To the modern mind, inundated with images of "Drug Wars" and besieged by injunctions to "Just Say No," the present illegality of the substances known as narcotics(1) has nearly the universality and permanence of an Aquinian natural law. Certainly, the opposite notion - that these substances have not always been socially condemned and legally proscribed - is now hardly imaginable. Yet it is true. Less than one hundred years ago two major narcotics, Opium and Cocaine, were legal throughout most of the United States. Moreover, there was virtually no limitation on their availability; both substances could generally be purchased, without the requirement of a physician's prescription, at neighborhood drugstores. All that was usually required was that the purchaser sign his or her name on a register maintained by the druggist, and even this modest requirement was probably rarely followed or enforced.

Although the subsequent proscription of the narcotics on the federal level has been well documented,(2) little attention has been paid to their regulation by individual states before the passage by Congress in 1914 of the Harrison Narcotic Act - the federal government's first comprehensive attempt to address the sale and consumption of narcotics.(3) This article will address this major gap in the historiography of drug regulation by focussing on one Southern state - Tennessee.(4) This choice is significant because of the demographics of drug use in the South as a whole during this period, and because the primary materials in Tennessee are particularly fruitful. The article is primarily concerned with analyzing why Cocaine was treated in such a radically different fashion from the Opiates by the Tennessee Legislature - a matter that seems paradoxical in light of the many countervailing considerations at that time, and current society's total condemnation of all narcotics.

Opium and Cocaine in the Nineteenth Century

In 1860 Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., one of the eminent physicians of the era, denounced the nostrums employed by many physicians by declaring that if "the medica materia, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind - and all the worse for the fishes." Yet for all his distrust of the nineteenth-century pharmacopoeia, Holmes embraced Opium, lauding it as a natural substance "which the Creator himself seems to prescribe ..."(5) Holmes's famous remarks, though strangely poetic to those familiar with the literary conventions of modem medical journals, are telling. Opium was regarded as a virtual panacea by the medical profession throughout much of the nineteenth century. Because the etiology of many diseases was still little understood in the early and mid-nineteenth century, doctors were forced to resort to treating the symptoms, rather than the causes, of disease. And Opium was perfect for this goal.(6) Though doctors used the drug for many purposes, it was particularly prized for its analgesic properties because of the lack of alternative pain-relieving agents at this time.(7)

This medical use of Opiates, already widespread by the mid-nineteenth century, greatly increased with the advent of the hypodermic syringe in the 1860s. This tool enabled doctors to inject Morphine, a powerful derivative of Opium, directly into the bloodstream. This method of administration sped the relief of the patient's pain and avoided the unpleasant gastrointestinal effects associated with the oral administration of opium.(8)

Although Cocaine did not appear in America until the late 1870s, it too enjoyed a favorable reputation for a time. Initially touted for its anesthetizing properties, it soon came to be regarded, like Opium, as a cure for an amazing range of maladies. For example, Cocaine was routinely used, not surprisingly, as a remedy for hay fever and similar conditions.(9) The drug, however, was not limited to such pedestrian uses. Some writers believed that Cocaine could ameliorate certain sexual problems; and others had such faith in cocaine's beneficence that they recommended it as a cure for opiate addiction and alcoholism.(10) Moreover, Cocaine was widely hailed simply for its ability to uplift one's spirits; it was, according to one journal, an excellent "antidote for the blues." A wide range of products contained significant amounts of Cocaine for precisely this reason.(11)

By the late 1880s and early 1890s, however, the reputation of both substances had dramatically declined. Medical protest against the indiscriminate use of Cocaine began almost as soon as the drug achieved its exalted status. Physicians began to realize the folly of using it as a means to cure opiate addiction or alcoholism and urged extreme caution even when acknowledging its efficacy as a local anesthetic.

While medical journals in the United States in the 1880s and 1890s abound with articles condemning Cocaine,(12) elite physicians in Tennessee at this time were much more concerned with another major trend in the medical literature - the debunking of the once exalted medical status of the opiates.(13) In a paper entitled "Morphinism and its Relation to the Sexual Functions and Appetite," given before the Tennessee State Medical Society in 1892, Dr. T.J. Happel presented several case histories of children born to parents addicted to opiates.(14) He argued that the Opiates were extremely dangerous because their addictive properties could be genetically transmitted, thereby instilling in the offspring of addicts a condition of the nervous system which predisposed them to opiate addiction. This phenomenon was devastating, Happel concluded, because Opium caused "insanity, idiocy, and imbecility" in persons addicted to it.

Three years later Happel renewed his attack on the Opiates in more radical terms. In "Opium Curse and a Preventive," given before the Society in 1895,(15) Happel described the profound shift in the attitude of the reputable medical profession toward the Opiates by declaring that "the medical and surgical world were never more united upon any one question than in an effort to discourage the use of Opiates in many diseases where it was formerly thought and taught to be a sine qua non." He then relayed a notion, prevalent in the medical literature at the time, that women were the chief victims of opiate addiction; and he reiterated his view of the genetic consequences of parental opiate addiction. Happel then set forth a program to extirpate the addiction evil in order to protect both women and the unborn. He first noted an existing Tennessee statute regulating the sale of poisons by druggists, and charged that "morphine, Opium, and laudanum are poisons, and will kill with as much certainty as will strychnine, arsenic, and such like poisons." Happel declared that druggists should be made to comply with the recordkeeping requirements of the statute, and with its prohibition of the sale of poisons to children under ten years of age. He described the repeated violations of these prophylactic provisions of the law and their dire consequences in ominous tones:

Over and over, a child of less than ten years of age, steps into a drug-store with a fifty-cent piece and a small scrap of paper, inscribed with one word, "morphine." No name is signed. No questions are asked. The bottle of Morphine is wrapped up and passed to the child over the counter. A death may follow the sale, but the Morphine cannot be traced.

