George Fisher's "Beware Euphoria"

George Fisher is the Judge John Crown Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, where he has been teaching evidence, prosecution practice, and criminal legal history since 1995. He began practice as a Massachusetts prosecutor and later taught at Boston College Law School, Harvard Law School, and Yale Law School.

Fisher applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Beware Euphoria: The Moral Roots and Racial Myths of America's War on Drugs, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Beware Euphoria recounts a singular episode in the history of American attitudes toward alcohol prohibition. Set in Philadelphia in 1788, this vignette concerns an address by Dr. Benjamin Rush, widely thought the leading physician of his day, to a congress of American Methodists. Rush counseled the congress to tighten the faith's rule governing distilled alcohol. That rule traced to Methodism's founders, John and Charles Wesley, who enjoined followers in 1743 to shun "[d]runkenness, buying or selling spirituous liquors, or drinking them, unless in cases of extreme necessity." Speaking from a medical standpoint, Rush declared spirits necessary only when "a person was chilled with cold, or wet, or was ready to faint with fatigue." After Rush's address the congress struck out the last six words of the Wesleys' original injunction -- "unless in cases of extreme necessity" -- rendering the rule an absolute ban against "buying or selling spirituous liquors, or drinking them." This new rigidity, however, proved a bridge too far. It staked out an extreme moral position, one that outstripped mainstream morality. Only two years later the Methodists reversed the change.

From this episode the reader can discern four themes of my book. The first is that this study of the moral roots of America's war on drugs takes a long look backward at the regulation of alcohol and, even earlier, of nonprocreative sex. The second is that all three moral regimes -- those governing sex, alcohol, and recreational drugs -- reflect a moral revulsion to appetitive pleasures that blot out reason. Third, all three moral regimes extended an indulgence in cases of necessity, especially medical necessity. Hence no moral teacher ever rejected all sex, for humans must procreate. Anti-alcohol regimes, likewise, always made provision for medicinal use. And dangerous addictive drugs, even fentanyl, are perfectly legal when prescribed or employed by physicians. A fourth theme, finally, is that legal regimes governing euphoric substances or activities that outstrip mainstream morality typically cannot hold. Hence almost no Western prohibition of even nonintoxicating drinking has survived much longer than a dozen years.

These four themes define the first half of the book and explain the first half of my subtitle: "The Moral Roots and Racial Myths of America's War on Drugs." The book's latter half considers those "racial myths." If moral impulses largely motivated our earliest anti-drug laws, racial hatred did not. Hence the book documents overwhelming historical evidence disproving commonly uttered claims that racial prejudice prompted early lawmaking against opium, cocaine, and cannabis. Such claims prove not merely mistaken -- they are exactly wrong. For these were laws about whites, written by white lawmakers anxious to protect the moral purity of white women and youth. White cops enforced these laws primarily against white users and those who sold to them. So a very different form of racism was at work, one that exposed indifference to the moral welfare of nonwhites.

Learn more about Beware Euphoria at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue