Abstract

This thesis argues that at the youth-at-risk rhetoric that has characterised anti-drug campaigns from the 1920s to the 2020s has its origins in the imperial and eugenic concerns of the early twentieth century. The first US federal drug policy was born in the colonial Philippines. Prior to annexing the archipelago in 1898, drug laws in the United States were scarce and limited to local governments. Nativist agitation against the Yellow Peril in the 1870s linked Chinese immigrants with opium dens and contagious degeneration, leading to the first municipal anti-narcotic ordinances in US history. These stereotypes were brought to the Philippines, where opium use was blamed on the ethnic Chinese population. The paternalistic imperialism adopted by the United States after 1898 framed Filipinos as children and wards of the state, and the decision to enact the first federal drug prohibition in US history was a direct result of this parent/child colonial relationship. To protect and civilise a less developed Other, it became imperative to guard them from the degenerative effects of foreign drugs. This, in essence, was the precursor to the youthfocused anti-drug campaigns that emerged in the 1920s. By the 1930s, the public campaign to eliminate the 'marihuana menace' relied on this 'protect the youth' paradigm as well as on Orientalist tropes about cannabis-induced violence and insanity, framing the drug as a eugenically degenerative agent. In these early twentieth century crusades, anti-drug crusaders warned that the United States' place in the global order and the supremacy of the White race depended on raising future generations of self-disciplined, hardworking, Christian, middle-class Americans. Eliminating drugs, the 'assassins of youth,' was critical in the fight to save America from national and racial degeneration. These rhetorical strategies have, in turn, shaped anti-drug propaganda and strategies to the present day. I conclude that the war on drugs was from the beginning conceived as a war against racial and national degeneration.