Racial and religious motives for drug criminalization

Abstract

The world has a long-standing system of drug control intended to suppress the use of a range of psychoactive drugs on the basis that such use is very harmful both to the users themselves and to their social surroundings. This perception of harmfulness has a long medical history, but recent research indicates that many forms of illicit drug use are not more harmful than the use of alcohol and tobacco. This article analyzes the historical and normative background for the apparently exaggerated assessments of drug harms on which the regime of drug control is founded. Starting from the observation that the drugs that have been exempted from this criminalization regime are those that were integrated in European cultures during the early modern era whereas the drugs criminalized under this regime lack such a history of European acceptance, the article discusses racial and cultural (especially religious) prejudice as a foundation for the exaggerated perceptions of drug harms. It finds that such prejudice is well-attested in the historical literature and seems to have contributed substantially to the formation of the international drug control regime. In sum, this article argues that drug prohibition was first introduced in the early modern era on racial and religious grounds and that the influence of these prohibition motives can be traced, directly and indirectly, all the way to the present day. This influence may explain why the health risks associated with illicit drug use are still often exaggerated in contemporary drug harms research.

It appears that the world has been more skeptical of illicit drug use than what would be warranted by its negative impact on health and behavior. Compared to alcohol use, the use of many illicit drugs does not seem to confer an especially strong tendency toward dependence formation, and tobacco appears to be the most addictive drug of all (Anthony et al., 1994; Lopez-Quintero et al., 2011; Schlag, 2020). For the issue of acute lethal toxicity, Gable (2004; see also Lachenmeier & Rehm, 2015) found that alcohol had a safety ratio of 10, comparing unfavorably to the safety ratios for instance of cocaine (15), MDMA (16), LSD (1000), and cannabis (>1000), and there is broad agreement in the research literature that although some forms of illicit drug use may be associated with violence, the association is much stronger for alcohol use (Boles & Miotto, 2003; Coomber et al., 2019; Hoaken & Stewart, 2003; White et al., 2019). Furthermore, while much has been said about the association between cannabis use and psychosis, a recent review by Johnstad (2022a) found that the association for moderate cannabis use is not stronger than those between psychosis and moderate tobacco use. Similarly, Schoeler et al. (2022) found that in a sample of 230,000 respondents, the rate of psychotic symptoms associated with cannabis use was at about the same level as alcohol-associated psychosis. These findings are supported by overall assessments of the harmfulness of licit and illicit drugs, which have found that many illicit drugs are less harmful both to users and to other people than the licit drugs alcohol and tobacco (Bonomo et al., 2019; Crossin et al., 2023; Nutt et al., 2010; Sellman, 2020; van Amsterdam et al., 2015).

Given this range of findings, it appears that some other explanation than straightforward health harms must be identified for the aversion to illicit drug use that underlies the international regime of drug control. Observing that this regime was established on the initiative of the United States (Bewley-Taylor, 1999; Pembleton, 2022), this article will discuss the possibility that an underlying reason for the aversion to (presently) illicit drugs is that such drug use has not been a part of European traditions. Seen in this perspective, we could understand the global regime of drug criminalization that was implemented during the twentieth century as being biased against the types of drugs that were used predominantly in non-European cultures. Furthermore, it is possible to understand the effort to criminalize and suppress certain drugs as originating in a struggle for religious orthodoxy. Some types of drugs have a long history of use in religious contexts (Devereux, 2008; Ferrara, 2021; Fuller, 2000; Labate & Cavnar, 2014, 2016; Maroukis, 2012), and have also been found to induce spiritual experiences in modern western users (Griffiths et al., 2006, 2019; Johnstad, 2018, 2021, 2022b, 2022c; Pahnke, 1966; Strassman, 2001; Yaden et al., 2017). Such induction of spiritual experience via psychoactive drugs has not been an (official) part of western Christian traditions, however, and may have been perceived as a threat to these traditions.

There is substantial previous work on the impact of racial and religious motives on drug criminalization. Back in 1970, Bonnie and Whitebread pointed to the “[o]pen prejudice and public ethnic slurs” accompanying passage of the early drug laws in the United States:

[S]trong ethnic bias against the Chinese on the [United States’] West Coast was the prime motivation for those states’ early anti-opium laws. Likewise in the Southwest the primary impetus for the criminalization of marijuana use was prejudice against the growing Mexican communities in those states. Laws were passed against the Mexicans and “their weed”. (Bonnie & Whitebread, 1970: 1173)

Hickman (2000) also identified the role of anti-Chinese racism in the early twentieth-century discourses of addiction, and Herzberg (2022) noted that the first federal anti-drug law in the United States was an 1882 statute that specifically forbade Chinese people—not other ethnicities—from importing opium (see also Boyd, 2021; Zheng, 2022). A report from Canada's Senate Special Committee on Illegal Drugs (2002) observed that “[e]arly drug legislation was largely based on a moral panic, racist sentiment and a notorious absence of debate” (22). Several others have argued that the drug criminalization regime serves essentially as a continuation of old racist policies under the guise of apparent colorblindness (Alexander, 2010, 2011; Steiner & Argothy, 2001).

Regarding the impact from religion, Richards (1981) argued that drug criminalization is rooted in a Christian repudiation of shamanic ecstasy, which it labeled devil worship or witchcraft and sought to exterminate especially in the Americas. He understood the Christian rejection of drug-induced ecstasy as being based on the dogma of “an unbridgeable gap between the human and the divine” and that drugs are therefore “ruled out as stimuli to religious experience because they bridge this distance, allowing the narcissistic perception that the user himself is divine and thus free of the constraints of ethical submission” (Richards, 1981: 632). Similarly, Pendell (2010) found that the Catholic clampdown on psychedelic plant use in the Americas served as the beginning of the regime of drug control and maintained that the religious dimension of the drug criminalization regime has subsequently “been obfuscated as much as possible” (15). Muraresku (2020) for his part traced the history of religious or spiritual use of psychoactive drugs from the Neolithic era through the Mystery religions of Antiquity and into early Christianity, concluding that the Catholic Church started the campaign against drug use in late Antiquity as an attempt to purify Christianity of drug-induced ecstasy.

The main contribution of the present article is to extend the historical scope of previous analyses of racial motives as well as to deepen the analyses via the application of relevant but underutilized theoretical perspectives. The article argues that the relation between presently criminalized drugs and non-western cultures extends far deeper than the references to Chinese use of opium and Mexican and Black use of cannabis in the early twentieth-century North America allow for, as cannabis has long traditions of use among Indians, Arabs, and Africans while psychedelics use has long traditions especially among the indigenous (or First) peoples of the Americas. Similar points could be made for opium and many other psychoactive drugs (Devereux, 2008; Rätsch, 2005). Thus, the use of cannabis and opium that North American authorities clamped down on in the early twentieth century was a foreign cultural practice not merely because it was common among Blacks and immigrants from Mexico, although that may have been the proximate cause for its criminalization. Its foreignness extended much further back in time, encompassing a wide range of non-European and non-Christian cultures that all generally came to be regarded as inferior during the colonial era. Furthermore, the article utilizes perspectives from theorists on racial prejudice as well as on the relationship between religion and power to deepen our understanding of how racial and religious factors have shaped modern perceptions of drug use on a normative level and thereby provided a foundation for its criminalization.

