9th century and talk about two other drugs, opium (the grandfather of heroin), and cocaine.
Opium, a very addictive drug made from common poppies, (but relatively harmless by today's standards), was once widely used by the Chinese. When Chinese started to immigrate to the United States, they brought opium with them. Chinese workers used opium to induce a trance-like state that helped make boring, repetitive tasks less awful. It also numbed the mind to pain and exhaustion. By using opium, the Chinese could work very long hours in the sweatshops of the Industrial Revolution. During this time, there was no such thing as fair wages, and the only way a worker could make a living was to produce as much as humanly possible. Since they were such good workers, the Chinese held many jobs in the highly competitive industrial workplace. Even before the Great Depression, when millions of jobs disappeared overnight, Chinese workers were preferred and white Americans began to resent this. Chinese workers became hated among the white working class.
Even more than today, Americans of European ancestry had a very big political advantage over the Chinese, they spoke English and had relatives in the government. Coming up with a plan to expel Chinese immigrants from the U.S. was easy, (or at least keep them from inviting all their relatives to come and live in America). This plan depended on stirring up racist feelings, and one of the easiest things to focus these feelings on was the foreign and mysterious practice of using opium.
Decades later can perceive this pattern repeat itself with cocaine, except African Americans were the targets. The strategy against Chinese immigrants (picking on their drug of choice), had been so successful that it was used again. For African Americans, though, the racist feelings ran deeper, and the main thrust of the propaganda campaign was to control the African American community and keep African Americans from becoming successful.
