Mackenzie King Wasn’t a Libertarian:

Drug History and the Forgotten Sixties

Christopher Dummitt

Jailed for Possession: Illegal Drug Use, Regulation, and Power in Canada, 1920-1961 Catherine Carstairs Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. 244 pp. $55.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Not This Time: , Public Policy, and the Marijuana Question, 1961-1975 Marcel Martel Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. 277 pp. Illus. $55.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.

Bud Inc.: Inside Canada's Marijuana Industry Ian Mulgrew Toronto: Random House Canada, 2005. 287 pp. $35.00 cloth.

t was a pleasant spring if frustrating, features of the event Iday in 2001, and I set out to do my was watching Lorne Maynecourt, the civic duty by attending my local all- Liberal candidate, repeatedly open his candidates meeting. The provincial mouth, speak what sounded like words, ndp government was running low in the and yet manage to say nothing at all. polls, and the feeling was that it was all The most intriguing figures at the but doomed to defeat. But that did not meeting turned out not to be the major stop a fairly large crowd from turning candidates at all. The representatives of out to listen, question, and occasionally the smaller parties and the independents heckle the candidates. The opposition could truly speak openly, and they did. Liberals had clearly put out a gag-order The most articulate was a man in a to prevent any of their candidates from bear suit who went by the name “Boris saying anything that could cause con- Bear.” But certainly the angriest, and troversy. They knew that the ndp could the one who is important to us here, was be counted on to lose the election and Marc Emery, the representative of the did not want their candidates getting in . the way. So one of the most amusing,

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At the time I was fairly ignorant of brought a minimum six-month jail the Marijuana Party. I assumed that term. Yet, in 2004, one of the province’s they were a fairly simple single-issue biggest marijuana dealers opened up party with the emphasis on party, a Da Kine Café on Commercial Drive bunch of jokers who wanted to have a (a.k.a. the Drive), one of Vancouver’s good time, legalize pot, and make fun trendiest streets, and openly sold of the political system – the Rhino party drugs for months. Everyone knew on drugs. I was wrong. what he was doing. There was no Emery was entirely serious. And attempt to hide anything. In the guise if anyone had expected some kind of of supporting medical marijuana, left-wing hippie sixties leftover they customers were asked to sign a sheet were soon brought up short. Emery’s on which they explained from which pol itics were decidedly libertarian of particular ailment they suffered. You the right-wing and anti-government could put down anything – headache, variety. He went into long-winded inflated testicles, or bruised ego. It speeches criticizing the “fascist” gov- didn’t matter. The café was open for ernment’s actions on a variety of fronts, months. The mayor and chief of police not only in wasting resources policing refused to take any action until the the marijuana industry but also in provincial attorney general became so crit icizing just about any other gov- irate that something had to be done to ernment attempts to regulate individual save face. But the direction of change behaviour. Emery was not just any was clear: pot was the new beer. candidate: he was the party leader and All of this is both reminiscent of, one of the illegal pot industry’s biggest and yet strikingly different from, celebrities and entrepreneurs. And his the Vancouver of a century ago. The politics reflected (and still reflect) the Vancouver of the early twentieth politics of contemporary marijuana afi- century was also home to the country’s cionados. While this pungent plant is drug world. It was here that one could still celebrated by the hippie crowd, its find most of the opium dens and the support base has diversified. Although Chinese population who were so closely Bud is still illegal, some of its most associated with drug use. Indeed, it was voci ferous adherents now speak the a trip to Vancouver in the autumn of language of corporate and neoliberal 1907 that led to the creation of Canada’s respectability. drug laws. In the wake of anti-Asian And the drug itself is on the verge riots in September of that year, Laurier’s of genuine respectability. In 1999, government sent the energetic young the Department of National Health deputy minister of labour, Mackenzie applied for a special exemption to allow King, to sort through the mess on terminally ill Canadians to smoke his way to the Far East. When King marijuana for medical reasons. The arrived he was faced with compensation laws against possession of marijuana claims from proprietors of opium dens