POT

21 Pages 5150 Words

y the Chinese. When Chinese started to immigrate to the United States, they brought opium with them. Chinese workers used opium to induce a trance-like state that helped make boring, repetitive tasks more interesting. It also numbed the mind to pain and exhaustion. By using opium, the Chinese could pull very long hours in the sweat shops of the Industrial Revolution. During this time, there was no such thing as fair wages, and the only way a worker could make a living was to produce as much as humanly possible.

Since they were such good workers, the Chinese held many jobs in the highly competitive industrial workplace. Even before the Great Depression, when millions of jobs disappeared overnight, the White Americans began to resent this, and Chinese became hated among the White working class. Even more than today, White Americans had a very big political advantage over the Chinese-they spoke English and had relatives in the government, so coming up with a plan to force Chinese immigrants to leave the country was easy for them (or at least keep them from inviting all their relatives to come and live in America.) This plan depended on stirring up racist feelings, and one of the easiest things to focus these feelings on was the foreign and mysterious practice of using opium. We can see this pattern again with cocaine, except Black Americans were the targets. Cocaine was not especially useful in the workplace, but the strategy against Chinese immigrants (picking on their drug of choice) had been so successful that it was used again. For Blacks, though, the racist feelings ran deeper, and the main thrust of the propaganda campaign was to control the Black community and keep Blacks from becoming successful. Articles appeared in newspapers which blamed cocaine for violent crime by Blacks. They painted Black Americans as savage, uncontrollable beasts when under the influence of cocaine-they said that it made a single Black man as strong as ...