Round 2 a.m. on Monday, December 6, 1875, a “posse of police” led by Captain William Douglass descended on 609 Dupont Road in San Francisco. The cops arrested Fannie Whitmore, Cora Martinez, James Dennison, and Charles Anderson, together with “two Chinamen who saved the place.”
That place, The San Francisco Examiner defined, was an “opium den,” and this was the primary raid performed below an ordinance that town’s Board of Supervisors had enacted on November 15. The brand new legislation decreed that “no individual shall, within the metropolis and county of San Francisco, hold or keep, or turn into an inmate of, or go to, or shall in any means contribute to the help of anywhere, home, or room, the place opium is smoked, or the place individuals assemble for the aim of smoking opium.”
The supervisors made that crime a misdemeanor punishable by a high-quality of $50 to $500—roughly 3 % to 30 % of a clerk’s annual wage in California on the time. Violators additionally might be jailed for 10 days to 6 months.
The 4 patrons and two proprietors nabbed by Douglass and his crew have been convicted the identical day and paid the minimal high-quality, so you can say they obtained off frivolously. Then once more, it should have been jarring to be hauled off to courtroom for conduct that had been completely authorized a couple of weeks earlier than. And the sweeping scope of town’s ban, which on its face reached not solely business institutions but in addition any personal residence “the place opium is smoked,” was fairly startling too.
San Francisco’s ordinance utilized solely to opium smoking, to not oral consumption of the identical drug, which had lengthy been extensively out there in over-the-counter patent medicines. Nor did it cowl injections of morphine, an opium spinoff. That was not an oversight. The legislation was designed to focus on a behavior related to a despised minority—a behavior that alarmed police, politicians, and the press exactly as a result of it was related to a despised minority.
That behavior, the Board of Supervisors anxious, was spreading to the European-American majority. Because the board’s Well being and Police Committee defined, “opium-smoking institutions saved by the Chinese language” have been serving “white women and men.” These locations have been “patronized not solely by the vicious and the wicked” however “are nightly resorted to by younger women and men of respectable parentage and by younger males engaged in respectable enterprise avocations.”
The committee was aghast that “habitués of those notorious resorts inhale the fumes from the opium pipes till a state of stupefaction is produced.” And “until this most harmful species of dissipation could be stopped in its inception,” it warned, “there may be nice hazard that it’s going to turn into one of many prevalent vices of town.” These “notorious resorts” have been “an unmitigated evil,” demanding “fast and inflexible laws.”
That “inflexible laws” was the nation’s first anti-drug legislation, in case you do not depend the short-lived alcohol bans that 13 states enacted within the mid-Nineteenth century. It presaged many different legal guidelines, some rather more draconian, that aimed to stamp out politically disfavored strategies of intoxication. It additionally established a sample that might be repeated with cocaine and marijuana, which likewise impressed concern at the least partly as a result of they have been perceived as medicine favored by menacing out-groups.
“Essentially the most passionate help for authorized prohibition of narcotics has been related to concern of a given drug’s impact on a selected minority,” David F. Musto concluded in The American Illness, his traditional 1973 drug coverage historical past. “Sure medicine have been dreaded as a result of they appeared to undermine important social restrictions which saved these teams below management.” As with opium smoking in San Francisco, these medicine additionally have been dreaded as vectors of contamination that would transmit to the bulk the debauchery, dissipation, and degradation that political leaders noticed as attribute of these minorities.
‘The Worst Class of Individuals’
Testifying earlier than the California Senate’s Particular Committee on Chinese language Immigration the yr after Douglass’ raid, one other San Francisco police officer, George W. Duffield, averred that “ninety-nine Chinamen out of 100 smoke opium” and that “each home” had an opium den. That appeared like an excuse for cops to invade any dwelling in Chinatown. Duffield, who described Chinese language immigrants as “the worst class of individuals on the face of the earth,” in all probability would have been high-quality with that.
