The cultivation, use, and trade of
psychoactive and other
drugs has occurred since ancient times. Concurrently, authorities have often restricted drug possession and trade for a variety of political and religious reasons. In the 20th century, the United States led a major renewed surge in drug prohibition called the "
war on drugs".
Early drug laws religion worshiped the god of
Peyote, a drug. The prohibition on
alcohol under Islamic
Sharia law, which is usually attributed to passages in the ''
Qur'an'', dates back to the early seventh century. Although Islamic law is often interpreted as prohibiting all
intoxicants (not only alcohol), the ancient practice of
hashish smoking has continued throughout the
history of Islam, against varying degrees of resistance. A major campaign against hashish-eating
Sufis were conducted in
Egypt in the 11th and 12th centuries resulting among other things in the burning of fields of
cannabis. Though the prohibition of
illegal drugs was established under Sharia law, particularly against the use of hashish as a
recreational drug, classical
jurists of medieval
Islamic jurisprudence accepted the use of hashish for
medicinal and therapeutic purposes, and agreed that its "medical use, even if it leads to
mental derangement, should remain exempt [from punishment]". In the 14th century, the Islamic scholar Az-Zarkashi spoke of "the permissibility of its use for medical purposes if it is established that it is beneficial". . Chinese attempts to suppress opium smuggling sparked the
First Opium War. In the
Ottoman Empire,
Murad IV attempted to prohibit
coffee drinking to Muslims as
haraam, arguing that it was an
intoxicant, but this ruling was overturned soon after he died in 1640. The introduction of coffee in Europe from Muslim Turkey prompted calls for it to be banned as the devil's work, although
Pope Clement VIII sanctioned its use in 1600, declaring that it was "so delicious that it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it".
Bach's
Coffee Cantata, from the 1730s, presents a vigorous debate between a girl and her father over her desire to consume coffee. The early association between
coffeehouses and seditious political activities in England led to the banning of such establishments in the mid-17th century. A number of Asian rulers had similarly enacted early prohibitions, many of which were later forcefully overturned by Western colonial powers during the 18th and 19th centuries. In 1360, for example, King
Ramathibodi I, of
Ayutthaya Kingdom (now
Thailand), prohibited opium consumption and trade. The prohibition lasted nearly 500 years until 1851 when King
Rama IV allowed Chinese migrants to consume opium. The Konbaung Dynasty prohibited all
intoxicants and
stimulants during the reign of King Bodawpaya (1781–1819). After Burma became a
British colony, the restrictions on opium were abolished and the colonial government established monopolies selling Indian-produced opium. In late
Qing China,
opium imported by foreign traders, such as those employed by
Jardine Matheson and the
East India Company, was consumed by all social classes in
Southern China. Between 1821 and 1837, imports of the drug increased fivefold. The wealth drain and widespread social problems that resulted from this consumption prompted the Chinese government to attempt to end the trade. This effort was initially successful, with
Lin Zexu ordering the
destruction of opium at Humen in June 1839. However, the opium traders lobbied the British government to declare war on China, resulting in the
First Opium War. The Qing government was defeated and the war ended with the
Treaty of Nanking, which legalized opium trading in Chinese law
First modern drug regulations ''. The sale of drugs in the UK was regulated by the
Pharmacy Act 1868. The first modern law in Europe for the regulating of drugs was the
Pharmacy Act 1868 in the United Kingdom. There had been previous moves to establish the medical and pharmaceutical professions as separate, self-regulating bodies, but the
General Medical Council, established in 1863, unsuccessfully attempted to assert control over drug distribution. The act set controls on the distribution of poisons and drugs. Poisons could only be sold if the purchaser was known to the seller or to an intermediary known to both, and drugs, including
opium and all preparations of opium or of
poppies, had to be sold in containers with the seller's name and address. Despite the reservation of opium to professional control, general sales did continue to a limited extent, with mixtures with less than 1 percent opium being unregulated. After the legislation passed, the death rate caused by opium immediately fell from 6.4 per million population in 1868 to 4.5 in 1869. Deaths among children under five dropped from 20.5 per million population between 1863 and 1867 to 12.7 per million in 1871 and further declined to between 6 and 7 per million in the 1880s. In the United States, the first drug law was passed in
San Francisco in 1875, banning the smoking of opium in
opium dens. The reason cited was "many women and young girls, as well as young men of a respectable family, were being induced to visit the Chinese opium-smoking dens, where they were ruined morally and otherwise." This was followed by other laws throughout the country, and federal laws that barred Chinese people from trafficking in opium. Though the laws affected the use and distribution of opium by Chinese immigrants, no action was taken against the producers of such products as
laudanum, a
tincture of opium and alcohol, commonly taken as a
