There is Governor Taft, sitting in Manila, and now he's faced with a rising tide of opium-smuggling. He is re-enacting one of the clearest lessons of history – that if you prohibit, or over-tax, something people really want, you inevitably create a market for the smuggler. While a demand exists, then, as night follows day, there will be an illegal supply. Indeed, simply by prohibiting something, you risk making people want it whereas they might have been indifferent to it until then.

Americans had this brought home to them during the years when they tried the experiment of Prohibition. Between 1920 and 1933, and as a result of sustained and brilliantly-organized lobbying by the churches, alcohol was totally banned throughout the United States. It was described as a 'noble' experiment, but it was an experiment that failed utterly. Not only did it fail, but it damaged America so grievously that we are living with the results of that damage even today. Prohibition was like setting a torch to a bonfire of lawlessness.

Millions upon millions of people flouted the law. Bootleggers multiplied, gangsterism and 'organized crime' sprang up, law-breaking syndicates came into existence and real violence appeared on the streets along with Tommy Guns. Judges started taking bribes, as did sheriffs and other law-enforcement officers. As Bill Bryson, the distinguished American scholar and writer, puts it:

'Seldom has any law anywhere led to greater hypocrisy or been more widely flouted. People not only continued to drink, but in greater numbers than ever. Before Prohibition, New York had 15,000 legal saloons; by the end of Prohibition it had over 30,000 illegal ones. Detroit had no fewer than 20,000 speakeasies, as illegal drinking establishments became rather curiously known.... Hardly anyone took the law seriously. In 1930 a journalist testified to the House Judiciary Committee that he had attended a lively party at a Detroit roadhouse where he had seen the Governor of Michigan, the chief of police of Detroit and four circuit judges, drinking lavishly ..'

Until Prohibition, the drinking of alcohol in America had been largely a male activity, but with the opening up of the innumerable 'speakeasies', women enthusiastically joined in as well. Worst and most damaging of all, the breaking of the law became fun. It was daring, fashionable and smart. It was part of being ‘cool’ in the Twenties, as rolling and smoking joints was part of being cool in the Sixties. And when it becomes cool to disregard the law, a country is on the edge of a slippery slope. Imagine the chaos if it became cool to ignore all letters from the IRS.

But that was Prohibition, a breeding ground for all kinds of nasty things. America still has organized crime today, and as for the public's respect for the law, Prohibition was the first massive assault on the law-abidingness of the American people. The churches and the other anti-alcohol activists didn't achieve what they set out to achieve. Instead, their 'noble experiment' generated violence, corruption, lawlessness and disregard for the law on a scale America had never known before. By 1933 the Constitution had to be amended to get rid of Prohibition.

To be fair to the activists, it must have seemed a tremendously worthwhile aim, doing away with alcohol. If ever there was a dangerous drug, this is it. Millions of people are addicted to it. Millions are incapacitated by it. It causes untold carnage on the roads and highways of the western world, and it leads to all manner of domestic violence. The ugly side of alcohol is as ugly as – probably uglier than – the ugly side of most prohibited substances, and if it had been possible, in the human scheme of things, to do away with the ugly side of alcohol, it would have been quite wonderful.

But we live in the real world, and the make-up of the ordinary human being is such that if you try to control people's behavior in ways they don't like – whether for their own good or not – they are likely to oppose you. Nothing short of a total police state can stamp out the supply of what people want. Opium smoking wasn't stamped out in China until Mao Tse Tung (or Mao Zedong as he is currently spelled) established a dictatorship that took no account whatever of Human Rights.

'The lesson of history' said the philosopher, 'is that nobody learns the lessons of history.' If that is right, it's very sad, but it certainly seems to be borne out by the War against Drugs. If a government criminalizes any commodity, it invites trouble. Indeed, it was because of a ban imposed by a government that opium smoking caught on among the Chinese in the first place. The last of the Emperors of the Ming Dynasty, Chuang-lieh-ti, (1627-44) issued a decree prohibiting the use of the new drug, tobacco. But he was already too late. By the time he issued his ban, a generation of Chinese had acquired the new habit of smoking, and when supplies of tobacco dwindled, they cast around for something else to smoke. Opium provided the substitute, and by the time tobacco re-appeared, the new practice of opium-smoking had taken hold. But come back to the Philippines for the next development.

Wondering what to do about this quite inevitable – and quite uncontrollable – smuggling problem, Taft takes the English way out and sets up a committee. It is named the Opium Investigating Committee.(We could have some Peter and the Wolf background music here, because this committee is the start of a lot of trouble.)It is a committee of three – a local doctor, an army major, and who else but the ever-present Bishop of the Philippines, The Right Reverend Charles Henry Brent himself. They go off on a tour of the Far East – to Japan and Formosa, to China and Java, to what was then called the Straits Settlements, now Malaysia, and to French Indo-China – later known as Vietnam. Bishop Brent returns to the Philippines shocked by the laissez faire of the French and by their complete indifference to the moral aspects of smoking opium. But he is charmed by the politeness of the British, and he is quite convinced that opium trafficking must be controlled. Opium production throughout the world, declares the bishop, must be cut back.

Bishop Brent thus makes the fundamental and quite fatal mistake of believing it is the supply of drugs rather than the demand for them which must be controlled.

It is Bishop Brent who writes the report for Governor Taft and who stays in touch with the President. It is Bishop Brent who maintains contact with the religious lobby in America. It is Bishop Brent, really moving and shaking at this point, who urges President Theodore Roosevelt to convene an international conference to deal with the 'opium problem'. When one looks a little closely at the history of the War against Drugs, one can't be blamed for wondering what might have happened if Charles Henry Brent had been otherwise occupied somewhere in America. In a war that has no heroes, Bishop Charles Henry Brent was almost heroic in the dedication with which he fought against opium. He’s there, all the way through, and if any one individual can be identified as having caused it to be unlawful to possess cannabis in England, Bishop Brent is a pretty good candidate.

Taft might have been able to come to terms with the 'problem': he might indeed have found another way of handling it – and as a result changed the course of history. For it hadn't been a problem until then. The Spanish had permitted the Chinese their 'recreation' in the way they preferred, and by doing the actual supplying themselves they had prevented opium smuggling from taking hold in the Philippines. It was Bishop Brent and his well-meaning supporters who created the problem because they were convinced they were dealing with 'evil'. With the very best of Christian intentions and with exemplary missionary zeal they took it upon themselves to judge what was right and wrong for people they didn't know and didn't understand, and then demanded that the law be used to enforce their judgement.