In a report submitted to the committee on behalf of the San Francisco Police Division, one other officer, James R. Rogers, echoed the issues that had pushed the Board of Supervisors to motion. “This behavior had previously been practiced by the Chinese language virtually completely,” he mentioned. However lately, “not lower than eight locations have been began, furnished with opium pipes, beds for sleeping off the fumes, and so forth.” Though “these latter locations have been performed by Chinamen,” they have been “patronized by each white males and white ladies, who visited these dens in any respect hours of the day and night time.”
This was a typical and chronic grievance. A decade after Rogers’ testimony, state Sen. John Lenahan (D–San Francisco) warned that Chinese language residents of his metropolis, “all” of whom appeared to “indulge within the vice,” have been “diligent within the induction of others into the accursed behavior.” Opium dens have been “in every single place,” he mentioned, and “we’re assured that white males, ladies, girls and boys are frequently made victims of the lethal drug.”
Wasn’t San Francisco’s ban supposed to place an finish to that? Regardless of the 1875 ordinance, Rogers reported in 1876, “the follow, deeply rooted, nonetheless continues.” And “in implementing the legislation with regard to this matter,” police “have discovered white ladies and Chinamen facet by facet below the consequences of this drug—a humiliating sight to anyone who has something left of manhood.” That remark mirrored anxieties about opium-fostered race mixing, together with the concern that Chinese language males have been utilizing the drug to seduce or sexually enslave white ladies.
“Throughout the partitions of an opium den all fiends are equal,” The San Francisco Examiner complained in 1889. “Coloured males and white ladies lie concerning the flooring, inhaling the fumes of the drug till, stupefied, they fall into the opium-smokers’ sleep. The vast majority of free ladies who ply their commerce on the streets within the southern part of town have been delivered to their degraded situation by means of opium, or by affiliation with customers of it.” 5 years later, the Examiner was appalled at “the horrible situation of the opium-depravity” in Salt Lake Metropolis, as illustrated by a raid by which “two white ladies have been discovered mendacity on the ground utterly below the affect of the drug, and virtually in a nude state.”
In his 1890 ebook How the Different Half Lives, muckraking journalist Jacob Riis described a home in New York Metropolis’s “Chinese language quarter” inhabited by “ladies, all white, ladies hardly but grown to womanhood, worshipping nothing save the pipe that has enslaved them physique and soul.” Riis was disturbed by their equanimity: “Of the depth of their fall nobody is extra completely conscious than these ladies themselves; nobody is much less involved about it. The calmness with which they focus on it, whereas insisting illogically upon the fiction of a wedding that deceives nobody, is disheartening.”
The American Federation of Labor (AFL), making the case in opposition to Chinese language immigration in 1902, described “little ladies no older than 12” who “have been present in Chinese language laundries below the affect of opium.” By way of “some wily technique,” the AFL mentioned, “they’ve been induced by the Chinese language to make use of the drug,” and “what different crimes have been dedicated in these darkish and fetid locations when these little harmless victims of the Chinamen’s wiles have been below the affect of the drug are virtually too horrible to think about.”
Whereas Riis reported that “scrupulous neatness” was “the distinguishing mark of Chinatown,” the California Senate’s immigration committee mentioned the alternative was true in San Francisco, describing Chinese language properties as “filthy within the excessive.” If it weren’t for “the healthfulness of our local weather,” the committee theorized, “our metropolis populations would have lengthy since been decimated by pestilence from these causes.”
A committee member, state Sen. Edward J. Lewis (D–Colusa), elaborated on his disgust at life in Chinatown. “We went into locations so filthy and soiled that I can not see how these individuals stay there,” he reported. “The fumes of opium, mingled with the odor arising from filth and filth, made moderately a sickening feeling creep over us.” Since “the entire Chinese language quarter is miserably filthy,” he added, “the passage of an ordinance eradicating them from town, as a nuisance, can be justifiable.”
