Sugar Blues

By William Dufty, 1975

Chapter 2: The Mark of Cane

Nostalgia is as old as Adam. Whenever earning our bread by the sweat of our brow gets to be too much, we are inclined — like Adam — to long for the good old days. The notion of a heavenly pastoral past crops up in mythology the world around. Like all universal myths, it lurks as something deep in the memory of the human race: Paradise Lost of the Book of Genesis, the Golden Age of Taoism, and Buddhism. Perhaps the Garden of Eden was more than a piece of Middle East real estate; perhaps it once encompassed much of this planet, from the Polynesian Islands to Shangri-la in Tibet.

It is impossible not to dream about what it must have been like. The Bible provides some clues. First of all, no sweat. Man lived naturally off the bounty of nature. Second, no cities. The word civilization means nothing more or less than the art of city living. In the good old days there was none of that. Third, no sickness. Biblical man had a lifespan incredible by modern standards. Ancient Oriental anatomical charts not only record the acupuncture meridians but also what are called beauty marks in the West — the dark spots that appear on the body at birth or later. A mark at four o’clock beneath the right eye of the male or at eight o’clock beneath the left eye of the female indicated the catastrophic probability of death by sickness. When these charts were compiled, thousands of years ago, natural death — just going to sleep without waking up — was the normal way to die. Last, but not least, refined sugar (sucrose) did not form part of the human diet.

People did have almonds and chestnuts and walnuts and pistachio; apples and figs and grapes and olives and mulberries; barley and wheat and rye and millet; cucumbers and melon and carob and mint and onion and anise and garlic and leeks; lentils and mustard and milk and honey and a multitude of natural goodies. All of these were brimming with natural sugars. Even ginseng, but no man-refined sugar. (The rediscovery of ginseng in our time coincides with the rediscovery of China and acupuncture. Newsmagazines sometimes called it a Red Chinese herb. Few remember that our grandparents learned about its magic properties from the Indians of the North American continent and used it — with squirrel brains — to treat gunshot wounds in the Old West.)

From the Garden of Eden through thousands of years, what we call sugar was unknown to man. He evolved and survived without it. None of the ancient books make mention of it: Mosaic Law, the Code of Manu, the I Ching, the Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine, the New Testament, the Koran.

The prophets tell us a few things about the status of sweet cane in ancient times: It was a rare luxury, imported from afar and very expensive. What else they did with it except offer it up as a sacrifice, we can only surmise. The far country the sweet cane came from may have been India. Polynesian myths and legends make much of the sweet cane. There is evidence that China exacted tribute from India in the form of imported sweet cane. It seems to have been native to tropical climes. If countries outside the tropical belt tried to cultivate it, they apparently had little success. A passage in the Atharva-Veda is a paean to sweetness: I have crowned thee with a shooting sweet cane so that thou shalt not be averse to me. In ancient India, the sacred cows may have chewed on it The Indians grew it in their backyards and started chewing on it themselves for its sweetness. The sweet cane was cultivated with great labor by husbandmen who bruise it when ripe in mortars, set the juice in a vessel until concreted in form like snow or white salt. The scrapings were taken with chapati bread or with pottage. A decade later or so they began pressing the cane and drinking the juice in the same way that the American Indians tapped the maple trees to make syrup. Apple cider or toddy from the date palm have to be drunk while fresh, so did the sweet juice from the sweet cane. It was as fragile as cider and would not keep without fermenting. Reay Tannahill, Food in History.

The Greeks had no word for it. When Nearchus, admiral in the service of Alexander the Great, sailed down the Indus to explore the East Indies in 325 b.c., he described it as a kind of honey growing in canes or reeds. Common soldiers of Alexander the Great found natives of the Indus Valley partaking of sweet cane juice as a fermented drink. It turns up in other Greek and Roman accounts continually compared to the basic staples of the time: honey and salt. Sometimes it was called Indian salt or honey without bees and imported in small quantities at enormous cost. Herodotus called it manufactured honey and Pliny called it honey from the cane. It was used, like honey, as a medicine. It took a Roman writer of Nero’s time to record its Latin name: saccharum. Dioscorides described it as a sort of concreted honey which is called saccharum found in canes in India and Arabia Felix; it is in consistence like salt and brittle between the teeth. Ibid.

The school of medicine and pharmacology at the University of Djondisapour, the pride of the Persian Empire, is credited with the research and development of a process for solidifying and refining the juice of the cane into solid form that would last without fermenting. Transportation and trade were now possible. This happened sometime after 600 a.d. when the Persians began growing sweet cane on their own. T’ang China imported loaves of stone honey from Bokhara where careful skimming of the liquid and the addition of milk contributed to the whiteness of this imperial luxury. A piece of saccharum was considered a rare and precious miracle drug of its time — heavily in demand in time of plague and pestilence.

While the medieval Latin name for a medicinal morsel of the precious substance came to be appropriated later for a sugar substitute in the West, the original Sanskrit word for morsel or piece (of anything) became permanently attached to Indian salt and survived transition through the languages of the Muslim empire and the Latin tongues. The Sanskrit khanda became the English candy.

The Persian empire rose and fell, as empires always do. When the armies of Islam overran them, one of the trophies of victory was the secret for processing sweet cane into medicine. The Werner von Braun of Baghdad may have been brought to Mecca. It wasn’t long before the Arabs took over the saccharum business.

When Muhammad sickened with fever and died, his kalifa or successor set out, with the faith that moves mountains, to subjugate the whole world with an army of a few thousand Arabs. With military campaigns among the most brilliant in the world’s history, he came within an ace of succeeding. Within 125 years, Islam expanded from the Indus River to the Atlantic and Spain, from Kashmir to Upper Egypt. The conquering caliph had ridden to Jerusalem with a bag of barley, a bag of dates, and a water skin. One can read stories about a successor, Omayyad Caliph Walid II, who mocked at the Koran, wore fancy outfits, ate pork, drank wine, neglected his prayers, and developed a taste for sugared drinks. The sauce of the Saracens became the pause that refreshes. Arab armies of occupation took with them the rice grains from Persia and the cuttings of the sweet cane that the Persians had found in India — it was more practical to plant young sugar cane than import the end product.

Islam soon discovered many new diseases and, perforce, divorced science from religion. Great and vital strides were made in medicine and surgery. They used anesthetics; initiated the science of chemistry; discovered the concept of zero; rediscovered algebra; advanced in astronomy; discovered alcohol; produced fantastic work in metal and textiles, glass, pottery, and leatherwork; and manufactured paper after the fashion of the Chinese. Of all their contributions to Western civilization, perhaps those of paper and sugar were eventually to have the greatest impact.

It is tempting to wonder, from eyewitness reports that turn up later, what role sugar played in the decline of the Arab Empire. In the Koran, the sacred book of Prophet Elijah Muhammad, sugar is not mentioned. But the heirs of the Prophet are probably the first conquerors in history to have produced enough sugar to furnish both courts and troops with candy and sugared drinks. An early European observer credits the widespread use of sugar by Arab desert fighters as the reason for their loss of cutting edge. Leonhard Rauwolf is the German botanist who gave his name to the plant rauwolfia serpentina. The derivatives of the plant are still in use today as sedatives and tranquilizers. Rauwolf made voyages in the lands of the Sultan through Libya and Tripoli. His journals, published in 1573, contain timeless military intelligence:

The Turks and Moors cut off one piece [of sugar] after another and so chew and eat them openly everywhere in the street without shame … in this way [they] accustom themselves to gluttony and are no longer the intrepid fighters they had formerly been.

Rauwolf viewed sugar addiction among the sultan’s armies in much the same way as modern observers discovering American forces in Asia hooked on heroin and marihuana. The Turks use themselves to gluttony and are no more so free and courageous to go against their enemies to fight as they had been in former ages. This may be the first recorded warning from the scientific community on the subject of sugar abuse and its observed consequences. The word scientist was not to be coined until 1840; the test tube and the laboratory were a good way off, but Rauwolf seems to have had the insight to view human beings as whole men in an environment with a history rather than a litany of labeled symptoms. Journals of Leonhard Rauwolff. A collection of curious travels and voyages in two tomes. The first containing Dr. Leonhard Rauwolf’s itinerary into the Eastern countries: Syria, Palestine in the Holy Land, Armenia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Chaldea, etc. Translated from the High Dutch by Nicholas Staphorst. London, S. Smith and B. Walford, 1693. Edited by John Ray (1627-1705). Second Edition, London, S. Smith and B. Walford, 1705. (The reader will note that the above author’s name is spelled with one and with two Fs. This text follows that prevailing in reference works, Rauwolf.)

After the rise of Islam, sugar became potent political stuff. Men would sell their very souls for it. The same fate that had crippled Arab conquerors was now to afflict their Christian adversaries. En route to wrest the Holy Places from the grip of the Sultan, the Crusaders soon acquired a taste for the sauce of the Saracens. Some of them wanted only to languish in the land of the infidels until they could get their fill of fermented cane juice and sugar candy. European rulers discovered that their ambassadors at the Egyptian court were being corrupted by the sugar habit and won over by bribes of costly spices and sugar. Some had to be withdrawn.

The last major Crusade ended in 1204. A few years later, the Fourth Lateran Council assembled in Rome to plan Crusades against heretics and Jews. Then in 1306, Pope Clement V — in exile at Avignon — received an appeal for a renewal of the Crusades of the good old days. Copies of the appeal went to the kings of France, England, and Sicily. This early diplomatic position paper outlined a southern sugar strategy for bringing the wily Saracens to heel.

In the land of the Sultan, sugar grows in great quantities and from it the Sultans draw large incomes and taxes. If the Christians could seize these lands, great injury would be inflicted on the Sultan and at the same time Christendom would be wholly supplied from Cyprus. Sugar is also grown in the Morea, Malta, and Sicily, and it would grow in other Christian lands if cultivated there. As regards Christendom no harm would follow.

In the face of serpentine assurances such as this, Christendom took a big bite of the forbidden fruit. What followed was seven centuries in which the seven deadly sins flourished across the seven seas, leaving a trail of slavery, genocide, and organized crime.

British Historian Noel Deerr says flatly: It will be no exaggeration to put the tale and toll of the Slave Trade at 20 million Africans, of which two-thirds are to be charged against sugar. Noel Deerr, The History of Sugar.

In the first round of the European sugar race, the Portuguese were out in front. The Saracens had introduced cultivation of the sugar cane to the Iberian peninsula during their occupation. Great cane plantations were set up in Valencia and Granada. Henry the Navigator of Portugal explored the West Coast of Africa in searching for fields of sugar cane outside Arab dominion. He didn’t find the cane fields he was looking for, but he did discover plenty of black bodies acclimated to slave in the tropical zones where the cane would flourish. In 1444, Henry took 235 Negroes from Lagos to Seville where they were sold into slavery. That was the beginning.

Ten years later, the Pope was induced to extend his blessing to the slave traffic. Papal authority was extended to attack, subject, and reduce to slavery the Saracens, Pagans, and other enemies of Christ. The ostensible rationale of Christianism abroad was the same one that justified hounding of heretics and Jews at home: to save their souls. The fact that the sweat of black brows could tend the new fields of sugar cane in Madeira and the Canary Isles was a providential fringe benefit for the Portuguese empire. For centuries, the Scriptures were systematically perverted to provide solace for slave-holding Christian sugar pushers. In his prophetic 1923 work Cane, the black American poet Jean Toomer wrote it on the wall for all time: The sin what’s fixed against the white folks … they made the Bible lie.

Sugar and slavery were two sides of the coin of the Portuguese realm. By 1456, Portugal had control of the European sugar trade. However, Spain was not far behind. When the Moors were expelled from Spain, they left behind cane fields in Granada and Andalusia.