In addition to advocating stricter enforcement of these existing safeguards, Happel advanced a much more radical measure - the commitment of all opiate addicts to asylums for the insane. Addicts should be institutionalized until they were completely cured because, according to Happel, they were "persons dangerous to the public and [should not be] permitted to be at large."

The participants in the meeting were, to a very considerable extent, in agreement with Happel's assessment of the opiate problem and his suggested remedies. Although one doctor did object that confinement to an asylum could infringe upon the addict's personal liberty, most of the comments on this aspect of the recommendation centered on a perennial problem of many reform measures - the political quandary presented by the necessity of increasing taxes to meet the cost of incarceration. Notwithstanding this disagreement, the Society voted to have its Committee on Legislation draft appropriate resolutions for submission to the state legislature.

State and Local Regulation of the Narcotics

Perhaps because the 1895 Tennessee Legislature had already been in session for several weeks when Happel presented his paper, that body made no attempt to regulate the sale of any drugs - Opiates or otherwise. When the legislature met again in 1897, however, the strong recommendations of the Medical Society had time to percolate. In that session, the society's exact recommendations were embodied in House Bill 139, which provided that any person selling Morphine, except on the prescription of a practicing physician, was guilty of a misdemeanor.(16) This bill marked the first time in the state's history that the legislature had attempted to abandon its traditional laissez-faire attitude toward the sale and consumption of narcotics.

Despite the willingness of the 1897 legislature to regulate "vice" (for example, it completely banned the sale of cigarettes),(17) the Society's recommendations failed to become enshrined in law. After it passed by a vote of 69-15 on the final reading, House Bill 139 was challenged on a motion to reconsider and was thereafter tabled.(18)

This proved to be only the beginning, however, for the regulative impulse, once released, is not easily contained. In 1899 the legislature attempted a broader measure, introducing two bills to prohibit, except on the prescription of a physician, the sale of "opium, Indian hemp, choral, and cocaine."(19) These measures, however, were no more successful than the prior bill aimed exclusively at morphine. House Bill 88 was tabled on recommendation of the House Sanitation Committee, and its companion, Senate Bill 8, lapsed after the Senate Judiciary Committee failed to act upon it.(20)

Despite the failure of the regulative efforts on the state level in 1897 and 1899, concerns about the narcotics were beginning to surface in Tennessee's largest cities during this period. And these concerns, which had little or nothing to do with Dr. Happel's denunciation of the Opiates on scientific and medical grounds, would ultimately produce local legislation intended to prohibit the nonmedical use of the narcotics.

The first rumblings came from Chattanooga. In September 1898 the Chattanooga Times reported that a local doctor, J.J. Straeker, had recently treated several cases of Morphine poisoning in "a neighborhood inhabited by altogether a very low and depraved class of negroes." Dr. Straeker believed that "careless" drugstores of the city were to blame for this spate of poisonings, and he asserted that anyone could "procure the drug in large quantities with the greatest facility." The Times concluded with a grim assessment of the rising problem of opiate abuse among Chattanooga's black underclass:

It appears that the Morphine habit is growing at an alarming rate among the low class negroes of this city. It is cheap and produces sensations of an agreeable and soporific character. Most negro women prefer it to whiskey, although some of them take both. None of the negroes understand the use of the drug, and as a little produces satisfactory results, they imagine that more will be better, and thus all but kill themselves.

These warnings of a potential drug scourge among the city's underclasses were mild, however, when compared to the fervor soon created by the perceived new drug of choice of those classes: cocaine. In October 1899 the Times interviewed Captain William Huffaker of the Chattanooga Police Department, who described the recent meteoric rise of Cocaine and the concomitant transformation of the local drug scene as follows:

Before 1898 ... the negroes and the low class whites, especially women of the town, knew nothing whatever of the Cocaine habit. Before that time they went to the dogs by the whiskey and Morphine route, a large number of them being confirmed Morphine eaters. But with the arrival of the regular armies at Chickamauga Park, they learned a new vice - the Cocaine habit - the result of which will be that if it continues many more years, we will have more lunatics on our hands than we know what to do with. The drug is far worse in its effects than either Morphine or whiskey.(21)

His curiosity apparently piqued by the interview, a Times reporter, accompanied by a police officer, visited the "tough quarter" of Chattanooga, where he saw "strange sights indeed for an American city." He described these sights in vivid, almost phantasmagoric terms:

In one house ... as many as eight persons, mostly women of both colors, [were] sitting about on the floor in a circle, in the center of which was a small package of pulverized Cocaine, from which one or the other of those seated in a circle would take a pinch, inhaling it the same as they would snuff. Their eyes were unnaturally bright and it was clear to any one that their faculties were keyed up to the highest pitch. While thus seated they indulged in ribald and profane songs, peals of idiotic laughter, jokes, jests, badinage, and every form of merriment. Thus they spend the night. A boy is employed who makes frequent trips to a drug store, that is doing a land-office business in this drug, for the purpose of replenishing their stock of cocaine.

The reporter concluded his strange trip into the Chattanooga underworld with a solemn recognition, by way of cross-cultural analogy, of the varied and immense powers of cocaine: "[t]his drug not only allays fatigue, stifles hunger, and deadens pain, but places even the most wretched in a state akin to that of the East Indian hashish eater when under the influence of his favorite stimulant."(22)

The tension engendered by the narcotics, and by Cocaine in particular, continued to mount across the state over the next few months. In March 1900, the Knoxville Journal and Times noted the recent increase in the use of Cocaine among prostitutes of both races in that city's "Bowery District," while characterizing the malignant effects of the drug in positively apocalyptic terms:

The arch enemy of mankind smiled when some cunning agent taught him how to use ardent spirits. He must have chuckled when Opium was discovered, and this chuckle grew louder when the first youth inhaled the smoke of the deadly cigarette. But when the first man sniffed a pinch of Cocaine up his nose a loud guffaw must have resounded through the regions of the damned.

The use of Cocaine as a habit is of recent date, but it promises to eclipse all other stimulants in its deadly march throughout the civilized world. The possibilities of this drug, as an agent of evil, are horrible to contemplate.

