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During the 17th century, a standardised form of laudanum was being widely prescribed. Within a century, doctors recognised the potential for addiction in their patients. Coleridge's notoriety was unusual for his time, but the locus of his addiction - medical prescription - was the main source of contemporary opiate addiction in Europe.
Previously, the addict had been imagined through a veil of xenophobia: opium addiction had been blamed on the vices of the Turk or other heathen races. Slowly, through the experiences of their patients, this perception changed among some European doctors.
Davenport-Hines locates the origin of the modern history of drug use around the 1820s. Public interest in opium use was sustained by the controversy surrounding the opium trade in India. Use of the drug, both medicinally and as a palliative for the conditions of factory life, was endemic. Self-medication was also rampant.
A new breed of drug user was also emerging - the pleasure-seeker. In artistic circles, opium smoking (as opposed to laudanum consumption) became fashionable. Newspapers were to have a devastating impact on subsequent developments. Incipient fears of cultural pollution were aggravated when the pattern of Chinese coolie immigration following the gold rushes in Australia and the US reached its zenith. Lurid tales were rife of opium dens corrupting white youth and leading respectable young girls astray. Most of these stories were egregious lies, but good for sales.
So the long saga of prohibition began. The first restrictive legislation was unambiguously racist and punitive - it prohibited opium smoking and was aimed at removing the Chinese populations of the US and Australia. Temperance movements gained momentum, especially in America, where the anti-opium cause was analogised to the fight against slavery.
Disaster followed. Davenport-Hines demonstrates convincingly that virtually every attempt to expand prohibition and enforcement has led to an escalation of illicit trafficking and drug use. In short, he argues that international prohibition under US hegemony is largely responsible for the grave problems we face today.
To give examples: many of the American opium addicts whose legitimate supply was terminated by the 1920s switched to injecting heroin, then licit. After the infamous Volstead Act, Americans embraced marijuana ``tea-parties''. In Britain, the suppression of heroin given to maintain addicts in the late 1960s led to an alarming increase in amphetamine abuse.
The economic incentives presented to traffickers by prohibition were irresistible: before the 1920s, most supplies came from pharmaceutical companies; afterwards, production shifted to clandestine laboratories. Drug trafficking into the US went ballistic. Of course, both drug-enforcement agencies and traffickers shared an interest in maintaining and extending a prohibition policy the ambit of which exceeded its reach - the former to justify their existence; the latter to reap the pecuniary benefits.
The unrealistic puritanism of successive US administrations, and the official lies underpinning it, were attended by increasingly elaborate and draconian enforcement measures. This ensured that when Richard Nixon announced in 1969 that ``we need a total war on drugs'', it was a war that could not be won. Indeed, the cartels created by Nixon's war are now so immense that the UN estimates it would take an interception rate of 75 per cent to start affecting their profits. The effects are largely felt at the other end of the scale. During the presidency of George Bush (1989-1993), there were more young black men in jail than in college.
As a global history, Davenport-Hines' book has great strengths but also obvious gaps. It unabashedly focuses on Europe and America - ignoring, for example, the elaboration of Chinese perspectives on the Opium Wars. Furthermore, its analysis of the impact of prohibition in the20th century is almost exclusively limited to the British and American experience. But The Pursuit of Oblivion is probably the most cogent and comprehensive argument about the origins and effects of international prohibition policy yet published. Despite suspicion that he occasionally stacks the evidence Pilger-style to support a premeditated hypothesis, this book is a timely corrective to the hysteria the subject engenders in the public imagination. Every maker of drug policy should read it.
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