On his second voyage to the New World in 1493, Christopher Columbus took along some hunks of sugar cane at the suggestion of Queen Isabella. In his book composed during that voyage, Peter Martyr claims the explorers found sugar cane growing in the islands of Hispaniola. Columbus suggested transporting West Indian natives to work in the Spanish sugar cane plantations. Isabella was against it. When Columbus sent two boatloads of slaves back to Spain, the Queen ordered them returned. After her death. King Ferdinand consented to recruit the first large contingent of African slaves needed in the burgeoning Spanish sugar industry in 1510.

By this time, the Portuguese were growing sugar cane with slave labor in Brazil. One element of their sugar strategy was ingenious. While other European countries were burning Jews and heretics and witches, the Portuguese emptied their jails of condemned criminals and sent them to colonize their possessions in the New World. Convicts were encouraged to interbreed with heathen female slaves to produce a hybrid race that could survive in the tropical sugar cane fields.

Dutch traders got into the act around 1500: Skillful seamanship made it possible for them to engage in cut-rate shipping — slaves were sold on credit to make up for a late start. The Dutch soon established a sugar refinery in Antwerp. Raw sugar cane was shipped from Lisbon, the Canary Islands, Brazil, Spain, and the Barbary Coast for processing in the Antwerp refineries. The sugar was then exported to the Baltic states, Germany, and England. By 1560, Charles V of Spain had built the magnificent palaces in Madrid and Toledo out of taxes on the sugar trade. No other product has so profoundly influenced the political history of the Western world as has sugar. It was the nickel under the foot of much of the early history of the New World. The Portuguese and Spanish empires rose swiftly in opulence and power. As the Arabs before them had crumbled, so they too fell rapidly into a decline. To what extent that decline was biological — occasioned by sugar bingeing at the royal level — we can only guess. However, the British Empire stood by waiting to pick up the pieces. In the beginning, Queen Elizabeth I shrank from institutionalizing slavery in the British colonies as detestable, something which might call down the vengeance of heaven on her realm. By 1588, her sentimental scruples had been overcome. The Queen granted a royal charter extending recognition to the Company of Royal Adventurers of England into Africa, which gave them a state monopoly on the West African slave trade.

In the West Indies, the Spaniards, following the trail of Columbus, had exterminated the natives and brought in African slaves to tend their fields of cane. In 1515, Spanish monks offered $500 in gold as loans to anybody who would start a sugar mill. In due time, the British fleet would arrive to drive out the Spaniards. The slaves retreated to the mountains to wage guerilla war. The British annexed the islands by formal treaty and the crown monopoly installed overseers on the sugar plantations and took over the slave trade. Fermented raw sugar cane juice was turned into rum. The first rum runners brought their fire water to New York and New England where it was traded to the North American Indians for precious furs. A penny’s worth of rum would buy many pounds’ worth of furs, which in turn could be sold in Europe for a small fortune. On the westward journey, the Queen’s Company of Royal Adventurers would visit the West African Coast for slaves; these were then transported to the West Indies and sold to the sugar planters to tend more cane to make more sugar and molasses and rum. Sugar and furs for Europe. Rum for the American Indians. Molasses for the American Colonials. (The three-cornered trade would continue until the land in Barbados and other British islands was exhausted, worn out, spent. No further crops would grow.)

Sugar pushing had become so profitable by 1660 that the British were ready to go to war to maintain their control. The Navigation Acts of 1660 had as their object the prevention of the transport of sugar, tobacco, or any product of the American Colonies to any port outside England, Ireland, and British possessions. The Colonies wanted to be free to trade with all European powers. Mother England wanted to protect her revenues and maintain the priceless shipping monopoly. She had the Royal Navy. The Colonies had no firepower, so Britannia ruled the waves … and controlled the sugar business. Eventually, by the 1860s, the word sugar had passed into the English language as a synonym for money.

Although some American historians like to argue that it was the British tax on tea that precipitated the War of Independence, others point to the Molasses Act of 1733 which levied a heavy tax on sugar and molasses coming from anywhere except the British sugar islands in the Caribbean. The ship owners of New England had cut themselves in on the lucrative trade in slaves, molasses, and rum. They sailed off with a cargo of rum to the slave coast of Africa to exchange it for blacks, whom they hauled back to the West Indies for sale to the eager British plantation owners. There they took on a load of molasses which they hauled back home to be distilled into rum and then peddled to their heavy drinking local customers. Long before the Boston Tea Party, the annual consumption of rum in the American Colonies was estimated to be almost four gallons for every man, woman, and child. The Molasses Act of 1733 posed a serious threat not only to the American Colonial trade cycle but also to its thirst for demon rum.