No substance in the world was more harmful, concluded the Journal, except perhaps for the "terrible hasheesh [sic] of India."(23)

Another ominous article concerning Cocaine appeared in the Chattanooga Times two months later. In a piece entitled "Cocaine Use - The Alarming Spread of a Demoralizing Habit," the Times asserted that the "cocaine habit ... shows a decided increase in the city." The article also revealed a new aspect of the problem, asserting that "additional proofs are at hand that the use of the drug is not confined wholly to the negroes and the lower classes." This Cocaine use by the upper classes was, according to a physician and druggist interviewed by the paper, primarily due to the fact that many popular patent medicines contained large amounts of the drug. And these cases, in the physician's view, "are all the more serious and pathetic because the habit was contracted unconsciously."

But the consternation caused by the patent medicine problem was apparently only of secondary importance, as the article quickly reverted to the theme of Cocaine use among the black, urban underclasses. The Times reprinted this excerpt from a midwestern medical journal to convey the message:

Attention has been recently called to the special development of this habit in the southern states, especially among the negro population. The drug is used as a kind of snuff for its exhilarating effect and is dispensed in small packages which are sold by druggists at a price from 5 to 10 cents each. That the evil has reached alarming proportions is demonstrated by the fact that some druggists are in the habit of selling 100 to 200 packages of the drug in one day.(24)

This sort of media vigilance against the perceived drug problem among the "submerged fifth," - one newspaper's label for "the lowest, most criminal and depraved portion of any city's population"(25) - soon attracted the attention of local legislative bodies. And on June 6, 1900, the Chattanooga City Council became the first to respond to the widespread publicity by passing a measure intended to curtail the nonmedical use of the narcotics. The Chattanooga ordinance applied to both Cocaine and Morphine, and it prohibited the sale of either substance, except on a physician's prescription.(26)

Other major cities in Tennessee quickly followed Chattanooga's lead. In Memphis, whose local media had also stressed the existence of widespread Cocaine use among the underclasses,(27) the city council just two days later passed a measure designed to prevent the purchase of Cocaine by impoverished persons. This ordinance forbade the sale of Cocaine, except on a physician's certificate, in amounts less than one pound.(28) Knoxville passed an ordinance applying to both Cocaine and Morphine on January 4, 1901.(29)

By the time the 1901 legislature convened, then, both Cocaine and the Opiates were already subject to regulation by several of the state's largest cities. The legislature lost no time in acting on this anti-narcotic momentum, and on January 10, Representative Charles Fahey introduced House Bill 80 - a measure which, like the Memphis ordinance, was designed to curtail the nonmedical use of cocaine. This bill, which criminalized the sale of Cocaine except when dispensed pursuant to a physician's prescription, sailed through the House; it was approved by an overwhelming margin of 91-4 on the final reading on January 30.(30) Fahey's measure was then transmitted to the Senate, where it was amended to provide for stiffer sanctions. Once amended, it passed the Senate by a comfortable 24-4 vote on February 4, and was signed into law by the governor three days later.(31)

Meanwhile, on January 31, immediately on the heels of the virtual consensus on Cocaine in the House, Representative Abernathy introduced House Bill 398, a measure identical to Fahey's bill except that it applied to morphine. The next day, Representative Wickham, who had unsuccessfully attempted to extend Fahey's bill to "opium, Morphine, and laudanum," also introduced a measure restricting the sale of Morphine to situations where the purchaser held a valid prescription.(32)

Despite the apparent anti-narcotic mood in the House, Representatives Abernathy and Wickham would have been better served by settling for the less ambitious "Memphis Model." As the date of the anti-morphine bills' final reading approached, a seemingly mysterious phenomenon occurred: the House was swamped by petitions from cities and counties across the state in opposition to the bills. The House Journal of 1901 reveals that 86 formal petitions - 77 from "citizens" and 9 from "merchants" - concerning these bills were presented between March 13 and March 29.(33) And not one of them supported the measures. This is a particularly impressive display of the general public and mercantile feeling concerning the Morphine issue, especially because formal petitions regarding pending legislation were by no means filed as a matter of course. In fact, only 110 total petitions were presented to the legislature during the period from March 13 to March 29.(34) Predictably, the anti-morphine bills wilted under this storm of protest; both were tabled by the House Sanitation Committee on April 11.(35)

This sort of opposition by both the general public and mercantile interests, though not always so clearly expressed, would doom every attempt by the legislature in the next decade to limit the availability of the opiates. While restrictive legislation was introduced in 1903, 1905, and 1911, each attempt was either voted down or was tabled.(36) Despite the swift and decisive manner with which the 1901 legislature dealt with Cocaine, the Opiates remained remarkably resistant throughout the next twelve years to any type of regulative effort.

The Tennessee Anti-Narcotic Act of 1913

In 1913 this resistance was finally broken when the legislature passed a comprehensive measure, entitled the Tennessee Anti-Narcotic Act, aimed at curbing the nonmedical use of the opiates. Although this legislation actually predated the federal Harrison Act of 1914 by more than a year, it was nevertheless almost certainly a direct offshoot of the federal drive for the regulation of the narcotics which had begun just after the turn of the century.

This drive - which originated in the federal government's somewhat disingenuous attempt to help China rid itself of a foreign Opium trade, and was pushed along because of the international treaty obligations created by this attempt - had by early 1913 produced nothing except the Smoking Opium Exclusion Act of 1909, which simply banned the importation of Opium for smoking purposes, and did not attempt to address the domestic use of narcotics of any kind.(37) Moreover, as in Tennessee, several bills aimed at curbing the nonmedical use of the narcotics had been introduced in Congress, but had met with no success. Thus, there seemed to be little hope for the success of federal legislation aimed at substantially restricting the availability of the narcotics.

