitation,” says Craig Reinarman, author of Crack in America. “The campaign against smoking opium [but not against other,
non-Chinese uses of opiates] included lurid, fictional newspaper accusations of Chinese men drugging white women into sexual slavery.”

Chinese men were viewed as sexual prowlers—men who fed on the naiveté of proper white women. San Francisco authorities stated that many women and young girls were being forced to visit the [Chinese] opium smoking dens, also known as coolies, where they were ruined morally. Soon after, an 1875 San Francisco ordinance sought to “forbid the practice [of opiate use] under penalty of a heavy fine or imprisonment or both.” In 1909, the government instituted a total ban on the importation of opium use in the U.S. The Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 attempted to stop recreational use by restricting the prescription of the drugs to physicians.

The tricky and unconstitutional dilemma is that opium smoking continued within non-Chinese communities. Next month, we’ll take a look at the 1960s marijuana movement and its historical resonance.