Problem Substances: Temperance and the Control of Addictive Drugs in Nineteenth-Century Australia

Abstract

During the second half of the long Australian nineteenth century (ca. 1840–1914), drugs were subjected to increasing government control in a process largely driven by the temperance movement. Temperance activism and its highly public campaign against alcohol were the key to a profound shift in the social imaginary of drugs—the common understanding of intoxicating substances—which were converted from symbols of individual deviance to the structural cause of social problems. The temperance movement promoted the disease concept of addiction and lobbied governments for expanded controls on alcohol, a model that was later copied by critics of opium. But more importantly, temperance and its radical attack on alcohol as a problem in itself inspired a fundamental shift in the public discourse about drugs that paved the way for modern drug prohibition. This article uses a series of government inquiries into alcohol and opium to illustrate their transformation into problem substances by the early twentieth century.