Drug Abuse as a Colonial Disease: How Colonial History Shaped Dutch Knowledge and Policies on Drugs

Description

This paper investigates how profoundly Dutch policies and perceptions around illicit drugs and their users are interwoven with our colonial cultural archive. Their construction is outcome of a long-term historical process that led to the ‘othering’ of drug users of various ethnic and cultural backgrounds, and to a demonization of drugs used. Dutch maritime and colonial expansion after 1600 went together with the cultural appropriation of herbs, medicines, and intoxicants from Asia, Africa, and South America, and their incorporation in Western and colonial medicine. At the same time local practices and uses became demonized and ‘fetishized’ – especially when thought by the Dutch to endanger their economic and political interests and/or Christian values. While a global interadoption of drugs and technologies of use (e.g., the pipe) led to dissemination of new drug habits such as smoking opium (from the early 17th century onward) and cannabis (in the 19th century) these habits, the drugs, and their users became negatively framed. Drug habits became associated with orientalized images of passivity, endangering the white man’s self-control (when used by whites), labour discipline (when used by the colonial population), and even the colonial state (when traded by Chinese secret societies and other smuggling rings). The first Dutch drug regulations were therefore not in the Netherlands itself but in its colonies, criminalizing production, distribution, and consumption of drugs unless undertaken by the Dutch colonial state itself (in the Opiumregie or opium regime in the Dutch East Indies). When after the First World War the first Opiumwet or drug law was enacted in the Netherlands, outlawing non-medical use of certain drugs, similar fears as in the colonies were extended to drug trade and use among migrant populations in the Netherlands, to start with the Chinese and later to other migrant groups from the former colonies and elsewhere.

Period	22 Apr 2021
Event title	Spores of empire : Exploring the colonial foundations of Dutch society and culture
Event type	Conference
Degree of Recognition	International