Hop heads and hypes, drug use, regulation and resistance in Canada, 1920-1961

Abstract

This dissertation is a social and cultural history of drug users and their regulators, including narcotic officials, doctors, police officers and social workers. It draws on and contributes to gender and working class history, medical and legal history and the history of the welfare state. Three main questions underlay the project: (1) What happened to drug users when certain types of drug use became a criminal activity? (2) How did the state, and other social actors, implement control over consumption? (3) How did drug users themselves respond to regulation by others and how did they regulate themselves? Since my goal is to demonstrate the effects of criminalization on the lives of users, I have focused on drugs which were controlled under the Opium and Narcotic Drug Act, including opium, morphine, heroin, cocaine and cannabis. Unlike much work of the work on moral regulation, which focuses on only one moral agent, I examine multiple sites and types of regulation. I have paid careful attention to the impact of regulation on the lives of targeted individuals, to the motivations and techniques of the regulators and to the interactions among drug users, regulators and the state. The history of drug use gets to the heart of how bodies and subjectivities are constructed by individuals, by others, and by the state. By examining one of the most intensively regulated groups in society, we can better understand the operation of state and other types of power in the mid-20th century. Drug users were an extremely stigmatized group and their treatment raises serious questions about inequality, how and why it is reified and perpetuated and how it can be corrected. Finally, as a group extensively targeted by the criminal justice system, the treatment of drug users forces us to ask important questions about the operation of the criminal justice system and normative notions of justice, equality and fairness.