5. The Drug Is Associated with the Moral Corruption of the Young, Particularly Their Sexual Corruption "You're in paradise until the blast wears off and you've got to face reality again: you're hooked, chained, a teenage dope addict." Chemicals have long been inextricably linked in prohibitionist literature with the sexual corruption of young people. Joan. Fran. Rauch attacked chocolate in 1624 as a violent inflamer of passions. 40 Tobacco was linked with sexual immorality in the 1850's,41 and the association between opium and the corruption of young women began in the 1880's with the publication in 1882 of H.H. Kane's Opium Smoking in America and China in which Kane states: "Many females are so much excited sexually by the smoking of opium during the first few weeks that old smokers with the sole object of ruining them have taught them how to smoke. Many innocent and over-curious girls have been thus seduced."42 It has already been outlined how cocaine was extensively associated with sexual attacks on white women by black men during the early 1900's. During the alcohol prohibitionist movement era alcohol was reported to create sexual excess within and outside of marriage, and alcohol was subtly webbed through stories of Jews "buying up the virtue of Gentile virgins" or Roman Catholic priests "seducing Protestant girls in nunneries."43 In an expose of the white slavery traffic written in the 1930's, we find the arch villain (the alleged pimp) responding to a question on how he procures women for the life of prostitution: "I secured a large number of girls from high schools, by doping them with my weed." 44 There is an added irony on the above theme that occurs as one reads through the prohibitionist literature from different periods. Nearly every drug that has been singled out for prohibition (opium, cocaine, alcohol, marihuana) has been said to provoke uncontrolled sexual desire and provoke sexual attacks upon defenseless women while at the same time the drug is said to produce impotence. The media coverage of the numerous lifestyle changes of the 1960's constantly associated drugs with communal living, cohabitation, etc. Pictures of teenage girls allegedly prostituting to "support their habits" blazened across the television screen did nothing but update this age old association between chemicals and sexual corruption. The inflaming of this fear about the fate of our own children made it difficult if not impossible for most Americans to take a careful and reasoned look at our drug policies. [ Watch clips from "The Cocaine Fiends" (1935) -or- Download .mpg movie clips (11MB)]

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