The Retail Side of Industrialisation: Legal Opiate Trade in Switzerland, c. 1700–1960

Abstract

Opiate smuggling has found increasing scholarly attention. Legal distribution however remains largely a blind spot. Against this background, I follow in this article some of the traces it has left in Switzerland. I ask not only how it was regulated, but also where the drugs came from and how and by whom they were sold. In the first section, I examine the trade in the opium-based panacea theriac in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At that time, pharmacists were increasingly successful in claiming the exclusive right to sell remedies. When powerful industrial opiates gradually replaced the early modern artisanal goods in the nineteenth century, it was they who benefited most. As I argue in the second section, this line of business came under pressure when the use of opiates increasingly faced criticism in the last third of the century. However, as I show in the third section, legal provisions were only reluctantly enforced and followed. A fundamental shift only occurred in the 1960s when, in the context of the cold war, the Americanisation of international crime control and the “war on drugs” led to a repressive turn in law enforcement.

Introduction

In addition to studies of (inter)national drug policies, consumption and, to a lesser extent, production have been the main focus of the historiography on opiates in industrialisation era Europe.¹ In the recent years, smuggling activities, which developed in parallel with prohibition since the early twentieth century, have found increasing scholarly attention.² The legal distribution of these goods by pharmacies and other retailers however, which seems to have been at least as important well into the second half of the century, remains largely a blind spot. Since the pioneering work of Virginia Berridge and Griffith Edwards, references have remained rather anecdotal.³ At least with respect to these players, it is therefore more of a (justified) assumption than a proven fact when Paul Gootenberg in a recent overview writes that “[o]n the ground, intermediaries such as pharmacists, botanists, shamans, or merchants, some of them subaltern or distant actors, appear essential in shifting the definitions and directions of drug trades.”⁴

This is particularly true of Switzerland, to which this article refers. Considering the importance the country’s pharmaceutical industry had in the opiate business of the first third of the twentieth century,⁵ it is somewhat surprising that, after a few early works on smuggling,⁶ the historiography has shown little interest in the distribution, and especially the legal retailing, of such substances. We hardly have an idea of its structures in general, let alone the ways in which it may have—or have not—influenced the meanings and practices Gootenberg refers to. An exception though is Catherine Hänni, who in her study of the regulatory side also looks at the agency of pharmacists, albeit mainly in relation to the implementation of the national narcotics acts in the twentieth century.⁷ Broadening the focus in terms of time and stakeholders, I follow in this article some of the traces of legal opiate retailing in Switzerland since the eighteenth century. I ask not only how it was regulated, but also where the drugs came from and how and by whom they were sold. In other words: I focus on the actual behaviour of the different players in the field of opiate retailing.

As it turns out, Switzerland seems to have not differed fundamentally from its neighbouring countries. While the specific circumstances—the individual institutions and regulations—may well have been unique, it can thus be regarded as an example for the general trends in Central and Northwestern Europe. Firstly, legal retailing in opiates was organised transregionally until well into the nineteenth century. It was only with the industrially produced opiates, the subsequent tightening of regulations and particularly the successful promotion of the professional interests of pharmacists that the early modern transregional trade came to an end. In a sense, smuggling was to become its illegal successor. Due to their commercial potential, secondly, opiates attracted various players in the retail sector. The question of who should be allowed to trade in these products was therefore raised not only from a health policy perspective but was also influenced by conflicting business interests. This was linked, thirdly, to the fact that establishing and enforcing regulation and prohibition proved to be a lengthy and contradictory process. Not only was the pharmaceutical industry resisting restrictions. Retailers also pursued their own interests.

All too often, studies focus on a relatively short period of time, making it difficult to identify such continuities and discontinuities. Taking a long-term perspective instead, I examine in the first section the trade in the opium-based panacea theriac in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Small artisanal producers and traders of various origins made sure that these goods found their customers. At that time, pharmacists were increasingly successful in their attempts to claim the exclusive right to sell remedies. When powerful industrial opiates gradually replaced the early modern artisanal goods in the nineteenth century, it was they who benefited most. As I argue in the second section, this line of business came under pressure when the use of opium and opiates increasingly faced criticism in the last third of the century. With prohibition on the rise around 1900, the trade in such goods became increasingly restricted and a black market developed. However, as I show in the third section, the legal provisions were only reluctantly enforced and followed, so that legal retailing continued to flourish. A fundamental shift only occurred in the 1960s when the Americanisation of international crime control and the “war on drugs,” which were closely linked to the cold war, led to a repressive turn in law enforcement. It preceded transformations of demand and supply in the context of the counterculture, rather than being a mere reaction to them.