are irregularly enforced at best and whose property had been damaged. more often completely ignored by police King balked. How could this be? and citizens alike. While the debate The idea of swooning opium-users over decriminalization continues, the was repugnant to the sober and self- general cultural attitudes towards the restraining Presbyterian Scot. Back drug have changed dramatically. In in , he set in motion a series of 1961, a conviction for possession still discussions that led to the passage of MacKenzie King Wasn’t a Libertarian 109 a law prohibiting the non-medicinal Vancouver Daily World led high-profile sale, distribution, and manufacture of campaigns calling for harsher drug laws. opium. Another law followed in 1908, They directly linked the drug problem and these laws were expanded in the with the country’s “yellow menace.” 1920s. Marijuana was added to the list In 1922 and 1923, as a direct result of in 1923 with little fanfare. this agitation, the federal government Same city, different century: how stiffened penalties under the Opium and can we explain the change between Narcotic Drug Act. In other words, it is the Vancouver of the early twentieth no coincidence that Canada’s tough drug century and the Vancouver of the early laws were passed at the same time as was twenty-first century? It is a question the Anti-Chinese Exclusion Act, 1923. that gets to the heart of changes in The introduction of these laws morality over the last one hundred significantly shaped the nature of years. To what can we attribute the drug use and drug users’ lives over the great changes in legal regulation, levels next forty years, and this is the story of use, and, most important, attitudes that Carstairs sets out to tell us. As towards drugs? the 1920s moved into the 1930s, the Catherine Carstairs does an ad- proportion of Chinese users dropped mirable job of telling this story for the considerably. Drug users increasingly first half of the century. The direction came from the white working class, of change in these years gave no hint with some middle-class users’ being an of Marc Emery’s future prospects. exception to the rule. Harsher police Carstairs tells the story of the “classic enforcement led, Carstairs argues, to a period” of Canadian drug laws. This change in the type of drugs consumed. is the period between the early 1920s As drugs became harder to find, drug and 1961, when governments focused users turned to morphine and heroine on strong laws, strict policing, and and to different ways of taking opium tough sentencing. She begins her story (ways that were easier to conceal). slightly earlier. First, she teases out the Marijuana was almost unknown. By origins of the drug laws, recounting the the 1940s and 1950s, the country’s now-famous role of Mackenzie King drug-user population was incredibly and his 1907 trip to Vancouver in first small by today’s standards, numbering instigating laws against drug use. But approximately four thousand. With the bulk of the book picks up in the such a small population and so many 1920s with the introduction of harsher police resources devoted to it, the possi- penalties. One of Carstairs’ biggest bilities of surveillance and control were contributions is to show just how omnipresent. Almost every regular drug important anti-Asian fears were to the user in this period would have spent introduction of drug laws. This might some time in jail. This could be for have seemed obvious in King’s response drug offences or for crimes committed to the opium dealers’ compensation in order to pay for drugs. For women, claims in 1907; but King would as likely this frequently meant prostitution. have been alarmed by recreational drug- Jailed for Possession is an intriguing use on the part of anyone. It was much book in that it is engaged as much clearer in the decidedly racist media with contemporary debates about harm campaigns in and, reduction as it is with historiography. especially, Vancouver in the early 1920s. Carstairs uses her research to suggest First the Vancouver Sun and then the that the strong policing and sentences 110 bc studies of this “classic period” were much In the context of the expert-friendly more harmful than they needed to 1950s, the (treatable) disease idea clearly be. They forced addicts to take drugs made sense. that were more harmful than the ones These concepts were most clearly they had been taking as well as to laid out in the Narcotic Control Act, use methods (such as injection) that 1961. The Act removed min imum were dangerous. She notes that police sentences and introduced the goal of methods were often brutal and that, treating drug offenders. Summing up, although police training became more Carstairs argues that, “in the middle professional through these years, they years of the twentieth century police relied on on-the-job training, which officers, government bureaucrats and was far from