In early 1913, however, several of the large drug trades that had been instrumental in blocking restrictive bills, sensing that the federal anti-narcotic movement was gaining strength, agreed to negotiate with the proponents of the Harrison bill. After the bill was weakened to a degree, the representatives of the drug trades gave it their formal approval. Representative Francis Harrison presented the compromise bill to the House on June 24, and it passed within one week.(38)

Although the Harrison bill was destined to be held up for over a year in the Senate, the favorable response of the House to the measure was in the background when Governor Ben Hooper called for an extra session of the 1913 Tennessee legislature. This session, which was primarily convened for the purpose of considering certain bills relating to the enforcement of statewide prohibition of Alcohol (which had been achieved in 1909),(39) began on September 8. By September 22 both houses had passed, with only a single dissenting vote, the Tennessee Anti-Narcotic Law. This law was nearly a mirror image of the Harrison Act: it criminalized the sale of Opium and Cocaine, but provided exceptions for doctors prescribing in their regular practice, pharmacists dispensing pursuant to a doctor's prescription, and wholesalers or distributors selling to retail druggists.(40)

The Tennessee Act differed, however, in one important aspect from its federal counterpart. Because the drafters of the Act believed that opiate addiction was a disease and not simply a moral failing, this law explicitly enabled physicians to prescribe Opiates for the maintenance of persons addicted to their use, a point on which the Harrison Act was ambiguous.(41) In order to obtain refills of their prescriptions, though, addicted persons were required to apply to the State Board of Health for a permit. This permit system assisted the Board in keeping track of the distribution of narcotics; and it served as a valuable means of gathering information about the addict population, as will be referred to later.(42)

An Analysis of the Regulatory Events

With the exception of the 1913 Act, which seems at least partially attributable to the parallel federal movement, the manner in which narcotic regulation proceeded in Tennessee from 1897-1911 presents somewhat of a puzzle. After all, the catalyst for the initial attempt at statewide narcotic control was the Tennessee State Medical Society - a body which, judging by its success in authoring and lobbying for bills protective of the "reputable" medical profession, could exercise considerable influence in the legislature. The Society's recommendations were, moreover, based on the work of Dr. T.J. Happel, a prolific writer and speaker who forcefully condemned the Opiates for many years while ignoring cocaine.(43) Also, it is fairly clear that some members of the medical profession at least vaguely understood what would appear to be an important distinction: that the Opiates were truly addictive, in the sense that the addict would experience physical withdrawal symptoms, while Cocaine could cause a type of psychological dependence but was not truly addictive.(44) This is evidenced by the fact that one of the four dissenters to the anti-cocaine bill in the House was E.D. Brantly, a medical doctor who argued on the House floor that "of all narcotics, Cocaine is the least deleterious of any used," and that "cocaine fiends were the most easily relieved of any."(45)

Nor can the rapid legal condemnation of Cocaine as compared to the Opiates be totally ascribed to racist fear of Cocaine use by the black population, as some scholars have suggested.(46) Racism permeated this period: it was a time of the mass disenfranchisement of the black population, and accounts of white vigilantes lynching blacks appeared nearly every day in the major Tennessee papers. Therefore, blacks were likely to be associated with anything considered harmful or threatening. We have seen that the authorities were alarmed by the extent to which the black population used morphine; and in the context of intrastate Alcohol Prohibition, the "Drys" repeatedly charged that blacks were inveterate drunkards who, while under the influence of Alcohol, debauched white women.(47) But neither of these substances was sanctioned nearly as quickly as cocaine. Moreover, Cocaine use was not limited to blacks, as the newspaper articles often refer to its use by "low class whites," and the like. Thus, while it is undoubtedly part of the story, racism cannot, standing alone, explain why Cocaine was treated so completely differently from the Opiates by the Tennessee legislature.

Another explanatory possibility - that the Opiates resisted regulation because of the organized and influential opposition of pharmaceutical interests - is, at first glance, quite plausible. We have already seen that some of the pro-morphine petitions presented to the 1901 legislature were signed by "merchants." Additionally, J.F. Voight, a prominent Chattanooga pharmacist and president of the State Board of Pharmacy, was a primary impetus for the anti-cocaine bill and actually drafted portions of the bill.(48) And his statement to the Chattanooga Times on the eve of the anti-cocaine bill's passage in 1901 that "I don't consider it at all necessary to regulate the sale of the other poisonous drugs[;] [c]ocaine is the dangerous one and the one that is causing all the mischief"(49) is a telling indication of the manner in which the organized pharmaceutical interests supported the Opiates while denouncing cocaine. Yet raw economic interest does not satisfactorily explain why the pharmaceutical trades lobbied against anti-opiate measures while failing to do the same with regard to cocaine. Voight's own drugstore in Chattanooga carried products manufactured by the Parke-Davis Company, the largest manufacturer and seller of Cocaine and Cocaine products in the United States.(50) Given the newspaper accounts of the vast quantities of Cocaine being sold, presumably Voight and his fellow pharmacists could have made substantial sums of money from the sale of the drug. Therefore, while economic considerations do help explain the opiates' resistance to regulation, they cannot completely account for the differential treatment of Cocaine and the Opiates by the pharmaceutical interests and by the legislature. The paradox remains.

In order to answer the question of why the nonmedical use of Cocaine was condemned on a legal level, while the Opiates exhibited such a hardy resistance to any regulative efforts, we must first know something about the opiate user population in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We must know, in other words, what kinds of people signed the "citizen" petitions protesting the anti-morphine bills in 1901 when it appeared that their unlimited freedom to secure Opiates might be in jeopardy.