No cask of sugar arrives in Europe to which blood is not sticking. In view of the misery of these slaves anyone with feelings should renounce these wares and refuse the enjoyment of what is only to be bought with tears and death of countless unhappy creatures.

Thus wrote French philosopher Claude Adrien Helvetius in the middle of the eighteenth century when France had moved into the front ranks of the sugar trade. The Sorbonne condemned him; priests persuaded the court he was full of dangerous ideas; he recanted — in part to save his skin — and his book was burned by hangmen. The virulence of his attacks on slavery brought his ideas to the attention of all Europe. He said in public what many people thought in secret.

The stigma of slavery was on sugar everywhere, but most particularly in Britain. Everywhere sugar had become a source of public wealth and national importance. Through taxes and tariffs on sugar, government had remained a partner in organized crime. Fabulous fortunes were being amassed by plantation owners, planters, traders, and shippers; and the sole concern of European royalty was how they were to take their cut.

It only took three centuries for the European consciousness to be raised to the point where the first Anti-Saccharite Society was formed in 1792. The British sugar boycott soon spread throughout Europe. The British East Indian companies — already up to their ears in the opium trade — capitalized on the slavery issue for an advertising campaign, using the sugar boycott to practice moral one-upmanship.

East India Sugar not made by slaves was their eighteenth-century slogan. B. Henderson China Warehouse — Rye Lane Peckham, Respectfully informs the Friends of Africa that she has on sale an Assortment of Sugar Basins [bowls] labeled in Gold Letters: East India Sugar Not Made By Slaves. In finer print they spelled out their pitch: A family that uses five pounds of sugar per week will, by using East India instead of West India for 21 months, prevent the Slavery or Murder of one Fellow Creature. Eight such families in 19Vi years will prevent the slavery or murder of 100.

His majesty’s government, with its vested interest in both slavery and sugar, spoke loftily of the empire. Britain was the center of the sugar industry of the entire world. The pleasure, glory, and grandeur of England has been advanced more by sugar than by any other commodity, wool not excepted, said Sir Dalby Thomas. The impossibility of doing without slaves in the West Indies will always prevent the traffic being dropped. The necessity, the absolute necessity then, of carrying on must, since there is no other, be its excuse, quoth another eminent political figure of the time. L. A. Strong, The Story of Sugar.

It had taken no time at all for the British empire to become totally hooked on the issue of sugar. In other empires, the rare medicament had gone as/far as becoming a costly luxury. Britain, however, had gone all the way. Want had become need. Gluttony had produced necessity. Sugar and slavery were indivisible. Therefore, they were defended together.

When the British West Indies were plagued with slave revolts, heavily outnumbered colonials living in terror petitioned the Crown for protection. We cannot allow the colonies to check or discourage in any degree a traffic so beneficial to this nation, it was said in Parliament. The Negro trade and the natural consequence resulting from (it) may justly be esteemed an inexhaustible source of wealth and naval power to this nation, said another pillar of the British empire.

At the time of its introduction to Britain, sugar was prohibitively expensive, a courtly luxury in a price class with the most expensive drugs on the market today. At $25 a pound, it was the equivalent of a year’s salary for a working man. Around 1300, according to surviving accounts, a few servings of sugar accounted for a third of the cost of a magnificent funeral feast In the mid-sixteenth century, by the reign of Elizabeth I, the price had been cut in half. By 1662, Britain was importing 16 million pounds of sugar a year. The cost had been cut to a shilling a pound, which was equivalent to the cost of three dozen eggs. Two decades later, the price was cut in half again. By 1700, the British Isles were accounting for 20 million pounds a year. By 1800, it was 160 million pounds a year. In a century span, the consumption of sugar had gone up eightfold. In another hundred years, Britons were spending as much on sugar as they spent for bread. Seventy-two pounds per person per year and still going up.

