Abstract

Long widely available, opiates and cocaine came under a raft of prohibitive laws in the United States and Europe from 1914 onward, paving the way for contemporary drug control. Explanations for this change remain fragmented, with limited overlap between cultural interpretations, mostly US or UK focused, and international histories. Taking a first step towards a synthesis, this article looks at the rise of medical theories of addiction in France and Germany and its interlink with the first drug laws. While emerging disease concepts of addiction were important in paving the way for prohibition, this shows, they could not predict the nature of the laws passed. Germany, notably, though a leader in addiction research, failed to criminalize the drug user when the time came. In neither country, secondly, can the impulse to legislate on narcotics be attributed to the medical body, which already possessed significant authority under their respective pharmacy laws. This, finally, throws the onus on international developments. France, like the US and the UK but unlike Germany, was through its possession of colonial opium franchises a front-rank participant in the early twentieth-century opium conferences, providing a crucial trigger for banning drugs at home as well as abroad.

摘要

自1914年以来，在美国和欧洲，鸦片和可卡因长期以来得到广泛使用，并受到一系列禁止性法律的约束，为当代药物管制铺平了道路。对于这种变化的解释仍然是零散的，文化解释（主要集中在美国或英国）与国际历史之间的重叠很少。本文朝着综合性迈出了第一步，着眼于法国和德国的成瘾医学理论的兴起及其与第一部毒品法的相互联系。这表明，尽管成瘾性疾病的新兴概念在为禁令铺平道路方面很重要，但这表明，它们无法预测所通过法律的性质。值得注意的是，德国虽然是成瘾研究的领导者，但在时机成熟时未能将吸毒者定为犯罪。其次，在两个国家 是否可以将对麻醉品立法的冲动归因于医学机构，该医学机构已经根据各自的药房法拥有重要的权力。最后，这给国际发展带来了责任。与美国和英国一样，法国与德国不同，法国拥有殖民地鸦片特许经营权，因此是二十世纪初鸦片会议的前排参与者，这为在国内外禁止毒品提供了关键触发因素。