The Dual Symbolism of the Poppy

A British delegation comprising key members of the newly formed coalition government caused huge offence to the Chinese when they sported Remembrance Poppies during a visit to the capital city Beijing back in 2010. Amongst the group looking to further British interests in the rapidly expanding economy of China, the Prime Minister David Cameron took the lead in refusing to remove the iconic symbol of remembrance.

In a fragmented moment of intercultural communication the British members of parliament were unaware of the inflammatory nature of the poppy to the Chinese whose memory of the two Opium Wars of the Nineteenth Century is all to clear.

The wars fought by the British between 1839 - 1842 and 1856 - 1860 were an overt bid to champion imperialism in the Far East. Emerging global expansion had brought Britain to the forefront of international trade and military might. The Union Jack flew over much of the world yet the multinational companies such as the East India Company, Jardine Matheson and Peninsular & Oriental (P&O) had yet to succeed in breaking into the closed markets of the Chinese Empire. Beyond the port of Canton, the Chinese viewed the outside world with suspicion. The 'Red Barbarians', as they referred to the British sailors who arrived to collect cargos of tea and porcelain, were kept beyond the Chinese quarters of the city walls to prevent their contaminating the customs and traditions of the Quing Dynasty.

Silver flowed in one direction only and with little else to export to the self sufficient Chinese, the British merchants looked to opium as a product to trade from India. Well known for its addictive qualities the merchants understood that once the product was established through a network of corrupt port officials and smugglers, demand for it would grow.

The trade dominated the networks between India and China throughout the early part of the Nineteenth Century with tons of opium exported from the Patna and Malwa region of the Indian continent. Despite the decrees of the Chinese Emperor, making opium use a capital offence, it flourished and predictably dependency ensued.

The Emperor, compelled by the drain on Chinese silver and the growing addiction of the population, sent Lin Zexu, his trusted advisor, to the province around Canton to investigate the source of the trade. Having identified foreign merchants at the root of the problem Lin Zexu quickly encircled the trade quarters demanding that ex patriot representatives hand over the stock.

A stand off ended when the British capitulated and allowed the remaining chests of opium to be withdrawn and destroyed. It was not long before pressure groups lobbied parliament back in London to consent to a naval force being sent in defence of the assets taken by the Chinese. The first of two Opium Wars commenced with resultant naval attacks along the coastline of China, until a treaty was drawn up conceding Hong Kong to the British Crown in recompense.

In a parliamentary debate William Gladstone, wondered if there had ever been:

"a war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated to cover this country with permanent disgrace, I do not know."

Tensions between the British merchant fleets and the Canton authorities remained over the following decade until October 1856 when the Chinese authorities seized a vessel called the 'Arrow', which had been engaged in piracy. The British consul in Canton demanded the immediate release of the crew and an apology for the insult to the British flag. When hostilities remained and the Chinese withdrew the terms of the earlier treaty of Nanking the British government sent a

further naval force into Chinese waters, bringing about the Second Opium War.

This time the French entered into the fray on the British side and a land assault was launched from Hong Kong, engaging in a number of military confrontations before ground troops marched upon Peking. The Emperor finally capitulated and agreed to a treaty allowing extensive trade rights across China, but not before the Anglo-French armies had laid waste to the Old Summer Palace (Yuan Ming Yuan) looting a vast array of priceless items, some of which now adorn the displays in Buckingham Palace.

It is hard to imagine the impact such defeat would have had on British culture had the military action been reversed, alongside the resulting loss of British life and the wanton looting and destruction of our heritage. Whilst the red poppies that adorn the lapels of our proud population, seeking to remember the war dead, have their origins in the fields of Flanders, Remembrance Sunday offers an opportunity to reflect not just on our own soldiers who gave their lives for our nation, but also those caught up in armed conflict around the world both past and present.

Ultimately the supply of opium to China was replaced by other exports. Parliament had come under increasing pressure to challenge the companies involved in the trade of opium in the Far East and the likes of P&O and Jardine Matheson turned their attention to increasingly lucrative markets in assets and supply chains.