perfect. Undercover work parliamentarians all held the hope that and connections to the drug world with proper psychiatric care, drug users opened up opportunities for police might be cured.” But the moment of corruption. hyper-expertise was limited. “By the The counter-point to this story of time the first treatment prison was police regulation is the growing support built,” Carstairs goes on to argue, for an expert-led “disease model ” of drug growing scepticism about the use, which gained ground in the 1940s value of prisons, asylums, and and 1950s. Doctors had frequently been other total institutions, and the in an ambiguous position with regard rise of middle-class marijuana to drug policy, given their role as drug use meant that the compulsory dispensers. They could easily be seen segregation and treatment of as problems themselves, as potential addicts would lose the appeal sources of drugs. But in the postwar it had had in 1961. The 1961 years a more confident (if divided) Narcotic Control Act was a medical profession began to come up product of the 1950s, arising from with new ways of thinking through a faith in experts, especially the problem of drug use. In the face psychiatric experts, from of the obstinate continuity of drug use conservative social norms, and and the inability of tough legislation to from a willingness to experiment effectively fix the problem, some doctors with new social programs to suggested that drug use be considered a address Canada’s perceived ills. disease. It could, they argued, be treated But in 1961, Canada was at the through medical intervention and dawn of a new age, and the even through prescriptions of regular solutions of 1961 were quickly small doses of the drugs themselves abandoned. (158) or their less harmful alternatives (e.g., methadone). The idea gained ground This is where Carstairs leaves us: in in conjunction with support from social 1961, at the end of the so-called “classic workers and like-minded professionals. period,” with the ostensible age of Interestingly, the growth of the disease expert-led cures on the horizon but model of drug use mirrored a change also with the knowledge that all of this in professional attitudes towards homo- would be overtaken in short order by sexuality. In that case too, the view that the cultural changes of the 1960s. It is saw such practices as morally abhorrent at once an obvious but also a somewhat had to compete with an expert approach disappointing end point. Were there that labelled them diseases of the mind. no signs of this “new age” that was MacKenzie King Wasn’t a Libertarian 111 about to dawn? Was there nothing to the ways in which the revolt against indicate why a whole slew of middle- “normality” had already begun. class youth were about to slough off Although the early postwar decades the cultural beliefs of their predecessors were certainly conformist in many and begin to use drugs on a historically respects, the era also saw the acceleration unprecedented scale? The book leaves of a culture of pleasure, and this had us to think that the changes of the lasting repercussions. Attitudes towards 1960s were still to come. And this is too alcohol softened considerably. Indeed, bad. Because there are intriguing hints Vancouver saw its first cocktail lounges throughout Jailed for Possession that the in 1954. Middle-class commentators roots of later changes could be traced at increasingly found less fault with least to the 1950s, if not earlier. gambling and just about all the other Drug users, it seems, felt themselves “vices.”1 In fact, they were beginning not to be unique. In a culture that celebrated to be considered vices at all. Carstairs the “normal,” they were anything but. notes that the social workers of the 1950s Yet it may be this very desire to break focused more on issues of personality with what was normal that brought and psychology than did those of two them so close to key trends in the decades earlier. She presents the rise popular culture that, ostensibly, they of this socio-psychological view as a were trying to avoid. “I was beginning conservative development, suggesting to comprehend what it means to be a that the transformation went from member of the addict world,” one parole the economic view (in the depression) officer recalled. “It automatically makes to the psychological view (in the all other strata of society as alien as a postwar years). Yet, the more obvious village in Outer Mongolia. Benny, like transition was not from the economic most of the snappers, was convinced that to the psychological; it was from the he was so different from the squarejohn moral to the psychological. It was world that he could never fit into it and the transformation from a Victorian be accepted by it. Heroin was nothing emphasis on moral character to a compared with this problem. The drug modern emphasis on personality. Other was merely the way out from worrying