Napoleon Bonaparte left his mark on the sugar story both as producer and consumer. Weary of being robbed by the merchants of Venice in earlier times, the French got into the business of sugar refining in a big way. Around 1700, refined sugar was France’s most important export Their sugar industry prospered until the Napoleonic Wars. When Britain retaliated with a naval blockade, French refineries were cut off from the sources of raw stock. The price of sugar went sky high; bonbons were too expensive for anyone but the royal court. Napoleonic armies — like the battalions of Islam — were starved for sweets during the period they took their turn at conquering much of continental Europe. Then Napoleon struck back. In 1747, German scientist Franz Carl Achard had been experimenting in Berlin with a kind of parsnip recently arrived from Italy. Its original source was said to be Babylonia. Achard’s work continued under the sponsorship of Frederick William III of Prussia. However, French scientists — under pressure from the blockade and the emperor — undertook an intensive research program.

Benjamin Delessert found a way to process the lowly Babylonian beet into a new kind of sugar loaf at Plassy in 1812. Napoleon awarded him the Legion of Honor. Napoleon ordered sugar beets planted everywhere in France, an imperial factory was established for refining; scholarships were granted to schools for starting courses in sugar beet crafts; 500 licenses were created for sugar refineries. By the very next year, Napoleon had achieved the herculean feat of producing eight million pounds of sugar from homegrown beets. When Napoleonic armies set out for Moscow, their sugar rations were ensured. Like the Moors before them, they were turned back while traveling north. The mighty French army, in the unaccustomed climate, had met their match and more, including the armies of a backward people who had not yet accustomed themselves to sugar in their tea.

After Napoleon had beaten Britain’s sugar blockade, the Quakers in Britain took up cultivation of the sugar beet as an antislavery gesture. The sugar cane industry construed this as subversive activity and demanded that the Quakers be uprooted. Most of Britain’s sugar beets were fed to the cows and it was not until there was a shipping shortage in another world war that the British sugar beet industry got going again.

The French were first to abolish the slave trade by law in 1807. It took another quarter century of agitation before emancipation was proclaimed in the British colonies in 1833. That meant slavery was outlawed except in the cradle of liberty, the United States of America, land of the free. British sugar planters in Barbados and Jamaica were ruined; slaveholders were indemnified by the British government with $75 to $399 a head for their slaves. In 1846, protective tariffs went down, disenchanted blacks rose against their masters, and East Indian immigrants were brought in to man what was left of the once powerful international sugar business. But American technology was waiting in the wings to pick up the pieces. A triad of inventions in the beginning of the nineteenth century set the stage for the big-time entry of the U.S. into the sugar business: James Watt had perfected his steam engine; Figuier had completed a method for making charcoal out of animal bones; and Howard had produced the vacuum pan. However, the slavery of one kind or another never went out of style as far as sugar was concerned. The sugar industry was the model for other agribusiness conglomerates that were to follow decades later. Sugar beets had still to be planted, thinned and topped by hand. Growing sugar cane required backbreaking labor under the hot sun of those climates where the cane thrived. Tending and cutting of sugar cane could not be mechanized. It had to be done by hand. Most of the hands were black.

The United States had barely freed itself from the colonial domination of Britain before it began practicing wholesale economic colonialism of its own in Cuba. Cuba became the classic example of a poor country economically hooked to a larger country. The best Cuban land — after British islands were exhausted — was used to supply America with raw materials for their giant and complicated refineries. Until the age of the vacuum pan, steam, and charcoal, no such thing existed as the refined white commercial sugar used today. Primitive refining processes produced raw, light brown sugar. It took those animal bones and those giant refineries to turn it into pure white crystals.

