Cannabis Britannica: Empire, Trade, and Prohibition, 1800-1928.

Cannabis Britannica: Empire, Trade, and Prohibition. By James H. Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. xii plus 239 pp.).

The profusion of recent historical work in the field of "drug history" may be roughly sorted by the authors' orientation to two important questions. First, is the work drug-specific, or does it aim to say something generally about a range of illicit or licit substances? The former tend to emphasize detail and specific contexts, while the latter works paint with a much broader brush in looking for widely applicable generalizations. Second, does the author have an explicit policy orientation, or does the work tend to emphasize careful (and ostensibly more neutral) historical excavation? The former places the author in a position of advocacy in which the historical record labors in service of contemporary reform, while the latter's policy views tend to be buried under the details of the historical account.

James Mills' Cannabis Britannica is as drug-specific as a work can be. Indeed, the study is so richly detailed on the subject of cannabis and the British Empire, that Mills has taken the story only up through 1928--a second volume, to cover the more recent history, is planned. Devoting so much space to the early history of one substance--and further limiting that study to Britain and her empire--has some payoffs. This study is built upon a tremendous research effort, one which easily surpasses anything heretofore written on the subject. Indeed, this book should quickly become one of the standard historical references on cannabis. I found the chapters on early medical experimentation and commercial cultivation especially useful, for it is here that the author's immersion in the details yields new insights. Mills unearths the tax-avoidance schemes of Indian cannabis growers, for example, and argues that these early illicit smuggling networks were critical to the development of cannabis' "criminal associations" in the minds of British officials.

Of course, this level of detail is not without its frustrations. Like other drug-specific monographs, the early history is a record of not much happening. Potentially significant research turns out not to interest anybody, potential sources of regulation and control prove indifferent to the drug, and potential commercial interest fails to catch on. Perhaps the biggest non-event in the whole book is that few people in the UK between 1800 and 1928 (the period of this study) ever consumed cannabis! One sometimes feels in reading Cannabis Britannica that a great deal of space has been devoted to non-events but, as David Courtwright pointed out in Forces of Habit, the failure to embrace particular drugs at particular moments can tell us a great deal about drugs and their use. (1)

In his story of cannabis and empire, Mills serves up a great deal of original research on the construction of the cannabis user as deviant. Chapter Four, for example, goes a long way toward filling in the story of how cannabis became definitively linked with crime and madness. While the facts are always up front, this chapter offers a nice addition to the theoretical literature on colonial regimes, surveillance, and production of social problems. One of the most attractive aspects of this analysis is the manner in which Mills rarely settles for neat dichotomies (native v. Western, for example). Patterns of cannabis use in India, for example, show the drug to have been culturally integral for some and alien to others. One hopes to see still more of this sort of analysis in the volume to come.

With respect to the issue of policy advocacy versus "neutral" excavation of facts, Mills is skeptical of the advocacy posture. The Introduction clearly shows that all sides of the contemporary debate over cannabis policy have misused the historical record. Their sins--the selective use of facts, the failure to consider context, presentism--are ones that Mills easily avoids. There is, nonetheless, a bridge between past and present in this work, and that is the question of how policy is made. Although one cannot identify a particular model of policymaking that informs this study, the general argument seems to be that policy before 1928 was "driven by mistakes and misunderstandings rather than by well-informed debate." (page 7) This is Mills' critique of contemporary policy as well. The implied solution would seem to be policy developed on the basis of medical or scientific expertise, presumably in a setting free of political, moral, or value judgments. Just how this would work in practice is not entirely clear. How might policymakers shed the surrounding political universe? After all, the political universe is what Mills so effectively shows to have been critical to the creation of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, to the actions of the League of Nations, and the passage of the Defense of the Realm Act.

One might conclude that turning policy over to the medico-scientific experts might solve the problem, but Mills' own medical men nearly always seem influenced by a regard for something beyond objective study. The quest for fame and fortune, the desire to make a name for one's self appear time and again in this account. Likewise, medical research picks up upon the worst user stereotypes, leading medical men to link cannabis to insanity and criminality based on little real evidence. The Pharmaceutical Society classified cannabis as a poison based largely on sensationalized media reports and a fear of adverse publicity. Is any of this far removed from what we might expect of contemporary medicine? Mills does not answer, but this is surely a most important question to consider before drawing any conclusions for policy.

ENDNOTE 

1. David T. Courtwright, Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA, 2001).

Joseph Spillane

University of Florida