But, as is being expensively demonstrated throughout the Western World today, there are some things the law can't control. If it tries to, it becomes like a frustrated parent surrounded by disobedient, unruly children. History demonstrates that the only way to prevent smuggling, short of abandoning all individual liberty and escalating into a total police state, is to lift the prohibition. If, in a comparatively free society, you want to prevent people from smoking opium – or crack cocaine, or marijuana or tobacco – there's only one practical way to do it, and that's by persuading them to stop. And before persuasion can work, you have to have a case to argue.

The truth of this has been shown in recent years in relation to tobacco. Particularly in California, but in many other states as well, public opinion has turned against the cigarette to such an extent that those who smoke are regarded as pariahs. People now believe that 'second-hand smoke' can be dangerous; they have been told that smoking tobacco kills tens of thousands of people every year and that no matter how relaxing or stimulating nicotine may be, it can also be lethal. They have a case to argue and they are arguing it – persistently and inexorably. As a result, entire groups of people are being persuaded to beat the habit and to work their way out of the (properly so called) nicotine addiction. Despite the great wealth of the tobacco lobby, and despite the fact that at the time of writing American teenagers are taking to tobacco in large numbers, this grass roots movement among adults has been succeeding. Cigarettes are still there to be bought, but more and more people are giving up the habit. When peer pressure discourages one from doing something, it is far more effective than the law. It will be interesting to see whether there is any backlash from California's recent laws prohibiting smoking tobacco in public places.

None of this is thought about, let alone understood at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, and America is now fast approaching an important turning point. If the religious lobby and the political forces it represents succeed in pressuring the federal government into mounting an anti-opium crusade – as Bishop Brent and his colleagues are agitating for – then United States diplomacy must become involved. And if that happens it will be difficult for America to pull back. Once a nation throws its diplomatic weight behind a venture, it becomes a matter of national self-respect that the venture should succeed. Patriotism is involved, and a climb-down or an abandonment of the project can easily seem like a humiliation on the international stage. If the US government once takes up cudgels against the poppy, America will really be committed. It's time for cautious debate and wise counsel and for a cool assessment of what is involved. If they could have known, for instance, that by the end of the Twentieth Century America would be spending over $12 billion a year in the struggle against drugs, one wonders if the US Government might have taken a different course.

But they didn't have the benefit of hindsight and, in the religious and political climate of the day, they clearly thought they were doing the right thing. Bishop Brent and his supporters keep up the lobbying and, surely enough, the American diplomatic machine is set in motion. United States foreign policy now begins to concern itself with the affairs of the opium-producing countries of the world – and the list of these countries contains some pretty impressive names. Top of the list is the British Empire itself.

India and Burma, both ruled by British Imperial administrators, are major opium producers. Something like a third of all the wealth flowing into London from India, the Jewel in the Crown, is pure profit from the growing and selling of opium. You don't find much about this in English school books, but the British have been exporting opium to China since the late Eighteenth Century. When, indeed, one of the Chinese Emperors, concerned that so much silver was leaving his country to pay for opium, tried to stop the British trade, England went to war. The Royal Navy sailed belligerently up the rivers, and the British waged not one, but two 'Opium Wars' against the Chinese, ending up by imposing a humiliating treaty on a helpless Emperor. This treaty not only permitted the British to continue their opium trade, but got them Hong Kong into the bargain. It may be odd to think of the high-minded Victorians doing such things, but this is British history.

When, therefore, America comes along, agitating for an international conference to stamp out the production of opium – except for medicinal purposes – it's not difficult to imagine the response in the corridors of power in London. They are not amused. Yet, at the same time, Britain is a Christian country, supporting quite a lot of missionaries itself, and it's not easy to know how to neutralize Bishop Brent, enthusiastically pushing ahead with his campaign to stamp out evil and now with the weight of the government of the United States of America behind him. The best the British can do is make conciliatory noises and drag their feet as much as possible.

As a result of persistent diplomatic pressure from the US Government, an international meeting of sorts does at last take place. The first International Opium Commission meets in Shanghai in February, 1909. It has representatives from the United States, China, Great Britain, Austria-Hungary, France, Portugal, The Netherlands, Italy, Russia, Japan, Persia (now Iran) and Siam (now Thailand). Persia's representative is a local Shanghai businessman: Turkey accepts the invitation but doesn't actually attend. And the chairperson of this first international conference on perception-modifying substances? Who else but Bishop Charles Henry Brent.

The American negotiating team of three are the bishop himself, a Dr Charles Tenney, also a missionary, and a certain Dr Hamilton Wright. This third member of the American Opium Commission is a strange character. Within the short period of seven years he manages to offend, irritate and exasperate virtually everyone who has anything to do with him. But during the seven years between 1908 and 1915 this politically ambitious medical man has an enormous impact on the development of the War against Drugs.

Hamilton Wright had been involved in medical research in the Far East and therefore seems well qualified to direct America's preparations for this first international discussion on the evils of opium. He has married into a politically active family and, at the age of 40, he is bursting with energy and with enthusiasm to make a name for himself. In 1908 he is thrilled by an invitation from the President to head up the American Opium Commission – 'I saw at a glance it was bound to be a large and extensive bit of work' – and he throws himself into his investigation, revelling in the power at his disposal. He travels the United States, bombards the drug companies, pharmacists, prisons and police departments with questionnaires, and compiles a great dossier on opium, morphine and heroin in America. And, determined that the United States shall set a good example to the rest of the world, he starts to agitate for a federal statute to control narcotics.

If an actual transcript exists of the First International Opium Commission in Shanghai, I haven’t been able to find it. Which is a pity, because it would be fascinating to watch how the argument developed and to know who, exactly, said what. For the resolutions that end this first ever international drugs conference reflect little agreement, and there are, perhaps not surprisingly, said to be 'strained relations' between the Americans and the British. As Professor David F. Musto, the distinguished American medical historian, puts it:

'Most nations were mildly interested in the subject but unwilling to exert much effort for non-medical prohibition as proposed by the United States. It was impossible to get general agreement that the use of opium for non-medical purposes was evil and immoral. '[emphasis added]

Frustratingly for Bishop Brent, he has a hard time with the international community. The best he can get out of them is what is rather desperately described as 'nearly unanimous' agreement that non-medicinal use of opium should be 'carefully regulated', and the rest of the international community is merely asked to 're-examine its laws'.

There's no question that Bishop Brent had an uphill task, because at this time not only are Britain, Persia, Turkey and Siam major opium producers; Japan is a major producer of morphine; and although the collapsing Manchu dynasty claims to be trying to control opium production and use in China, a significant part of the Chinese economy is linked to the cultivation of the poppy. Just as opium hadn't been a problem in the Philippines until the Americans arrived, so it hadn't been perceived as a problem by the international community, either, until America started agitating for conferences, conventions and international control.

But the bishop and Dr. Hamilton Wright have only just begun. They keep up their intensive lobbying, and the American government is diplomatically committed, now, to keep pressing for a further international meeting. The result of this intensified diplomatic activity is that in 1911 America manages to convene the First Opium Convention at the Hague.

This doesn't accomplish much, either. The timing is unfortunate because it coincides with the total collapse of the Chinese imperial system. That enormous country is falling apart, corruption is rife, war-lords are taking over and poppy-cultivation is being used to finance revolution. Furthermore, the Europeans are gearing up for the bloodbath of the First World War. The Hague Opium Convention holds meetings in 1911, 1912, 1913 and 1914, and in the end the delegates do indeed agree to a scheme for criminalizing narcotics. What seems to have happened is that the rest of the world found a way of de-fusing the American negotiators.

Bishop Brent and Hamilton Wright were obviously prepared to carry on, year in year out, struggling tirelessly to convince the Europeans and the rest that narcotics were evil and that there should be a world-wide crusade against them. For Hamilton Wright, this 'large and extensive bit of work' had become his career: as for the bishop, he was utterly convinced he was in the right and to back him up he had the unwavering support not only of America's churches but of the State Department as well. For the rest of the civilized world, it had become a tiresome on-going annual event – the trip to Holland, the sermons on the evils of narcotics, the yearly effort to remain patient and polite while having to listen, yet again, to the Bishop's dream of a world where no-one used narcotics because no narcotics were available.

In what looks like a clever move to out-manoeuver Brent and Wright and to send the whole problem out into a distant orbit from which it would almost certainly never return, the rest of the world suddenly declared that they were at last convinced. As America wanted it, so it should be. All the delegate nations – and they included the whole of the civilized world – would indeed enact laws to control the production, preparation and distribution of opium and its derivatives. Laws would be passed to cut back production of narcotics right across the globe to just that amount needed for medicinal purposes. The use of narcotics by the ordinary citizen would be controlled by the criminal law. There would be no providing of opiates to pander to the cravings of degenerate races. It would be just as America wanted it to be.

The rest of the world didn't even try to include any small print in their agreement, and for the following reason. All ambassadors and all delegates at international conferences know that nothing is written in stone until their own government ratifies whatever has been agreed. Only when this national seal of ratification has been delivered is a country bound to do anything. What the rest of the world agreed to at the final Opium Convention at the Hague was that the delegates would all return to their countries and recommend their governments to ratify their Hague scheme outlawing narcotics. And when every government represented at the Hague had ratified the agreement, then each government would be obligated to change its laws so as to criminalize and control narcotics.

It was unanswerable. The rest of the world shook America's hand, congratulated the US at having won through with its point of view, bowed gravely and went home, wondering how many centuries would go by before every delegate nation at the Hague had ratified its proposals. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, the problem was disposed of, shelved, indefinitely postponed, deferred to some far distant time in the future.

But then came the First World War. The Europeans slew each other by the million, and the Chinese, devolving into chaos, carried on using the opium market to finance anarchy. Nobody paused to think what the next five short years would bring.

Meanwhile, back in the United States, the anti-drug activists have found a new ally – an American celebrity who has 'deep prohibitionist and missionary convictions and sympathies'. This is a man who believes America has a 'moral duty' to enact a federal law banning opium, morphine and heroin from end to end of the nation. This powerful new anti-drug warrier is William Jennings Bryan. He's a famous speaker-lawyer-editor. He's run for president no less than three times and he's just become the US Secretary of State as his reward for helping Woodrow Wilson into the White House. He is also what later would be called a 'fundamentalist' Christian, meaning that Jennings Bryan claims to believe that every word in the Bible is literally true. Years later this same Jennings Bryan will be counsel for the prosecution in what comes to be known as the Monkey Trial – when the Tennessee schoolteacher, Scopes, is convicted of the crime of teaching Darwin's theories of evolution to his pupils.

In America, the anti-drug activists have had it all their own way so far. It's been a clear run for an entire decade, unquestioningly supported from pulpits across the nation. The anti-drug movement, with its political muscle, all backed by the solid respectability of the churches and the missionary movement, has encountered no opposition it couldn't brush aside.

But now, just before Europe collapses into the First World War, an American pressure group starts to come together that offers the first bit of resistance to the anti-drug crusaders. The pharmaceutical companies are waking up to the fact that any kind of anti-drug laws could cause them difficulties. So are the physicians, and so are the pharmacists. If the anti-drug movement has its way, physicians, pharmacists and pharmaceutical companies may well find themselves branded as 'criminal' for supplying a whole slate of 'remedies'. They, too, have political connections, and despite the open support of William Jennings Bryan, the anti-drug activists, spearheaded as they are by the energetic Dr Hamilton Wright, now find that they are encountering serious opposition for the first time in Washington.

They also run into the problem of the relationship between federal government and the various states. This is an aspect of American politics that has had no real counterpart in Europe, and it's little understood outside America. The central government of the US – president, congress and the federal courts – has only limited powers. Much of the business of government really is left to the individual states, with their own separate legal systems and their own senates and assemblies. The state legislators enact their own state laws, and one state may prohibit something while neighboring states permit it. A federal law, that applies to all states, is therefore a serious interference with jealously-guarded local freedoms.