panacea by white Americans. The distinction between its use by white Americans and Chinese immigrants was thus a form of
racial discrimination as it was based on the form in which it was ingested: Chinese immigrants tended to smoke it, while it was often included in various kinds of generally liquid medicines often (but not exclusively) used by Americans of European descent. The laws targeted opium smoking, but not other methods of ingestion. Britain passed the All-India Opium Act of 1878, which limited recreational opium sales to registered Indian opium-eaters and Chinese opium-smokers and prohibiting its sale to emigrant workers from British Burma. Following the passage of a regional law in 1895, Australia's
Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897 addressed opium addiction among
Aborigines, though it soon became a general vehicle for depriving them of basic rights by administrative regulation. Opium sale was prohibited to the general population in 1905, and smoking and possession were prohibited in 1908. Despite these laws, the late 19th century saw an increase in opiate consumption. This was due to the prescribing and dispensing of legal opiates by physicians and pharmacists to relieve
menstruation pain. It is estimated that between 150,000 and 200,000 opiate addicts lived in the United States at the time, and a majority of these addicts were women. Due to increasing pressure in the
British parliament, the
Liberal government under
William Ewart Gladstone approved the appointment of a
Royal Commission on Opium to India in 1893. The commission was tasked with ascertaining the impact of Indian opium exports to the
Far East, and to advise whether the trade should be banned and opium consumption itself banned in India. After an extended inquiry, the Royal Commission rejected the claims made by the anti-opium campaigners regarding the supposed societal harm caused by the trade and the issue was finalized for another 15 years. The missionary organizations were outraged over the
Royal Commission on Opium's conclusions and set up the Anti-Opium League in China; the league gathered data from every Western-trained medical doctor in China and published
Opinions of Over 100 Physicians on the Use of Opium in China. This was the first anti-drug campaign to be based on scientific principles, and it had a tremendous impact on the state of educated opinion in the West. In England, the home director of the
China Inland Mission,
Benjamin Broomhall, was an active opponent of the opium trade, writing two books to promote the banning of opium smoking:
The Truth about Opium Smoking and
The Chinese Opium Smoker. In 1888, Broomhall formed and became secretary of the Christian Union for the Severance of the British Empire with the Opium Traffic and editor of its periodical,
National Righteousness. He lobbied the British parliament to ban the opium trade. Broomhall and
James Laidlaw Maxwell appealed to the London Missionary Conference of 1888 and the Edinburgh Missionary Conference of 1910 to condemn the continuation of the trade. As Broomhall lay dying, an article from
The Times was read to him with the welcome news that an international agreement had been signed ensuring the end of the opium trade within two years. ,
Louisiana in 1912 reporting on a drug arrest, a month after the
International Opium Convention was signed and ratified at The Hague In 1906, a motion to 'declare the opium trade "morally indefensible" and remove Government support for it', initially unsuccessfully proposed by
Arthur Pease in 1891, was put before the
House of Commons. This time the motion passed. The Qing government banned opium soon afterward. These changing attitudes led to the founding of the
International Opium Commission in 1909. The
First International Opium Convention was signed by 13 nations at
The Hague on January 23, 1912, during the First International Opium Conference. This was the first international
drug control treaty and it was registered in the
League of Nations Treaty Series on January 23, 1922. The Convention provided that "The contracting Powers shall use their best endeavors to control or to cause to be controlled, all person manufacturing, importing, selling, distributing, and exporting morphine, cocaine, and their respective salts, as well as the buildings in which these persons carry such an industry or trade." The treaty became international law in 1919 when it was incorporated into the
Treaty of Versailles. The role of the commission was passed to the
League of Nations, and all signatory nations agreed to prohibit the import, sale, distribution, export, and use of all
narcotic drugs, except for medical and scientific purposes.
Prohibition In the UK the
Defence of the Realm Act 1914, passed at the onset of the
First World War, gave the government wide-ranging powers to requisition the property and to criminalize specific activities. A
moral panic was whipped up by the press in 1916 over the alleged sale of drugs to the troops of the
British Indian Army. With the temporary powers of DORA, the
Army Council quickly banned the sale of all psychoactive drugs to troops, unless required for medical reasons. However, shifts in the public attitude towards drugs—they were beginning to be associated with
prostitution,
vice and
immorality—led the government to pass further unprecedented laws, banning and criminalising the possession and dispensation of all narcotics, including opium and cocaine. After the war, this legislation was maintained and strengthened with the passing of the
Dangerous Drugs Act 1920 (
10 & 11 Geo. 5. c. 46).