In early America, the sugar pushers were on their own. Government interference didn’t exist. The Pure Food and Drug Laws were still to be created. The Department of Agriculture had yet to come into existence. Before the Civil War, all agricultural matters were handled by a division of the office of the U.S. Patent Commissioner. Sugar cane was one of the last crops introduced into the continental U.S. An inconsequential amount was grown with slave labor in Louisiana. The founding fathers of America took no more interest in the business of sugar than had their late repressor George III of England. They looked on it merely as a sure source of tax revenues. The tiny federal government budget was raised totally through the imposition of excise taxes (one of which caused the Whiskey Rebellion) and duties on imported goods. Cuba was a back door sugar colony. Approximately 90 percent of America’s sugar came from there. Import duties of almost 20 a pound on imported raw Cuban sugar bound for American refineries accounted for 20 percent of the total federal revenue from import duties.

Americans soon outdistanced the British and virtually every other nation in sugar bingeing. The U.S. has consumed one-fifth of the world’s production of sugar every year but one since the Civil War. By 1893, America was consuming more sugar than the whole world had produced in 1865. By 1920, at the time of the noble experiment in the prohibition of alcohol in the U.S., that figure for sugar consumption had doubled. Through war and peace, depression and prosperity, drought and flood, sugar consumption in America has risen steadily. It is doubtful there has ever been a more drastic challenge to the human body in the entire history of man.

In a strange way, the trail of the opium poppy has kept a parallel historical pace with the mark of cane. The use of both began as medicines; both ended up being used as habit-forming sensory pleasures. The opium traffic, like the sugar trade, seems to have begun in Persia. Both were discovered and introduced far and wide by the Arab empire. It took only a few centuries for both items to pass from medicinal usage to that of a purely pleasurable pursuit. Opium smoking began in China in the seventeenth century. The Portuguese were the first western traders to capitalize on both commodities. Then the British took over.

An early emperor of China foresaw — when alcohol was discovered — that it would raise havoc among his subjects, but he issued no prohibitions on its use. By 1760, however, Chinese imperial authorities felt obliged to prohibit opium smoking and outlaw the opium trade. Prohibition, as usual, made things worse. The British fought the Opium Wars with China rather than allow any interference with their lucrative opium trade. The Royal East India company maintained its monopoly on opium cultivation in East India the same way the Royal West India company maintained its monopoly on the cultivation of sugar cane in the West Indies. Opium running — like sugar pushing — became the basis for some of the great fortunes in Britain and America. In both cases, appalling human slavery and degradation were on the other side of the golden coin. The Opium Wars ended with the treaty of Nanking in 1842, and opium imports into China were opened up again at Britain’s insistence in 1858.

By that time, the chemists had gone to work on both sugar and opium and produced refined versions of each. The refinement of opium was called morphine. The same industrial revolution which produced the steam engine and the evaporating pan also brought the invention of the hypodermic needle. Morphine shots became the wonder drug of their time, a cure for all ills, including a new malady that had been discovered in sugar-bingeing nations called sugar diabetes. After the American Civil War, morphine addiction in the U.S. was called the army disease. The abuse of morphine in the Union armies of the North was so widespread that thousands of veterans went home hooked on the stuff. During the Civil War years, soldiers also developed a yen for cans of condensed milk preserved with great quantities of sugar.

When physicians belatedly discovered the addictive properties of morphine, the chemists went to work again and came up with a further refinement of morphine that was much touted by the medical men as a new non-addictive pain killer. Its multisyllabic chemical name, diacetylmorphine, was soon supplanted by the name of heroin. Heroin was hailed in its turn as the miracle wonder drug of its time. It replaced morphine in the treatment of sugar diabetes.

Shortly after the excise taxes on sugar were repealed in America at the turn of the century, the government undertook to use its tax powers to control the Widespread abuse of opium, morphine, and heroin. The government didn’t get around to rediscovering Canabis sativa — hemp, hashish, or marijuana, the use of which was more ancient than either sugar or opium — until the late 1930s. In some quarters early in the 1900s, there were spokesmen who judged sugar the greatest of all addictive evils, while the attitude toward opiates was relatively benign.