This article uses “drug criminalization” and “drug control” to indicate the international regime of drug control as defined by the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances, and the 1988 Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances at the United Nations. The substances prohibited under this regime are referred to as “illicit drugs,” although some are now decriminalized to a substantial extent. The discussion focuses especially on cannabis, psychedelics, opiates, and cocaine, which were not in widespread European use in the early modern era yet widely used by a number of non-European cultures and therefore, as will be argued, subject to substantial demonization in European discourse. For simplicity, furthermore, the article uses the term “the western world” to point to the countries of Europe and the Americas as well as Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea. Arguably, the normative impact of the racial and religious motives for drug criminalization here discussed has affected all these countries, although it should be noted that countries such as the Netherlands, Czechia, Spain, Portugal, and recently Uruguay, Argentina, Canada, the United States, and Mexico among others have engaged in depenalization initiatives that challenge this normative foundation.

While this article discusses racial and religious motives for drug criminalization in some detail, it should be clear that the drive toward a prohibition regime was also motivated by other concerns, among them a legitimate worry about the potential harms of drug use. The above review of drug harms research established that illicit drug use does not seem to be more harmful than the use of alcohol and tobacco, but this conclusion obviously does not imply that illicit drug use is harmless. Throughout history, observers of illicit drug use, especially in immoderate usage patterns, have had many opportunities to witness negative consequences both for the users themselves and for their surroundings. Only with the development of sophisticated means of statistical analysis has it become possible to understand and compare drug harms in an objective manner, and early modern observers lacking access to such studies necessarily had to rely on other, more biased means of assessment. While their concern may have been legitimate, in other words, it may also have been exaggerated or biased. The purpose of this article is to identify how underlying ethnoracial and cultural (especially religious) prejudice has supported the drug criminalization regime in both direct and indirect ways, where direct contributions involve the application of drug prohibition as a tool of ethnoracial and religious oppression and indirect contributions relate primarily to an underlying normative influence. While there is evidence indicating that the direct and sinister application of drug prohibition as a means of oppression has taken place, much of the influence from racial and religious motives was probably on a less visible level of normative influence. Indirectly, the demonization of illicit drugs on ethnoracial and religious grounds appears to have provided a normative foundation for subsequent exaggerations about the harmful effects of these drugs even among people who would not support the ethnoracial or religious levels of condemnation.

Although comparative drug harms research indicates that alcohol use is at least as harmful as the use of most illicit drugs, and therefore that the medical rationale for the prohibition of the latter is no stronger than that for the former, it should be acknowledged that alcohol was also prohibited in the United States and other places in the early decades of the twentieth century. However, I believe it is significant that alcohol prohibition encountered widespread societal opposition and was soon abandoned, while the prohibition of cannabis, psychedelics, opiates, and cocaine grew into a worldwide policy regime. Thus, while the temporary prohibition of alcohol demonstrates that the prohibition of intoxicants is not the exclusive domain of the racial and religious motives discussed in this article, the very different trajectories of the respective prohibition campaigns also indicate differences in their normative foundation. The discrepancy is especially glaring for cannabis and psychedelics: for some reason, the harms from the use of these drugs have been regarded as more problematic than the harms from alcohol use even as the latter are, in objective research, far more extensive. This article argues that the ethnoracial disparity in the respective drug cultures combined with a religious struggle against heterodox spiritual practices may explain this discrepancy, and thus explain also why cannabis, psychedelics, opiates, and cocaine were prohibited under the international regime of drug control while alcohol was exempted. It is also noteworthy that intoxicants that were not associated with non-European cultures but were rather inventions from western chemical science—amphetamines being a primary example—were initially treated with more lenience than those discussed here (see Herzberg, 2022, for a discussion of the medicine-drug divide).

Theoretical foundation: demonization, white ignorance, religious authority, power

As a theoretical foundation for this discussion of racial and religious motives for drug criminalization, I will briefly introduce Fanon's (1952/2008, 1967) perspectives on the demonization of blackness, Mills’ (2007) concept of white ignorance, and an analysis of the relationship between religious authority and power based on Asad (1983, 1993) and Klass (1995). Fanon (1952/2008) observed that the enslavement, exploitation, and suppression characterizing colonial regimes was built on the foundation of a systematic devaluation of both the biological and the cultural characteristics of non-white peoples. He found that this devaluation starts with the color black itself, which has been equated with wickedness, stupidity, sin, evil, and immorality in white-dominated discourse. Having thus demonized blackness as the counterpart to all that is pure, white, and good, it follows that people who manifest such a mark of spiritual darkness on their skin must be understood as inferior on every level including the moral and the cognitive. And as a third step, it further follows from this logic of demonization that whatever passes for culture among such people is necessarily barbaric and of no particular value—“[t]he customs of the colonized people, their traditions, their myths—above all, their myths—are the very sign of [their] poverty of spirit and of their constitutional depravity” (Fanon, 1967: 32). With these three stages of demonization, people of African descent in particular were effectively reduced to the level of animals in the eyes of white Europeans, paving the way for their enslavement.

The demonization of blackness and people of black skin served (at least) three important purposes for Europeans and their descendent in North America: it paved the way for the ruthless and very profitable exploitation of non-white labor, enabled white people to enjoy the comfortable delusion of racial and cultural superiority, and legitimized the oppression of non-white peoples in ways that allowed for the continuation of white hegemony. Besides these self-serving benefits, the delusion of racial and cultural superiority also conferred a duty of sorts upon white people: because of their perceived preeminence, Europeans saw themselves as being responsible for bringing civilization to non-white people in general and to the indigenous peoples of Africa and America in particular. All sorts of atrocities were carried out in the name of this civilizing mission (e.g. Restall, 2020), among them the brutal suppression of non-European traditions of drug use. For Fanon, an important point in this regard was to recognize how Black people growing up under colonial regimes internalized the condemnation of their own cultural traditions as uncivilized and degenerate, effectively turning themselves into self-hating racists who believe in the white-defined narratives of their racial and cultural inferiority. This inferiority complex, to use Fanon's psychoanalytic language, necessarily resulted in the disparagement of one's own cultural traditions, and especially of such traditions that lacked a counterpart in the superior European culture and would not be met with “white approval” (Fanon, 1952/2008: 34). I believe that the postcolonial support for the international regime of drug control in Africa and other places can be understood in this light.

