{"id":52624,"date":"2018-08-13T10:36:23","date_gmt":"2018-08-13T14:36:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/?p=52624"},"modified":"2024-09-01T09:55:59","modified_gmt":"2024-09-01T13:55:59","slug":"malleck-the-influence-of-opium-and-cocaine-panic-in-canadian-drug-policy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/2018\/08\/malleck-the-influence-of-opium-and-cocaine-panic-in-canadian-drug-policy\/","title":{"rendered":"MALLECK: The influence of opium and cocaine panic in Canadian drug policy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Dan Malleck, Associate Professor of Health Sciences at Brock, wrote a <a href=\"http:\/\/theconversation.com\/the-influence-of-opium-and-cocaine-panic-in-canadian-drug-policy-99910?utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20August%2013%202018&amp;utm_content=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20August%2013%202018+CID_4f3d7a6778ced2f54b3fd63ca89da2e7&amp;utm_source=campaign_monitor_ca&amp;utm_term=The%20influence%20of%20opium%20and%20cocaine%20panic%20in%20Canadian%20drug%20policy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">piece recently published in <em>The Conversation<\/em><\/a> about the history of Canadian drug policy.<\/p>\n<p>Malleck writes:<\/p>\n<p><em>Current discussions on the history of prohibition and drug laws in Canada have explored the narrative that\u00a0Canada\u2019s drug laws were fuelled by racism.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>The\u00a0story goes like this: A 1907\u00a0anti-immigration attack on Chinese establishments\u00a0in Vancouver\u2019s Chinatown brought the deputy minister of labour,\u00a0William Lyon Mackenzie King, to the city to allocate reparations to businesses damaged in the riots. Some of the submissions came from opium \u201cfactories,\u201d\u00a0small businesses in which raw opium was refined for smoking.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>King investigated the issue further, the story goes. In his initial report to Parliament, King noted that opium\u2019s\u00a0\u201cbaneful influences are too well-known to require comment\u201d\u00a0<\/em><em>and urged a law to ban opium for non-medicinal use. In July 1908, King\u2019s boss, Rodolphe Lemieux, presented a one-page Opium Act to Parliament.\u00a0It passed through the House of Commons\u00a0with no notable commentary and through Senate with little more than a minor amendment.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Scholars have interpreted King\u2019s initiative\u00a0as\u00a0anti-Chinese. The speed at which the Opium Act sailed through Parliament is also seen as evidence of a racist reaction to what may have been conceived to be a predominantly Chinese activity. As well, since restrictions on Chinese immigration to Canada were increasing, this is\u00a0considered by many scholars\u00a0to be a further attempt to restrict Chinese immigration.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Continue reading the full article <a href=\"http:\/\/theconversation.com\/the-influence-of-opium-and-cocaine-panic-in-canadian-drug-policy-99910?utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20August%2013%202018&amp;utm_content=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20August%2013%202018+CID_4f3d7a6778ced2f54b3fd63ca89da2e7&amp;utm_source=campaign_monitor_ca&amp;utm_term=The%20influence%20of%20opium%20and%20cocaine%20panic%20in%20Canadian%20drug%20policy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dan Malleck, Associate Professor of Health Sciences at Brock, wrote a piece recently published in The Conversation about the history of Canadian drug policy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":45641,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[36,7,6],"tags":[3212,1696,5512],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52624"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52624"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52624\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52625,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52624\/revisions\/52625"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}