Hamilton Wright, however, passionately believes that the federal government of the United States must set a good example to the rest of the world. He is ready for a fight and he doesn't let the truth hold him back. The evidence he presents to Congress is dramatic and colorful. Professor Professor Musto again:

'Wright may have believed it was necessary to stress the evil of opium in America in order to secure passage of domestic legislation. His statistics were usually interpreted to maximise the danger of addiction, dramatize a supposed crisis in opiate consumption, mobilize fear of minorities and yet never waver from .. exuberant patriotism ..' [emphasis added]

This understates the position: Hamilton Wright was unquestionably the first of the intentional disinformers in the Drug War. Wild inaccuracies and preposterous claims abound from this point on, backed up by 'statistics' plucked out of the air and foisted on a willing public which is already in the mood for Prohibition. Popular magazines like the Ladies Home Journal join in the 'ain't it awful' campaign that Hamilton Wright is skillfully waging and go out to scare their readership with blatantly dishonest and nakedly racist journalism.

Consider this as an illustration. In order to get a federal anti-drug law through Congress, Hamilton Wright desperately needs the support of those states that lost out in the Civil War – the Deep South. These states, however, are still passionately mistrustful of Washington, and are ready to fight tooth and nail to defeat any change in the law that increases federal power. So how might Hamilton Wright be able to bring these States round? His solution (assisted by the press and in particular by the women's magazines) is to 'educate' public opinion in the South. And the guaranteed way of getting, first, attention and, then, support was, in those days, to play on the white population's fear of the African American.

Since the African American doesn't use opium, another drug is needed, and, conveniently for Hamilton Wright, the African American, like a lot of other people in the United States, sometimes uses cocaine. Unbelievable though it may seem, it is put about that when an African American male uses cocaine, he becomes bulletproof. Some police departments actually change from .32 to .38 caliber revolvers on the strength of these reports.

It is also put about that cocaine induces 'superhuman strength, cunning and efficiency,' that it improves pistol marksmanship and that it is 'a spur to violence against whites.' These stories are actually believed in the southern states, where the relationship between black and white, in the early part of the Twentieth Century, is still a troubled one. The South falls enthusiastically into line, clamoring, now, for new laws that will eliminate this terrible danger, and perfectly willing, in the circumstances, to surrender state power to the federal government.

In warfare the first casualty is invariably Truth, and the War against Drugs is no exception to the rule. Although Hamilton Wright's dramatizations have little connection with reality, they do the trick. Despite the opposition of the physicians and the pharmacists and a good many other clear-thinking people besides, Hamilton Wright sufficiently stampedes the American public that he succeeds in getting a federal law through Congress. And inevitably included in the list of 'narcotics' brought under the control of federal law is the non-narcotic that brought round the southern states – cocaine.

Interestingly, and significantly, Marijuana/Cannabis/Hemp is not included in this first federal prohibition of drugs. Despite Hamilton Wright's best efforts, Congress cannot find any justification at all for controlling cannabis, far less for criminalizing it – and it is dropped from the bill. On March 1, 1915, the Harrison Act comes into force. America now has a nation-wide narcotics control law.

Ironically, in his hour of triumph, no-one wants anything further to do with Hamilton Wright. Although history will refer to him as the 'father of the drug laws', and although he has proved himself capable of moving national and international forces, his career suddenly grinds to a halt. He can't find another assignment and nobody will give him a job. Not even Jennings Bryan or Bishop Brent will help him. After no less than two years of fruitless letter-writing and lobbying he gives up in despair and goes to France to drive an ambulance. There, he gets badly injured in an accident, is shipped back to the United States and dies in obscurity. By November, 1918, at the end of the 'war to end all wars', Europe is in a state of exhaustion and near bankruptcy and the United States has emerged not only as a world power but as the coming world leader. This is where 'the American Century' really begins.

All wars end up with treaties. In 1919 the victorious powers get together just outside Paris to re-draw the map of Europe and hand out the punishments. At the peace conference that formulates the Treaty of Versailles, America's wishes now have to be given very great weight indeed, as befits its new and elevated status in the world, and although President Woodrow Wilson is much exhausted by the British and French prime ministers, Lloyd George and Clemenceau, and returns to America broken and despondent, one of the clauses that finds its way into the peace treaty delights the anti-drug warriors. For, buried among the sections of the Treaty that impose savage reparations on a defeated Germany, create mankind's hope for the future in the form of the League of Nations and redistribute territories in the Middle East and Africa, there appears Section 295. Ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, says Section 295, will automatically involve ratification of the proposals of the pre-war Opium Convention at the Hague.

Thus, as the result of an obscure clause in the small print of a world-changing treaty, the war against 'perception-modifying' drugs moves into its truly international phase. If a nation ratifies the Treaty of Versailles, it automatically commits itself to modifying its own internal laws and to clamping down on the possession, manufacture and trade in opium and its derivatives. And along with the opiates, the properly-called narcotics, cocaine is outlawed too.

Despite all the international indifference and resistance encountered by Brent, Hamilton Wright and Jennings Bryan before World War I broke out, and despite all attempts by the Hague Convention delegates to send narcotics-control out into distant orbit, by the year, 1920, the anti-drug activists' dreams have come true. One by one, as nations ratify the Treaty of Versailles, they embark on a world-wide prohibition of narcotics and cocaine – and thereby create the conditions for the biggest wave of smuggling the world has ever known.

The story from this point on becomes horrendously complicated, as not only the United States but other countries as well struggle with this new and, as history will demonstrate, insoluble problem.

In America there is an immediate conflict between those who feel that addicts should be pitied and should be supplied with their needs, and those who believe in the harsher policy of 'no maintenance'. Clinics established to cater to the needs of addicts are quickly closed down by the authorities and an on-going campaign is waged to keep the public convinced that opiates and cocaine are an evil scourge.

Truth continues to be twisted or suppressed. New York's Health Commissioner, for instance, Dr R.S.Copeland, goes on record that in his city there are an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 narcotic addicts; yet when, for a period of less than two years, New York establishes an addiction clinic and offers a legal supply of narcotics to those who need them, hardly more than 6,000 take advantage of the offer. As the head of the American Medical Association's judicial council, Dr Alexander Lambert, observes, 'It is evident that the number of narcotic addicts has been enormously exaggerated.' Dr S. Dana Hubbard, one of the physicians involved in the treatment of addicts, describes the official figures as 'mythical.'