Ironically, as Western attitudes towards drugs changed with the advent of the Pharmacy Act and later the Defence of the Realm Act in the early part of the Twentieth Century, the Chinese were demonised as the 'insidious' purveyors of opium and cocaine throughout clandestine networks which spread across cities such as London and New York. In an almost Stalinist rewriting of history, the Opium Wars were quickly forgotten in the British psyche, along with the cynical capitalist trade in opium from which they were born. A race that fell foul of the addictive properties of the opium poppy at the hands of British networks became synonymous with its supply as Chinese migration spread to Western capitals in the aftermath of the First World War.

The prohibitionist movements on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean seized on the emerging moral panics defined by drug use, inter race relations and the emancipation of women, in their bid to bring about tighter legislation outlawing drug use. At the heart of these moral panics were lurid stories about Chinese nationals 'ensnaring vulnerable white women' in an intoxicating mix of premeditated seduction and drug use during a heady jazz age.

Small wonder that Cameron and his party of trade delegates were met with skepticism when they embarked on their tour of Chinese industry in 2010.

Amy Winehouse and the origins of the drug moral panic

Like many of the ascending stars before her who bore a similar fate, the tragic end to the brilliant but short-lived career of Amy Winehouse has polarised public opinion.

Predictably the social network sites have been littered with spontaneous commentary, some reflecting the views of the ignorant or else the plain cynical. All vying to be the first to find a timely joke amid the word search of lyrics on her album sleeves or else pronouncing to their cyber audience that the world is a better place without another addict in our midst. The desire for instant self-gratification in cyber space mirrors the instantaneous nature of the very drugs being described.

In contrast the more compassionate bloggers and social commentators seek meaning from the tragedy, how could this have happened, why wasn’t it prevented and how can we stop this happening again?

As Russell Brand rightly states in his tribute post to the singer, ‘Whether this tragedy was preventable or not is now irrelevant. It is not preventable today’.

The sad reality is stark, Amy Winehouse died at the flat where she lived in North London on her own, sometime during a humid Saturday afternoon. Nothing can now change that fact and her lyrics, brought to life by her unique intonation, take on an ethereal, haunting quality almost overnight.

Whilst the details have yet to be released by the coroner there is little doubt in the minds of the media and the general public that Amy died as a result of her spiralling substance use, be it drugs or alcohol. Few have responded with real surprise, her drug use was already a well known fact, the focus over recent years of the same derision and uncharitable humour that manifested in certain quarters of the internet during the immediate hours following her death.

Amy was cremated in the Jewish tradition at Golders Green Crematorium on the 26^th July, an occasion attended by her grieving family who have found themselves at the centre of a maelstrom that few can struggle to comprehend.

Little more than five miles away from Golders Green Crematorium is the site of another cemetery. Built in the nineteenth century along the architectural lines of the fashionable Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, Kensal Green Cemetery hosts the resting place of a number of notable figures, including the writer Willkie Collins.

Buried in the intervening years between the First and Second World War a story bearing similar characteristics to that of the late Amy WInehouse unfolded in a media moral panic that swept across the newspaper headlines. It is a story that ended in a quiet corner of Kensal Green Cemetery in 1922.

Freda Kempton was a dancer who lived in the twilight world of London’s burgeoning jazz scene. Sleeping through the daytime at her flat in Westbourne Grove, Freda would rise in the afternoon, sometimes spending time with her much loved nephew, before preparing herself for a night of dancing to the latest hot sounds that brought the Flapper Girls onto the floors of Tottenham Court Road’s dance clubs.

Other girls would remark on Freda’s distinctive dance style, which set her apart from her peers, whilst her landlady reported that the young dancer had a peculiar tendency to grind her teeth when she encountered her in the hallway returning tired from a night still reverberating from the distinctive beat of frenzied jazz rhythms.

