Addicts, Experts and the Medicalization of Opium Use in French Colonial Vietnam

• In Event: For Love, Money or Drugs: Policing Illicit Activities in Colonial Southeast Asia

Abstract

In January 1938, a group of opium smokers wrote a letter to the French colonial government in Vietnam protesting the dramatic rise in the cost of opium. They argued that for those addicted to the drug, inflated prices represented a cruel and inhumane punishment. This letter appeared as various proposals to reduce opium use were being debated in the colony, from laws prohibiting smoking among both French and Vietnamese bureaucrats to plans for smoker registration and opium rationing cards. At the heart of these debates stood fundamental questions about the nature of drug addiction and the responsibility of the state for its prevention and treatment. At what point does drug use become pathological? How could the colonial state both pursue the manufacture and sale of a product while also mitigating its harms to self and society? In particular, this paper will examine the role of medical experts in shaping colonial drug policy in the 1930s, opening up the Vietnamese population to new, more intensive forms of state regulation, all while the colonial state was itself being opened up to new forms of international scrutiny.

This paper forms part of a broader project concerned with writing drug addicts back into the history of drugs in Vietnam. While drugs are typically studied as either commodities or cultural objects, this project will instead consider the social exclusion of drug addicts and state projects for their rehabilitation, from when the opium trade operated as a state-sanctioned monopoly through the era of HIV/AIDS.

Author

• Claire Edington, University of California, San Diego