Despite all the disinformation, a series of hard facts and statistics do emerge. In Shreveport, Louisiana, for example, an addiction clinic is permitted to operate for a period of two years. During that time there is a falling off of crime in Shreveport and the police are unable to detect any peddling of narcotics. When federal agents close down the clinic there is an immediate increase in crime and peddling becomes rife.

When a clinic in New Haven, Connecticut, is closed down, the local Chief of Police reports an almost immediate doubling of the street price of drugs, and by June, 1921, when the clinics have all been suppressed, the Secretary of the United States Treasury reports, in words that have a familiar, modern ring about them, that

By 1928 a third of all inmates in America's federal prisons are there for drug offences, and whereas in 1920 the Narcotic Division of the Bureau of Internal Revenue's Prohibition Unit has 170 narcotics agents and is spending half a million dollars on drug enforcement, by 1929 there are 270 agents and the costs of enforcement have tripled.

Furthermore, several reputable surveys are conducted which produce reliable estimates of the number of people in America who actually are addicted to narcotics or cocaine. Levi Nutt, the head of the Narcotic Division and chief federal enforcer of the new prohibitions, tells Congress that in his view there are 110,000 addicts in the whole of the United States. The following year he adjusts that figure down to 95,000. This is just slightly less than the number estimated by two doctors who conduct a nation-wide survey. Whichever is nearer the truth, it is officially acknowledged that addiction exists only in a fraction of one per cent of the population.

These hard facts, however, do nothing to curb the self-appointed scare-mongers, and the American public is bombarded with fictitious horror stories from a number of allegedly high-minded societies and individuals. They are best personified by a silver-tongued propagandist by the name of Richmond P. Hobson. The American Medical Association and even the head of the Narcotic Division complain about Hobson's exaggerations, but this doesn't curb the enthusiasm of his audiences. Hobson has charisma. He's a hero from the Spanish-American War – the war that precipitated Bishop Brent's 'opium problem' – he is a former Congressman and, like Secretary of State Jennings Bryan, he is a spell-binding speaker.

It's worth bearing in mind what bit of the Twentieth Century we are in at this point in the story. It's the 'Roaring Twenties': short skirts, bobbed hair and jazz. The post-war recession is over and there's an economic boom going on. The motor car has arrived, along with the cinema; and radio and television are just round the corner. Despite Prohibition, there's as much alcohol as anybody wants, but it's all illegal, and the 'speakeasies' where the law is happily flouted offer the fun of conspiracy as well as great cocktails.

This is what the press and Hollywood would have us believe about the Roaring Twenties, and on the whole it's a fairly accurate picture.

But it's only half the picture. The other half, the much bigger half, is a picture of a sober, God-fearing society that has voted for Prohibition and wants it to succeed. Imagine how this sober part of society feels about the flappers in their short little skirts and cloche hats. Imagine how they feel about the flouting of the law and the rollicking speakeasies. They are apoplectic.

What happens in the Swinging Sixties is, in many ways, a re-play of what happens in the Roaring Twenties: the older generation is shocked and appalled by the behaviour of the younger. With their new tastes in clothing and hairstyle, their new preferences in music, their new morality and, above all, their new attitude, the younger generation seems to be trampling on everything their parents hold dear. They are rejecting all the old values, spurning all the old standards and cocking a snook at everything the older generation stands for. This generates anger.

Because the Twentieth Century has been a century of such enormous, rapid, change, Western societies have been going through a whole series of generation gaps. We have been able to accomodate to some of them, but the generation gaps exposed by the Twenties and the Sixties were so different in scale and in intensity that the resentment and outrage they caused were monumental. The response of the older generation – 'the Authorities' – to some of the rock groups of the Sixties was vituperative, the anger almost explosive, and the impulse to lash out at these outrageous youngsters almost uncontrollable. This is the social context in which the escalation of the War against Drugs takes place – first in the Twenties and Thirties, then again in the Sixties and Seventies.

By the 1920s America has experienced at least thirty years of reforming zeal, ending up with a World War in which mothers' sons from Sausalito and Cincinnati die in European trenches. Prohibition is voted in: the President's veto couldn't stop it. And now this. The respectable, church-going, part of society looks askance at what the Twenties are turning into, and is enthusiastically grateful to any champion who can stand up and voice their resentment and outrage.

So when a clever demagogue like Richmond P. Hobson turns up in town, they flock to hear him and come prepared to swallow, whole, whatever 'ain't it awfuls' he has to offer. He's already a much-in-demand and highly-paid speaker, passionate in his support of Prohibition and in his condemnation of alcohol, and now his career moves on to the horrors of narcotics.

It's one of the strange contradictions of the Drug War that apparently high-minded people, allegedly motivated by the noblest of intentions, find it so easy to trade in dishonesty when they feel it serves their purpose: Hamilton Wright's bullet-proof negro serves as an archetype of distortion. But Richmond P. Hobson takes disinfomation a stage further.

Since he wants it to appear that his campaigning has official backing, he recruits a sympathetic Congressman. Then he takes advantage of the fact that the Congressman can send things through the mail without charge and gets him to dispatch thousands of letters to responsible citizens throughout America – college presidents, leaders of parent-teacher associations, city supervisors and so on – and along with the letter goes a copy of a pamphlet Hobson himself has created, The Peril of Narcotic Drugs.

In print as well as in his speeches Hobson asserts that there are over a million addicts in the United States, that heroin makes the user into 'a desperado of the most vicious type,' and that a single ounce of heroin can turn no less than 2,000 people into addicts! He actually goes on, with a completely straight face, to warn the women of America to have their face-powder analysed so as to make sure it doesn't contain heroin.

The recipients of these letters don't know they are being led by the nose, and Hobson gets thousands of replies urging him on. He proclaims that he is fighting a 'biological struggle for the life of our people' and when radio arrives he starts to broadcast under such titles as 'The Struggle of Mankind against its Deadliest Foe'. He creates not one, but three separate national associations to carry the message, and he himself travels the speakers' circuit, stirring up fear and loathing. Professor Musto again:

'Overall, the propaganda spread by zealots like Hobson was accepted as true, and addicts were perceived as an immense evil which should be blotted out of society .. Hobson effectively associated heroin with crime and violence .. [he] sent out millions of pamphlets and information sheets to service clubs, encouraging their interest in fighting the menace... Fighting narcotics became a very respectable and time-consuming activity for clubs in search of a suitable menace. Picturing the opium addict as a beast who threatened homes and safety gave the crusade a little excitement, confirmed the public need for their efforts, encouraged appreciation, and harmed no-one – except perhaps the addict.'