The Early Modern Trade in the Artisanal Panacea Theriac

Until well into the nineteenth century, theriac was one of the best-known medicinal compounds. In some sources it is also called “mithridate” or “orvietan,” after Orvieto, one of its production sites.⁸ Used in antiquity as an antidote to animal poison, it became a panacea in the medieval and early modern times.⁹ Since there were no binding rules for production, its composition was adapted to the raw materials available and to local medical cultures.¹⁰ Snake meat, an important ingredient in older recipes, does not seem to have been added in early modern Europe. Opium, however, became a central component.¹¹ It is not least because of this that theriac can be considered a luxury good of the time. Correspondingly, many of the capsules in which it was sold were richly decorated.¹² Whether poppy juice was used, and if so, in what quantities, cannot be determined. It is at least doubtful for products that were manufactured in Swiss towns and villages for a local clientele.

With around forty licensed apothecaries, Venice was the European centre of production of luxurious theriac, as suggested particularly by archaeological findings. In Switzerland, capsules from the Testa d’Oro and Paradiso apothecaries were found in the cantons of Fribourg and Vaud.¹³ As we learn from written sources such as Johann Christian Schedel’s (1748–1803) Neu eröfnete Academie der Kaufleute (Newly Established Merchants’ Academy) from 1798, the theriac from the lagoon city was also available in Lausanne.¹⁴ However, there were other northern and central Italian production sites, such as the aforementioned Orvieto, as well as towns north of the Alps, such as Nuremberg and Amsterdam.¹⁵ And there existed numerous small manufacturers who sold the goods themselves, in Switzerland as elsewhere.¹⁶ Around 1700 for instance, the Collegio Medicorum of Lucerne examined a—probably self-produced—“schweißtreibener theriac” (sudorific theriac).¹⁷ In 1742 the government of Zurich permitted the manufacture of the same good, but prohibited the addition of certain substances classified as harmful.¹⁸

The opium used in the production of theriac came mainly from the Levant, with its main port of Smyrna (now Izmir), and was transported by sea to south-western Europe.¹⁹ From Livorno and other Italian ports, the Hamburg encyclopaedist Philipp Andreas Nemnich (1764–1822) writes in his 1811 account Reise durch Italien (Journey through Italy), that poppy juice and other drugs were shipped on to America, as well as to Germany and Switzerland. The Venetian theriac, in turn, was sent back to the Levant as well as to German-speaking countries.²⁰ At that time, the southern French cities of Marseille and, above all, Lyon were the main trading centres between the Mediterranean on the one hand and Switzerland and other central and northern European regions on the other.²¹ According to a report from 1786, the latter was one of the “most distinguished manufacturing and trading cities in Europe” where merchants offered “all kinds of silk goods, silk, cloth, canvas, oil, spices and drugs, theriac, chestnuts, Swiss cheese” and much more. Venetian theriac, for example, was available at Goudard frères.²² This shop, located close to the town hall, regularly praised its “genuine & very old theriac from Venice” in a local advertising journal in the early 1770s, as did a wigmaker from the neighbouring Place des Terreaux and a certain Sieur Trufaut, a “post courier” from Rome, who offered food, pomades and other goods from various Italian cities on a street corner a little further south.²³

In addition to domestic producers who sold the goods themselves, such itinerant traders seem to have been responsible for a significant proportion of the theriac supply in Switzerland. If they did not produce the goods themselves, they bought them from apothecaries or at fairs.²⁴ The promotional activities of these manufacturers and traders were based on the capsules and advertisements mentioned above, as well as sensational performances in self-built “theatra” on urban streets and squares.²⁵ As Thomas Holste notes for the German-speaking countries as a whole, some of them were also known for their orientalising clothing and their accent. Their so-called theriac tractates, which praised the effects and offered suggestions for use, were intended to further promote sales. Itinerant traders also tried to prove the authenticity and efficacy of their products through words and experiments. The latter purpose was served, for example, by colour changes caused by chemical reactions. Animal and self experiments, by contrast, seem to have fallen into disuse around 1800.²⁶

