We Can’t Get High Like We Used To

Archival photos courtesy of Archivo Casasola

The Mexican upper classes blamed the Chinese immigrants for the early drug-trafficking networks while those same people got high in Chinese-run opium dens. Meanwhile, most of the profit from the drug trade went into the pockets of European traffickers and corrupt politicians.

More and more often when I go out partying in Mexico City, I notice that my friends somehow feel guilty for indulging in a joint or doing a line. When they do it, they can’t avoid thinking—at least for a second—that they are in some small way contributing to Mexico’s drug war, which has been responsible for 50,000 deaths and the disappearance of tens of thousands of people during the current government’s reign. Perhaps it’s even fair to say they no longer just smoke some weed or do a bump of coke: They smoke a finger, snort a tongue, take a bong rip of a torso. Then they laugh and get over it.

Since the 1940s, Mexicans have prosecuted, jailed, and killed one another because of the joys and profits that come from controlled psychoactive substances—profits that derive, at least in part, from the war on drugs having made supply scarcer while demand remains insatiable. But today, the violence has reached a new level of intensity.

The problems deepened in 2000, when the right-wing National Action Party won national elections against the Institutional Revolutionary Party for the first time in more than 70 years. Then, in 2006, Felipe Calderón was elected president after running on a platform of job creation. As soon as he took office, he instead decided to wage a brutal war on Mexico’s drug lords. Calderón’s crusade quickly affected—and infected—the entire country.

Surveying documentary photos from the early 20th century, it would seem as though it were OK to get high as a kite throughout Mexico, but the truth is using certain substances has been prohibited as far back as colonial times. When the Spanish realized that the indigenous people would use all sorts of trippy goodies to speak to their gods, or just space out, they began to ban them. That’s what happened to peyote in 1670, when the Inquisition posted edicts in churches throughout New Spain declaring its use a sin.

By the 19th century, drug use had become secular. Peyote, weed, and coca leaves weren’t sinful anymore, and they began to get used in the name of science and medicine. As was the case in most of the world back then, doctors and scientists became the gatekeepers to the beautiful kingdom of getting high.

By the beginning of the 20th century, drugs had become a class issue, and that’s where the problems started. Indigenous people, inmates, and soldiers were seen as the primary users of marijuana; therefore it was considered vulgar. The Spanish and whiter mestizos used more “scientific” and foreign drugs like heroin and opium. In the midst of the Mexican Revolution, the rich, especially well-to-do housewives, would frequent Chinese-run opium dens, where they could forget about their troubles with just a couple puffs.

Such was the life back in a Mexico divided by the boundaries of race, class, and education. But by 1920, when the revolution was complete, a new war had begun that would soon be fought throughout the world. Between 1909 and 1919, the American government and its allies lobbied to ban opium globally. Many countries supported the measure, including Mexico. The ban was signed in 1912 at the Hague and was incorporated into the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, beginning a brave new antidrug era that would see Mexico buried under mountains of dead bodies.


In the early 20th century, no one really understood the newly established prohibition on drugs. Cocaine and morphine produced by European pharmaceutical companies were easily available by prescription.