How much of the Truth any society is given at any particular time is bound to be an open question. There will always be distortions to some extent or other, no doubt. Even without official censorship, the power of the editor will always be considerable. Populations can be led, stirred up, enthused or quietened down depending on what they are told and how they are told it, and until we are all blessed with omniscience we will have to work with what we are given. When, however, one discovers that one's whole society has been fed distortion and dishonesty, what is one supposed to think? What, indeed, is one supposed to do?

In the 1990s, a hundred twenty years on from those first suppressions of the Chinese opium dens in San Francisco, one can look around at our beleaguered court-systems and at the confiscations of property that are taking place in defiance of the protections of the Fourth Amendment; one can look at the statistics of imprisonment in today's America and at the virtually free availability of drugs in America's high schools, and one is surely entitled to wonder: were we taken in? Were we all taken in? If the whole of our anti-drug culture, our fear of it and all our negative feelings about it, actually grew out of the blind prejudices of people like Bishop Brent, and if it had its foundations in the distortions and outright lies of people like Hamilton Wright and Richmond P.Hobson – not to mention the editorials in the Ladies Home Journal – have we all been made fools of by a pack of demagogues and religious zealots? It's been an expensive exercise if we have.

What we come to now is the story of how cannabis/marijuana was criminalized. Without exaggeration, it is one of the disturbing stories of our times and we will spend a little while on it.

As mentioned earlier, cannabis/marijuana is one of humankind's oldest medicines, good for aches and pains, sleeplessness, eye-problems, loss of appetite and so on. From the beginning of history, and up to the year 1936, cannabis enjoyed an almost entirely clean bill of health. A Turkish sultan, once, decreed that his Egyptian subjects shouldn't use it, and in the Middle Ages the Catholic Church outlawed it for a while. It seems that, as well as relaxing and, occasionally, inspiring the user, cannabis/marijuana sometimes makes people marginally less respectful of their elders and betters. Rulers who want to exercise tight control over people don't want them using cannabis because when people are stoned they don't take those in authority seriously enough.

Apart from these isolated examples, cannabis has always been as lawful as apples or blackberries. We have seen, indeed, that when Congress passed the first federal anti-drug statute, the lawmakers declared that cannabis was harmless and not a matter for government control. That was in 1915.

Ten years on from that first federal anti-narcotics statute, Washington was asked to think again. American troops guarding the Panama Canal discovered that if they smoked bits of a local plant, it made them feel good. Their officers didn't know what attitude they should adopt, and handed the decision up the line. Washington assembled a committee of senior army officers and distinguished medical men who researched the matter and produced an account of their work in the Canal Zone Report of 1925.

Their conclusion was that cannabis was harmless and nothing should be done about it. To quote from the report:

As part of the Canal Zone committee's background reading, they had considered the report of The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893-1894. In late Victorian times, the British had commissioned a full-scale investigation of cannabis, and they, too, had decided it was harmless. To quote from the conclusion of the British government report:

'the moderate use of hemp drugs (ie cannabis/marijuana) is practically attended by no evil results at all ... Moderate use produces no injurious effects on the mind (and creates) no moral injury whatever.'

And yet, during the year 1936, cannabis came to be feared from end to end of America. By 1937 – if the newspapers of the time are to be believed – the American people were crying out for Congress to do something about this lethal menace that was loose in the land. Why the sudden change?

To make sense of how this came about, we have to make a diversion into the hot back country of San Diego County and consider a device called a 'Decorticator'. Most people have never heard of such a thing, but it was a revolutionary machine. It was developed at the end of the First World War by a German immigrant, and what it did was reduce a cannabis plant to the finest of fine fibers.

Up to this stage in the story we have been looking at cannabis/marijuana as a medicine, drug or mild intoxicant. But the plant has other uses, and under the name of Hemp it has a history of usefulness which is almost unrivalled. Certainly, in terms of usefulness to humankind, hemp is right up there with the great trees – oak, pine, teak and mahogany – and with bamboo itself.

Throughout history, and until the late 1930s, hemp was regarded as one of the plants essential to life. This is because it was the raw material from which rope was made. It was also the raw material from which canvas was made: the word itself, canvas, is an English form of the word cannabis. The sails and the rigging of Columbus's ships were entirely made of hemp, as were the sails and the rigging of all the other ships that opened up the world. The first colonists who came to Virginia came with hemp sails and hemp rigging. On the day when America's first English-speaking assembly came together – Sunday, July 31, 1619 – one of the laws they put on their brand-new statute book commanded every householder to grow a hemp-patch somewhere in their yard. When the Pilgrim Fathers crossed the Atlantic a few years later, it was hemp sails and hemp rigging that brought them. The Bibles that came with them, incidentally, were also made of hemp: the plant was used for making paper ever since paper was invented.

When, many years down the road, America produced the Declaration of Independence (written on hemp paper) and went to war with the British, the uniforms worn by George Washington's soldiers were made from the fabric that the women of America spun out of the hemp patches in their yards. The book that, more than any other single thing in 1776, galvanized America into revolution – Common Sense by Tom Paine – was also printed on hemp paper. The more one reads about this plant, the more difficult it is not to be enthused by its sheer usefulness, and, as the last chapter explains, this strange vegetable may yet provide humankind with the fuel it needs. And having read around, I confess that I am enthused by the history of the relationship between us humans and this vegetable life form. So I offer no apology for adding to hemp’s list of advantages.

Coming a little closer to our own times, when Levi Strauss invented jeans, the ultimate in hard-working pants – with rivets, metal buttons and so forth – the fabric he used was made, not of cotton, but of hemp. It produces a tough material, said to be several times as hard-wearing as cotton, and several times more absorbent. Moreover, while the hemp/cannabis plant is growing, it needs virtually no pesticides and virtually no fertilizers. Compared with cotton, which uses as much as 25 per cent of all the pesticides and fertilizer produced in the United States, hemp is a crop that is friendly to the environment.

