See photo credits below.
The following is an excerpt from p. 61-64 of Chapter 1, “Precious Crystals: What Salt Teaches Us About Drugs” from my new book, Drugism (2022):
[This excerpt is the 3rd in a 4-part series exploring the parallels between history’s salt merchants and today’s drug dealers, both legal and illegal. Read Parts 1 and 2 here.]
We learned earlier that in many different places at many different points in history, laws existed which criminalized personal production of salt. In each case, such policies were the consequence of (often exorbitant) salt taxation. These laws did not prevent people from making their own salt, however. People continued to make their own salt anyway, but these same people were now criminals. The resulting criminalization of people and commodities produced situations astonishingly similar to today’s War on Drugs.
Indeed, if we turn our attention to illegal salt smuggling, we find hardly a single quality that its culture does not share with that of modern drug trafficking. We will see that salt smugglers and drug smugglers, although they may seem quite distinct on the surface, are in fact so similar that at some points in history they have been one and the same, simultaneously trafficking both salt and drugs. All of which is to say that the parallels between the two are illuminating, and should be of particular interest for students of drug use.
The similarities between salt smugglers and drug smugglers are seemingly countless. Nonetheless, for clarity, I have loosely grouped them into five clusters of characteristics. They are as follows:
1. Salt and many drugs have been extracted from natural resources in ways and places beyond the reach of state control
2. Their production and trafficking have often (but not always) been delegated to economically or socially marginalized groups
3. They have been sold openly in the streets by organized syndicates, sometimes falsely labeled or prepared to appear legal
4. The most successful smugglers of salt and other drugs have been treated as folk heroes and given colorful names
5. Producers and distributors of illegal salt and drugs have faced perpetual, violent conflict with the state, incarceration, state-sanctioned murder, etc.
1. Salt and many drugs have been extracted from natural resources in ways and places beyond the reach of state control
The first point is perhaps the most obvious. Salt and many drugs have been illegally extracted from natural resources for eons. As mentioned above, people all over the world made illicit salt by simply evaporating sea water. And many of the most popular drugs are extracted from plants which once grew wild in various parts of the world. Hash, coke, heroin, DMT, etc. all come from such plants (cannabis, coca, poppy, and Mimosa hostilis, respectively). Due to the wide accessibility of seawater and the relative ease with which these plants can be grown, restrictive measures have never been entirely effective. Instead, people have easily circumvented them to produce salt and numerous other drugs through history.
2. Their production and trafficking have often (but not always) been delegated to economically or socially marginalized groups
The next parallel is that illegal salt and other drugs have typically been produced and sold by working class people for supplemental or sometimes primary income. While there are exceptions, such as instances in which drug production has been facilitated or performed by wealthy or otherwise powerful people, the vast majority of it is done by people who are not wealthy and who may otherwise have limited opportunities to make money.
At times these illegal trades have supported entire families. Illicit salt production supported families in India during British colonization, in France under the gabelle, and presumably elsewhere. Likewise, in recent generations, families have supported themselves from the production of illegal drugs (particularly in the opium, coca, and cannabis farming regions of the world).[i]
3. They have been sold openly in the streets by organized syndicates, sometimes falsely labeled or prepared to appear legal
The third cluster of similarities revolves around how illegal salt and other drugs have been sold. At times they have been sold openly in the streets.[ii] Often they have been sold by highly organized networks. And sometimes they are made to look as if they have been legally produced.
Most readers will already be aware that drugs are often distributed by gangs or other highly organized networks. The practice of distributing illegal products through elaborate networks or gangs is a phenomenon also found in the history salt smuggling. Arguably the practice of illegal drug trafficking itself evolved from the smuggling of salt and other precious commodities.
In eighteenth-century India, when the British colonial government banned the sale of salt from the Orissa region, the ban immediately resulted in the creation of “well-organized bands of salt smugglers” who then “flooded” the market with “inexpensive contraband salt.”[iii]Something similar happened in China. A journalist in the nineteen thirties writing about China describes “societies” of salt smugglers “organized in true gangster fashion,” with “fancy names” like “Heavenly Gate Society,” “Golden Birth Club” and “Red Spear Association.” The journalist directly compares salt smuggling to the bootleg alcohol business which thrived in the US at the time due to prohibition. They insisted that “salt smuggling in China is equivalent to the bootlegging of moonshine.”[iv]
Such “societies” of salt smugglers evolved into drug trafficking networks, particularly in China and Europe. This is not figurative; it is literal. In China for example, the Green Gang and Red Gang were two such groups with roots going back to the fifteenth century that originally included illegal salt smugglers among their ranks. In time, the Green Gang and Red Gang both became preeminent opium trafficking organizations that dominated China’s narcotics trade well into the twentieth century.[v] Now, drugs of all sorts are distributed by countless syndicates and gangs such as the various Mexican cartels, Hell’s Angels, etc.
Some salt dealers falsely labeled their salt to appear as a high quality, legal product. Similarly, many drugs on the illicit market now are made to look as though they are from legal sources. Consider the enormous quantities of fake prescription drugs, pressed and labeled as if they are OxyContin, Vicodin, Xanax, etc., but which are illegally produced and often analogues or different substances entirely.[vi]
Endnotes
[i] Kurlansky, 338; McCoy, xv, 519; Hernandez, Narcoland, 32-33, 52, 106 and 163.
[ii] Kurlansky, 351; Webb, Dark Alliance, 24; McCoy, 26.
[iii] Kurlansky, 337.
[iv] “Salt Smugglers Organize…”
[v] McCoy, 266; McCoy, Read, and Adams, The Politics of…, 379.
[vi] Kurlansky, 167; Gartrell, “Feds Arrest 12…”; “3 arrested, counterfeit…”
Sources
“3 arrested, counterfeit Xanax seized in largest pill bust in New Jersey history.” ABC7, Apr 16, 2019.
Gartrell, Nate. “Feds arrest 12, seize 137 pounds of meth, 33,000+ opiate pills, in bust of multi-state drug ring based in California. The Mercury News, Sep 28, 2020.
Hernandez, Anabel. Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers. Verso, New York, NY. 2014.
Kurlansky, Mark. Salt A World History. Penguin Books, 2002. New York, NY.
McCoy, Alfred W., Cathleen B. Read, and Leonard P. Adams III. The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. Harper & Row, New York, NY. 1972.
McCoy, Alfred. The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. Lawrence Hill Books, 2003. Chicago, IL. Print.
“Salt Smugglers Organize in China.” The Evening Star, Sep 5, 1935. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1935-09-05/ed-1/seq-13/
Webb, Gary. Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. Seven Stories Press, New York, NY. 1999.
Photo credits
Historic illustration of salt production in imperial China from Medievalists.net at https://www.medievalists.net/2021/10/salt-mafias-rebellion-medieval-china/
Photo of Green Gang from Timenote.info at https://timenote.info/en/events/Green-Gang-and-Shanghai-massacre-of-1927
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