Few of the people intimate with Freda were aware that her ability to stay up dancing all night and her telltale perpetual jaw movement were symptomatic of her excessive cocaine use.

Discovered as an alkaloid derivative of the coca erythroxylum plant, indigenous to South America and first isolated in 1859 by Albert Niemann of Gottingen University, cocaine was already well understood as a powerful stimulant of the central nervous system.

None other than Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, had extolled its virtues as a panacea for common ills, including fatigue and various forms of neuroses.

However, by the time Freda Kempton stepped onto the dance floor of the notorious 43 Club on Gerrard Street, Soho, cocaine possession and use was already outlawed in both the United Kingdom and the United States of America.

One might be forgiven for assuming the rationale for legislating against drugs in the early part of the Twentieth Century was a direct result of the same health concerns that we harbor today, underpinned by the ‘Just Say No’ campaigns of the 1980s.

The truth is curiously more malevolent and is directly linked with the paternalism of the Edwardians as they struggled to come to terms with the shifting landscape of society and the total annihilation of the bloody First World War.

The newspapers of the time carried stories of soldiers returning from the front ‘crazed’ through consumption of ‘Forced March Tablets’ aimed at enabling fatigued soldiers to cover longer distances and arrive on the battlefield ready to fight, pills that contained cocaine as a key ingredient. At the same time reports appeared of Canadian soldiers openly selling cocaine in Leicester Square in a bid to supplement their service rations. Cocaine and other drugs were viewed suspiciously as imports into the United Kingdom, brought back by soldiers whose experiences were beyond the pail of comprehension and who now appeared alien to those who poured out onto the streets to welcome them home, or otherwise symbolic of the new world, a world which was moving at a faster pace and which threatened to corrupt Englishness with its slang terms and hedonistic jazz craze.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic Ocean citizens of the United States breakfasted to lurid newspaper tales of black men who had gone on a rampage of violence having first taken cocaine, as if the drug had somehow awakened an inherent physical threat to an unsuspecting white population.

Played out as a backdrop to the sensationalist journalism of this period was an encroaching reality, a reality that grated on the psyche of a paternalistic society: whilst the war had stolen the lives of men on a hitherto unprecedented scale it had also served to emancipate women in the same breath.

Drug overdoses such as those of Freda Kempton and Billie Carleton, a stage actress who had died several years earlier on the night of the Great Victory Ball in 1918, were sensational. It was revealed in the coroner’s report that Billie Carleton had died as a result of a cocaine overdose, though as Marek Kohn rightly points out in his excellent book ‘Dope Girls, The Birth of the British Drug Underground’, it was more likely the result of Veronal, a barbiturate supplied by her doctor. Notwithstanding, her death galvanized public anxiety, which became amplified through the media. The message was clear and simple, there were inherent dangers if society stood by and watched whilst women strayed from the safety of their homes and their responsibilities to their husbands and families. Both Billie Carleton and Freda Kempton were airbrushed by the media, their modernity and emancipation replaced by the imagery of a butterfly upon a wheel, too innocent to withstand the harsh reality of a world beyond the hearth.

Drug use became the common denominator by which society could articulate its fear of female emancipation, inter-race relationships and sexuality. The inquiries into the deaths of both Billie Carleton and Freda Kempton gravely pointed at their relationship with drugs, their independent lifestyles, relationships they had with men from different ethnic backgrounds. In the case of Billie Carleton her close friendship with Reginald DeVeulle, a gentleman whose occupation as a dress designer and his involvement in an earlier scandal involving a cross dressing party, was dredged up in court to highlight the dangers of fraternizing with men of dubious sexuality. Drug use was the common thread, knitting together the disparate fears and prejudices of a world that was changing beyond all recognition.

For Freda Kempton the inquiry highlighted her relationship with Brilliant Chang, a restaurateur in the West End of London. Freda had been acquainted with Chang in the weeks before her death and the newspapers revealed how she had purchased cocaine from Chang on the night she died. Chang was eventually deported from the United Kingdom, but not before the frenzied media had described in characteristic xenophobic visceral how Chang was purportedly ensnaring vulnerable white women into a life far from the ideals of their Victorian and Edwardian forbearers.

