Anti-Chinese Xenophobia Fueled America’s First Drug War
Around 2 a.m. on Monday, December 6, 1875, a “posse of police” led by Captain William Douglass descended on 609 Dupont Street in San Francisco. The cops arrested Fannie Whitmore, Cora Martinez, James Dennison, and Charles Anderson, along with “two Chinamen who kept the place.”
That place, The San Francisco Examiner explained, was an “opium den,” and this was the first raid conducted under an ordinance that the city’s Board of Supervisors had enacted on November 15. The new law decreed that “no person shall, in the city and county of San Francisco, keep or maintain, or become an inmate of, or visit, or shall in any way contribute to the support of any place, house, or room, where opium is smoked, or where persons assemble for the purpose of smoking opium.”
The supervisors made that crime a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of $50 to $500—roughly 3 percent to 30 percent of a clerk’s annual salary in California at the time. Violators also could be jailed for 10 days to six months.
The four patrons and two proprietors nabbed by Douglass and his crew were convicted the same day and paid the minimum fine, so you could say they got off lightly. Then again, it must have been jarring to be hauled off to court for conduct that had been perfectly legal a few weeks before. And the sweeping scope of the city’s ban, which on its face reached not only commercial establishments but also any private residence “where opium is smoked,” was pretty startling too.
San Francisco’s ordinance applied only to opium smoking, not to oral consumption of the same drug, which had long been widely available in over-the-counter patent medicines. Nor did it cover injections of morphine, an opium derivative. That was not an oversight. The law was designed to target a habit associated with a despised minority—a habit that alarmed police, politicians, and the press precisely because it was associated with a despised minority.
That habit, the Board of Supervisors worried, was spreading to the European-American majority. As the board’s Health and Police Committee explained, “opium-smoking establishments kept by the Chinese” were serving “white men and women.” These places were “patronized not only by the vicious and the depraved” but “are nightly resorted to by young men and women of respectable parentage and by young men engaged in respectable business avocations.”
The committee was aghast that “habitués of these infamous resorts inhale the fumes from the opium pipes until a state of stupefaction is produced.” And “unless this most dangerous species of dissipation can be stopped in its inception,” it warned, “there is great danger that it will become one of the prevalent vices of the city.” These “infamous resorts” were “an unmitigated evil,” demanding “immediate and rigid legislation.”
That “rigid legislation” was the nation’s first anti-drug law, if you don’t count the short-lived alcohol bans that 13 states enacted in the mid-19th century. It presaged many other laws, some much more draconian, that aimed to stamp out politically disfavored methods of intoxication. It also established a pattern that would be repeated with cocaine and marijuana, which likewise inspired fear at least partly because they were perceived as drugs favored by menacing out-groups.
“The most passionate support for legal prohibition of narcotics has been associated with fear of a given drug’s effect on a specific minority,” David F. Musto concluded in The American Disease, his classic 1973 drug policy history. “Certain drugs were dreaded because they seemed to undermine essential social restrictions which kept these groups under control.” As with opium smoking in San Francisco, those drugs also were dreaded as vectors of contamination that could transmit to the majority the debauchery, dissipation, and degradation that political leaders saw as characteristic of those minorities.
‘The Worst Class of People’
Testifying before the California Senate’s Special Committee on Chinese Immigration the year after Douglass’ raid, another San Francisco police officer, George W. Duffield, averred that “ninety-nine Chinamen out of one hundred smoke opium” and that “every house” had an opium den. That sounded like an excuse for cops to invade any home in Chinatown. Duffield, who described Chinese immigrants as “the worst class of people on the face of the earth,” probably would have been fine with that.
In a report submitted to the committee on behalf of the San Francisco Police Department, another officer, James R. Rogers, echoed the concerns that had driven the Board of Supervisors to action. “This habit had formerly been practiced by the Chinese almost exclusively,” he said. But in recent years, “not less than eight places have been started, furnished with opium pipes, beds for sleeping off the fumes, etc.” Although “these latter places were conducted by Chinamen,” they were “patronized by both white men and white women, who visited these dens at all hours of the day and night.”
This was a common and persistent complaint. A decade after Rogers’ testimony, state Sen. John Lenahan (D–San Francisco) warned that Chinese residents of his city, “all” of whom seemed to “indulge in the vice,” were “diligent in the induction of others into the accursed habit.” Opium dens were “everywhere,” he said, and “we are assured that white men, women, boys and girls are continually made victims of the deadly drug.”
Wasn’t San Francisco’s ban supposed to put an end to that? Despite the 1875 ordinance, Rogers reported in 1876, “the practice, deeply rooted, still continues.” And “in enforcing the law with regard to this matter,” police “have found white women and Chinamen side by side under the effects of this drug—a humiliating sight to any one who has anything left of manhood.” That comment reflected anxieties about opium-fostered race mixing, including the fear that Chinese men were using the drug to seduce or sexually enslave white women.
“Within the walls of an opium den all fiends are equal,” The San Francisco Examiner complained in 1889. “Colored men and white women lie about the floors, inhaling the fumes of the drug until, stupefied, they fall into the opium-smokers’ sleep. The majority of loose women who ply their trade on the streets in the southern section of the city have been brought to their degraded condition by the use of opium, or by association with users of it.” Five years later, the Examiner was appalled at “the horrible condition of the opium-depravity” in Salt Lake City, as illustrated by a raid in which “two white women were found lying on the floor completely under the influence of the drug, and almost in a nude state.”
In his 1890 book How the Other Half Lives, muckraking journalist Jacob Riis described a house in New York City’s “Chinese quarter” inhabited by “women, all white, girls hardly yet grown to womanhood, worshipping nothing save the pipe that has enslaved them body and soul.” Riis was disturbed by their equanimity: “Of the depth of their fall no one is more thoroughly aware than these girls themselves; no one is less concerned about it. The calmness with which they discuss it, while insisting illogically upon the fiction of a marriage that deceives
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