CHAPTER 2 THE INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT

A starting point for this study is that the international control system for drugs, as designed and executed by the United Nations (UN), has played and still plays an important role in the national drug policies in the Netherlands and Sweden. However, as will be shown, the advantages and limitations of the control system were perceived in quite different ways in the two countries. Illegal drug use is usually considered a global problem that can only be solved successfully by global co-operation. However, has this view on the control of psychotropic drugs always prevailed? To understand how the international control system influenced the elaboration of the national strategies against the modern drug problem it is important to trace its historical roots.4

Opium

The substance that stood in the centre of the origin of the international drug control system was opium. At the end of nineteenth century, opium was used for medical purposes on a large scale in Europe and in the "New World". It was indispensable for the physician's medicine chest but also a universal panacea in most people's homes as well. Even if opium did not cure diseases, it certainly alleviated their symptoms. The trade in opium was in the hands of European colonial powers like Britain and the Netherlands. Britain held a monopoly on the opium route from India to China. The Netherlands ran a state monopoly on the sale of opium in the Dutch East Indies, as did France in Indo-China, Spain in the Philippines and Portugal in Macao. The revenues were substantial. Another important development occurred in the home countries where physicians and pharmacists had constituted themselves as a professional field that strove for and eventually achieved monopoly on the dispensation and sale of narcotics and other medicines. Furthermore, the steady stream of innovations within biology and chemistry was paired with the emergence of a pharmaceutical industry. These developments would eventually lead to a definite split between opium as a medicine and opium as a drug. At the end of the nineteenth century opium was used in the Western sphere as a base for a range of medicines. In the Orient, on the other hand, raw opium and opium prepared for smoking was also used as a drug for pleasure. However, in Europe and the United States the main concern in the field of substance abuse was alcohol, not opium. The question is why an international control system emerged, if use of narcotics was not perceived as a major social problem in the Western nations and they were profiting from the opium trade.

4 This chapter is primarily based on the work of Musto (1987), de Kort (1995), Bruun, Pan, Rexed (1975), van Vugt (1985), and Stein (1985).