‘Following the verdict of deportation - 'some of the girls rushed to Chang, patted his back, and one, more daring than the rest, fondled the Chinaman's black, smooth hair and passed her fingers slowly through it' (Empire News, 1922).

Whilst legislation began to emerge on the heels of the public reaction into the deaths of Billie Carleton and Freda Kempton, it was not until Henry J Anslinger set up the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in America that the phenomenon of drug use became a more potent tool for political force.

Armed with a talent for manipulating the media, Anslinger set out on an unprecedented campaign for power through a well-orchestrated crusade to defend the morality of decent white Americans. By targeting as ‘dope dealers’ anyone suspected as communists, Mexican immigrants, the counter cultures emerging out of the jazz scene and anyone else who didn’t fit with the values of the white hegemony, Anslinger built his empire of narcotic enforcers.

Films warning the population at large that drugs, such as cannabis would turn sisters or daughters into morally questionable vamps hell bent on thrills, or else waifs cowering from the light in darkened bedsits, waiting in vain for their dealers to mercifully arrive with their next hit, captured the fears of Bible Belt America.

With titles such as ‘Reefer Madness’ and ‘The Cocaine Fiends’ few could question the effects of that first dabble and Anslinger, ever keen to promote the urgency of the Federal Bureau of Narcotic’s mission, would readily lend his weight to endorsing this genre of exploitation movie.

The profound impact of such propaganda has had an unprecedented impact in the years since, leading to the creation of the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961 and ultimately the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 in the United Kingdom.

In the fortieth year since the Misuse of Drugs Act our knowledge of the complex relationship that drugs have with the neurological pathways in our brains has developed in a way that Anslinger could never have foreseen. We understand that drugs lock into key areas of our neurological system, often referred to as ‘pleasure circuits’. Simply put these complex neural messaging centres are essential to human survival, they guide our primal instincts, the need to eat, the desire to sleep, the fight and flight response and ultimately the need to procreate, thereby ensuring the continuation of the species. If the pharmacopeia of naturally and synthetically produced drugs light up these areas of the brain is it small wonder that they result in a compulsion to take more? The brain is sending an unadulterated message to the user, ‘I need heroin, crack, amphetamine to survive’.

Whilst learning in this field of science is advancing in an unprecedented way, our adjectives for people who use drugs remain firmly shackled to the moral panics of the early part of the twentieth century, a language still littered with prejudice and myth, influenced by the then media, the rise of the Alcoholics Anonymous movement and the powerhouses of the global enforcement administrations.

Take for example the term ‘junkie’ a term with its origins in the metal trade, scrap which heroin users sold to support their habit during the nineteen hundreds, not dissimilar to the term ‘tinkers’, used in the past to describe travelling communities.

Perhaps unwittingly language has perpetuated the dehumanizing of people who use drugs, ‘smack-head’, ‘crack-head’, ‘alcoholic’, ‘waster’, ‘druggie’ the list goes on and on, the staple of many an ice-breaker exercise in drug awareness training courses up and down the country.

We refer to people who use drugs as ‘unclean’ and observe from our pedestals their often repeated attempts to get ‘clean’, imagery not that far removed from the National Socialist Party’s descriptions of Jewish people in the 1930s. As a result drug users become something other, outsiders from the accepted conventions of society. They become, in the parlance of the forefathers of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith, people who have a disease.

In much the same way, links between drug use and race are as inextricably linked today as they were at the time of Freda Kempton and Brilliant Chang. Take for example the overt racism of Anslinger’s rhetoric during the 1950s

'There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others’.

