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).