In the western world, outright slavery was banned in the nineteenth century, and colonial regimes and other official instruments of racial oppression—Jim Crow, apartheid—were generally dismantled during the twentieth century. Yet their legacy lives on. The lifting of actual policies of segregation does not by itself erase the accumulated social marginalization from centuries of racist oppression, and slavery, Jim Crow, and apartheid continue to cast a shadow on the descendants of the people thus oppressed. Some people—typically the descendants of the oppressors, or in other words white people—would deny this and claim that the abolishment of oppressive policies leaves a level playing field for all, and Mills (2007) coined the term white ignorance to point to such forms of racially based unawareness. White ignorance is the purging of unpleasant historical facts from memory and consciousness—the Belgian “great forgetting” of the Congolese genocide, the American silence about the Tulsa massacre—as well as the non-recognition of the long historical shadow such events cast on the survivors and their descendants. It is the unwillingness or perhaps the inability to see present-day socioeconomic realities—poverty and underdevelopment in the Global South, anti-western anger in the Middle East, destitution and alcoholism among Native Americans—in light of the history of white exploitation and oppression. And, in my understanding, it is the denial of how certain policies introduced in the twentieth century effectively continued the old instruments of racial oppression under a new name, serving as a foundation for what Mills called the “transition from de jure to de facto white supremacy” (Mills, 2007: 21).

On the religious level, this article argues that the induction of spiritual experiences may serve to challenge the authority, and therefore the power, of institutional religion. This analysis, which summarizes a discussion from my dissertation in the study of religions (Johnstad, 2022b), finds its basis in Asad's (1983, 1993) conceptualization of religion as a power structure and the related perspective that the primary motivation of a power hierarchy is to maintain its hold on power. For a religious institution, power is in large part based on authority, and any challenge to its authority is therefore also a challenge to its power. However, the institutional authority inherent to the religious hierarchy may be subject to challenges from experiential bases of authority, as people may claim that they have had a spiritual experience that contradicts the dogma and orthodoxy that the religious institution presides over.

Religious institutions are therefore incentivized to protect themselves against the possibility that persons external to the religious hierarchy might, on a basis of their personal experience, claim a level of spiritual authority surpassing that of the institution. The two most obvious strategies of institutional power consolidation would be to either bring the source of experientially based authority into the fold of the institution (cooptation), or to negate this source of authority by demonizing and suppressing it. The former strategy seems preferable since the successful cooptation of potential challengers would serve not only to protect, but perhaps also to expand, the authority of the institution. However, in order for such an approach to be possible, a certain congruence between the description of the spiritual experience and the institutional dogma is necessary.

Research into the characteristics of psychedelic experiences has emphasized their capacity to dissolve the user's sense of a separate ego or self (Grof, 1976; Lebedev et al., 2016; Millière et al., 2018; Nour et al., 2016). Such self-dissolution is understood as an important aspect of mystical experience and is often accompanied by other mystical-type characteristics such as contact or union with transcendent forces (Griffiths et al., 2006; Hood et al., 2001; Johnstad, 2021, 2022c, 2023a; Stace, 1960). When a religious hierarchy presents itself as a necessary intermediary between ordinary people and transcendent forces, however, experiences of independent contact with transcendent forces may seem to challenge the hierarchy's position. Klass’ (1995) model of hierarchical and non-hierarchical religions helps us understand the power dynamics involved. He labeled the religious specialists for these two types of religion “priests” and “shamans,” respectively, although it should be noted that he did not use these terms in exact compliance with their ordinary meaning. The non-hierarchical religions of Klass’ model impose few if any constraints on religious practices: the individual shaman is free to shape practices according to his or her wishes, and laypersons may play an active role in the proceedings. The shaman

is not part of any formal organization and lacks any corpus of written rules. […] And if a shaman seeks information about attitudes or desires of divinities or ancestors or whatever, he or she is completely free to go directly to the source—which often means by way of some altered state of consciousness. (Klass, 1995: 67)

In hierarchical religions, on the other hand, the hierarchy establishes dogma for proper rituals and acts as a link between the people and divine or transcendent realms. Laypersons are expected to take a more passive role, and the individual is not permitted to seek any form of independent contact with divine realms:

A priest is therefore subject to external authority: that of his present superiors in the hierarchy (where there is one) or that of the dogma written by those who have gone before him. He is not free to reinterpret or to devise new ceremonies or modify old ones. Most particularly, he is not free to seek independent divine guidance—that is, he may not jump the chain of command by communicating with whatever being or power lies above or beyond the formal human organization and literature. (Klass, 1995: 66–67)

Thus, in order to preserve orthodoxy and the authority of the hierarchical system, such religions would be expected to discourage practices that give ordinary people the impression of being in personal contact with divine or transcendent realms. In this regard, it is worth noting that the Inquisition of New Spain explicitly prosecuted “false mystics” who

pretended or faked having direct contact with God. The Inquisition did not fear only that their pretended contact with God was heretical but also that it served to attack the very organized structure of the Catholic Church and its hierarchy. According to the inquisitors, a false mystic, by claiming revelations and communications with God or his saints, attacked the very basic precepts of Christian morality and the church's teachings concerning the necessary role of priests as mediators between God and the Christian faithful. (Chuchiak, 2012: 274)

As far as psychoactive drug use may elicit spiritual or mystical experiences, it would therefore from a perspective of hierarchical religions seem preferable to prohibit such drugs. As Fuller stated in his exposition of the role of drugs in American religious history:

The claim to mystical experience by lay members is an implicit challenge to the authority of the ordained clergy who are entrusted with guarding orthodoxy. Mystical experiences imply that these individuals—on their own—have learned to initiate “contact” with the divine. This helps to explain why religious institutions often develop negative attitudes toward ecstasy-producing drugs. (Fuller, 2000: 13)

In sum, drug-induced spiritual experience is problematic from the perspective of institutional religion because it challenges the authority of the religious hierarchy and in some ways renders the hierarchy superfluous. A core purpose of this hierarchy is to serve as an intermediary between the human and divine realms, but such a mediating function is only required when there is a gap between the two. If individual priests (in Klass’ terminology), and even more so individual members of the laity, have the (perceived) ability to initiate contact with divinities through the independent use of psychedelic drugs, they effectively have the capacity to close the gap on their own and therefore no longer need to rely on institutional religion as an intermediary. Furthermore, spiritual experiences may serve as a source of spiritual authority and thereby constitute a challenge to the institutional authority possessed by the religious hierarchy. If psychedelic drugs were in widespread use, it is possible that these users would report many forms of spiritual experience that do not conform to the dogma of the religious institution. This would result in a heterogeneous religious landscape with many competing voices claiming spiritual authority based on personal experiences, and established religions would perhaps struggle to maintain their institutionally based spiritual authority and the system of orthodoxy they preside over. Insofar as cannabis and psychedelics may induce spiritual experiences, institutional religions would therefore be incentivized to prohibit their use. Thus, the religious rationale for drug criminalization is that the use of drugs such as cannabis and psychedelics threaten both the authority and the orthodoxy of Christian institutions.