Home Office control was extended to include
raw opium,
morphine,
cocaine,
ecogonine and
heroin. Hardening of Canadian attitudes toward
Chinese-Canadian opium users and fear of a spread of the drug into the white population led to the effective criminalization of opium for nonmedical use in Canada between 1908 and the mid-1920s. The
Mao Zedong government nearly eradicated both consumption and production of opium during the 1950s using social control and isolation. Ten million addicts were forced into compulsory treatment, dealers were executed, and opium-producing regions were planted with new crops. Remaining opium production shifted south of the Chinese border into the
Golden Triangle region. The remnant opium trade primarily served Southeast Asia, but spread to American soldiers during the
Vietnam War, with 20 percent of soldiers regarding themselves as addicted during the peak of the epidemic in 1971. In 2003, China was estimated to have four million regular drug users and one million registered drug addicts. In the US, the
Harrison Act was passed in 1914, and required sellers of
opiates and cocaine to get a license. While originally intended to regulate the trade, it soon became a prohibitive law, eventually becoming
legal precedent that any prescription for a narcotic given by a physician or pharmacist – even in the course of medical treatment for
addiction – constituted conspiracy to violate the Harrison Act. In 1919, the
Supreme Court ruled in
Doremus that the Harrison Act was constitutional and in
Webb that physicians could not prescribe narcotics solely for maintenance. In
Jin Fuey Moy v. United States, the court upheld that it was a violation of the Harrison Act even if a physician provided prescription of a narcotic for an addict, and thus subject to criminal
prosecution. This is also true of the later
Marijuana Tax Act in 1937. Soon, however, licensing bodies did not issue licenses, effectively banning the drugs. The American judicial system did not initially accept drug prohibition. Prosecutors argued that possessing drugs was a tax violation, as no legal licenses to sell drugs were in existence; hence, a person possessing drugs must have purchased them from an unlicensed source. After some wrangling, this was accepted as federal jurisdiction under the
interstate commerce clause of the
U.S. Constitution.
Alcohol prohibition The prohibition of alcohol commenced in Finland in 1919 and in the United States in 1920. Because alcohol was the most popular recreational drug in these countries, reactions to its prohibition were far more negative than to the prohibition of other drugs, which were commonly associated with ethnic minorities, prostitution, and vice. Public pressure led to the repeal of alcohol prohibition in Finland in 1932, and in the United States in 1933. Residents of many provinces of
Canada also experienced alcohol prohibition for similar periods in the first half of the 20th century. In Sweden,
a referendum in 1922 decided against an alcohol prohibition law (with 51% of the votes against and 49% for prohibition), but starting in 1914 (nationwide from 1917) and until 1955 Sweden employed an alcohol rationing system with personal liquor ration books ("
motbok").
War on drugs growing in
Afghanistan, a major source of drugs today In response to rising drug use among young people and the
counterculture movement, government efforts to enforce prohibition were strengthened in many countries from the 1960s onward. Support at an international level for the prohibition of
psychoactive drug use became a consistent feature of United States policy during both Republican and Democratic administrations, to such an extent that US support for foreign governments has often been contingent on their adherence to US
drug policy. Major milestones in this campaign include the introduction of the
Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs in 1961, the
Convention on Psychotropic Substances in 1971 and the
United Nations Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances in 1988. A few developing countries where consumption of the prohibited substances has enjoyed longstanding cultural support, long resisted such outside pressure to pass legislation adhering to these conventions.
Nepal only did so in 1976. In 1972, United States President
Richard Nixon announced the commencement of the so-called "war on drugs". Later,
President Reagan added the position of
drug czar to the
President's Executive Office. In 1973,
New York introduced
mandatory minimum sentences of 15 years to
life imprisonment for possession of more than of a so-called
hard drug, called the
Rockefeller drug laws after New York Governor and later Vice President
Nelson Rockefeller. Similar laws were introduced across the United States. California's broader '
three strikes and you're out' policy adopted in 1994 was the first
mandatory sentencing policy to gain widespread publicity and was subsequently adopted in most United States jurisdictions. This policy mandates life imprisonment for a third criminal conviction of any felony offense. A similar 'three strikes' policy was introduced to the United Kingdom by the Conservative government in 1997. This legislation enacted a mandatory minimum sentence of seven years for those convicted for a third time of a drug trafficking offense involving a class A drug.
