Beware euphoria: the moral roots and racial myths of America's war on drugs
"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, and pain 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"--