Next to Germany and France—sources from Zurich mention a certain Hartmann from the Vogtland in today’s German-Czech border region and an “Operator” from the Picardy²⁷—, these market and ointment criers, as they are often called in the sources, came from all over Europe, from Austria, the Ottoman Empire and Italy in particular.²⁸ But many also lived in the respective region. In Horgen on Lake Zurich, nine theriac traders were counted in 1807, in addition to a medicine maker and a remedy seller. The further medical personnel consisted of four surgeons and physicians, an ophthalmologist, a veterinarian and four midwives, while, as in many other rural communities, there seems to have been no apothecary.²⁹

The regulation of the trade in remedies was based on provisions concerning dispensing and storage. Since the fifteenth century, Hänni notes, Bernese apothecaries were only allowed to dispense laxatives, opiates, and soporifics on prescription, and to sell poisons and other goods that had a strong effect on the body only to sworn citizens of good repute. In the centuries that followed, regulations were gradually tightened.³⁰ The 1772 ordinance on the sale of poisons, for example, required that such goods—opium and its preparations are not explicitly mentioned—be stored under lock and key and that records be kept. For the first time, penalties for violations were specified and “speciality merchants, materialists, oil and theriac peddlers, and spice carriers” were explicitly required to refrain from any sale.³¹ This indicates that theriac itself did not fall within the scope of the ordinance and that it was not considered a good having a strong effect on the body. In contrast, a permit issued in Lucerne around 1792 to a “market crier for … theriac, tea, ointments and the like” stipulated that he had his products inspected and refrained from “internal applications.”³²

While it remains unclear what role opium played in provisions on the trade in theriac, the late medieval and early modern regulations suggest that the poppy juice and its preparations were considered anything but harmless from early on. The fact that they appear to be mentioned more frequently in sources since the early nineteenth century does not therefore indicate a fundamental change in how they were dealt with. In Bern, to continue with this example, they were still only to be sold in apothecaries and only on prescription. Materialists or druggists were allowed to sell certain types of poisons, but not opium or its preparations. However, they were authorised to engage in wholesale trade in these substances, as were manufacturers and factory owners.³³ Similar developments can be observed in other cantons, although Geneva, for example, in the 1820s temporarily permitted the retail sale of opium by druggists.³⁴

In addition to complying with dispensing and storage regulations, retailers had to pay tariffs on imported goods, and, in the case of itinerant traders, obtain patents. Regarding the former, the Swiss cantons seem to have been rather modest. In Zurich in the decades around 1800, the duty on medicines was five kreutzers per hundredweight. This was the same as for coffee and slightly higher than for sugar. Other transregionally traded consumer goods, such as tea and fine spices, were taxed at twenty kreutzers.³⁵ Obtaining patents, by contrast, was accompanied by significant barriers. A mandate issued by the mayor and council of Zurich in 1783 justified them on the grounds that the “market criers wandering about the country, including foreign and domestic root and theriac peddlers,” were not only a danger to health, but also strengthened superstition and “noticeably diminished the confidence in the many good, faithful, well-educated physicians, as well as wound doctors and midwives.”³⁶ In the early nineteenth century, the prerequisites to obtain a patent included good conduct, the general need for a trade and, in the case of non-residents, the absence of domestic suppliers.³⁷ Such sources illustrate once again that, alongside the state’s concern for the supply of high-quality medicine, the commercial interests of locals and certain professional groups played an important role in the regulation of the retail trade.

In his 1852 Pharmacopoeae Bernensis Tentamen (An Attempt at a Bernese Pharmacopoeia), a forerunner of the Swiss pharmacopoeia, the pharmacist Carl Fueter (1792–1852) still listed theriac. It is an opium-containing compound with a total of seventeen ingredients.³⁸ And to this day, it can be obtained on the Internet. Nevertheless, it slowly disappeared from medicine cabinets in the nineteenth century, along with the other famous opium-based medicine of the early modern period, the painkiller and sedative laudanum. They were gradually replaced by more potent industrial opiates. As the pharmacists—and the physicians, since they continued to be entitled to dispense medicines directly in most German-speaking cantons³⁹—had the exclusive right to sell such remedies, it was they who benefited most from this development. However, as I argue in the following section, this line of business came under pressure as the problematic aspects of opiates were increasingly discussed.