historians trace the change to the early about it” (90). Yet how unique was this twentieth century, but it did not take belief? How different was this feeling place with any kind of completeness of being alien in an all-too-straight and until the 1950s or later.2 hypocritical culture? In fact, some of the most engaging literature of the 1950s 1 These kinds of developments are discussed in took on exactly this problem. Replace a variety of recent books in Canadian social “squarejohn” with “phonies” and you history, although the emphasis is usually could quite easily be talking about on the way in which regulation continues in altered forms. See Craig Heron, Booze: Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye 1951 A Distilled History (Toronto: Between the ( ). The Canadian example would be Lines, 2003); Robert Campbell, Sit Down Duddy Kravitz’s energetic critique of and Drink Your Beer: Regulating Vancouver’s middle-class wasp and Jewish culture Beer Parlours, 1925-1954 (Toronto: University in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz of Toronto Press, 2001); Suzanne Morton, 1919 1969 (1959). It is these kinds of cultural At Odds: Gambling and Canadians, - developments that go unrecognized (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003). in Jailed for Possession, which ignores 2 This transition from character to per- sonality is central to Anthony Rotundo’s 112 bc studies

The link between this culture of the Marijuana Question, 1961-1975 would pleasure (we could also think here of the do the job. After all, Martel starts up embrace of consumption, the retreat to in 1961, directly where Carstairs left family life, etc.) and the medical model off. His is the first book to take on the of the experts is still somewhat unclear. subject of drugs in 1960s Canada. One The conservative American historian might expect that it would focus on of “bad habits,” John Burnham, has what were probably the most im portant argued that there was a direct link. For developments of drug use in these Burnham, treating the drug problem years: the vast increase in the number as a medical addiction was one step of users, the drug culture of students, along the path towards making the vice the counter culture, and the radical acceptable behaviour. When doctors challenge that drugs presented to long- began talking about drug use as an standing notions of self-control and illness, they created empathy. Media respectability. But Martel only glances stories about the troubles of drug users at these issues. Not This Time takes as established a kinship between the public its starting point the decision of the and drug users, breaking down the (in federal government not to decriminalize his view, appropriate) barriers of harsh marijuana. In other words, it assumes judgment.3 We do not necessarily need that the big story of drugs in the 1960s to agree with all of Burnham’s politics is one of continued regulation. to see that there is at least something From this rather unexpected start, in what he says. If we want to figure Martel takes us through the efforts out why attitudes towards drug use of various “social actors” to influence became so much more liberal in the government drug policy. There is an 1960s and afterwards, medicalization analytical enemy here, and it is the needs to be part of the answer. Yet “moral panic” school of analysis, which Jailed for Possession never fully engages emphasizes the media’s role in blowing with these questions. No doubt this is moral issues out of all proportion to because the major changes postdate her reality, thereby creating a climate of fear work, but there were still plenty of clues and persecution. Martel tells us that to to what was to come in her empirically take this approach to drug laws in 1960s rich book. Canada would be altogether wrong. It is The gaps in Carstairs’ otherwise rather a shame that no one has actually excellent work would not be such a made such a claim about drug policy in disappointment were it not for the fact 1960s Canada – at least no one that he that we do not yet have anywhere else cites. But he does not appear phased by to turn to find the answers. It might the absence of any real-life opposition; seem as though Marcel Martel’s Not rather, he contrasts this straw man to This Time: Canadians, Public Policy and the logic of his own explanation – that the role of “social actors” was supreme argument in American Manhood: Transfor- in determining public policy. mations in Masculinity from the Revolution Not This Time is organized into to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, chapters that look at the role of social 1993). actors, and it ends with a chapter on 3 John C. Burnham, Bad Habits: Drinking, the LeDain Commission’s inquiry Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual into Canada’s drug laws (1969-73) and Misbehavior and Swearing in American History (New York: New