Opium and Empire

             (US troops raid an opium den in Manila, 1898)
Many of us are well aware of the American military's campaign to rid Afghanistan of the opium trade. Opium has been identified as a leading resource of revenue for the Taliban, although it is also an important part of the average Afghan's livelihood. It is estimated that 95% of the world's opium is harvested in Afghanistan. Thus not only has Afghanistan been the focus of the U.S. war on terrorism, it has also been positioned under the umbrella war on drugs. In Afghanistan, U.S. troops and special forces operate alongside DEA agents, USAID workers, and Department of Agriculture officials to neutralize the Taliban insurgency and the opium "scourge."

Interestingly, this is not the United States' first encounter with opium agriculture within the context of nation-building. Following the swift victory over Spain in the War of 1898, the US occupation of the Philippines was faced with the dilemma of the opium trade and use. Historian Anne Foster's engaging article, "Models for Governing: Opium and Colonial Policies in Southeast Asia, 1898-1910" in The American Colonial State in the Philippines (2003) offers an excellent resource for understanding America's first joint war on a local insurgency and drugs. I rely on her article in the following paragraphs.

In the lead-up to 1898, a strong prohibitionist culture had been established within the United States. Broadly speaking, opium use had begun during the mid-nineteenth century among white middle class women and Civil War veterans who discretely took the drug with a tonic or in a powdered form. Opium use eventually spread to other ethnic groups and the working classes by the end of the century, enabling the middle class prohibitionist culture to gain considerable authority and power by playing off white middle class fears of crime, foreign corruption, and the disruption to American society. These reformers argued that the health risks and immorality of opium was most typified by the Chinese "opium den"--which served as a gateway for foreign corruption and the breakdown of American institutions.

Yet roughly from 1898 to 1910, the U.S. colonial regime in the Philippines allowed and even approved of continued opium use and importation. The Philippines former imperial rulers, the Spanish, has restricted opium use among the local Filipino populace, yet did allow them to sell the commodity. With the arrival of the Americans, there was a recognition of the lucrative nature of the drug, as it provided important tax revenue through importation. Few Filipinos used opium, yet ironically, as the U.S. colonial authority allowed for increased opium importation, opium use spread from the ethnic Chinese on the islands to an increasing number of Filipinos.

As the ever-increasing number of American reformers and missionaries arrived to the islands, the drumbeat for the restriction of opium also grew louder. These new advocacy groups argued that opium use increased crime and undermined the U.S. colonial mission to remake a loyal and functioning Filipino citizenry. The U.S. Bureau of Insular Affairs (the main colonial governing apparatus) resisted calls for restriction, instead launching a scientific commission of inquiry to study the opium trade in the wider imperial world of Southeast Asia. Drawing from Dutch colonial experiences in Java, the commission determined that total prohibition could not be enforced and was unwise. Instead in 1905, it called for an entire government monopoly over the product, the registration of all current addicts, and a three year period of "gradual prohibition" to appease the growing prohibitionist forces gathering in the United States.

By 1908, the United States used the Philippines as an experiment in prohibitionist policies by making opium importation to the islands illegal (by this point, opium smoking had already been restricted in the United States as further means to control the Chinese immigrant population). The United States hoped to emerge as a leader in global opium restriction prior to the International Opium Commission, a 1909 meeting in Shanghai among the world's imperial powers to tackle the opium problem. This led to the 1912 International Opium Convention, which was the first international drug control treaty. As Anne Foster puts it, the "Prohibitionist Regime" was born. By 1914, the Harrison Narcotics Act enabled the U.S. federal government to regulate and tax opium.

                           (CIA map of global drug trade)

A hundred years since the unofficial beginning of the U.S. war on drugs, all facets of American culture have experimented with drug use and drug restriction. From the Philippines to Afghanistan, the United States has been further empowered by a legal system and a dominant cultural view of the illicit nature of narcotics. In the Philippines, approaching the problems of drug control was seen through the lens of colonial authority, the need for taxable revenue, and the moral imperatives of building a citizenry. For American authorities in Afghanistan, drug control is the complicated intersection of defeating a regional insurgency, disrupting an illicit global trade, reshaping Afghan agriculture, and maintaining the broader spirit of America's unrelenting war on drugs.

Interestingly, as we saw in the case of the Philippines, experiments in colonial policy can reshape how the United States approaches the issues of drug control. In that case, experiences in the Philippines further solidified the growing prohibitionist culture in the U.S. One must wonder how experiments in Afghanistan might reshape our own war on drugs at home--at the very least, Afghanistan has exposed the complexities of attempting to remake an agricultural system so dependent on a single staple crop, in this case, opium. Perhaps, this colonial adventure might shake the foundations of the one hundred year old prohibitionist pillar--or maybe not. It remains to be seen.


(U.S. marines patrol while watching locals harvest opium poppies in S. Afghanistan)