As repulsive as this quote may sound to the contemporary ear, it is worth noting that such links between the vulnerability of white women, immigration and drug use remains a staple of the modern media moral panic, a phenomenon as familiar today as in the days of Freda Kempton. The following provides a recent excerpt from a Judge’s summing up of a case involving a young black man, as reported in a London newspaper,

‘The case has everything about it that is un-English, drugs, knives, guns and the exploitation of whores’.

In his summing up of the case the newspaper went on to describe how the perpetrator, a young black man, had benefitted from growing up with adoptive white parents in a middle class ‘respectable mainly white area of Leeds’. Despite such ‘blessings’ the young man quickly found himself in trouble with the police.

In the United States today sentencing for possession of crack cocaine, by comparison with cocaine powder, carries considerably stiffer penalties. The net result is that poorer communities with higher proportions of black and Hispanic people are much more likely to end up in prison, whilst white middle class Americans who use powdered cocaine on a recreational night are far less likely.

So whilst Russell Brand concludes in his blog that ‘Addiction is a serious disease; it will end with jail, mental institutions or death’, it would appear that a person’s ethnic background will play a significant factor in this outcome.

In the immediate aftermath following the death of Amy Winehouse the tabloid newspapers scrabble for any information. Was her death the result of drugs, her heavy use of alcohol and the damage to her body resulting from this combination? Does society have a responsibility to protect and if so what is the mechanism by which this should happen?
Like a nation caught in the aftermath of some terrible natural disaster the default is to act instinctively, driven by a need for answers, the desire for someone or something to blame. Only then might we absolve ourselves from having failed in our paternalistic duty.

Perhaps it is time to take a step back, though, and pause before jumping on the back of the well-worn clichés and moral panics that have defined our relationship as a society to drug use over the last hundred years. As Russel Brand points out, isn’t it time we started to look at drugs as a health issue rather than a matter of criminal justice?

By taking drugs out of the criminal justice system and into the realms of health we instantly take control back from the networks of organized criminals, moving drugs into a tighter legislative framework.

As Transform, the charity campaigning for a review of drug law, states in its publication ‘After the War on Drugs’, ‘Only legalizing the most widely used drugs, subjecting them to strict quality assessment and making them available through controlled outlets will allow people to make intelligent choices’.

Isn’t it time to take back control of our health? And in a world outraged by the deceptions amidst elements of our media, who are prepared to stop at nothing to make headlines, isn’t it time we put a stop to the moral panics that keep millions of people worldwide trapped into a cycle of addiction?

For further information on the work of Transform please visit www.tdpf.org.uk

Billie Carleton, Freda Kempton and the Birth of the Drug Moral Panic

As the Edwardian era gave way to the horrors of the Great War, British society stood on the brink of unprecedented change. Whilst tens of thousands soldiers died on the battlefields of Ypres, the Somme and Arras, many of the British women back home discovered a new found freedom in employment traditionally reserved for men. The efforts of such women in sustaining the industry of war, in often-perilous conditions, has only been officially recognised by the British Government as recently as 2009.

Essential though the efforts of these women had been in securing a victory in the war against Germany, the aftermath of the Great War saw a creeping reaction to female emancipation, as soldiers returned from the conflict to find women keen to maintain their status and financial independence. This was the era of suffrage as women stood to defy the paternalism of the Victorians.

Another prominent feature in the changing cultural landscape of the Great War was migration. The last bastions of the British Empire were called upon to support the allied forces in their campaign across Northern France, including around 100,000 Chinese laborers, many of whom dug trenches along the battlefronts. In the aftermath of the Great War migrant workers settled in Britain along with hundreds of other workers arriving from across the globe, drawn to the ports of the Great British Empire in search of a better, more prosperous life.

The 11th November 1918 saw the end to the terrible carnage that had so dominated Europe in the preceding four years of warfare. As soldiers returned from the battlefield faced with the task of reintegrating with a population who were unable to comprehend their experiences, Great Britain turned its attention to celebrating the victory in Northern France.