The Contested Retailing of Industrial Opiates in the Late Nineteenth Century

Morphine, the most important of the alkaloids extracted from opium in the early nineteenth century, was produced industrially from the late 1820s. It was used in increasing quantities as a sedative and painkiller, as well as for all sorts of other ailments.⁴⁰ An analysis of the medicines dispensed by the Solothurn hospital pharmacy between 1840 and 1860 showed that it was included in about one percent of the prescriptions. It was used slightly less frequently than opium extract and a little more often than laudanum.⁴¹ Although studies on private pharmacies are lacking, it is very likely against this background that morphine was of commercial interest for them. At the same time, however, the old reservations about the effects of opiates on the human body were updated and intensified in the context of new patterns of use and particularly the popularisation of the concept of addiction.⁴² By the 1870s at the latest, this line of business began to face harsh criticism. Not least, it came from competitors in the medicine retail trade as the following example shows.

In 1872, two women died in childbed at the Bern maternity hospital. Instead of quinine, which was used to treat muscle spasms, they had been given morphine produced by E. Merck & Co., the Darmstadt-based alkaloid pioneer and industrial heavyweight.⁴³ The deaths caused a sensation far beyond Bern. Various players used them to position themselves in the controversial field of medicine production and retailing. For Merck itself, the stakes appear to have been high. Shortly after the events in Bern had become public, for example, the governorates of the Austrian crown lands had called on pharmacies to exercise special caution regarding Merck products.⁴⁴ The fact that its competitor Jobst from Stuttgart promised to supply its morphine as a “crystalline powder” to make confusion more difficult suggests that the entire industry feared damage to its morphine business.⁴⁵

As a result, the Göttingen professor of pharmacy August Wiggers (1803–80) and his colleague August Husemann (1833–77) from Chur, the capital of the Swiss canton of Graubünden, assured in their Jahresbericht über die Fortschritte der Pharmacognosie, Pharmacie und Toxicologie (Annual Report on the Progress of Pharmacognosy, Pharmacology and Toxicology) that “the highly respected company E. Merck in Darmstadt, the name of which is repeatedly mentioned in this regard and which has even been discredited by a very hasty and unmotivated official decree in Cis- and Transleithania, has nothing to do with any of the cases of poisoning.”⁴⁶ Other newspapers and pharmaceutical journals joined the chorus and printed a circular in which Merck defended itself against the insinuation that the fatal mistake had occurred in its own premises.⁴⁷

A second player was the state pharmacy, from which the maternity hospital had obtained the morphine. Founded in 1834, it was intended to supply the cantonal hospitals, prisons and penitentiaries with inexpensive medicines and to serve as a “model pharmacy and teaching institution.”⁴⁸ The establishment of such facilities is an important aspect of the expansion of state medical care that began in the early nineteenth century. Correspondingly, the authorities had a strong interest in ensuring that it did not fall into disrepute because of the events at the maternity hospital. “The rigorous and conscientious judicial investigation revealed that the contaminated preparation had been supplied to the state pharmacy by a local druggist and had been tested there before use in accordance with the regulations,” the administrative report stated, “and that the state pharmacist could not be blamed for the failure to detect the contamination in this case. The druggist was also acquitted by the court.”⁴⁹ Along the supply chain, everything seems to have gone correctly.

The establishment of the state pharmacy had only been possible in the face of opposition from private pharmacists, the third players.⁵⁰ As they had been responsible for supplying medicines to state institutions in earlier times, the market entry of the state pharmacy is likely to have led to a noticeable drop in sales. In this respect, the Schweizer Bote (Swiss Messenger), published by the liberal politician, pedagogue, and forestry official Heinrich Zschokke (1771–1848), had written in 1835 that “the gentlemen pharmacists” were to blame themselves. They “could have saved the state a great deal of trouble and still secured a tidy profit,” he argued, if they “had offered cheap supply contracts at the right time—for the abuses were indeed too bad.”⁵¹ Even if the state supported the professionalisation of doctors and pharmacists, commercial interests on the one hand and public health and state finances on the other were not always compatible.

But there were also common interests. The leading staff of private and state pharmacies belonged to the same social class, they were equally involved in the opiate business, and the boundaries between private and state activities were blurred. The first state pharmacist, Franz Sprüngli (1808–60), had previously been a tenant of a Bernese pharmacy.⁵² His successor, Friedrich August Flückiger (1828–94) elected in 1860, had made his name as a pharmacist and wholesaler in the provincial town of Burgdorf.⁵³ A leading representative of pharmacognosy, among whose particular interests were the alkaloids of cinchona bark and opium, he was to be appointed a professorship in Strasbourg in 1873, the year after the accidents in hospital.⁵⁴ On behalf of the Swiss Pharmacists’ Association, and in parallel with his work as a state pharmacist, he was also substantially involved in the compilation of the first two editions of the Pharmacopoea Helvetica. Until then, various European pharmacopoeias had been used.⁵⁵