Which brings us back to the Decorticator. By breaking the hemp plant down into finer fibers than had ever been achieved before, all manner of possibilities were opened up. The finest cloths for shirts and handkerchiefs were as easy to make out of cannabis as out of cotton. So were delicate muslins. Linen could now be made from hemp which was as fine as linen made from flax. Hemp could now be used to produce every kind of yarn, from the finest filaments to the thickest ropes. Perhaps most importantly of all, cannabis/hemp could now be used to produce newsprint – the paper on which newspapers, magazines and advertising giveaways are printed – but far more cheaply than by any previously known method. One acre of hemp promised to produce as much newsprint as four acres of pine forest.

It's one of Life's Rules that there is no such thing as a new invention which doesn't threaten somebody. When the pocket calculator appeared, the days of the slide-rule manufacturers were numbered, and almost any change is bound to hurt someone, somewhere. Since most Americans have never so much as heard of the Decorticator, it's an obvious question to ask: was somebody threatened by this new invention? Were someone's financial interests under attack? Did anyone stand to lose out because of what this new machine was going to be able to do with the hemp plant?

It's the cotton growers who immediately spring to mind. If hemp can now do everything cotton can do, yet without pesticides and fertilizers, doesn't this spell a mighty threat to the cotton farmer? The answer is, of course it does, but it's only a temporary threat. The cotton farmer can change over to cultivating hemp – which will thrive wherever cotton can be grown. It's initially inconvenient, no doubt, but such a changeover doesn't mean ruin. If not the cotton growers, who else was threatened?

There were indeed potential losers as a result of the possibilities opened up by the Corticator, but they were not obvious, and they just happened to be two of the most powerful names in America. One of them was the newspaper magnate, William Randolph Hearst – grandfather of the heiress Patti Hearst, who achieved celebrity when she was kidnapped and then recruited by the Simbionese Liberation Army in the 1970s. The other one was the chemical and pharmaceutical corporation, DuPont. The evidence of what these commercial giants did is all still there, on record, but because there has never been a trial about it, no-one has ever been indicted, let alone found guilty of anything. It is therefore for you, the reader, to decide what you make of it.

William Randolph Hearst was an American Tycoon out of the same mould as the Robber Barons of the Nineteenth Century – the Rockerfellers, Vanderbilts, Stanfords and so on – and Hearst owned something like half of all the newspapers in America. As it happens, he himself was an addict but his addiction was collecting. He did it on the grandest scale. He used to buy up European castles and have them moved, stone by stone, out to California. He made his home in a fantasy castle on a mountain overlooking the Pacific, where he lived with a film star, and he had vast storerooms to contain the innumerable bits and pieces he bought all over the world. When Orson Welles made the movie Citizen Kane, Hearst was the model for Kane. In terms of controlling what the American people did and didn't get to hear about, Hearst was extraordinarily powerful, more powerful then, indeed, than Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch rolled into one.

And Hearst had investments. In particular, he owned countless acres of pine forest, waiting to be cut down and converted into newsprint. If Hemp was suddenly capable of producing newsprint at a fraction of the cost, the value of Hearst's pine forests would plummet. The newspaper mogul stood to lose, quite literally, millions of dollars as a result of the Decorticator.

As for Du Pont, they stood to lose on at least two fronts. They didn't want a competitor for the new-fangled nylon they were about to produce, and they sold Hearst the chemicals that turned trees into paper. Let me say that again in a bit more detail.

It was DuPont who owned the patent on the process of converting wood pulp into newsprint and who supplied Hearst with the necessary chemicals – which would no longer be needed if hemp took over from the pine forests.

Secondly, in the mid-1930s DuPont were gearing up to launch America into the era of man-made fibers. They had bought from the Germans who invented it a process for producing a completely new kind of fiber, a polymer that the world came to know as Nylon. DuPont had invested heavily in this new process, and the last thing they needed was competition from hemp, rejuvenated by the Decorticator and capable of producing the equivalent of anything these new man-made fibers could produce. And, of course, DuPont produced pesticides and fertilizers.

Between them, so it is alleged, Hearst and DuPont set out to eliminate the financial threat which hemp and the Decorticator had thrown in their path. It was Hearst, with his vast network of newspapers, who did the main hatchet job, but DuPont helped with their contacts. In particular, DuPont's bankers had a family member who, conveniently, happened to be the head of the Federal Narcotics Bureau. His name was Harry J. Anslinger.

Harry J. Anslinger had taken no apparent interest in cannabis, not, anyway, until the year 1936. Suddenly, however, he started making speeches and writing articles which, more than half a century on, are seen to be quite breathtakingly dishonest. For better or for worse, there are tens of millions of Americans alive today who have tried cannabis: it is estimated that in the 1990s between twenty and thirty million Americans use it regularly. If the writer's experience as a parent of children in American schools is anything to go by, it seems that most schoolkids today know the effects of cannabis/marijuana, if not from personal experience of using it, then from what they hear from their friends. The point is that although the American people remain in almost complete ignorance of what actually happened in the War against Drugs, there are on the other hand tens of millions of Americans who do know something about cannabis/marijuana; and these people will know from personal experience what to think about the campaign waged in 1936 and 1937 by William Randolph Hearst and Harry J. Anslinger. What follows is a short selection of quotes from the Hearst newspapers, from Anslinger himself or from his Federal Narcotics Bureau.

An excerpt from a 1936 story syndicated by the Universal News Service and written by one Kenneth Clark:

'Shocking crimes of violence are increasing. Murders, slaughterings, cruel mutilations, maimings done in cold blood as if some hideous monster was amok in the land.

Alarmed federal and state authorities attribute much of this violence to the 'killer drug.' That's what the experts call marijuana. It is another name for hashish. It's a derivative of Indian hemp, a roadside weed in almost every State in the Union...

Those addicted to marijuana, after an early feeling of exhilaration, soon lose all restraints, all inhibitions. They become bestial demoniacs, filled with the mad lust to kill .....'

Now a quote from a propaganda movie called Reefer Madness, made with the help and blessing of the Federal Narcotics Bureau. It begins with the following words:

'The motion picture you are about to witness may startle you. It would not have been possible otherwise to sufficiently emphasize the frightful toll of the new drug menace which is destroying the youth of America in alarmingly increasing numbers. Marijuana is that drug – a violent narcotic – an unspeakable scourge – The Real Public Enemy Number One!