As politicians like Lewis noticed it, the opium drawback was inextricably intertwined with the Chinese language drawback. If the federal government couldn’t forcibly take away these “filthy” foreigners, as Lewis appeared to choose, it might at the least make life as tough as potential for them. As former congressman James Budd put it at an 1885 anti-Chinese language assembly in Stockton, California, it was native authorities’ “obligation” to make circumstances so “devilishly uncomfortable” that the Chinese language can be “glad to go away.”
Legislators actually tried. San Francisco’s ban on opium dens, which cities like Stockton imitated, was only one side of a broad, longrunning authorized marketing campaign aimed toward subjugating or driving away Chinese language immigrants. Along with makes an attempt at outright bans on Chinese language immigration into California, that marketing campaign included particular taxes, discriminatory laws, and restrictions on the appropriate to hunt, fish, personal land, vote, and testify in courtroom.
These measures have been prompted by large-scale Chinese language immigration to the US, which started in the course of the California Gold Rush within the 1850s. The immigrants have been overwhelmingly males, lots of whom labored in California’s mines and, later, on the transcontinental railroad. From 1860 to 1880, the Chinese language-American inhabitants rose from about 35,000 to greater than 100,000. That was nonetheless lower than 1 % of the whole U.S. inhabitants, however the overwhelming majority of the immigrants settled in California, the place they accounted for 9 % of the inhabitants and maybe 1 / 4 of employees. Many white Californians have been alarmed by this alien presence.
‘A Human Tidal Wave’
From the start, the inflow of Chinese language immigrants aroused resentment and hostility, together with assaults on Chinese language miners by native prospectors. In 1850, the California Legislature imposed a $20 month-to-month tax (a couple of fifth of a laborer’s wages) on overseas miners, which was later diminished but in addition amended in order that it utilized solely to Chinese language immigrants. Eight years later, the Legislature authorised “An Act to Forestall the Additional Immigration of Chinese language or Mongolians to This State,” which the California Supreme Court docket deemed unconstitutional.
The courtroom additionally rejected an 1862 legislation imposing a particular month-to-month tax on residents from China who weren’t already topic to the miner’s tax. Legislators have been specific about their targets, calling the invoice “An Act to Shield Free White Labor Towards Competitors With Chinese language Coolie Labor, and to Discourage the Immigration of the Chinese language Into the State of California.” Because the justices noticed it, these legislators have been attempting to train powers that the U.S. Structure assigned to the federal authorities: the imposition of import duties and regulation of commerce with overseas nations.
Financial developments stoked the anti-Chinese language sentiment mirrored in such legal guidelines. The Gold Rush was over by the top of the 1850s, and the Pacific Railroad was accomplished in 1869. The “Lengthy Despair” of the 1870s added to anxieties about financial competitors from Chinese language immigrants whereas concurrently driving them towards trades and small companies beforehand dominated by white Californians.
The complaints about Chinese language competitors, which have been amplified by labor unions, the Workingmen’s Get together of California (based in 1877), and middle-class businessmen, turned virtues—thrift and a robust work ethic—into vices. Anti-Chinese language agitators groused that the immigrants have been prepared to work laborious for much less pay as a result of they saved their dwelling bills low, subsisting on meager diets and tolerating the crowded circumstances decried by state legislators. Though that grievance was laborious to reconcile with the portrayal of Chinese language immigrants as indolent opium addicts, nativists have been unfazed by the inconsistency.
On a Sunday in April 1876, the San Francisco Chronicle crammed its entrance web page with an article concerning the “Chinese language Drawback” that weaved these contradictory themes collectively. “Celestials,” it mentioned, have been liable to opium smoking, playing, prostitution, and “different vices.” However they have been additionally hardworking and entrepreneurial, creating “a human tidal wave” of “disastrous competitors” for “our miners, mechanics, and even tradesmen.” They’d opened laundries, cigar retailers, “small ware” shops, and vegetable stands. These “peculiar individuals” had “quaint and curious” customs, they usually have been consultants at “economizing house,” combining “ingenuity and trade” with “the vices and abominations of the Chinese language character.” They’d no “larger ambition than that of hoarding cash.”
