Summary
The San Francisco Opium Den Ordinance of 1875 was the first law in America that banned a non-alcoholic drug by making it a misdemeanor to visit places where people smoked opium.
It was driven largely over xenophobic fears about growing Chinese communities in the city, as well as concerns that it played a role in attracting white residents to Chinatown establishments away from white-owned ones. In doing so, law enforcement had the legal cover to selectively disrupt Chinese communities under suspicions of being an opium den while white neighborhoods continued using liquid opium as medicine.
Context
The 1870s were an economically rough time for California. The Long Depression of 1873 lasted until 1879 as the longest period of economic contraction recognized by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Paradoxically, historians mark the beginning of the Second Industrial Revolution around the same time. Factories were adopting new technologies in steel, chemical manufacturing, and electrical grids. This meant goods could be cheaply mass manufactured which drove down their prices globally and cut down the profit margins businesses were expecting. Massive speculation in railroad companies after the Civil War proved to outpace actual returns. The collapse of banking house Jay Cooke & Company triggered panic that led to the temporary closure of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). An estimated 18,000 businesses and 89 railroads went bankrupt in the US in the initial years, with a peak unemployment of 14% by 1878. Layoffs and wage cuts were met with violent backlash like the Great Railroad Strike of 1877.
However, finance and economics are hard concepts. Instead of blaming the rampant financial speculation or lack of policies to help workers transition during periods of massive change in the labor market, they blamed immigrants for dragging down wages and using underhanded tactics to undermine white businesses. White saloons and gambling houses viewed Chinatown opium dens as competitors for working-class white men seeking recreational substances. Factory owners and labor leaders alike claimed that opium addiction, though not alcoholism, was affecting the productivity of white workers. The Workingmen’s Party of California demanded a boycott of Chinese-made goods and Chinese-owned businesses.
Some of the claims bordered on hysteria and conspiratorial paranoia. Labor organizations practically alleged a nefarious plan to trap white workers in drug dependency in order for Chinese communities to get ahead. Yellow journalism companies ran stories that claimed Chinese men used opium to lure, seduce, and traffick young white women into “white slavery.” They would fabricate narratives painting Chinatown as a seedy underbelly and pay locals to pose in ways that fit the story they were trying to write. For politicians, anti-Chinese hysteria became a platform that could unite upper-class business owners fearing labor unrest and working-class European immigrants who feared job competition.
Thus, America’s first anti-drug law was born out of a desire to dismantle a minority community that was growing into an economic hub. White residents could still buy laudanum, or liquid opium, sold at pharmacies and high-end hotels in white neighborhoods. Opium itself wasn’t being restricted; only the methods and locations used by Chinese communities, namely smoking opium and dens. Local law enforcement had the pretext to raid businesses through Chinatown, which disrupted commerce, devalued real estate, and drove customers to other shops.
For a while, Chinatown businesses and operators relocated from San Francisco to Oakland or further inland to the Central Valley. And the same hysteria eventually relocated with them as rural laborers echoed the complaints about opium dens being established near their farms and railroad camps. In 1881, a statewide expansion of the San Francisco ordinance gave local law enforcement in every jurisdiction the ability to disrupt and segregate Chinese communities.
If all this sounds eerily familiar, whether you’re thinking about the War on Drugs or the fentanyl crisis being blamed on China in recent years despite the finding that most manufacturing happens in illicit labs in Mexico, you’re not alone.
Outcomes
A San Francisco Chronicle interview clipping preserved by a Dr. Harry Hubbell Kane in his 1882 book Opium-Smoking in American and China gives us some insight into how law enforcement at the time experienced the crackdown. When asked if driving the white opium smokers out of Chinatown would decrease the general prevalence of the habit, Officer James Mahoney replies,
“Not much. It will rapidly increase. The habit in past years, so far as whites were concerned, was confined to hoodlums and prostitutes mostly. Few decent men or women would care to come into Chinatown and smoke in the filthy dens here. Now that there are scores of places where the habit can be contracted in clean rooms and in respectable portions of the city, the practice will gradually extend up the social grade. Schoolboys and clerks who would never have gone into a Chinese den are already finding out the respectable places and learning to like the habit… The anti-opium-smoking ordinance drove the white smokers out of Chinatown, but the vice came along and scattered the smokers, planting them, in fact, in every portion of the city.”
By forcing dens closed, opium was simply smoked in more discrete private locations like one’s own room. It’s difficult to classify a bedroom as an opium den, and small-scale paraphernalia can easily be hidden or disposed of in case of a raid. Mahoney claims even search dogs are ineffective, which he guesses could be a result of an opium-smoker being too repulsive for a dog to seek.
A Note About Selective Enforcement
When I see someone fanning the flames of division between local communities through bigotry and prejudice, I instinctively look for the money trail. I am personally of the belief that we as humans default to diversity, trade, and forgiveness until someone thinks they build a monopoly by dividing and conquering. The history of drug regulations makes it really easy to see how arbitrary the line is between “choice available to an informed consenting consumer” and “contagious threat to the entire community that must be eliminated.” It’s depressingly simple to map that line onto the preexisting ones around race, ethnicity, culture, religion, etc.