Inquisitorial struggles in the early modern era

As the introduction and implementation of the drug criminalization regime in the twentieth century was clearly dominated by western powers, this discussion of the regime's origins will focus on the western cultural sphere. Nevertheless, we should acknowledge that there is also a history of (attempted) drug suppression for instance in Islamic cultures (Duvall, 2015, 2019; Rosenthal, 1971) and in China (Zheng, 2022). I am not aware of any direct evidence for a campaign to suppress some forms of drug use in Europe before the sixteenth century, but circumstantial evidence indicates that such suppression may have taken place. Indeed, it has been suggested that western skepticism of drug use in spiritual contexts extends back to the formative years of Christianity in late antiquity, when the Church Fathers were (putatively) confronted with “pagan” drug rites being incorporated into the practices of various Christian congregations (Muraresku, 2020; Ruck et al., 2000). Guerra-Doce noted that

at a certain point, around the first centuries of the present era, drug plants seem to have fallen into oblivion [in Europe]. The timing is significant, as it coincides with the spread of Christianity, which would ultimately be responsible for the elimination of old traditions involving drug plants. (2022: 46)

There is also a controversial research literature into early Christian use of psychoactive drugs which seems to identify iconographic and other evidence indicating that some early Christian congregations had a close relationship with such drugs that at least merits further investigation (Allegro, 1970; Brown & Brown, 2019; Merkur, 2001; Rush, 2008, 2011; Samorini, 2001). While such evidence should not be uncritically accepted, it should also not be uncritically rejected, and the fact that the authors presenting this evidence have sometimes overinterpreted it is not in itself a reason to reject the evidence altogether.

In this context, it is interesting to note that Christian authorities in Late Antiquity were especially concerned with the Gnostic heresy, which often emphasized the connection between the human and divine: for some Gnostics, to know oneself experientially at the deepest level was to know the divine, for the two are in truth one (Pagels, 1989). Such unity experiences need not be drug-induced, but as mentioned above, one of the most prominent effects of psychedelics use is that it sometimes leads to ego-dissolution and experiences of existential unity. Therefore, it is possible to understand the concern among early Christian authorities for the Gnostic heresy in relation to a putative concern about the survival of pre-Christian drug rites. According to this perspective, then, the historical foundation of the modern drug criminalization regime may extend back to late antiquity, when early Christian authorities clamped down on the continuation of what they regarded as pagan drug use practices and thereby established the official Church view on the use of drugs other than alcohol.

However, as far as I am aware, the first direct evidence of such a campaign against drug use in Europe is from the sixteenth century and relates to the introduction of coffee and tobacco. The spread of the black brew from the Muslim world caused considerable resistance from some Catholic authorities, who labeled it the “Devil's drink” and the “bitter invention of Satan” (Chrystal, 2016; Ukers, 1935/2011). Tobacco was similarly demonized (Campos, 2012, 2022; Norton, 2022), and its introduction from the New World also caused ecclesiastical controversy: Rodrigo de Jerez, who sailed with Columbus and was the first person to bring tobacco back to Europe, was reportedly imprisoned for years by the Inquisition for his smoking habit (Atkinson, 1934), and several 16^th and seventeenth century popes attempted to ban its use, with Innocent XII threatening to excommunicate tobacco users in Rome (Burns, 2006).

Nevertheless, the only lasting drug prohibition for which there is clear evidence related to the use of psychedelic plants among the indigenous peoples of the Americas. ¹ In Mexico, the Aztecs and other peoples used ololiuhqui (Ipomoea tricolor syn. Turbina corymbosa, a psychoactive species of Morning Glory), peyote (Lophophora williansii), teonanácatl (Psilocybe mushrooms), as well as the newly introduced cannabis (apparently sometimes under the name pipiltzintzintlis) and a range of other psychedelic substances in religious contexts (Campos, 2012; Carod-Artal, 2015; Dierksmeier, 2020; Elferink, 1999), while the peoples of Peru and the Amazon region used the San Pedro cactus (Echinopsis pachanoi syn. Trichocereus pachanoi), ayahuasca (a psychedelic drink usually mixing Banisteriopsis caapi and Psychotria viridis), yopo (a psychedelic snuff made from Anadenanthera peregrine), and other substances (Guerra-Doce, 2015; Miller et al., 2019). In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Catholic Church regarded such practices as a form of devil worship and responded with a ferocious prohibition campaign that has been well documented by historians (Chuchiak, 2012; Dawson, 2018; Dierksmeier, 2020; Greenleaf, 1978, 1994; Leonard, 1942; Megged, 1994; Slotkin, 1955).

The Spanish conquest and settlement of Mexico and other parts of the Americas brought them into contact with the religious practices of the indigenous peoples of these areas, which often involved the use of various psychedelic plants. Catholic authorities regarded such practices as a form of devil worship, and thus the use of psychedelic plants, “believed to facilitate communication with the devil,” joined the Inquisition's list of offenses (Dierksmeier, 2020: 292). They issued prohibition edicts against the use of “medico-religious substances that too readily facilitated ecstatic experiences of a non-Christian nature,” including a formal ban in 1620 (Campos, 2012: 41). In one trial from 1698 that condemned the use of pipiltzintzintlis, a friar recounted the following statement from a Spanish constable who had been sent to confiscate this herb from the people of Xochimilco:

We come to take this herb from these natives. It is not permitted, nor is it good that they drink this herb because with it they see many vile and evil things and visions and when they take it they speak with demons and other vile monsters. This herb is prohibited and forbidden by the Inquisition. (quoted in Chuchiak, 2012: 312)

According to the seventeenth-century journalist and natural historian José Antonio Alzate y Ramírez, pipiltzintzintlis was nothing other than cáñamo or cannabis (Dierksmeier, 2020: 302), although the term may also have been used for other plants (Campos, 2012). In 1769, Archbishop Francisco Antonio de Lorenzana y Butrón, after a visit from the Prelate, issued a decree that condemned “feigned miracles [or] revelations” and explicitly prohibited pipiltzintzintlis, peyote, and other plants that might give rise to such experiences:

…executing superstitious cures using methods and materials not conducive to sanity: or abusing Pipilzitzintlis [sic], peyote, chupamirtos or roses, or other herbs or animals or feigned miracles, revelations, raptures or enchantments…. (quoted in Dierksmeier, 2020: 293)

It is interesting to note that this religious condemnation of the use of cannabis and psychedelics connected the spiritual harms incurred by “feigned miracles” to matters of mental health. Such conflation of ostensive spiritual harms caused by spiritual experiences that the Church deemed inauthentic and more straightforward forms of mental harm may have arisen with Archbishop Lorenzana, but certainly did not end with him. As for the link to devil worship, a confessional for penitent transgressors explicated the connection:

Dost thou suck the blood of others? Dost thou wander about at night, calling upon demons to help thee? Hast thou drunk peyotl, or given it to others to drink …? (quoted in La Barre, 1938: 23)

As we saw previously, such demonization of drug use initially extended also to the tobacco that the indigenous peoples of the Americas used alongside their psychedelics. Because of tobacco's “intimate relationship with native religious practice, the church initially associated it with the devil. But for whatever reason, concern about the use of the drug was tempered” (Campos, 2012: 50). I believe that a likely explanation for this tempered concern is that tobacco does not frequently give rise to evil visions, opportunities to speak with demons, or feigned miracles, revelations, or raptures: in other words, it is not commonly reported to induce spiritual experiences.

