Disrupting and Maintaining Prohibition: Institutional and Grassroots Harm Reduction Practices in Ottawa

Abstract

It has not been a means of addressing specific harms related to drugs. The first iteration of prohibition in what we now refer to as Canada was the 1868 ban on the sale of alcohol to Indigenous people (Maynard 2017). In 1874 Indigenous people were prohibited from being intoxicated (Moss and Gardner-O'Toole 1987). These prohibitions were consolidated in the Indian Act, 1886, and kept in place until the Act was reformed in 1985 (Moss and Gardner-O'Toole 1987). Following this inception, which focused on controlling the Indigenous population, prohibition in Canada expanded with the Opium Act, 1908. Much like the prohibitions on the sale of alcohol to Indigenous people, the Opium Act, 1908, was not a response to specific harms related to opium or other drugs (Carstairs 2006; T. Gordon 2006). Following the building of the trans-Canada railway system in the early twentieth century, there was a surplus of labourers seeking work and significant disparities in the pay between the recently migrated Chinese residents and white settlers (Carstairs 2006). Paid a lower wage, Chinese workers were more likely to be hired than the white settlers in what is now named Vancouver (Carstairs 2006). The federal government sent William Lyon Mackenzie King to Vancouver to investigate this race and class conflict (Carstairs 2006;Comack 1991). King sought to address the conflict by targeting the Chinese population's use of opium (Carstairs 2006). At the time, opium was not solely used by Chinese residents, nor thought to be problematic (Carstairs 2006). The federal government's response to the conflict was the Opium Act, 1908 and a series of advertisements admonishing opium's harms to the white race (Carstairs 2006). This beginning of prohibition in Canada was motivated by racism, classism, and concern for the purity of the white race (Carstairs 2006; T. Gordon 2006). More recently, Akwatu Khenti (2014) demonstrates that the War on Drugs in Canada motivated dramatic increases in the policing and control of Black, Indigenous, and people of colour communities through inflated police powers, racial profiling, and the use of incarceration.