The work of several social historians, most notably David Courtwright, goes a long way toward resolving the paradox. In Dark Paradise: Opiate Addiction in America Before 1940, Courtwright argues that opiate addiction gradually increased in the United States during the nineteenth century, rising from a rate of not more than 0.72 addict per thousand persons before 1842 to a maximum of 4.59 per thousand in the 1890s, and declining thereafter. This widespread opiate addiction in the nineteenth century, Courtwright argues, was primarily caused by the willingness with which doctors administered Opiates, the perceived panacea of that century, to their patients. And this iatrogenic, or physician-caused addiction pattern, had profound consequences for the composition of the addict population. Because many poorer groups, such as blacks and the immigrants who arrived after 1880, could not afford professional health care, and thus were not candidates for iatrogenic addiction, the majority of opiate addicts tended to be white, native-born members of the middle and upper classes. Moreover, because the Opiates were often prescribed for ailments such as rheumatism and arthritis, which typically appear in middle age, most of the persons addicted became so in their thirties and beyond.(51)

These patterns, Courtwright contends, were present in the South, but on a larger scale than the rest of the nation. Because of the generally unhealthy living conditions and the psychological effects of the Civil War, the South had an opiate addiction rate approximately 65% higher than other regions of the country. And most of these addicts were white; in fact, Courtwright asserts that "with the possible exception of the Chinese, southern whites had the highest addiction rate of any regional racial group in the country, and perhaps one of the highest in the world."(52)

Courtwright's argument regarding the extent of opiate addiction in the South appears to apply with particular force to Tennessee. The statistics from which he derived the 65% figure - which are taken from narcotics clinics set up by individual states after the federal government decided to pursue an anti-maintenance policy - reveal that the opiate addiction rate in Knoxville and Memphis around 1920 was roughly 130% higher than the national average and 50% percent higher than the South as a whole.

Courtwright's argument concerning the composition of the addict population likewise seems to hold true for Tennessee. In fact, the argument is partially based upon an article written by Lucius Brown, the State Food and Drugs Commissioner whose department was charged with the responsibility of enforcing the 1913 Anti-Narcotics Act. After the Act had been in force for one year, Brown reported that 2,370 persons had obtained permits to have prescriptions for narcotics refilled. Of these permit holders, approximately 98.7% were addicted to some form of Opium, with the vast majority, about 86%, applying specifically for refills of morphine. But only about 10% of the total number of permit holders were black, even though blacks comprised about a quarter of the state's population. Brown attributed this disproportionately low rate of opiate addiction among the black population to the fact that permits were not obtainable under the Act for Cocaine, which blacks used more often than opiates.(53)

With the aid of these sources, the mysterious flood of "citizen" petitions presented to the 1901 Tennessee legislature protesting against the anti-morphine bills becomes understandable. The signatories of the petitions were likely white, Protestant, middle-aged members of the middle and upper classes - "the better class of native American stock," in the words of an early twentieth-century addiction expert.(54) Perhaps this is hardly surprising; for settled procedure required the legislator to formally present the petition of his constituents on the floor of the legislature, and presumably few legislators would have been willing to present a document signed by a congery of criminals and ne' er-do-wells.

Because there is no legislative history or other materials that illuminate these petitions, it is difficult to know exactly what motivated these middle- and upper-class persons to sign them. However, some hypotheses are possible. First, it is likely that the petitioners did not really mind that the anti-morphine bills would drive up the cost of securing the drugs. They were also probably not worried, notwithstanding the official anti-opiate stance of the elite doctors in Tennessee, that they would be unable to locate a doctor who would prescribe the drugs for them. Certainly Lucius Brown still believed, as late as 1914, that most cases of narcotic addiction were caused by the "indiscreet administration" of drugs by physicians.(55) No: the petitioners were probably not much concerned with these practical effects of the bills. Rather, their opposition probably rested on two somewhat different grounds.

Since narcotic use had been traditionally unfettered in Tennessee, some of the petitioners probably believed that the bills invaded what would be referred to today as their "right of privacy." Certainly J.F. Voight thought that the perceived violation of users' "personal rights" had doomed the broad anti- narcotic bill introduced in the 1899 legislature, although his interpretation of the reasons for the bill's failure is somewhat self-serving and thus is open to question.(56)

Another possible ground of the petitioners' opposition is quite different. Because the opiate addiction rate in the United States generally and in the South in particular around the turn of the century was at an all-time high, it is very likely that at least a fair number of the petitioners were actually addicted to Morphine or some other type of opiate. This is extremely important, for a great deal of evidence exists which indicates that most addicts were incredibly ashamed of their condition and were fearful of the impairment of their respectability and social status if it should become known. For example, T.J. Happel was only one among the many contemporaries to note this when he asserted to the State Medical Society that:

Time and again, in answer to the question as to how much [morphine] the individual used, have I been given a quantity of about one-third or one-fourth the amount that I knew was consumed by them. The opium-eater does not want the public to know how much he consumes. The habit is carried on in secret for years until it bursts upon the public in some unexpected way.(57)

Many accounts in the medical literature of the time lend credence to Happel's personal experiences. One such account is the story of "Mrs. B," a thirty-four-year-old widow and mother who began using laudanum to palliate a uterine condition and to relieve the stress of raising her young children by herself. In time "Mrs. B" became addicted to the drug. In relating her story in a recent essay, Courtwright highlights the shame associated with opiate addiction by stating that "[addicts] were highly secretive. Mrs. B went ten miles out of her way to purchase her laudanum so that her neighbors would not suspect her dependence on the drug."(58)

In the final analysis, then, the petitioners' opposition was likely of two distinct, though perhaps overlapping, types. One group simply resented the encroachment on its traditional "right" to freely use the drugs; while another was deeply embarrassed about the extent of its drug use, and wanted above all to keep the extent of that use hidden. This latter group just did not want to go to the doctor to obtain the necessary prescription for the drugs.(59)

While this sketch of the 1901 "citizen" petitioner may not be surprising, especially to those versed in the social history of the period, it does have the effect of suggesting alternative analytic strategies as to the regulative issue. Specifically, it enables us to analyze the initial narcotic regulation in Tennessee not merely as a product of racist fear of "cocainized blacks," nor as a direct result of the intervention of the organized pharmaceutical interests, but simply as another part of the larger Progressive moralistic reform program.