An actress, Billie Carleton, who was an up and coming star of the West End, attended one such celebration, The Great Victory Ball at the Royal Albert Hall. In the twilight world of the Theatre, Billie Carleton had become a user of drugs including opium and cocaine. In addition, she had become a regular user of prescription drugs supplied to her by her doctor, and was becoming, what might be described in the parlance of today, a polydrug user. On the night of the Great Victory Ball, Billie Carleton was to return to her flat at the back of the Savoy. Having spent the evening using cocaine, Billie was later to die of a drug overdose in the early hours of the morning.

Whilst it is worth noting that her overdose was more likely attributable to the prescribed drugs that she was taking at the behest of her doctor than the cocaine she had imbibed, her tragic circumstances lead to considerable media moral panic as the newsprint picked apart the events leading up to her death, a tragedy that was to epitomize the collision between Edwardian society and the emerging hedonism of jazz.

The final inquest into Billie Carleton's death drew light on her relationships with a number of men, one of who, Reginald De Veulle, a dressmaker, was cross-examined by the coroner. The media cast aspersions on his masculinity, highlighting what they viewed as feminine traits, not least of all his avoidance of conscription in the war. The increased scrutiny by the media focused upon Billie Carleton's use of cocaine, adopting it as a metaphor for their fears of the changing cultural landscape. Revelations in newspapers such as The Daily Sketch described a frail, waif like woman who had slipped from societies paternalistic embrace to fall foul of the vices of drugs, the pitfalls of the theatrical way of life and her relations with an underclass of men, all of whom had avoided the war draft. Billie Carleton became the epitome of the 'butterfly on a wheel'.

As jazz culture took hold on both sides of the Atlantic, our story focuses on another woman whose life was tragically taken as a result of her penchant for drugs, in this case the records point to clear evidence of a cocaine overdose. In 1922 the British Government was increasingly legislating against the supply, possession and use of drugs, largely in response to the prohibitionist drive of the USA and the moral panics surrounding the deaths of Billie Carleton and the earlier tragedy that befell the Yeoland Sisters at the turn of the century, whose disappointment in their theatrical careers lead to a suicide pact involving cocaine in 1902.

Freda Kempton was a dancer who lived in Westbourne Grove with her landlady, but spent her working life frequenting the nighttime economy of the West End. Her lifestyle brought her into contact with cocaine as a means of staying awake and energising herself for the rigors of dancing with the club membership. Freda's use of cocaine had already drawn the concern of some of her friends, however it was the intoxicating mix of her substance use, her relationship with a Chinese entrepreneur known in the West End as 'Brilliant Chang', and her tragic overdose that drew the baying of the media.

On the night prior to her death she had reportedly been in the company of Chang. It was alleged that she had known him for a short time and that she had obtained a regular supply of cocaine through his association. Having returned to her flat in possession of a bottle of cocaine in the hours of the morning of the 6^th March, she spent most of that day in bed before her mother called round. Later on that afternoon she returned to bed until the evening when she appeared for a glass of water. The landlady described how Freda Kempton had again emerged from her room, only this time complaining of terrible pains to her head, which resulted in convulsions and foaming at the mouth within the hour. Freda died in the arms of her landlady, Sadie Heckel.

The subsequent verdict was suicide following the discovery of a note by her landlady, although the evidence was largely inconclusive. Freda Kempton was later buried at Kensal Rise Cemetery in common grave number 47380, square 198 at 9.30 am on Saturday 11th March 1922 - aged 21. The plot no longer remains, having made way for the memorial garden to the back of the crematorium some years later. As with Billie Carleton, the media were keen to draw parallels between Freda Kempton's use of cocaine and her interracial relations, as though drugs and ethnicity were inexorably linked. Brilliant Chang was afforded the mysterious andcruel caricature of the Sax Rohmer creation Fu Manchu by contemporary reports. As with the later efforts of the eugenics movement they were keen to describe his racial physiology as they portrayed him masterminding a sinister network of vice behind his emotionless smile. The media warned of the perils facing a permissive society were it to refrain from it's moral duty in taking a strong stance on the issues of multiculturalism, substance use and female emancipation.

