The notion that drug prohibition is inherently racist has become exceedingly popular within the harm reduction world and, by extension, inside many public health institutions and graduate programs. Yet anyone with even a cursory knowledge of history can see that this is absurd. Societies from all across the world have long understood the dangers of addictive substances and supported efforts to criminalize them—so why is this being ignored?

Though the “prohibition is racist” movement usually flies under the public’s radar, it was thrust into the limelight earlier this month when B.C.’s top doctor, Bonnie Henry, released a report calling for the legalization of all drugs. Not only did Henry recommend that dangerous substances—including meth, cocaine and fentanyl—be sold in stores much like alcohol and cannabis, her team asserted that prohibitionist policies are “based on a history of racism, white supremacy, paternalism, colonialism, classism and human rights violations.”

One would hope such sweeping declarations would have been backed with fulsome arguments and historical references, but that didn’t happen here.

Instead, the report simply emphasized how Canada’s original drug laws, dating back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, were motivated by racist animus against Chinese immigrants. As opium was popular among these immigrants, the drug was believed to pose a special moral threat to white society and was among the first substances to be harshly policed. This, in turn, gave the state a new legal tool to harass Chinese Canadians and, in some cases, deport them.

After briefly explaining this point, Henry’s report concluded that, “Over time, the moral panic associated with drug use expanded to target many more groups of people, including Indigenous people, Black people, women, people of colour, and people of lower socioeconomic status.” This extrapolation was presented as a self-evident fact, without any evidence or citations to explain or substantiate it.

Henry’s recommendations were immediately rejected by the provincial government and savagely ridiculed in the media. Yet the views articulated in her report, shocking as they may have been to many, were not actually exceptional. They only rehashed the dominant beliefs of the harm reduction world—beliefs have also, over the past decade or so, permeated deeply into Canada’s public health bureaucracies.

Henry’s report may be dead in the water, but the underlying ideas which animated it are still very much alive and will, in all likelihood, continue to influence Canadian policymakers within the cloistered hallways of the civil service. This is a shame, because it is difficult to overstate how strange these kinds of beliefs are.

To argue that drug prohibition is broadly based on a history of racism, mostly because it was misused for racist purposes a century ago, is kindergarten-level reasoning. There are ample examples of non-European societies, past and present, embracing criminalization. This is glaringly obvious and, in many cases, common knowledge.

Non-Western drug prohibition throughout the ages

Perhaps one of the greatest examples of non-European drug prohibition is Sharia law, which has banned the consumption of mind-altering substances since the 7th century. One wonders how harm reduction activists can claim, with a straight face, that prohibition is rooted in “colonialism” and “white supremacy” when Islam’s religious and legal texts supported it centuries before global European empires emerged.

Since harm reduction scholars are so concerned about Chinese experiences, it would be instructive to look toward China itself, where prohibition is also popular.

In the late 18th century, the British began exporting large quantities of opium to the Qing Empire (China), which quickly fomented a wave of addiction and social disorder. Soon after, Qing officials embarked on a multi-decade campaign to criminalize the drug. “Opium is a poison, undermining our good customs and morality. Its use is prohibited by law,” wrote the Daoguang Emperor in an edict issued in 1810.

By the mid-19th century, the Qing worried that, without drastic action, China would be left bereft of money and productive men—so they banned all sales of opium and destroyed any supply of it they could find, including European wares. This angered the British, who profited handsomely off the opium trade, and led them to victoriously wage war against the Qing—not once, but twice—to forcibly stop prohibition.

Narcotics thus continued to flow through the veins of China’s body politic, wreaking havoc for generations. Since then, Chinese nationalists have bitterly remembered the Opium Wars as a colonial crime which marked the beginning of China’s “century of humiliation.”

The 98th Regiment of Foot at the attack on Chin-Kiang-Foo (Zhenjiang), 21 July 1842, resulting in the defeat of the Manchu government. Watercolour by military illustrator Richard Simkin (1840–1926).

This raises an important question: how exactly can anyone square this history with the ideological framework of the harm reduction movement? Were the Qing embodying some mystical form of white supremacy? Perhaps we should be grateful that the British sent their anti-racist warships to decolonize China’s drug laws.

Even today, the legacy of the Opium Wars continues to inform Chinese attitudes towards drugs—both within China itself (where strict prohibitionism is the norm) and in the diaspora.