This kind of analysis begins with Joseph's Gusfield's Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement. In this classic study, Gusfield argued that national Prohibition was the result of the rejection by significant numbers of Catholic, urban, working-class immigrants of the norms of temperance espoused by the dominant white, native-born, Protestant rural culture. Gusfield did not argue, however, that this cultural clash would inevitably or automatically result in coercive legislation embodying those norms of temperance. Instead, he contended that such coercive legislation would only become necessary if and when the minority culture openly and brazenly repudiated the norms of the dominant culture; at that point, the dominant culture would move to repress these "contesting deviants" with the power of the state.(60) Moreover, Gusfield contended that it did not matter if the resulting law was unenforced or even unenforceable. The law still served important symbolic and ideological functions for the dominant culture because it legitimated that culture's normative structure.(61)

Gusfield's work, though first published in 1963, still has remarkable viability within many different segments of the academic community.(62) In fact, it is an integral part of the thinking which informs the most comprehensive study on American crime and criminal justice to date - Lawrence Friedman's Crime and Punishment in American History. In this work, Friedman argues that the American criminal justice system - which he perceives as a purely social construct and not a product of an intellectual or philosophical tradition - has two related but distinct functions: to control and limit intolerable behavior, and to inculcate society's definition of tolerable behavior. Friedman describes this latter, or "teaching" function, in unmistakably Gusfieldian language:

The teaching function of criminal justice, its boundary-making function, is exceedingly important. Criminal justice is a kind of social drama, a living theatre; all of us are in the audience; we learn morals and morality, right from wrong ... through watching, hearing and absorbing. The sections of the penal code, written in crabbed legal language, harbor an unwritten subdocument, a subdocument of community morality. The penal code, after all, can be read as a kind of ... catalogue of norms ... Groups that dominate society display their power most brutally and nakedly in the police patrols, riot squads, and prisons; but power expresses itself also in the penal codes and in the process of labeling some values and behaviors as deviant, abnormal, dangerous - criminal, in other words.(63)

Therefore, the criminal justice system, which is "symbolic, ideological, [and] hortatory," is partly a "story about the dominant morality, and hence a history of power.(64)

Despite their acceptance, the insights of Gusfield's work have not been explicitly brought to bear on the history of drug regulation, a phenomenon which occurred in the same milieu of moralistic reform as did Alcohol Prohibition. Despite this, Gusfield's model fits the early part of Tennessee's history of drug regulation rather neatly. At the very least, it provides an alternative way to answer the question of why Cocaine was treated so differently from the opiates.

The first step in applying the model to the problem at hand is to determine if a dominant norm exists, and if so, to ascertain the content of that norm. This is not as easy as in the context of Alcohol, where the dominant norm was explicit and was institutionalized by churches and various morality groups. However, considering the 1901 "citizen" petitions and the secondary materials in tandem, the following de facto norm of the white, native-born, Protestant culture with regard to the narcotics may be inferred - the dominant culture did not per se condemn the use of the narcotics, but believed that these drugs should be used privately in the sanctity of the home. This norm is not, however, necessarily synonymous with the belief that the drugs should be used solely for medical purposes. Although the evidence concerning private narcotics use is by definition difficult to obtain, it is hard to believe that the dominant culture truly condemned certain nonmedical, or quasi-medical, private use of the narcotics which it almost certainly knew occurred. That some contemporary commentators reported that middle-class women regularly used narcotics in the home merely to relieve boredom supports this intuition.(65) Also, there is frequent mention in the secondary sources of private opiate use for purposes of relieving stress, steadying the nerves, and the like; and this sort of usage is "medical" only under a very expansive definition of that term. In short, as long as narcotic use, whether strictly "medical" or not, occurred quietly within the confines of the home, the dominant culture did not believe that it was wrong. Once, however, the user crossed the line and became clearly addicted to the use of the drugs, that culture - with the exception of some members of the medical profession who believed that addiction was a disease - reacted with horror and repulsion.

Once this dominant norm is established, the apparent paradox of narcotics regulation in Tennessee becomes explainable. In this analytical framework, the anti-cocaine bill was not enacted because of the dominant culture's fear of "cocainized blacks," or because of the intervention of the organized pharmaceutical interests. Rather, the bill was passed because the dominant culture feared the increasingly "open and notorious" use of the narcotics by both black and white members of those cultures. In other words, coercive legislation became necessary when, in the late 1890s, those persons began flouting the controlling de facto norm of private, discreet narcotics use. Cocaine became the natural target of the "power," to use Friedman's term, of the respectable classes because as a stimulant, and in stark contrast to the depressive Opiates, it was a profoundly social drug. For example, we have already seen, through the eyes of the reporter for the Chattanooga Times, one memorable scene in Chattanooga's "tough quarter" where Cocaine was literally the centerpiece of boisterous social activity. The sociability which naturally accompanied Cocaine use was also captured by the Knoxville Journal and Tribune, which in a 1900 article stated that:

it is no uncommon thing to see a party of half a dozen men and women go into a saloon on Central Avenue, call for a glass of beer each, seat themselves at a table with it before them, slip out their individual boxes of Cocaine, and salt the beer with it.(66)

On the other hand, the Opiates resisted regulation because they fit the dominant norm of private narcotic use, which remained basically intact from 1901 to 1913. However, over these years powerful considerations, such as the federal drive for international and domestic narcotics control, and the filtering down of the reputable medical profession's continued attacks on the Opiates, emasculated the dominant norm. By 1913 the norm had eroded to such a degree that comprehensive regulation was possible.

This thesis admittedly places a great deal of the responsibility for the fate of narcotics regulation on the shoulders of the drug-using members of the dominant culture. But to advance this argument is not to deny that pharmaceutical interests had a role in immunizing the Opiates from regulation during this period; those interests most assuredly played a substantial role. It is to contend, however, that the pharmaceutical interests could not have succeeded in this endeavor without the implicit cooperation of the dominant culture. This is illustrated by the fact that although there was also a great deal of money to be made from the sale of Cocaine, pharmacists were not willing to defend this drug. They did not have the support of the dominant culture on this issue, and because of their dependence upon that culture for most of their livelihood, they were not willing to risk alienating themselves from it. Therefore, the pharmacists acted to preserve some of their drug profits by drawing a sharp, and entirely novel, distinction between Cocaine and the Opiates on the eve of cocaine's legal demise.