Calls for legalization, relegalization or decriminalization The terms relegalization, legalization, legal regulations, or decriminalization are used with very different meanings by different authors, something that can be confusing when the claims are not specified. Here are some variants: • Sales of one or more drugs (e.g.,
marijuana) for personal use become legal, at least if sold in a certain way. • Sales of an extracts with a specific substance become legal sold in a certain way, for example on prescription. • Use or possession of small amounts for personal use do not lead to incarceration if it is the only crime, but it is still illegal; the court or the prosecutor can impose a fine. (In that sense, Sweden both legalized and supported drug prohibition simultaneously.) • Use or possession of small amounts for personal use do not lead to incarceration. The case is not treated in an ordinary court, but by a commission that may recommend treatment or sanctions including fines. (In that sense, Portugal both legalized and supported drug prohibitions). There are efforts around the world to promote the
relegalization and
decriminalization of drugs. These policies are often supported by proponents of
liberalism and
libertarianism on the grounds of individual freedom, as well as by
leftists who believe prohibition to be a method of suppression of the working class by the ruling class. Prohibition of drugs is supported by proponents of
conservatism as well various
NGOs. A number of NGOs are aligned in support of drug prohibition as members of the
World Federation Against Drugs. In the WFAD constitution, the "Declaration of the World Forum Against Drugs" (2008) advocates for "no other goal than a drug-free world", and states that a balanced policy of drug abuse prevention, education, treatment, law enforcement, research, and supply reduction provides the most effective platform to reduce drug abuse and its associated harms and calls on governments to consider
demand reduction as one of their first priorities. It supports the UN drug conventions, the inclusion of cannabis as one of the "hard drugs", and the use of criminal sanctions "when appropriate" to deter drug use. It opposes legalization in any form, and
harm reduction in general. According to some critics, drug prohibition is responsible for enriching "organised criminal networks" while the hypothesis that the prohibition of drugs generates violence is consistent with research done over long time-series and cross-country facts. In the United Kingdom, where the principal piece of drug prohibition legislation is the
Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, criticism includes: •
Drug classification: making a hash of it?, Fifth Report of Session 2005–06, House of Commons
Science and Technology Committee, which said that the present system of drug classification is based on historical assumptions, not scientific assessment •
Development of a rational scale to assess the harm of drugs of potential misuse, David Nutt, Leslie A. King, William Saulsbury, Colin Blakemore,
The Lancet, 24 March 2007, said the act is "not fit for purpose" and "the exclusion of alcohol and tobacco from the Misuse of Drugs Act is, from a scientific perspective, arbitrary" • The
Drug Equality Alliance (DEA) argue that the Government is administering the Act arbitrarily, contrary to its purpose, contrary to the original wishes of Parliament and therefore illegally. They are currently assisting and supporting several legal challenges to this alleged maladministration. against the prohibition of cannabis in
South Africa, May 2015 In February 2008 the then-president of
Honduras,
Manuel Zelaya, called on the world to legalize drugs, in order, he said, to prevent the majority of violent murders occurring in Honduras. Honduras is used by
cocaine smugglers as a transiting point between
Colombia and the US. Honduras, with a population of 7 million, suffers an average of 8–10 murders a day, with an estimated 70% being a result of this international drug trade. The same problem is occurring in
Guatemala,
El Salvador,
Costa Rica and Mexico, according to Zelaya. In January 2012
Colombian President
Juan Manuel Santos made a plea to the United States and Europe to start a global debate about legalizing drugs. This call was echoed by the
Guatemalan President
Otto Pérez Molina, who announced his desire to legalize drugs, saying "What I have done is put the issue back on the table." In a report dealing with
HIV in June 2014, the
World Health Organization (WHO) of the
UN called for the decriminalization of drugs particularly including injected ones. This conclusion put WHO at odds with broader long-standing UN policy favoring criminalization. Eight states of the United States (Alaska, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington), as well as the District of Columbia, have legalized the sale of marijuana for personal recreational use as of 2017, although recreational use remains illegal under U.S. federal law. The conflict between state and federal law is, as of 2018, unresolved. Since Uruguay in 2014 and Canada in 2018 legalized cannabis, the debate has known a new turn internationally. On March 14th, 2025, the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs decided to create a panel of independent experts to rethink the global drug control regime. ==Drug prohibition laws==