The Chronicle devoted a bit of the article to “the opium dens of San Francisco,” which it mentioned “in all probability quantity a number of hundred.” In distinction with the claims of cops like Duffield and politicians like Lenahan, the paper allowed that “the follow of opium-smoking among the many Chinese language” was “maybe not common” however mentioned it nonetheless “prevails to an alarming extent.”
The article, which described opium’s subjective results as “scrumptious and entrancing,” additionally forged doubt on the excellence that town’s Board of Supervisors had drawn between modes of consumption. “The usage of opium on this type doesn’t seem to provide the baneful outcomes arising from consuming the drug,” it mentioned. “Neither is there any hazard of deadly consequence, as from overdosing with morphine.” The truth is, the paper mentioned, “opium-smoking could also be considered merely a brand new—maybe an improved—type of drunkenness.” In contrast to alcohol consumption, the Chronicle reported, opium smoking “develops no combating [or] damaging impulses,” and it’s “a slower system of poisoning than using alcoholic stimulants.”
Regardless of these {qualifications}, the Chronicle‘s dismay at this presumably “improved” type of intoxication was unmistakable. The opium dens “patronized by the decrease lessons defy description,” the paper mentioned, however gave it a go anyway: “Think about a room lower than fifteen toes sq., with a ceiling about eight toes excessive. On this room on the 4 sides are organized three tiers of bunks, the heads in opposition to the partitions. Right here opium-smoking lodging are furnished for forty individuals. The one technique of air flow is thru the door, and that is typically closed and mounted. The fumes of burning opium, the stench and impurities arising from this huddled nest of human beings, and the suffocating properties of the ambiance, ought actually to kill any first rate human being in an hour, however it appears to have solely a pickling impact on the Chinaman.”
The implication that Chinese language immigrants have been not first rate human beings was spelled out in the identical paragraph. “If something have been wanted to finish the degradation of the Mongolian race,” the Chronicle mentioned, “the besotting results of this pernicious follow furnishes [sic] the ‘decrease deep’ past which ethical and bodily debasement can not presumably go.” Worse, that follow had attracted “American women and men,” who “not occasionally are present in a state of full insensibility” after “pulling away collectively on the pipe.”
The Chronicle noticed opium smoking as emblematic of a broader drawback: Chinese language immigrants have been unassimilable. Whereas “the emigrants to our shores from each different quarter of the globe in time turn into naturalized residents,” the paper complained, “a Chinaman by no means takes the slightest curiosity in something pertaining to the general public good or the nationwide sentiment.”
‘This Ethical Campaign’
What was to be completed? Quite incongruously, given its scathing criticisms, the Chronicle cautioned in opposition to “intemperate language” and “threatening conduct,” which could result in “violence” that might discredit the anti-Chinese language motion. This was a sensible concern in mild of the violence California already had witnessed, together with an 1871 Los Angeles riot by which lots of of males looted Chinatown and murdered 19 residents.
“We should so conduct this ethical campaign in opposition to additional emigration of those hordes that the entire world will approve and applaud,” the Chronicle mentioned. “The mechanics and laboring males of California and the Pacific coast can not afford to confess squarely that the one query concerned on this motion is considered one of competitors and of {dollars} and cents. There’s a ethical and social side to the matter extra vital than another.”
The “ethical campaign” championed by the Chronicle quickly impressed the Chinese language Exclusion Act of 1882, the primary federal legislation to ban immigration based mostly on nationwide origin. The legislation, which utilized to “expert and unskilled laborers,” notionally made exceptions for sure classes of tourists, however permission was tough to acquire. Congress additionally made Chinese language immigrants already dwelling in the US ineligible for citizenship and required them to acquire reentry permits once they traveled overseas. Such insurance policies have been applauded by the “Anti-Chinese language Leagues” that started to proliferate throughout the West within the late Nineteenth century.