Still, the pharmacists could count on the state in their efforts to professionalise. As early as 1865, the year of its publication, the pharmacopoeia was enforced by the canton of Bern.⁵⁶ Even though not all other cantons followed suit immediately, this also represented an important step towards the nationalisation of the pharmacy trade—together with the freedom of movement for medical personnel as a result of the new constitution of 1874, and with the establishment of a domestic academic education and of a labour market protected by national diplomas.⁵⁷ Thus, to the discontent of many pharmacists who regretted the end of the concession system, professionalisation went hand in hand with nationalisation. At the same time however, trading by foreigners was made more difficult and the state continued its efforts to strengthen the position of pharmacists. It kept restricting the activities of druggists and tried to prevent those of other retailers altogether.⁵⁸

Against this background, it is not surprising that the deaths in the maternity hospital provided an opportunity for these fourth players in the medicine trade to attack Flückiger and his “allopathic” medicine head on. A commentary in the homeopathic and folk-medicine weekly Dorfdoktor (Village Doctor) ironically described him as “the state pharmacist who in earlier times had so zealously fought against self-dispensing by homeopaths, and whose main argument was that the public could only be protected from poisoning if examined and patented pharmacists alone were allowed to retail.” By adding that “the only true, rational guild”—an expression that obviously referred to the pharmacists—“must not leave such a fighter in the lurch when a little mishap happens to him,” the commentator implied a lack of will by other members of the profession to shed light on the incidents.⁵⁹ A few weeks before, the journal had already written “that any system that works with such strong and harmful means must lead to such accidents.”⁶⁰

The editors of the Dorfdoktor, Friedrich Rödiger (1824–1909) and Albert von Fellenberg-Ziegler (1819–1902), were no unknowns. The former, a farmer’s son and agronomist who had fled from Saxony after the revolution of 1848, was a radical-liberal orator, adviser on land improvement projects and agricultural reformer, as well as a naturopath, historian and archaeologist.⁶¹ The latter, a Bernese burgher, was a proponent of homeopathy and had gained a reputation as a reformer of agriculture and alpine farming. They believed that agriculture, like other branches of the economy, was on the verge of a “revolution” that would transform the hitherto “inferior and despised business into an industry,” as Fellenberg-Ziegler wrote in 1861.⁶² Despite their distance from academic medicine, they were anything but opponents of the new era.

It was precisely in 1872 that Fellenberg-Ziegler also published his short Homöopathische Arzneimittellehre (Homeopathic Pharmacopoeia).⁶³ In addition to this book, which is still used today, he offered other specialised publications, materials such as jars and bottles as well as all kinds of tinctures and homeopathic medicine chests for sale.⁶⁴ In so doing, Fellenberg-Ziegler and similar protagonists had to some extent taken the place of the early modern itinerant traders. Economically, they were quite successful—above all Willmar Schwabe (1839–1917), whose Leipzig homeopathic factory and mail-order company became almost globally active before the turn of the twentieth century.⁶⁵ Schwabe’s publishing house also printed Fellenberg-Ziegler’s pharmacopoeia. However, the opium mentioned in the book was not allowed to be sold by non-pharmacists like him.⁶⁶ At least in this respect, the homeopaths’ “fight for freedom and for equal state rights for all” remained unsuccessful.⁶⁷

Despite its mention in Fellenberg-Ziegler’s pharmacopoeia, opium was usually described by the Dorfdoktor as the epitome of an allopathic medicine. “For our part, we wish that there would be no opium at all,” wrote the author of an article on domestic poppy cultivation experiments, “because it does far more harm than it relieves! Sick people who have been treated with morphine, laudanum and the like have nothing more to look forward to on this earth! No! No! Such cultivated plants do not speak for culture. You can see best with the Turks what opium can do!”⁶⁸ As is exemplified by the widely read book Die Morphiumsucht (The Morphine Addiction), published in 1877 by Eduard Levinstein (1831–82), this criticism was increasingly shared by representatives of academic medicine.⁶⁹ Calls for stricter regulation were voiced louder in national as well as international politics. However, as I argue in the next section, not only did it take several decades before the retail trade in these goods was further restricted in Switzerland, but the provisions of the law were also followed and enforced rather reluctantly.