We have seen that the inquisition's clampdown on psychedelics use in Mexico in the early modern era is the first indisputable drug prohibition campaign in the western world. ² The underlying rationale for this campaign was clearly religious, although an attempt to suppress the religious practices of conquered peoples who are ethnically and culturally distinct from their invaders is undoubtedly also racist. In this era, there was a literal demonization of indigenous drug use which portrayed it as a means of communicating with demons, but we can also understand the demonization of such cultural practices in a Fanonian perspective as proceeding from an underlying ethnoracial demonization.

Racism and demonization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Despite the inquisition's efforts, both the use of traditional psychedelics like peyote and the more recently introduced cannabis survived among the indigenous peoples of Mexico, who naturally learned to keep their drug practices secret. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the literal demonization characterizing the Inquisitorial campaigns of earlier eras gradually transformed into a different form of demonization based on exaggerated health harms that was sometimes explicitly racist, but which more commonly seemed blind to the fact that the drugs which, on rather insubstantial grounds, were portrayed as extraordinarily harmful also happened to be the ones favored by non-whites.

In nineteenth-century Mexico, the use and distribution of psychoactive plants were often linked to indigenous female herbolarias, and in line with the earlier inquisitors’ demonization of non-Christian religion and folk herbalism, such women were often vilified as witches. One illustrative example is the fictional account by Manuel Payno of a healing rite involving a human sacrifice to the Virgin of Guadelope, where a lost child “was captured by the older of the herbolarias, and was thrown into a field, where it was sure to be devoured by wild dogs” (Campos, 2012: 148). Racial prejudice thus fused with misogyny and the anxiety over non-Christian religiosity into a demonization trifecta. According to one commentator, the fear of cannabis had reached hysterical levels by 1908:

The horror that this plant inspires has reached such an extreme that when the common people […] see even just a single plant, they feel as if in the presence of a demonic spirit. Women and children run frightened and they make the sign of the cross simply upon hearing its name. The friars hurl their excommunications against those who grow and use it and the authorities persecute it with such fury that they order it to be uprooted and burnt, imposing cruel penalties on whom they find it. In a word they believe that it is a weed that has come from hell. (quoted in Campos, 2012: 165)

Furthermore, in Mexico, cannabis was “overwhelmingly associated with a class of people considered to be dangerous, degenerated, and criminal” (Campos, 2012: 119), and indeed the 1920 prohibition against its use was named “Dispositions on the Cultivation and Commerce of Substances That Degenerate the Race.” In such degeneration discourse, cannabis would accelerate or trigger atavistic tendencies latent in the bloodlines of certain people, effectively transforming them into ferocious beasts.

The inquisitorial prohibition of peyote also seems to have informed the campaign against peyote in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries United States. The territorial jurisdiction of the Inquisition in New Spain originally included the commissariats of Florida, Louisiana, New Mexico, and the California (Chuchiak, 2012), thus providing for an extensive geographical overlap, and the US campaign was driven by missionaries who found that peyote use in the Native American Church hindered their Christianizing efforts (Maroukis, 2012; Soni, 2016). Thus, the concern over the religious use of psychedelics continued to form a vanguard for some aspects of the drug prohibition movement well into the ninteenth and twentieth centuries.

Furthermore, Christian missionaries and pastors condemned cannabis use in Africa, where churches in the late nineteenth century sometimes excommunicated users (Duvall, 2019). Such censure seems to have been one reason for the early cannabis criminalization in colonial Africa, although colonial administrators were also concerned about the possibility that cannabis use caused the “sleeping sickness” (trypanosomiasis) that ravaged their workforces and profit margins (the disease is actually caused by a protozoan transmitted by the tsetse fly). At the same time, there was also a movement of Christian missionaries in Asia campaigning for the suppression of opium use (Lazich, 2006; Lodwick, 1996; Pettus, 2016).

These efforts to prohibit cannabis and opium soon spread to North America (Bonnie & Whitebread, 1970; Boyd, 2021; Hickman, 2000), where the campaign also included cocaine and was often accompanied by explicit racist rhetoric. When the US Federal Bureau of Narcotics presented its case for the criminalization of cannabis during the hearings for the 1937 Federal Tax Act, they warned that “marijuana causes White women to seek sexual relations with Negroes” (quoted in Gerber, 2004: 9). ³ Such racist rhetoric also included substantial mischaracterizations as to the effects of these drugs, not least with regard to their wildly exaggerated capacity to induce violent behavior. To take one example, a doctor quoted in Armstrong and Parascandola (1972) claimed that attacks on white women “are the direct result of a cocaine-crazed negro brain” (31). Cannabis similarly became known as the “killer weed,” the use of which resulted in “actions of uncontrollable violence” according to a police officer in Kansas and in “[n]umerous assaults […] upon officers and citizens with intent to kill” according to the Los Angeles Police Department (quoted in Bonnie & Whitebread, 1970: 1025). Relatedly, cannabis also gained a reputation for driving users insane, and this association with insanity, although lacking scientific corroboration, was accepted by legislatures and courts across the United States (Armstrong & Parascandola, 1972; Bonnie & Whitebread, 1970). One pharmacist, writing in a 1936 article in the American Journal of Nursing, warned that “continual cannabis use”

is known to produce a violent type of insanity which has brought to it the name “loco weed.” The subject will suddenly turn with murderous violence upon whomever is nearest to him. He will run amuck with knife, axe, gun, or anything else that is close at hand, and will kill or maim without any reason. (quoted in Armstrong & Parascandola, 1972: 29)

As indicated by the literature on drug harms cited in the introduction, these concerns over insanity and violence were clearly exaggerated, at least as compared to the effects of alcohol use. Similarly, early studies into the putative harms of cannabis use such as the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1895), the Panama Canal Zone Governor's Committee (Abel, 1982; Bonnie & Whitebread, 1970; Siler et al., 1933), and the La Guardia Committee Report (1944) all found that cannabis use was not a significant health concern, and a study by Bromberg (1934) concluded that cannabis was not habit-forming and did not induce violent behavior. Thus, the scientists of the era “had little evidence of [Cannabis] indica-induced insanity” (Duvall, 2015: 158). A few decades later the Nixon administration appointed the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse (1972) but proceeded to ignore its conclusion that cannabis was not a threat to society and should be decriminalized. Irwin (1973) conducted the first systematic comparative drug harms assessment, finding that alcohol use was more hazardous to health than was any illicit drug use, but the campaign for drug control intensified throughout the final decades of the century. At this time there was less acceptance for explicit racism in public discourse in the United States, however, and the racial rationale behind the intensification of the campaign of drug prohibition is not as readily identifiable. Nevertheless, Nixon's advisors Ehrlichman and Haldeman reportedly admitted that the Nixon administration's declaration of a war on drugs in the early 1970s was based on racial motives (Baum, 1996, 2016). Furthermore, Alexander (2010, 2011) and Provine (2011) have emphasized the role of racial bias in the clampdown on crack cocaine in the 1980s and 90s.

