ABSTRACT
The period at the turn of the twentieth century, and especially the first two decades of that century, was a transformative one in this field, culminating in some landmark legislative ‘events’, notably the Harrison Narcotic Act in 1914 in North America and the Dangerous Drugs Act in 1920 in Britain. Indeed, it is arguably the single most important period for understanding how we have arrived where we are today. It marks the emergence not only of our contemporary concept of ‘drugs’ but also of the ‘great regulatory divide’ out of which today’s international drug prohibition system was developed. So within the genealogy I am tracing here, this chapter is absolutely pivotal and in many respects lies at the heart of the whole book. As I will show, this fundamental regulatory shift needs to be understood by setting it in the wider context of social change, that is in relation to mutations in liberal governance. One of my principal guides to these mutations, characterized as the transition from classical liberalism to welfare liberalism, will be David Garland’s (1985) book Punishment and Welfare. By way of setting this background scene, I will say a little more here
about the nature and characteristics of this governmental transition. Over the course of roughly 50 years starting in the 1870s, the parameters, assumptions and modes of governmental action were all refigured during a
significant period of social change. There are several insightful commentaries on this to which interested readers are referred and on which I draw here. As well as Garland’s (1985) book which I have already mentioned, Rose (1999: 98-136) offers a highly influential analysis from a governmentality perspective. An excellent cultural history of the period is provided by Wiener (1990). I have also found Braithwaite’s (2008: 14-16) brief comments useful. There are three main dimensions of this transition. First, the increasing involvement of the state as both a provider and a
regulator, as the mode of government became increasingly interventionist in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Indeed, for this reason, Braithwaite (2008) prefers to describe this as the era of the ‘provider state’ rather than of welfare liberalism. This interventionism contrasts sharply with the ‘nightwatchman state’ of classical liberalism which sought to limit the sphere of governmental activities (Braithwaite, 2000). Indeed, as noted in Chapter 2, the initial and arguably foundational problematic of liberal government revolved around the aim of rationalizing and limiting the exercise of political power rather than extending its scope or reach (see Gordon, 1991). The interventionist turn is therefore a highly significant development. And as Braithwaite (2008: 14-16) suggests, it was created partly through recognition of the limitations of laissez-faire, the provider state in effect coming into being as a ‘solution’ to some of the failures of nineteenth-century regulation. Second, the trend of proliferating regulatory branches that Braithwaite
(2008: 13-14) astutely observes, and that was discussed in Chapter 3, continued to accelerate in the latter part of the nineteenth century. There was thus a multiplication of sites of intervention, more than a deepening or intensification of existing activities. As we will see, this is an important point – the new interventionism involved an extension of state activity in to areas which had previously been largely unregulated. Third, the emergence of welfare liberalism was founded on what Rose
(1999), after Donzelot (1984), terms the ‘invention of the social’, that is the creation of a new ‘form of sociality constructed around mass democracy, monopoly capital and an interventionist State’ (Garland, 1981: 35). The endeavour was ‘to construct a new kind of human being, social citizens taking responsibility for their physical and mental health and that of their family’ (Rose, 1999: 131). The corollary of this new social citizenship was the creation of new powers to intervene in the lives of individuals failing to meet those responsibilities in order to effect the ‘identification and repair of behavioural “abnormalities”’ (Garland, 1981: 29). It is these new ‘normalizing’ strategies that Garland (1985) charts so expertly. The emergence of these strategies was partly rooted in, and enabled by, the growth of the administrative machinery of government that I noted in the previous chapter and which began as early as the 1830s – MacDonagh’s (1958) ‘nineteenthcentury revolution in government’. There are continuities here, alongside transition and change.