York University a chapter on government drug policy. Press, 1993), 134-6. Martel does an admirable job of taking MacKenzie King Wasn’t a Libertarian 113 us through the views and actions of by the ahistorical nature of many a variety of key figures and groups. passing comments. Early on he tells He shows us the divisions within us that Not This Time “looks at the the medical profession and how they transformation of a new social reality, weakened its ability to definitively recreational drug use, into a social shape public policy. He takes us inside problem” (11). But surely recreational the perspectives of various provincial drug use was already considered to be governments, notably , , a social problem; it did not need to be British Columbia, and Prince Edward turned into one. The phenomenon of Island (the latter taking a role out mass marijuana use was new, but the of proportion to its size in the anti- social opprobrium that greeted it was marijuana crusade). We also learn about not. A couple of pages later he explains the strong action on the part of various that “gaining pleasure, facilitating policing organizations, including the social interaction, or embarking rcmp. Indeed, he ultimately argues that on mystic quests through drug use it was the strength of the rcmp lobby became morally suspect activities for plus Canada’s international obligations those opposed to non-medical drug that negated any major change in consumption” (13). It is that strange marijuana laws, although he does note word “became” that is troubling. Again, the significance of a change in 1969 that these types of activities were new, but allowed for first and second marijuana they did not have to become seen as possession offences to be handled by strange: they already were seen as summary conviction, a change that strange. The lack of historical context ultimately meant that the vast majority is baffling. One gets the sense that of those convicted never faced jail Martel has just grabbed this issue as a time. case study to test out his theory of how Although Martel’s conclusion sounds social actors influence public policy. reasonable, one might have wished he He could just as well have chosen had taken a much less bumpy road to anything else as he makes very little reach it. The frequent reiteration of attempt to historically contextualize the the term “social actor” begins to grate policy debate. The fact that the book is almost immediately. This is mainly organized around various social actors because the definition is so large as makes this ahistoricism even more of a to be almost meaningless. That an problem. We are never fully introduced organization like the Canadian Medical to the drug issue of the 1960s generally, Association could be labelled a social and we certainly never get a nuanced actor makes sense. But, for Martel, a discussion of how it changed over social actor could be just about anything time. or anyone. It could be an individual One of the golden rules of book doctor or a government; it could even be reviewing is never to criticize an a widely diverse category like “youth.” author for not writing a different book; There is no coherence or consistency however, a little transgression might be here, simply an overly earnest attempt in order this time. If you were going to to assign a term (“social actor”) to a set out to write a book about drugs in the complex social reality. It is an awkward 1960s, why would you not write about fit at best. the most important development of that This dissonance between analysis time? Why would you not take on the and evidence is made more unsettling enormous and significant development 114 bc studies of the drug culture of the era? Yes, in a series of articles in Maclean’s and marijuana remained illegal, but this was then in her book The Black Candle. She a side-issue. In 1961, getting busted for recounted to readers her harrowing trip possession got you six months; in 1971, into the opium dens in order to tell of you were almost guaranteed to go free. the dangers of the trade, especially to In between these years is a fascinating white womanhood. Nearly a century and important story about the changing later, Mulgrew, too, went into the dens nature of modern Canada. It is a story of Vancouver’s drug trade, but he came that neither Martel nor any Canadian back with a rather different story. He historian has yet told. clearly does not like all that he sees; All of this means that Canadian however, his prejudices are not those historians have not yet provided an of the moral reformer but, rather, those explanation for what we find in Ian of the neoliberal. The first expert he Mulgrew’s Bud, Inc.: Inside Canada’s draws upon is an economist from the Marijuana Industry. Mulgrew takes right-wing C.D. Howe Institute. He us inside the business and politics of sees wasted trade opportunities and Canada’s (mostly British Columbia’s) lost taxes. He