It is interesting to follow the demonization of drug use not traditional to European cultures into the twentieth century. In the first half of the century, such demonization was still frequently literal, with opium beings commonly referred to as the “demon flower” (e.g. Graham-Mulhall, 1926) and cannabis being labeled “the devil's weed” (Cape, 2003). Duvall (2015) observed that “[f]undamentalist Christian anti-drug crusaders have made Cannabis into monsters,” citing a 1943 book by James Devine called The Moloch of Marijuana “in which marijuana was a false god that demanded the sacrifice of young people” (146). And when the US Federal Bureau of Narcotics argued before Congress during the hearings for the 1937 Federal Tax Act, they warned against cannabis on the basis that its use had caused the growth of “satanic” jazz music (Gerber, 2004). Protestant missionaries who fought for the suppression of opium use in China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century similarly spoke of the drug as “evil” (Lodwick, 1996), and such negative labeling practices ultimately found their way into the rhetoric of international drug control:

The missionaries’ insistence on deploying absolutist categories such as sin, evil, and slavery to describe opium use found its way into the text of the multilateral treaties, commentaries, and diplomatic discourse that structure the international narcotics control regime today. (Pettus, 2016: 56)

Thus, the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961 portrayed drug use as “evil,” while in more recent debates drugs were framed in terms such as a “scourge” or “monster” threatening to annihilate humanity and requiring the response of an “international crusade” (Hobson, 2014; Room, 1999). This language was employed not only by western powers, but also by recently decolonialized nations whose cultural traditions had long included a relationship with these ostensibly monstrous drugs. To take one example, the Indian delegation to the 1994–1995 debates in the Commission on Narcotics Drugs declared that “[We must take action] before the drug monster annihilates the entire humanity” (quoted in Room, 1999: 1692), which is ironic given the Indian centuries-long traditions for cannabis and opium use. I would understand such overdramatization as an example of the Fanonian cultural inferiority complex, where people growing up under colonial regimes have tended to internalize the white disparagement of their own cultures and to compensate for their perceived inferiority by essentially demonizing the aspects of these cultural traditions that have been met with white disapproval. It is also interesting to note that neither slavery, apartheid, nor torture has ever reached the same level of iniquity in the language of UN conventions (Lines, 2010).

Back in 1972, Armstrong and Parascandola acknowledged that “[t]he question of why sensationalism about marihuana was able to take hold [in the 1930s United States], even among some persons who were knowledgeable about drugs, is a very complex one” (30). Besides pointing to the drug's “foreign image,” they discussed legends about violent Muslim Assassins and the association between heroin and cocaine use and violence that had already formed in the United States. Since the use of these drugs was associated predominantly with Chinese, Blacks, and Mexicans, it might seem that the three reasons largely boil down to the same thing, namely the complex of ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and racial prejudice that characterized the United States of this era.

In order to explain why cannabis use, which according to some present-day research tends to make people less prone to violence, became strongly associated with violent crime, while perceptions of the actual violence-inducing drug alcohol were more nuanced, one factor seems prominent. Since alcohol use was widespread among the societally dominant majority population in the United States—white people of European descent—most such people had a good understanding about its effects and would recognize that although alcohol use sometimes leads to violence, most people are able to handle their drinking reasonably well. Such a situation leaves little room for myths and prejudice. Cannabis use, on the other hand, was widespread only among the ethnoracial groups that the majority population considered cognitively and morally inferior, and it is not difficult to understand that such a foundation of racial prejudice was fertile ground for the growth of prejudices also about the effects of the intoxicants used by these racialized minority groups. A similar dynamic of prejudice played out in Mexico from the late nineteenth century on, and probably served as the inspiration for the later developments in the United States (Campos, 2012). While the Mexican discourse included warnings about alcoholism, the effects from alcohol were well known, and therefore

the discourse surrounding it was far more diverse and developed. Commentaries on the baleful effects of marijuana tended to be simple and efficient: the drug caused madness and violence and was an undisputed, pernicious force in society. Anti-alcohol campaigns, by contrast, were forced to rely on a much more diverse array of arguments. (Campos, 2012: 114)

In Mexico, condemnation of cannabis was rooted in class and racial prejudice, which were often overlapping since the descendants of the original indigenous inhabitants were usually poor. Such Mexican racism eventually flowed northwards, accompanying underprivileged mestizo (mixed ancestry) laborers who traveled to the United States in search of work; ironically, the Mexican prejudice against mestizos was thus turned into a general prejudice against Mexicans in the United States.

Race, religion, and drug criminalization in the contemporary world

We have seen that the drug criminalization regime of the twentieth century can be traced back to a campaign by Christian authorities to stamp out heterodox spirituality—possibly extending back to the Church Fathers of late antiquity, but certainly to the Inquisition of early modernity. The fact that the psychedelics (and coca leaf) that the Inquisition clamped down on in the Americas were used predominantly by the indigenous peoples of this continent, and that cannabis and opium use was prevalent especially in India, Africa, Asia, and the Arab world, also adds a racial dimension to this religious prohibition campaign. In both European colonial empires and in the United States, it is undebatable that drug criminalization arose in a context of systemic racism and targeted drug use associated with racialized minority groups.

These historical developments resonate in the contemporary world in a number of readily identifiable ways. In empirical research, Christian religiosity is still associated with less cannabis use in the United States (e.g. Steinman et al., 2008; Wallace et al., 2007), and Gritsenko et al. (2020) found the same in Russia. Krystosek (2016) investigated how different forms of religious belief and practice influence attitudes to cannabis policy, and his most complex statistical model found that social participation and belief in the literalness of the Bible as God's word predicted support for cannabis criminalization. Social control via religious institutions therefore seems to explain support for criminalization at least to some extent. It should be noted that this model by Krystosek controlled for political ideology, so that the impact from participation in organized religion and commitment to dogma was independent from the conservatism that is often associated with religiosity. While conservatism also predicted support for criminalization, participation in organized Christianity and belief in the literalness of the Bible predicted further support for criminalization beyond what would be expected on the basis of conservatism alone.

Convergent results in other research include the role of religiosity in strengthening the perceived immorality of drug use among university students in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, with the author concluding that “religious institutions seem to play an effective role in shaping normative culture around drug use” (Stylianou, 2004: 445). Jorgensen (2018) found that “commitment to religion” among police officers in the southern US predicted punitive attitudes toward drug use, while Cruz et al. (2018) found that Catholics in Uruguay were more likely to oppose cannabis legalization, whereas atheism predicted support for legalization. In Brazil, Sanchez et al. (2011) identified the role of religious beliefs in shaping negative attitudes toward drug uses as sinful and evil.