As suggested at the outset of the paper, there is a powerful tendency among many in our society to assume, monolithically, that drug use is simply alien to the American spirit; and that its complete and total prohibition is therefore necessary and somehow inevitable. Yet this nativistic conviction is wrong. Drug use and society's reaction to that use, drug regulation, are fundamentally cultural products;(67) and even the dominant culture in this country has, in the not too distant past, implicitly endorsed a certain type of drug use. We should not forget this when we seek to enshrine these cultural judgments about drugs in extremely punitive laws that have profound collateral consequences for all of society.

Department of History Nashville, TN 37240

ENDNOTES

The author would like to thank James Ely, Helmut Smith, Lizabeth Foster and especially David Langum for their invaluable assistance on this article.

1. This paper will use the term "narcotics" to refer to both the Opiates and Cocaine because the term was used as such during the period encompassed, and because both substances are classified as such in current state criminal codes. See e.g., Tennessee Code Annotated [section]39-17-402(16). However, this usage of the term is incorrect in a medical sense because the word "narcotic" refers to substances having a depressing effect on the nervous system, whereas Cocaine has a stimulating effect.

2. The most comprehensive treatment of the federal regulation of the narcotics is probably David F. Musto, The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control (New Haven, 1973). Federal regulation is also treated in H. Wayne Morgan, Drugs in America: A Social History, 1800-1980 (Syracuse, 1981), and Troy Duster, The Legislation of Morality (Berkeley, 1970).

3. Early state regulation is dealt with briefly in Lawrence M. Friedman, Crime and Punishment in American History (New York, 1993), pp. 137-38, and Musto, The American Disease, pp. 91-120. The early state regulation of Cocaine is mentioned in Gerald T. McLaughlin, "Cocaine: The History and Regulation of a Dangerous Drug," Cornell Law Review 58 (Fall 1973): 537.

4. This is made more difficult by the fact that official records of legislative proceedings were not kept at this time; official legislative history in Tennessee goes back only into the mid-1950s.

5. Oliver Wendell Holmes, "Currents and Counter-Currents in Medical Sciences," Medical Essays (Boston, 1892): 202.

6. See Musto, The American Disease, p. 13. The principal types of Opium used for medical purposes were Morphine, laudanum (a solution of Opium and alcohol), paregoric (a camphorated solution of Opium and alcohol), and gum opium. On the other hand, smoking Opium was almost never used for medical purposes, and was in fact banned by several western states beginning in the early 1880s because of its association with the Chinese. See Morgan, Drugs in America, pp. 35-38.

7. See Morgan, Drugs in America, pp. 1-9. The total lack of alternative pain-relievers is evidenced by the fact that the analgesic properties of aspirin were not discovered until 1899. See David T. Courtwright, Dark Paradise: Opiate Addiction in America Before 1940 (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 52, 97.

8. See Courtwright, Dark Paradise, pp. 46-47; see also David Courtwright, "Opiate Addiction as a Consequence of the Civil War," Civil War History 24 (Fall 1978): 101.

9. See Musto, The American Disease, p. 7.

10. One of the most forceful advocates of the addiction-relieving powers of Cocaine was none other than Sigmund Freud, who wrote several articles in the mid-1880s extolling the drug. Ibid.

11. See Morgan, Drugs in America, p. 18-19. See also Lester Grinspoon and James B. Bakalar, Cocaine: A Drug and its Social Evolution (New York, rev. ed. 1985).

12. See J.B. Mattison, "Cocainism," Medical Record 42 (October 22, 1892): 476; W.A. Hammond, "Cocaine and the So-Called Cocaine Habit," New York Medical Journal 44 (December 4, 1886): 638.

13. Some good examples of this trend are J.W. Robertson, "The Morphine Habit: Its Causation, Treatment, and Possibility of its Cure," Pacific Medical Journal 40 (May 1897): 270; and "The Medical Abuse of Opium," Medical Age 12 (October 25, 1894): 631.

14. This paper and the accompanying discussion are published in the 1892 Transactions of the Tennessee State Medical Society, pp. 162-179.

15. This paper and the accompanying discussion are published in the 1895 Transactions of the Tennessee State Medical Society, pp. 150-163; the paper is also published in the Medical and Surgical Reporter (Philadelphia) 72 (May 25, 1895): 731.

16. Tennessee House Journal 1897, p. 136. The text of the bills is not reproduced in the journals. However, all the original bills are kept in the legislative history division of the Tennessee State Library and Archives.

17. Ibid., p. 509.

18. Ibid., pp. 383, 419.

19. Tennessee House Journal 1899, p. 71.

20. Tennessee House Journal 1899, p. 503; Tennessee Senate Journal 1899, p. 901.

21. "Morphine Habit," Chattanooga Times, Sept. 2, 1898, p. 6.

22. "Cocaine Fiends," Chattanooga Times, Oct. 11, 1899, p. 4. Ironically, the intrepid reporter made the same mistake of classification as the drafters of the current Tennessee Criminal Code, for hashish is a derivative of the hemp plant, and is thus a depressant, not a stimulant.

23. "Cocaine Sniffers," Knoxville Journal and Tribune, Mar. 4, 1900, p. 4.

24. "Use of Cocaine," Chattanooga Times, May 1, 1900, p. 8.

25. See "Cocaine Fiends," Chattanooga Times, Oct. 11, 1899, p. 4.

26. See "The Local Dope Fiend," Chattanooga Times, June 7, 1900, p. 8.

27. See "The Cocaine Demon," Memphis Commercial Appeal, June 7, 1900, p. 6.

28. "Pound Sales Limit," Memphis Commercial Appeal, June 8, 1900, p. 6.

