| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 59

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Catherine Carstairs, Jailed for Possession: Illegal Drug Use, Regulation, and Power in Canada, 1920–1961 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2006)

ON AN ALMOST DAILY BASIS, the public is engaged in debate around issues arising from drug use in our society and internationally: the possibilities and pleasures they offer; the relative dangers they present; consumer demands and marketing; who should administer drugs and under what conditions; the role of government in regulating quality and sources, and in determining the clientele; methods to disentangle drugs and organized crime; and on and on. Most of these debates somehow involve the difficult intersections of health, morality, and citizenship with drug use, the rights and responsibilities of drug users and those who eschew drugs, and the role of the state in maintaining a delicate balance among competing demands. Given the increasingly prominent role of mood-altering drugs, it is striking that so little Canadian academic literature has been produced about the drug trade and use. Catherine Carstairs's new study aims to fill this huge gap in our literature.

Jailed for Possession situates the study of who used drugs in Canada between 1920 and 1960, the process of criminalization and its effects on users, and the various groups who worked with or against drug-users, usually on behalf of the state. Carstairs's contribution to an expanding international literature concentrates on the social history of drug use in Canada, privileging the effect on users of the strict regulation in this "classic" period of narcotic control, a time when the regulatory framework was being constructed and when it was relatively simple, consistent, and rigid. From the panic regarding Chinese opium users in the early 1920s to the 1961 Narcotic Control Act which set new penalties for drug possession, Carstairs charts changing public perceptions about which drugs were thought to be most dangerous and why, the hardening profile of users, and the racial and class distinctions. Carstairs notes that in this period Canada had some of the strictest drug regulations in the world, more restrictive even than America.

With enforcement of these strictures went also careful documentation. The study benefits from extensive case files — notably from the John Howard Society of Vancouver and the Narcotic Division of what is now Health Canada — through which she seeks to show the impact of drug regulations on peoples' lives. The profiles she constructs through the case records are both arresting and sad. She underlines that one of her goals was to give voice to the motivations, hardships, and drama of the addict's life, and in this she succeeds admirably, providing a view of addiction from the inside. Many of the stories her characters tell are affecting and, of course, instructive about the particular conditions which give rise to drug use. At the same time, she manages to maintain a balance in her assessment of the addiction experience, wisely resisting the natural tendency to shade sympathy into sentimental acceptance of their stories at face value. Her conclusions about the characteristics of addicts most often caught in the regulatory net will surprise few, as we see the same profile today. The poor, unskilled users with few community or family supports were much more likely to be jailed than their wealthier, middle-class, and formally educated cousins.

Among the many strengths of the book is Carstairs's sensitivity to the importance of race in the construction of the feared addict. Her discussion of the anti-Chinese opium panic of the early 1920s provides valuable insights into the way in which racial and drug panics overlapped and fed unreasonable terrors. The history of attitudes to drug use, she notes, is inextricably tied to Canada's history of racism. (14) Opium, cocaine, and morphine were all freely available before the 1908 drug law, and many patent medicines relied heavily on such drugs. Furthermore, drugs had typically been used recreationally by all classes of both Caucasion and Chinese throughout the 19th century. Carstairs shows that the regulatory framework did not become toxic for Chinese labourers in Canada until the Asiastic Exclusion League and British Columbia politicians chose to use drug fears as a weapon in their campaign to end all Asian immigration. Hence, the imposition of jail sentences for possession was, she observes, a result of political agitation rather than pressures from the medical community. In fact, her analysis of the role played by doctors, long criticized in the literature for their intrusion into areas where they held no special knowledge and their construction of moral campaigns masked as medical crises, is measured and fair. She concludes that doctors were both the regulators and regulated when it came to the control of illicit drugs.

Carstairs also explores the role of police officers and concludes that they were the most important element in the expanding drug regulatory framework. She argues that it was police (and social workers who sought to 'cure' the addict) who had the most to gain from constructing drug culture as a particular area of expertise, and as a relief from the daily grind of policing the city. As a case study of the implication of social workers in the users' recovery, she offers a fascinating profile of the John Howard Society and the many ways in which users manipulated for their own purposes these well-meaning advocates.

The analysis is at its finest in charting the many ways in which gender ideologies and patriarchal power structures affected the lives of drug users. From the late 19th-century 'white slavery' panic in which pure young Canadian women were thought to have been entrapped by opium users, a panic which helped to fuel the first restrictive drug laws, through the gendered explanations for first experimenting with drugs and the penalties meted out to users, to the gendered experience of addiction and prostitution (both as a means for sustaining that lifestyle and as an explanation for becoming involved in drug culture in the first place), Carstairs paints a vivid and believable portrait of the user as a gendered subject.

Of course, there are always ways in which an exploratory analysis of this type could be improved. In this case, the rich data base for Vancouver — unquestionably the drug capital of Canada — does mean that the argument's centre of gravity is usually on the west coast. There is some considerable attempt to provide examples and comparative analysis for central Canada as well, although the Maritimes rarely enter the discussion. Carstairs convincingly argues that between 1920 and 1960, the drug culture was largely an urban phenomenon. But the factors which gave rise to illicit drug-using were certainly not confined to cities, and one wonders how the story would have been enriched with records that surveyed rural and small-town experiences as well as Vancouver and Montreal. Secondly, Carstairs provides a series of graphs to summarize important and interesting information relating to such issues as the racial origin, gender, and type of drugs used by those convicted under the Opium and Narcotic Drug Act from 1921 to 1945. The tables are all difficult to decode, partly because of the amount of information squeezed onto each one, and also because of how the information is presented. Distinguishing one category from another is difficult, reducing their value for even conscientious readers. Thirdly, fears raised by drug use have always had a strong visual element via images of the apparatus used for injection, or the compelling images of addicts in search of relief. The power of these images is suggested by a photograph on the book's cover which is sexually ambiguous, oddly coloured (from early film footage) and compelling as an addict injects his fix. That this is the sole image in the book is disappointing.

Nevertheless, Carstairs's book is a welcome addition to the literature on addictions generally, and drug use specifically. It takes up a subject which is both timely and complex, presenting a highly readable historical analysis from which we can learn much.


Sharon Anne Cook University of Ottawa

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