More problematically, there is a clear ethnoracial bias in how drug criminalization is enforced in the contemporary world. Such bias has been identified at every level of enforcement from being searched by the police through the stages of arrest, prosecution, conviction, and sentencing (Earp et al., 2021). Although best documented in the United States (Brunson, 2007; Koch et al., 2016; Omori, 2019; White, 2015), racial disproportionality in drug crime policing has also been identified in England and Wales (Shiner et al., 2018) and the Nordic countries (Solhjell et al., 2019; Sollund, 2006), among other places. The High Commissioner on Human Rights Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (2021) at the United Nations reported that people of African descent were targeted by drug prosecution at 4.5 times the rate of Caucasians in the United Kingdom, and at 6.5 times the rate of Caucasians in the United States, although drug use among the two groups was at comparable levels. ⁴ The report also found that in Mexico, “minorities and the poor are disproportionately targeted” (8), and generally concluded that drug criminalization facilitates discrimination against marginalized groups:

The Working Group has observed that criminalization of drug use facilitates the deployment of the criminal justice system against drug users in a discriminatory way, with law enforcement officers often targeting members of vulnerable and marginalized groups, such as minorities, people of African descent, indigenous peoples, women, persons with disabilities, persons with AIDS and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex persons. Homeless persons, sex workers, migrants, juveniles, the unemployed and ex-convicts may also be vulnerable. (High Commissioner on Human Rights Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, 2021: 8)

To this it might be added that the criminalization regime has entailed high levels of community violence especially in the Global South, thereby arguably violating the human right to life and security of people living in drug-transit countries (Johnstad, 2023b). This further exacerbates the racial disproportionality in the regime's negative societal impact. The consequences of the racial bias in the implementation of the drug criminalization are for their part especially noteworthy in the United States, which has been the main instigator and defender of the international criminalization regime. Alexander (2011) pointed to some particularly glaring statistics:

More African American adults are under correctional control today—in prison or jail, on probation or parole—than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.

In 2007 more black men were disenfranchised than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race (Alexander, 2011: 9).

These developments are not exclusively related to drug criminalization (e.g. Pfaff, 2017), but it seems clear that the racial bias in arrests, prosecutions, convictions, and sentencing, as well as the subsequent disenfranchisement of people with felony convictions in many US states, has in some ways replicated the conditions from the eras of slavery and Jim Crow. As Steiner and Argothy (2001), Alexander (2010, 2011), and others have emphasized, drug criminalization is one important aspect of the legacy of racial segregation and oppression, serving essentially as a continuation of the old racist regimes under a guise of apparent colorblindness.

Conclusions and implications

We have seen above that the tendency to demonize illicit drugs, which was still in full flower in the discourse of international drug control in the late twentieth century, can be traced back at least to the early modern Inquisitorial clampdown on religious psychedelics use among indigenous peoples of the Americas. At some point in the twentieth century, however, the specifically religious rationale behind the early demonization efforts transformed into a health-based rationale. In the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, drug use was not “evil” because it facilitated communion with demons but because it constituted a grave danger to public health and safety. Furthermore, the large-scale introduction of these drugs especially in the United States took place predominantly via ethnoracial minorities, and it may have been this racial disparity that provoked the white majority population to respond with moral outrage and prohibitionist effort. In a society embroiled in struggles for racial and ethnic hegemony, the prohibition of minorities’ preferred intoxicants sometimes served as an excuse to further suppress these minorities and thereby maintain the system of white supremacy. More invisibly, underlying notions of racial and cultural inferiority seem to have served as a foundation for exaggerated fears over the harmfulness of this intoxicant use.

Thus, if the western world has been more alarmed by the health risks from illicit drug use than what would be justified by a sober assessment of their actual harm potential, the discrepancy may be explained by the fact that these drugs were originally used by non-white peoples. As this article has emphasized, such drug use in non-European cultures extend far longer back in time than what the references to minority groups in twentieth century North America allow for, and in the colonial era, cultural practices not reflected in European practices would tend to be disparaged as primitive and worthless. The customs and traditions of Arabs, Indians, and especially Africans were, as Fanon put it, taken as evidence of their “poverty of spirit and of their constitutional depravity” (Fanon, 1967: 32). Such ethnocentrism and xenophobia among people of European descent were, unsurprisingly, fertile ground for prejudice against the intoxicants these people used. In the white imagination of this historical era, Black people especially, but Arabs and Indians too, were exactly the sort of biologically and culturally inferior people who would be liable to use a drug that might turn a person into an insane murderer at the blink of an eye.

Today, the xenophobia that formed the basis for the gross exaggerations of the early twentieth century appears to live on in more muted forms of exaggerations in contemporary drug harms research. As pointed out for instance in Johnstad (2022a), there seems to be a systematic inconsistency in how we speak about the dangers from licit and illicit drugs. Why is the moderate association between cannabis use and psychosis, with a median odds ratio of 1.75 in the overview of meta-analyses presented in Johnstad (2022a), regarded as a major societal problem, while much less attention is given to the apparently stronger association between tobacco use and psychosis, with a median odds ratio of 2.70? We find the same tendency for a range of other drug-related issues, from violence to traffic accidents to brain damage: while the main culprit for such harms is actually alcohol, a lot of our attention is instead diverted toward less problematic illicit drugs.

One important dynamic that seems to be at play here is a tendency to confuse the social characteristics of drug users with the medical consequences of drug use. To illustrate this point, we can further examine the grossly exaggerated attribution of madness and violence to cannabis use in Mexico and the United States and its curious parallel in the even more exaggerated attribution of “sleeping sickness” or trypanosomiasis to cannabis use in colonial Africa. In Africa, “sleeping sickness accompanied exploitative labor relationships” (Duvall, 2019: 180). Enslaved people deprived of adequate nourishment, clothing or shelter were extra vulnerable to tsetse bites and trypanosomiasis infection, and many fell victim to the disease. Given their situation, we should not be surprised that these people were inclined to smoke cannabis (or use other intoxicants) when they had the chance in order to get a brief respite from their miserable existence, and to be observed doing so because of their proximity to slave owners. The misery that made them vulnerable to disease also gave them reason to use as much cannabis as they could get their hands on. In Mexico and the United States, the racialized underclasses were by the early twentieth century no longer enslaved, but many lived in destitution, hopelessness, and under the constant threat of violence. People living in such conditions are at extra risk for psychosis and other forms of mental illness (Altekruse et al., 2020; Jongsma et al., 2021; Ridley et al., 2020), and their capacity for violent outbursts is often simply a means of survival. The misery that made these people vulnerable to psychosis and prone to acts of violence also gave them reason to use as much cannabis as they could get their hands on. On both sides of the Atlantic, therefore, socioeconomically privileged observers could see a given cultural practice (cannabis use) and a negative health outcome (trypanosomiasis or violent psychosis) manifest more commonly in racialized underclass groups, and these observers concluded that the cannabis use must be the source of the negative health outcomes. More realistically, cannabis use and negative health outcomes were both caused by the fact that these underclass individuals were perpetually exploited and left to a miserable existence that they were eager to obtain any kind of escape from. The privileged observers looked for reasons, but were not ready to understand that they, and the system they represented, were the reason, preferring instead to blame the cannabis that the racialized underclass used as perhaps their only means of getting a brief respite from the misery of their lives.