29. "Cocaine Law," Knoxville Sentinel, Jan. 4, 1901, p. 4.

30. Tennessee House Journal 1901, p. 183.

31. Tennessee Senate Journal 1901, pp. 185, 286; 1901 Tennessee Public Acts, Ch.5.

32. Tennessee House Journal 1901, pp. 194, 215.

33. Unfortunately, the House Journal is the only remaining record of the petitions, as they are not to be found in the legislative history division of the Tennessee State Library and Archives.

34. Tennessee House Journal 1901, pp. 322-548.

35. Ibid., p. 732.

36. Tennessee Senate Journal 1903, p. 397; Tennessee House Journal 1905, p. 713; Tennessee Senate Journal 1911, p. 901. The 1905 attempt, House Bill 786, is particularly interesting. That bill provided that no person could sell any "medicine which intoxicates" within four miles of a schoolhouse. This was an attempt to bring the Opiates under the aegis of the Four-Mile Law, a well-known Alcohol temperance measure enacted in 1877. See Paul E. Issac, Prohibition and Politics: Turbulent Decades in Tennessee, 1885-1920 (Knoxville, 1965), pp. 10-11.

37. See Musto, The American Disease, pp. 26-28, 34.

38. Ibid., pp. 24-68; see also Courtwright, Dark Paradise, pp. 103-107.

39. See Isaac, Prohibition and Politics, pp. 153-170, 206-231.

40. 1913 Tennessee Public Acts, Ch. 11. For a good brief overview of the Harrison Act, see Claudine Schweber and Hugh E. Teitelbaum, "Criminalization and Incarceration: The Federal Response to Drug Addiction Among Women, 1914-1934," George Mason University Law Review 4 (Spring 1981): 71.

41. This ambiguity was finally resolved by the United States Supreme Court, which determined in Webb v. United States, 249 U.S. 96 (1919), that physicians could not prescribe narcotics to persons addicted to them merely to maintain their addiction.

42. See Lucius P. Brown, "Enforcement of the Tennessee Anti-Narcotics Law," American Journal of Public Health 5 (1915): 323.

43. T.J. Happel, "Morphinism from the Standpoint of the General Practitioner," Journal of the American Medical Association 35 (1900): 407, is an example of Happel's continued avid opposition to the medical use of the opiates.

44. On this point, see McLaughlin, "Cocaine," pp. 551-55.

45. "Tennessee Legislature," Chattanooga Times, Jan. 31, 1901, p. 3.

46. See David Courtwright, "The Hidden Epidemic: Opiate Addiction and Cocaine Use in the South, 1860-1920,"Journal of Southern History 39 (February 1983): 57, 67-72.

47. See Isaac, Prohibition and Politics, pp. 147-148.

48. "Sale of Cocaine - Restrictive Measures Considered by Druggists," Chattanooga Times, July 25, 1900, p. 6.

49. "Sale of Cocaine," Chattanooga Times, Feb. 7, 1901, p. 4.

50. For a discussion of the Parke-Davis Company, see Grinspoon and Bakalar, Cocaine, pp. 22-27.

51. Courtwright, Dark Paradise, pp. 9-42. This argument regarding the composition of the opiate addict population is supported by material in Morgan, Drugs in America, p. 34.

52. Courtwright, "The Hidden Epidemic," p. 57.

53. Brown, "Enforcement of the Tennessee Anti-Narcotics Law," pp. 326-331.

54. Courtwright, Dark Paradise, p. 40.

55. Brown, "Enforcement of the Tennessee Anti-Narcotics Law," p. 329.

56. "Sale of Cocaine," Chattanooga Times, Feb. 7, 1901, p. 4.

57. Happel, "The Opium Curse and a Preventive," 1895 Transactions of the Tenneessee State Medical Society, p. 157.

58. David Courtwright, "Nineteenth-Century Drug Laws and Drug Use," in Donald G. Nieman, ed., The Constitution, the Law, and American Life (Athens, GA, 1992), p. 123.

59. A colleague has pointed out a possible problem with these conclusions by noting that if the addict-petitioners were indeed extremely embarrassed about their drug use, why then were they willing to sign a public document essentially admitting to the use of such drugs? The point is well taken, but I suggest that perhaps the petitioners considered repeated trips to the doctor, especially if the doctor was located in their home-towns, to be more "public," and therefore more embarrassing, than merely signing a document.

60. Joseph R. Gusfield, Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement (Urbana, rev.ed. 1986), pp. 65-72, 110-138, 189-211.

61. A good example of this type of symbolic political action is the recent action of the governing body of Cobb County, Georgia, which passed a resolution disapproving of the "homosexual lifestyle." Moreover, the "political correctness" movement, in which terms that have been used for hundreds and even thousands of years are now regarded as anathema and banned on college campuses, is a stunning example of symbolic politics at work.

62. The work is still of obvious importance to social historians interested in drinking patterns in the United States and elsewhere. See Susanna Barrows and Robin Room, eds., Drinking: Behavior and Belief in Modern History (Berkeley, 1990). Gusfield is also often cited in works at the intersection of social and legal history, such as David J. Langum, Crossing Over the Line: Legislating Morality and the Mann Act (Chicago, 1994).

63. Friedman, Crime and Punishment, p. 10.

64. Ibid., (emphasis added). For an excellent analysis of the criminal law's function as ideology, see Douglas Hay's treatment of the English "Bloody Code" in "Property, Authority, and the Criminal Law," in Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth Century England (New York, 1975).

65. See Morgan, Drugs in America, p. 40.

66. "Cocaine Sniffers," Knoxville Journal and Tribune, Mar. 4, 1900, p.4.

67. For a very interesting account of the cultural foundations of criminal punishment, see Steven Wilf, "Imagining Justice: Aesthetics and Public Executions in Late Eighteenth Century England," Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 5 (Winter 1993): 51.