In doing so, they clearly chose to overlook Britain's aggressive approach to the export of Indian opium to China less than a century earlier, a commodity that culminated in two wars with China and the enslavement of thousands of Chinese people to the soporific and habit forming drug.

There can be no doubt of course that substances then, as now, presented a risk to the user. Many substances such as cocaine were initially hailed as wonder drugs in the run up to the Twentieth Century, endorsed by such notable figures as the Pope and Sigmund Freud. It was only when the latter’s best friend Fleischl-Marxow died through his use of cocaine that Freud tempered his inclination to extol the virtues of the Erythroxylum plant.

With the advent of the Pharmacy Act 1868 drugs such as opium came under tighter regulation in this country, although still accessible to the public at large. The Defense of the Realm Act at the onset of the Great War brought tighter controls in a bid to support the war effort, most notably the licensing laws that restricted sales of alcohol. In contradiction, soldiers fighting on the front were provided with ‘Forced March Tablets’, containing extract of kola and cocaine.

At the same time there were reports in the newspapers of soldiers returning from the battlefield delirious from their use of cocaine, alongside more racist stories of black men ‘crazed’ through excessive consumption of the drug.

This period of contradiction was to eventually give way to the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1925, the foundation stone for what was to later become the Misuse of Drugs Act in 1971. In the years following the Dangerous Drugs Act, the media moral panic was harnessed by the likes of the American prohibitionist Harry J Anslinger, (1892-1975), Head of the Federal Bureau Of Narcotics, in his campaign to outlaw all drug use. Where the media on both sides of the Atlantic had previously alluded to links between drug use, sexual promiscuity and the perceived dangers of inter race relations, Anslinger was forthright in his racist outlook,

'There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others’.

As repulsive as Anslinger’s rhetoric may sound to the contemporary ear, it is worth noting that such links between the vulnerability of white women, immigration and drug use remain a staple of the modern media moral panic, a phenomenon as familiar today as in the days of Freda Kempton. The following provides a recent excerpt from a Judge’s summing up of a case involving a young black man, as reported in a London newspaper, ‘The case has everything about it that is un-English, drugs, knives, guns and the exploitation of whores’.

History’s role in supporting us to challenge our assumptions is irrefutable. The tragic lives of Billie Carleton and Freda Kempton played a pivotal role in the creation of a moral panic that gendered drug use, a moral panic that that continues to thrive to this day, directly linking to the legislative framework governing both the consumption of drugs and the treatment available to those whose lives are affected by their use in the UK.

Originally published in Kensal Green Cemetery Magazine, July 2010

Vietnam 1971

The Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 was pivotal in defining attitudes to drug users in the UK for the next twenty nine years and beyond into the New Millennium. For the many of the people who had lived through the hedonism and optimism of the 1960s the MDA was the final nail in the coffin as recreational drug users became criminals overnight.
In South East Asia the war in Vietnam was changing under the US presidency of Nixon who wanted to see soldiers returning to America and the effective handing over of the war to the Southern Vietnamese to continue alone.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s the CIA had been at odds with the Federal Bureau of Narcotics under Anslinger and then Giordano. Whilst the CIA were championing a policy of anything goes in the interest of national security (including the running of heroin as a means of infiltrating the Communists and Mafia), the FBN found themselves investigating the very people whose side they were supposed to be on.
In the paradoxical world of the early 1970s, where boundaries were becoming increasingly blurred, soldiers engaged in the disastrous conflict in Vietnam found themselves caught in the maelstrom of a government desperate to draw a line under the war it was losing and a people back home that were more concerned with the ideals of the 1960s. For many, heroin offered a way out and a means by which to bury the horrors of war.
The photo of soldiers lining up for a heroin test reveals the extent to which the use of the drug was prevalent throughout the conflict. Readily available in South East Asia, largely as a result of British opium export to China during the 19th Century, heroin use was a concern for the American administration seeking to curtail it's use back home.

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