The tendency to confuse social characteristics and medical consequences is still with us in contemporary drug harms research. In such research, much emphasis has been placed on the association between cannabis use and psychosis, where the latter often tends to be interpreted as a consequence of the former. As mentioned above, however, psychosis is at least as strongly associated with tobacco use as with cannabis use (Johnstad, 2022a). Since it might seem unlikely that cannabis use and tobacco use should both have the capacity to cause psychosis, a more reasonable explanation would be that such substance use is associated with certain social characteristics which in turn are associated with psychiatric conditions. In other words, the evidence indicates that miserable people tend to engage in escapist substance use, and for some of them a psychiatric condition is the underlying reason for their misery while others are at risk for such conditions because of their misery.

In the context of the racism discussed in this article, the problem with conflating social characteristics and medical consequences is that it produces a bias against underprivilege, which in turn is statistically associated with being non-white. Furthermore, such conflation serves to support a drug criminalization regime that has very harmful consequences for underprivileged minority groups (e.g. Hart, 2020). Thus, while exaggerated claims of drug harms may be well intended, for instance with the belief that they might scare some young people away from experimenting with drugs, they can also be understood as ethnoracially biased statements that serve to perpetuate a criminalization regime that has had dire consequences especially for Blacks, and which has its genesis in colonial-era demonization of non-white peoples and cultures.

In my understanding, the non-recognition of the deep historical roots of the bias against illicit drugs and of its ultimate origin in the demonization of non-white peoples and cultures is an example of white ignorance. For a neutral observer, it should be obvious that the early twentieth-century criminalization of the drugs used by ethnoracial minorities in the United States was intimately related to racial and ethnic power struggles: when a systemically racist country prohibits the cultural practices of its minority groups, that prohibition must obviously be understood in a context of racism. More broadly, only a person deeply embedded in white ignorance could believe it a coincidence that the substances that were prohibited under the international regime of drug control were those that lacked a history of broad acceptance in European cultures, while the substances that did have such a history of European acceptance were all exempted. Institutions such as the Canadian Senate (Senate Special Committee on Illegal Drugs, 2002) and the Constitutional Court of South Africa (2018) have acknowledged and problematized the racist origins of the cannabis prohibition regime, and more should be expected to follow.

It should be noted at this point that even if the condemnation of drugs such as cannabis and opium was originally motivated by xenophobia based on the devaluation and suspicion of non-white cultural practices and the wish to keep non-white people in their place, it gradually transformed itself into a societal and academic orthodoxy. Over the course of the twentieth century, the notion that illicit drug use is extremely harmful somehow established itself as common knowledge, despite the fact that actual research into the matter, at least with regard to cannabis, repeatedly obtained evidence to the contrary (e.g. Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1895; La Guardia Committee Report, 1944; National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse, 1972). I believe we should understand this construction of common knowledge in the light of similar constructions, including the previously discussed fact that it “was common knowledge for Europeans in western Central Africa that sleeping sickness was a form of poisoning caused by cannabis” (Duvall, 2019: 180). Furthermore, we should also remember that in the first half of the twentieth century it was common knowledge in Europe and North America that women were inferior to men, homosexuals were sexual perverts, and non-white people were inferior to white people. Common knowledge, in other words, is commonly wrong, and especially when it is based on standards related to normative maleness, heterosexuality, and whiteness. As Mejia et al. (2018) emphasized, the drug criminalization regime has been based on the same post-truth ideology and politics that characterized the neo-nationalist resurgence of the 2010s.

Nevertheless, I believe we must acknowledge that even as common knowledge may represent prejudicial perspectives that happen to be factually untrue, it is also, as its name implies, widespread. Matters of common knowledge that are actually based in misogynist, homophobic, or racist prejudice may therefore be accepted even among people who are not themselves misogynists, homophobes, or racists, and when such people give expression or support to these matters of common knowledge, they do so without awareness of the underlying prejudice. This is an important aspect of white ignorance. When researchers and policy makers refer to the grave dangers related to illicit drug use, therefore, they should generally be understood as simply being informed by, and giving expression to, a societal and academic orthodoxy. That this orthodoxy is largely incorrect in a comparative sense and effectively serves to perpetuate the historical prejudice against non-white peoples and their cultural practices is not yet generally recognized. However, I believe it is also true to say that we are fast approaching a situation where excuses based on ignorance can no longer be regarded as legitimate.

We can understand the tendency to exaggerate the detrimental impact of illicit drug use in light of the well-identified racial bias in the enforcement of drug criminalization. As reviewed above, there is today a strong evidential base for the existence of such a racial bias especially in the United States, but also in European countries, and this bias pertains not only to the police, but also to prosecutors and judges (e.g. Earp et al., 2021). If the racist motivations behind the initiation of the regime of drug control in the first half of the twentieth century has survived in the form of a racial bias internalized by present-day police officers, prosecutors, judges, and juries, then it would not seem surprising if the same bias has been internalized by many researchers as well. Research into the harmful effects of illicit drugs is often paid for by grants from governmental institutions that are essentially embedded in the overall prohibition campaign—the United States’ National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) being one prominent example—and there is no reason to expect that academics working for such institutions should be immune to a racial bias that has clearly survived among equally well-educated prosecutors and judges. ⁵

In the final analysis, the drug criminalization regime can be understood as being rooted in the attempt by Catholic authorities to preserve the purity of their traditions by suppressing heterodox tendencies emerging from individualized mysticism empowered by drugs such as cannabis and psychedelics. In a colonial context, such concern over spiritual harms incurred by nondoctrinal spiritual practices was necessarily rather inhospitable to the cultural traditions of the conquered peoples. Over time, as the concerns over spiritual harms melded with concerns over medical harms, the xenophobia and cultural disparagement made it easier to believe that these colonialized peoples were such simple ignoramuses that they would be inclined to use drugs that harmed their brains in serious ways. By the nineteenth century, the struggle for religious purity melded with the broader struggle for white privilege, and the demonization of non-white cultural and religious practices related to drug use continued unabated. Thus, the US-led suppression of cannabis and other drugs in the twentieth century should be seen not only in relation to the immediate situation of an influx of Mexicans and the ongoing oppression of Black people, but in context of the broader ethnoracial struggle between white Europeans, dominant but in fear of being overwhelmed, and the multitudes of non-white peoples encroaching on white privilege. The international criminalization of some drugs and non-criminalization of others is not merely a historical accident, but must be understood as an expression of white hegemony.

Thus, we can see present-day exaggerations about illicit drug harms as originating in these ethnoracial and religious struggles, with underlying concerns about preserving white privilege and Christian orthodoxy reflecting themselves first in concerns over spiritual harms—seeing ostensive experiences of contact with the divine as examples of communication with demons—and thereupon in concerns over health harms. In the twentieth century, when accusations of devil worship started to lose their relevance, exaggerated concerns over health risks served as a means of continued demonization of these drugs and provided an excuse for their criminalization. According to this perspective, the exaggerations of drug harms among some researchers constitute an integral aspect of the broader ethnoracial struggle by providing apparently objective reasons to maintain the criminalization regime. However, as per Mills’ white ignorance, the people giving expression to exaggerated harms claims are probably often unaware of the racial and religious dimensions that may serve as the historical fundament for such claims.