Different anti-Chinese language measures of this period have been impartial on their face however clearly aimed toward a selected ethnic group. San Francisco, for instance, set a minimal house requirement of 500 cubic toes per resident for personal dwellings (thereby forbidding frequent dwelling circumstances in Chinatown), prohibited theater performances between midnight and 6 a.m. (concentrating on Chinese language opera), and required licenses for laundries in wood buildings—licenses that Chinese language laundry house owners in some way have been by no means capable of acquire. That final ordinance handed muster with the California Supreme Court docket, which noticed it as a legitimate train of town’s police energy. However the U.S. Supreme Court docket later unanimously dominated that the legislation’s discriminatory enforcement violated the 14th Modification’s assure of equal safety.
San Francisco’s ban on opium dens fell into the identical class because the housing, theater, and laundry laws. It was ostensibly motivated by public well being and security issues however truly designed to discomfit unwelcome foreigners. Western cities and states adopted San Francisco’s instance, which provoked further courtroom challenges.
In 1886, a federal decide in Oregon upheld a Chinese language man’s conviction below a state legislation banning the sale of opium for nonmedical use. “Smoking opium will not be our vice,” U.S. District Decide Matthew Deady wrote, “and subsequently it could be that this laws proceeds extra from a need to vex and annoy the ‘Heathen Chinee’ on this respect, than to guard the individuals from the evil behavior. However the motives of legislators can’t be the topic of judicial investigation for the aim of affecting the validity of their acts.”
The next yr, against this, the California Supreme Court docket blocked enforcement of a Stockton ordinance that made it a criminal offense for 2 or extra individuals to collect for the aim of smoking opium. Within the majority opinion, Justice Jackson Temple remarked on the legislation’s intrusiveness.
“To ban vice will not be ordinarily thought of throughout the police energy of the state,” Temple wrote. “A criminal offense is a trespass upon some proper, public or personal. The thing of the police energy is to guard rights from the assaults of others, to not banish sin from the world or to make males ethical….Such laws could be very uncommon on this nation. There appears to be an instinctive and common feeling that it is a harmful province to enter upon, and that by such legal guidelines particular person liberty may be very a lot abridged.” Concurring Justice A. Van R. Paterson likewise argued that “each man has the appropriate to eat, drink, and smoke what he pleases in his personal home with out police interference.”
The courtroom conceded that the secondary results of private habits reminiscent of opium smoking “might justify the [state] legislature in declaring these vices to be crimes.” However it concluded that native governments lacked such authority below California’s structure.
State legislators would quickly do what the California Supreme Court docket mentioned cities couldn’t. Six years earlier than the justices nixed Stockton’s opium ordinance, California already had made it a misdemeanor to keep up “anywhere” the place opium is “offered or given away to be smoked at such place.” The state criminalized all nonmedical opium gross sales in 1907 and made possession unlawful in 1909, the identical yr that Congress banned the importation of opium for smoking.
‘Half-Baked Laws’
Apart from import taxes, the Smoking Opium Exclusion Act of 1909 was the primary federal legislation aimed toward stopping deliberate consumption of a psychoactive substance. Just like the San Francisco ordinance that inaugurated the anti-opium marketing campaign, it focused a behavior that was seen as alien to American tradition. Whereas it prohibited importation of “opium ready for smoking,” it expressly allowed importation of opium “for medicinal functions.”