finds businesspeople marijuana industry at the beginning of suffering under needless regulation and the twenty-first century. Mulgrew is a legal climate that supports inefficient a journalist who regularly contributes and sometimes buffoon-like business to the Vancouver Sun and who, it practices where there should be daring becomes clear, has some fairly good entrepreneurship. connections in the illegal bud trade. This economic neoliberal fits effort- Bud, Inc. is an insider’s look at key lessly with the retrograde gender personalities, including Marc Emery politics of the marijuana industry itself. and his Marijuana Party, the leading All of the key players are male, and advocates of medical marijuana, the there is an excessive amount of macho hydroponics industry, and a wide bravura on display. Some of the key assortment of others whom you might entrepreneurs (including Emery) have find on Pot TV or contributing to female business partners who seem to . What Mulgrew shows know much more about the efficient is a thriving culture and business, running of the business than they do. and it is the latter that he wants to But the image of women in the industry emphasize. His own perspective is is all “tits and ass.” Emery met his clear: he compares the criminalization assistant, Michelle Rainey, when she of pot with alcohol prohibition in the worked at a nearby bank. She applied early twentieth century, and he makes for a job as his personal assistant and a mostly (though not entirely) economic recounted to Mulgrew how she got it: argument for the legalization of the “He [Emery] went, ‘You’re the nice- trade (i.e., that it would be good for looking woman with the red lips and both governments and businesses). big boobs,’ … I said, ‘Yes, I’d like to However, what makes the book apply for your job.’ [He] took my ten- fascinating is not the analysis but the page resume, [we] went to his house, journalism. Mulgrew is the twenty- and we’ve been together for almost five first century version of Emily Murphy. years” (35). Murphy was the moralistic reforming The kind of industry Mulgrew judge who, between 1920 and 1922, exposes and the kinds of politics he exposed the dangers of the opium trade himself shares represent important MacKenzie King Wasn’t a Libertarian 115 developments in late twentieth- and conscientious. Mulgrew comes from the early twenty-first-century Canada. libertarian side. But whether libertarian These are the strange connections or otherwise, the development of made by libertarian politics – between this kind of moral relativism has former hippies and neoliberal entre- gone almost entirely unexplained by preneurs, pornographers and right-wing Canadian historians who are too keen politicians, mainstream journalists and to keep emphasizing the continuity drug lords. This is the kind of cultural of regulation and the way in which nexus that deserves explanation. Some it demonstrates the inequalities of of this explanation ultimately lies in Canadian society, especially those of the kinds of changes that overcame class, gender, and race. Yet the existence Canada – and, indeed, much of the of some kinds of moral regulation Western world – in the postwar years should not be at all surprising: it is and, especially, in the period of the long simply a normal feature of social life. 1960s. These are the kinds of cultural We should not let the important job of transformations that contemporary studying the continued inequalities in Canadian social history, with its moral regulation prevent us from seeing emphasis on the continuity of moral the larger changes in morality more regulation (as in Martel’s book), have generally. been unable to explain. The kind Aside from being both unrealistic and of moral regulation that historians ahistorical, our focus on the continued frequently emphasize in histories of existence of regulation throughout drugs, sex, or alcohol is now more often the twentieth century has ultimately associated with social conservatism. Yet failed to explain how and why our own this is but one feature of the modern position of moral relativism has come Canadian ideological landscape – and to occupy such a dominant (though not the most marked one at that. In certainly not unchallenged) position the 2006 federal general election, the in contemporary Canada. Ironically, it Conservative Party felt the need to was the very changes of the twentieth downplay its social conservatism to win century, the questioning of moral even a modest victory. authority and the increased acceptance The more dominant characteristic of moral relativism, that have allowed of contemporary Canada is actually us to be so sceptical of any past attempts moral relativism. This comes in a to regulate moral behaviour. We would variety of guises, from neoliberal and appear to be the children of historical libertarian to socially progressive and changes we refuse to take seriously.