Its first effect is sudden uncontrollable laughter; then come dangerous hallucinations – space expands – time slows down, almost stands still, fixed ideas come next, conjuring up monstrous extravagances – followed by emotional disturbances, the total inability to direct thought, the loss of all power to resist physical emotions. Leading finally to acts of shocking violence, ending often in incurable insanity.

In picturing its soul-destroying effects no attempt was made to equivocate. The scenes and incidents, while fictionalized for the purposes of this story, are based upon actual results of research into the results of marijuana addiction. If their stark reality will make you think, will make you aware that something must be done to wipe out this ghastly menace, then the picture will not have failed in its purpose.'

In 1937, Anslinger himself wrote an article entitled Marijuana: Assassin of Youth. An extract:

'An entire family was murdered by a youthful addict in Florida. When officers arrived at the home they found the youth staggering about in a human slaughterhouse. With an ax he had killed his father, mother, two brothers and a sister. He seemed to be in a daze. He had no recollection of having committed the multiple crime. The officers knew him ordinarily as a sane, rather quiet young man; now he was pitifully crazed. They sought the reason. The boy said he had been in the habit of smoking something which youthful friends called 'muggles', a childish name for marijuana.'

In April of 1937 Anslinger is reported in the Washington Herald as saying,

'If the hideous monster Frankenstein came face to face with the monster Marijuana, he would drop dead of fright.'

Giving evidence to Congress in 1937, Anslinger declares:

'I believe in some cases one cigarette might develop a homicidal mania, probably to kill his brother .... All experts agree that the continued use (of marijuana) leads to insanity.'

Now some typical contemporaneous headlines from the Hearst press:

'Dope Officials Helpless to Curb Marijuana Use'

'Murders due to Killer Drug Marijuana Sweeping United States'

'Murder Weed Found Up and Down Coast – Deadly Marijuana Dope Plant Ready for Harvest that Means Enslavement of California Children'

Here is a short column from the Hearst press, reproduced in full:

It's also helpful to remember that the 1930s happened to be a time of world-wide economic depression. These were the years of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, of grinding poverty across America, of long lines of unemployed workers, of soup kitchens and songs like Buddy Can You Spare a Dime? Jobs were scarce and ordinary Americans were understandably terrified for their financial future. Back in the 1870s and 1880s, when the War against Drugs first broke out, there had been another economic depression and jobs were scarce then. In those days the competition on the job market, in the West anyway, had come from the Chinese immigrants. Opium smokers they may have been, but they enjoyed a reputation for indefatigable hard work, and out-of-work Anglos rightly regarded the Chinese as tough competitors for the available employment. As we have seen, racism played a large part in what happened then. Racism, together with competition for available jobs, plays its part, again, in the 1930s. This time it is the Mexicans who are targeted.

All over the South West are thousands of Mexican immigrants working in the fields and presenting real competition on the job market. Understandably, there is a wave of anti-Mexican feeling among the Anglos. Societies spring up with names like 'American Coalition' and 'Key Men of America', declaring that their aims are to 'keep America American' and to stamp out Mexican immigration. The American Federation of Labor demands strictly enforced barriers.

Frightened by the economic conditions of the times, the public are ready to accept all manner of 'ain't it awfuls' aimed at the Mexicans, and this fits in neatly with the Hearst witch-hunt against cannabis – which the Mexicans smoke and which they refer to by the Spanish slang-word marijuana. Here is part of a letter from the editor of a Colorado newspaper, written to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics:

'I wish I could show you what a small marijuana cigarette can do to one of our degenerate Spanish-speaking residents. That's why our problem is so great: the greatest percentage of our population is composed of Spanish-speaking persons, most of whom are low mentally, because of social and racial conditions. While marijuana has figured in the greatest number of crimes in the past few years, officials fear it not for what it has done but for what it is capable of doing. They want to check it before an outbreak does occur.'

Capitalising on this Anti-Mexican feeling, the Hearst press never once refer to their killer drug as 'cannabis': they always call it 'marijuana'. In the same way, they never refer to it as 'hemp', realizing, no doubt, that if they suddenly start attacking an age-old commodity that the pharmacists, physicians and public are familiar with, they risk being laughed at and seeing their terror-campaign fall flat.

Indeed, when Congress responds to Hearst's press campaign and holds hearings in 1937 with a view to bringing cannabis under federal control, a certain Dr Woodward, speaking on behalf of the AMA, tells the congressional committee that he had not realized until a few days before the hearing that 'marijuana' was in fact none other than cannabis. Like the rest of the public, he and his colleagues in the AMA had made the assumption that 'the killer weed from Mexico' was something new and dangerous. Dr Woodward, incidentally, was the only witness from the American Medical Association, and he most certainly did not testify in support of criminalizing hemp. Yet when the bill came before the House of Representatives and a congressman asked whether the AMA had been consulted, he was told that the AMA was 'in complete agreement' – which, on any interpretation, was, at its lowest, a gross inaccuracy.

Whether Hearst, DuPont and Anslinger conspired together to deceive the American people and to demonize cannabis/marijuana is a question which has never been officially answered. But as head of the Narcotics Bureau, Anslinger must have been aware of the Canal Zone Report, and he never once mentioned it. Hearst's editors, like Anslinger, must have known that in 1915 Congress had declared cannabis/marijuana to be harmless, yet nowhere in those two years of hysterical agitation do the press make any reference to the fact. The story which has been set out here explains why Hearst's newspapers did what they did. No other explanation is offered, and it seems to be accepted by everyone who has researched the subject that scullduggery in high places was responsible for the criminalization of hemp/cannabis/marijuana.

If this is what in fact happened, the results of this spate of lies and deception have been appalling. Thousands upon thousands of American – and European – citizens have been imprisoned for refusing to obey the anti-marijuana laws. Countless lives have been adversely affected, many of them no doubt ruined. The court system has been brought into contempt in the eyes of millions of Americans, and the most robust and useable system of law in the world is quite literally threatened with collapse. It also means that millions of trees have been unnecessarily cut down and pulped. From a sociological and from an environmental point of view it has been a shameful tragedy.