That exception coated the normal American use of opium and its derivatives, which customers might purchase over-the-counter in the course of the Nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Patent medicines, which have been promoted as treatments for a variety of signs and diseases, typically included substances that right now could be legally obtained solely by prescription. Manufacturers containing opium or morphine included Perry Davis’ Painkiller, Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, and Ayer’s Cherry Pectoral. The prevalence of opiates in authorized merchandise offered “for medicinal functions” was mirrored in a legislation that Congress authorised three years earlier than it took up the Smoking Opium Exclusion Act. The Pure Meals and Drug Act of 1906 required that patent medicines “bear an announcement on the label” indicating the “amount or proportion” of 10 specified medicine, together with opium, morphine, heroin, hashish, cocaine, and alcohol.
That legislation, which was meant to present customers info and forestall the sale of “adulterated or misbranded or toxic” merchandise, didn’t require a health care provider’s prescription to buy treatments containing the listed medicine, though states had begun to try this. Nor did the 1906 legislation handle the sale of opium itself. The Smoking Opium Exclusion Act aimed to fill that hole.
Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge (R–Mass.) and different supporters of the invoice mentioned its passage was pressing in mild of the Worldwide Opium Fee then assembly in Shanghai. The U.S. authorities, which was flexing its affect by taking a number one position in worldwide drug management, had instigated the convention and was eager to exhibit its seriousness by enacting federal laws. Lodge emphasised that the State Division “is extraordinarily anxious that this laws shall be handed as quickly as potential.”
Members of Congress took heed. The Senate authorised the invoice that very day, and the Home of Representatives adopted go well with lower than per week later. Though legislators have been united in viewing opium smoking as an evil that must be stamped out if potential, there was some disagreement concerning the effectiveness and constitutionality of the proposed legislation. However even the objections made it clear which drug customers Congress had in thoughts.
Though “Chinamen need opium ready for smoking in their very own nation,” Rep. Sereno E. Payne (R–N.Y.) mentioned, smokable opium “could be manufactured on this nation from medicinal opium.” And “moderately than not have it in any respect,” he added, “they’d take that ready on this nation, undoubtedly.” On condition that prospect, Payne was skeptical that the legislation would have a considerable influence on opium smoking.
Rep. Joseph H. Gaines (R–W.Va.), who known as the invoice “a chunk of half-baked laws,” took the same view. “Due to the conservatism of the Chinese language individuals,” he mentioned, “they a lot choose to have their opium ready in China that the excessive price of obligation has not stimulated the manufacture of opium on this nation.” However “those that are hooked on the opium behavior will safe the drug in some type, though not the popular type.” As a substitute of “defending the morals of the nation,” Gaines thought, the import ban would “stimulate the manufacture and preparation of opium for smoking on this nation.”
Payne ultimately got here round. After conferring with the secretary of state, he mentioned he was “very cheerfully for this invoice,” having been persuaded that it could “have a tendency in some method to make it tougher and subsequently to suppress partly using smoking opium.” However Gaines, whereas emphasizing that he was “yielding to no man…in my hostility to the follow of opium smoking and in my hostility to the drug behavior usually,” remained opposed.
“It takes plenary energy to stamp out such a behavior—if it may be suppressed in any respect—the total police energy,” Gaines mentioned. “Our federal authorities doesn’t have it.” Though he thought “a prohibitive internal-revenue tax on the transportation of opium for smoking” would possibly make the import ban more practical, he was not sanguine concerning the prospects of eradicating the behavior by laws. “It should happen to each man that if a factor which is so fascinating to be completed as stamping out the smoking of opium might be completed by a easy legislation prohibiting the importation of opium,” he mentioned, “that treatment would have been thought out and utilized way back.”
Most legislators have been unfazed by the constitutional and sensible objections to the invoice. “It’s a righteous measure,” declared Rep. James Robert Mann (R–Unwell.). He thought the legislation, aimed toward a drug favored by foreigners whom Congress had already deemed unfit for citizenship, was plainly “within the curiosity of humanity” and “one nice step ahead once more within the civilization of the world.”
This text initially appeared in print below the headline “‘Smoking Opium Is Not Our Vice’.”