Question by Alexi M: What was the most popular drug in France in the 1920s? Was it legal?

Best answer:

Answer by Muinghan Life During Wartime
Ah, easy question.
You have to think, “location, location, location”.

By the 1920s the more “westernized” countries – Europe, North America, Australia/New Zealand to name a few – were waking up to the serious issue of illicit drug usage and drug addiction on a GLOBAL level.
Medically. Economically. Politically. Socially. Financially.

The substances that most captured the attention of officials in the 1920s were opiates and, to a much lesser extent, cocaine and marijuana.

Opiate traffic, increasingly in the form of heroin instead of smoking opium, primarily originated in East Asia.
Heroin, once believed by some in the medical community to be a cure for morphine addiction, had initially reached a wide audience as a medicine for coughs courtesy of the Bayer chemical company of Germany.
A manufactured drug, heroin could be synthesized from morphine fairly easily; as a result, officials could not readily pinpoint the precise origin of the heroin found in the illicit trade.

The fall of China after 1915 made efforts to halt opium poppy growth growing impossible.

Turkey and Persia became major producers of vast quantities of raw opium for both the licit and illicit trade.
Turkey refused to comply with international anti-opium agreements until 1932, which rendered diplomatic overtures from Washington useless.
Persia, which by 1920 had replaced India in the opium trade with East Asia, depended heavily on opium-based revenue and had a deeply entrenched opium culture of its own.

And where was France during all of this???

French Indochina 1887–1954!
Growing their own damned opium!
The French GOVERNMENT of Indochina established a near monopoly on the trade of opium.

The French government in Asia was growing Opium — with near-slave labor — which was then shipped to drug manufacturing companies in Europe — where half was turned into the more expensive Heroin while the other half hit the open markets to be smoked — and transported around the world.
Was the illicit usage of opium and heroin for personal usage illegal?
Yes.
Did anyone give a damn including the governments which were growing, selling, and profiting on it?
No.

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