"This book seeks the moral roots of America's antidrug regime and debunks claims early antidrug laws arose from racial animus. The moral roots trace to early Christian sexual strictures. Augustine condemned sex as indulging beastly appetites and suspending Godlike reason. The demands of procreation excuse indulgence but only as necessary. Puritans similarly condemned drunkenness as suspending reason and rendering persons bestial. Yet alcohol too was deemed necessary-as a foodstuff, sanitary beverage, andpain and cold remedy. One could use alcohol as necessary, never to intoxicate. Saint Thomas Aquinas defined temperance, drinking in moderation, as a moral safe harbor. These principles largely defined temperance debates in England and America, helping make and unmake England's eighteenth-century gin ban and American national prohibition. The regime that followed embraced alcohol's social necessity, permitting drinking in moderation. Other drugs can't easily strike this moral balance. Nineteenth-century Chinese opium dens served no apparent need and seemed to allow no subintoxicating use. Worse opium was thought a sexual stimulant, ruining respectable young women. Hence lawmakers banned opium dens and later cocaine and cannabis. Lawmakers distinguished necessary medical use from recreational abuse by criminalizing sales unless prescribed. Early antidrug laws rarely rose from racial strife. They sprang from the traditional moral censure of intoxication and perceived threats to respectable white women and youth. Today's drug war's racial dynamic differs greatly. As harsher penalties swell prisons with mostly nonwhite dealers, antidrug laws suffer attack as tools of racial oppression, helping tip public opinion toward legalizing marijuana"--
George Fisher seeks the moral roots of America's antidrug regime and challenges claims that early antidrug laws arose from racial animus. Those moral roots trace to early Christian sexual strictures, which later influenced Puritan condemnations of drunkenness, and ultimately shaped the early American drug war. Early laws against opium dens, cocaine, and cannabis rarely rose from racial strife, but sprang from the traditional moral censure of intoxication and perceived threats to respectable white women and youth. The book closes with an examination of cannabis legalization, driven in part by the movement for racial justice.
Beware Euphoria uncovers the roots of America's moral obsession with drug regulation, offering a lively and fascinating history of the nation's racialized fear of intoxication. Challenging the idea that early antidrug laws in the US arose from racial animus, George Fisher instead shows in textured detail how US drug laws were driven by a deep-seated cultural taboo against euphoria and a preoccupation with white moral integrity.
From nineteenth-century opium dens to the war on cocaine and cannabis, and more, Fisher offers a vivid tour of the sites of conflict, along with a convincing case for how the moral discourses and social contexts of the day pit drugs against the law. Bringing this history up to the present, Fisher shows how the racial dynamic has changed dramatically. As harsher penalties swell prisons with mostly nonwhite dealers, antidrug laws have come under renewed scrutiny as a tool of racial oppression. The book closes with an examination of cannabis legalization, driven in part by the movement for racial justice.