In San Francisco, America’s petri dish for drug liberalization, it is Chinese-Americans who are leading a public backlash against progressive policies and calling for greater prohibition. Similarly, Chinese-Canadians were instrumental to Vancouver’s political pivot during the 2022 municipal elections, wherein the centrist ABC party swept the city council and the mayor’s office. Just this spring, Chinese-Canadian protestors in Richmond, the most ethnically Chinese city in North America , thwarted the launch of a new supervised consumption site, only to have a white progressive woman shout “Go back to Hong Kong” at them. No doubt another anti-racist activist.

When I interviewed almost a dozen Chinese-Canadian small business owners and workers in Vancouver’s historical Chinatown last summer, their support for prohibition was clear—and the legacy of the Opium Wars was invoked several times. Many other ethnic groups are processing similar historical traumas, and facing similar erasure. Do harm reduction activists forget, for example, that early European colonists devastated North American Indigenous communities by plying them with alcohol?

Indigenous leaders did not respond to that crisis by calling for more booze. On the contrary, they pushed for prohibition. Illustratively, when Treaties No. 6 and 7 were negotiated during the 1870s, Indigenous representatives asked for the “exclusion of fire water” from Saskatchewan, and that “no intoxicating liquor be allowed to be introduced or sold” on reserves. Even today, dozens of “dry” Indigenous reserves throughout Canada continue to ban alcohol and drugs to whatever extent they can.

When I interviewed over a dozen Indigenous elders and community members in Calgary last summer, their opposition to drug liberalization was clear—some went so far as to condemn decriminalization and “safer supply” programs as “pharmaceutical colonialism.” Ronnie Chickite, chief of the We Wai Kai Nation in British Columbia, told me this spring that his entire band council was “entirely against” decriminalization and that provincial officials had allegedly ignored them.

Building upon these interviews, two senior contacts in the Ontario government confirmed to me earlier this year that Indigenous leaders across the province seem to commonly hold prohibitionist beliefs. Who would have thought that Indigenous people could be such raging white supremacists?

Surveying the world today, it is clear that drug prohibition is actually strongest in non-European states—particularly East Asian and Middle Eastern ones—while liberalization is actually more popular in the West. It is telling that the harm reduction movement seems intent on ignoring this, or, alternatively, positioning non-white prohibitionism as a symptom of corrupting European influences. Both responses are, ironically, more than a little racist—how else can one describe the systematic erasure of non-European voices?

How is it that harm reduction advocates, who make such a theatre of their own “anti-racism,” cannot grasp that non-white communities have intellectual and cultural agency and do not simply let white people dictate their beliefs? In their obsessive disdain for European civilization, these advocates close their eyes to the rest of the world and inadvertently reproduce the same cultural narcissism that they ostensibly condemn—their calls for racial justice conceal a Eurocentric mindset sopping  with paternalism.

How is this possible? How has this happened? A glimpse of an answer can be found in the “Acknowledgements” section of Henry’s report this month, where brief biographies of the report’s contributors were provided. Each contributor fixated on their ethnicity and, in many cases, proclaimed themselves as “third generation settlers” or “occupiers.” Unsurprisingly, almost everyone on the team was white. Though there were some Indigenous voices (who were seemingly relegated to working on exclusively Indigenous-related tasks, of course), not a single Asian, black or Middle-Eastern voice could be found.

The B.C. provincial health officer report’s contributors section:

So it seems that a bunch of white progressive bureaucrats produced a document that fixated on “colonialism” and “racism” while ignoring the actual beliefs of many, if not most, non-white communities. Nothing could encapsulate the harm reduction zeitgeist more perfectly: the privileging of empty gestures over real consultation, the self-indulgent self-flagellation of the white bourgeoisie, the patronizing assumption that minority communities have homogenous political beliefs that happen to align with progressive causes.

All of this would be comedic if lives weren’t at stake.

It should be clarified that there are many valid ways to criticize drug laws from a racial justice lens. Laws are just tools which we use to order society, and, like any tool, they can be abused—so it is fair to explore how some laws, in some contexts, have racist intentions or outcomes.

This is best illustrated by the wealth of scholarship criticizing American cannabis laws—in this case, critics have been able to concretely show that specific laws, in specific contexts, are being enforced unfairly and exacerbating inequities without producing justificatory social benefits.

Yet this mode of analysis, which focuses heavily on outcomes and concrete data, is an entirely different beast from the essentialist arguments recklessly flung around by the harm reduction movement. It makes sense to test measurable hypotheses about specific laws and their implementations. But to argue that drug prohibition is intrinsically “racist” is to succumb to ideological hallucination.

This essay originally appeared in The Hub and has been syndicated to Break The Needle through a co-publishing agreement.