'Smoking Opium Is Not Our Vice'

America’s first drug war was driven by xenophobia against chinese migrants.

- By Jacob Sullum

A ROUND 2 A.M. on Monday, December 6, 1875, a “posse of police” led by Captain William Douglass descended on 609 Dupont Street in San Francisco. The cops arrested Fannie Whitmore, Cora Martinez, James Dennison, and Charles Anderson, along with “two Chinamen who kept the place.”

That place, The San Francisco Examiner explained, was an “opium den,” and this was the first raid conducted under an ordinance that the city’s Board of Supervisors had enacted on November 15. The new law decreed that “no person shall, in the city and county of San Francisco, keep or maintain, or become an inmate of, or visit, or shall in any way contribute to the support of any place, house, or room, where opium is smoked, or where persons assemble for the purpose of smoking opium.”

The supervisors made that crime a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of $50 to $500—roughly 3 percent to 30 percent of a clerk’s annual salary in California at the time. Violators also could be jailed for 10 days to six months.

The four patrons and two proprietors nabbed by Douglass and his crew were convicted the same day and paid the minimum fine, so you could say they got off lightly. Then again, it must have been jarring to be hauled off to court for conduct that had been perfectly legal a few weeks before. And the sweeping scope of the city’s ban, which on its face reached not only commercial establishments but also any private residence “where opium is smoked,” was pretty startling too.