Drug Wars and Empire: Methods and Rhetoric of Control After 1898

The first US federal effort to prohibit drug consumption began in its newly acquired colony in the Philippines, in 1905. Early justifications were filled with language of control. US officials claimed a need to control and protect Filipinos, who they portrayed as particularly susceptible to addiction. By contrast, these US officials wanted to control and ideally expel ethnic Chinese, who they saw as suspiciously able to tolerate opium consumption without apparent harm, and likely smugglers. The Chinese Exclusion Act had been extended to apply in the Philippines. US officials hoped that opium prohibition would prompt ethnic Chinese to leave the Philippines in order to access opium, and thereafter be barred from re-entry. Once prohibition was in place, concern about control extended to heightened worry about physical space and borders. These concerns prompted international efforts, both against smuggling and to encourage other countries also to adopt prohibition. Even in these early years of prohibition, control of drugs was conflated with other kinds of control, including national security, immigrant exclusion, and racist legal maneuvers. Slippage of both rhetoric and policy among these registers has characterized US antidrug policy since 1898.

This paper explores three moments: the initial efforts to implement prohibition in the Philippines after 1905, the relatively novel tactics of surveillance and tracking immigrants and suspected smugglers employed during the 1920s, and the US effort to both promote and (unsuccessfully) contain the spread of opiate production in Mexico during World War II. Each of these moments helps reveal how US control efforts, well before the official start of the War on Drugs, not only failed in achieving their stated goals, but also facilitated the growth of extralegal state power and perpetuated existing racist practices.