According to Dr. Robert Boesler, a New Jersey dentist, in 1912:

Modern manufacturing of sugar has brought about entirely new diseases. The sugar of commerce is nothing else but concentrated crystallized acid. If, in former times sugar was so costly that only the wealthy could afford to use it, it was, from the national economic standpoint, of no consequence. But today, when, because of its low cost, sugar has caused a degeneration of the people, it is time to insist on a general enlightenment The loss of energy through the consumption of sugar in the last century and the first decade of this century can never be made good, as it has left its mark on the race. Alcohol has been used for thousands of years and has never caused the degeneration of a whole race. Alcohol does not contain destructive acids. What has been destroyed by sugar is lost and cannot be recovered.

The good doctor’s warning about the American nation was as sweeping as Rauwolfs diagnosis of the Moors over three hundred years earlier. In 1911, the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica contained a complete, do-it-yourself guide for the acquisition, operation, and care of the opium pipe.

So far as can be gathered from the conflicting statements published on the subject, said the Britannica, drawing on dozens of official pharmacological and International Opium Commission reports:

Opium smoking may be regarded much in the same way as the use of alcoholic stimulants. To the great majority of smokers who use it moderately, it appears to act as a stimulant and to enable them to undergo great fatigue and to go for a considerable time with little or no food. According to the reports on the subject, when the smoker has plenty of active work it appears to be no more injurious than smoking tobacco. When carried to excess, it becomes an inveterate habit; but this happens chiefly in individuals of weak willpower, who would just as easily become the victims of intoxicating drinks, and who are practically moral imbeciles, often addicted to other forms of depravity.

The Britannica brushed off Chinese arguments against opium as being economically determined. There can be no doubt that the use of the drug is opposed by all thinking Chinese who are not pecuniarily interested in the opium trade or cultivation, for several reasons, among which may be mentioned the drain of bullion from the country, the decrease of population, the liability of famine through the cultivation of opium where cereals should grow, and the corruption of state officials.

Any backward glance reminds us that everything changes. And the social acceptability or public alarm over other people’s appetites, habits, and addictions has changed more often than it has remained the same. The difference between sugar addiction and narcotic addiction is largely one of degree. Small quantities of narcotics can change body-brain behavior quickly. Sugars take a little longer, from a matter of minutes in the case of a liquid, simple sugar like alcohol to a matter of years in sugars of other kinds.

The enduring American fantasy of the dope pusher — imbedded in law and myth — is a slimy degenerate hanging around school playgrounds passing out free samples of expensive addictive substances to innocent kids. This fantasy devil was created at the turn of the century by and for a country of booze and sugar addicts with an enduring nostalgia for the friendly country store where so many of them got their habit.

Mark Twain tells us in his autobiography that in the slave-trading town of Florida, Missouri, around 1840, there were two stores in the village — one belonging to his uncle.

It was a very small establishment … a few barrels of salt mackerel, coffee, and New Orleans sugar behind the counter; stacks of brooms, shovels, axes, hoes, rakes, and such; … a lot of cheap hats, bonnets, and tinware strung on strings and suspended from the walls, … another counter with bags of shot on it, a cheese or two, and a keg of powder; in front of it a row of nail kegs and a few pigs of lead, and behind it a barrel or two of New Orleans molasses and native corn whiskey on tap. If a boy bought five or ten cents’ worth of anything, he was entitled to half a handful of sugar from the barrel, … if a man bought a trifle, he was at liberty to draw and swallow as big a drink of whiskey as he wanted.

Everything was cheap: apples, peaches, sweet potatoes, Irish potatoes, and corn, ten cents a bushel; chickens ten cents apiece; butter, six cents a pound; eggs, three cents a dozen; coffee and sugar, five cents a pound; whiskey, ten cents a gallon.

Sugar was a lot more expensive than whiskey and other staples. But there they were, pushing free samples, hooking the kiddies good. Mark Twain — like most kids with an uncle who had a sugar barrel — was a sickly and precarious and tiresome and uncertain child, who lived, he tells us, mainly on allopathic medicines.

By 1840, the sugar pushers and the diseasestablishment That part of the establishment — once minor, now major — that profits directly and indirectly, legally and illegally, from human misery and malaise. were solid partners. Washington raked in two cents in federal taxes on every five-cent pound bag of sugar for another fifty years. Addicts supported the government — rather than vice versa — once upon a time.