The Slow Implementation of Prohibition in the Twentieth Century

The debates at the end of the nineteenth century culminated in the International Opium Convention of 1912. It is not surprising that Switzerland did not sign the treaty. Together with Germany, Great Britain, Japan, and the USA, it was one of the main producers of opiates in general and morphine and heroin in particular. Since the events described in the previous section, its pharmaceutical industry had evolved from an imitator to a technology leader.⁷⁰ To be sure, import and export restrictions existed at the federal level—next to the retail trade regulations at the cantonal level I have already mentioned.⁷¹ However, it was not until 1924 that Switzerland passed its first narcotics law, signed the convention and began to focus more strongly on prohibition. Despite a vociferous campaign, the industry was no longer able to successfully defend its free-trade position against pressure from within the country and abroad.⁷² For almost a century, an increasing proportion of production had taken place here. Now it was gradually shifting to the countries where the raw material was grown.

Despite the sensationalism of some media and authorities, opiate dependence was not a pressing problem.⁷³ The few morphinists, who were often members of the middle and upper classes, did not dominate the public health debates, which were still mainly concerned with the alcohol consumption of the lower classes.⁷⁴ Many opiate users were healthcare professionals who had easy access to medicines. Others obtained their morphine and heroin through forged prescriptions and similar practices, thus also relying on the legal retailing by pharmacies.⁷⁵ Around 1900, even druggists were authorised to sell opium tinctures⁷⁶, but also stronger opiates, in some places. Their involvement in consultations on a revision of the Bernese medicines ordinance, for instance, led to the decision in 1897 that the retail sale of substances such as morphine and cocaine was no longer restricted to pharmacists. In 1903, however, this right was revoked. In the following two decades, the cantonal authorities refrained from further tightening the regulations, despite various violations by both druggists and pharmacists and, in at least one case, by a physician.⁷⁷

As Hänni shows, there were also several legal proceedings against pharmacists and druggists in the canton of Basel in the decades around 1900.⁷⁸ However, the severity of the sanctions and whether they had a preventive effect on other members of these professions needs to be examined more closely. In any case, and possibly not least against the backdrop of an increase in opiate dependence among the lower classes, for whom the legal route via negligent or incautious physicians and pharmacists and the forging of prescriptions may have been less easily accessible, a black market developed. Unsurprisingly, its dimensions are difficult to estimate, as is whether the goods mainly originated from domestic or transnational sources. In 1918 and 1919 for example, various newspaper advertisements in Basel seem to have offered large quantities of cocaine, morphine, and Salvarsan, the bulk of which came from foreign war stocks.⁷⁹ But such evidence remains anecdotal.

The files relating to one of the first major trials held in Switzerland provide an insight into the internal structures of the black market. The investigations conducted in 1921 and 1922 focused on cocaine trafficking, but morphine also played a role.⁸⁰ At that time, a Basel merchant born in 1890 had apparently been earning his living from drug trafficking for quite some time. The bulk of his business consisted of smuggling large quantities of cocaine and morphine from Germany via Switzerland to France and Italy. In addition, he sold cocaine in Basel, mainly at the central Barfüsser square and in the surrounding pubs, that he seems to have occasionally consumed together with the clients. Several railway employees were involved in the smuggling, which probably facilitated the cross-border transport. They were uncovered when the police seized 1,850 ampoules of morphine, each containing 0.02 grams. As the files further indicate, one of the railway employees had obtained around 2,800 such ampoules from the merchant at a price of 0.15 Swiss francs each, which equalled about a quarter of a kilogram of bread.⁸¹

Even after the introduction of the narcotics law, lawsuits against both legal and illegal retailers remained rare. Although they are certainly not exhaustive, the annual reports to the League of Nations Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs give an impression of the scale of law enforcement activities at that time. In its first report, the federal government listed a total of eleven cases resulting in fourteen convictions for the whole country in 1926. Two investigations were dropped for lack of evidence. One case, from Zurich, was of a larger scale, involving the export of one hundred kilograms of morphine. The others concerned the possession, fraudulent procurement or illegal sale of (rather) small quantities of morphine and cocaine. Only one case concerned a pharmacist who had sold Pantopon, a preparation of opium alkaloids produced by Hoffmann-La Roche, without a prescription.⁸² The number of suspects reached a peak in 1931 with a total of eighty-two. However, in fifty-five cases the “judicial authorities declared … that there were no grounds for action” and none led to the seizure of drugs.⁸³ A low point was recorded in 1940 with “only one minor infringement of the provisions of the Federal Narcotics Law.”⁸⁴

As demonstrated by the repeated forgery of prescriptions by a travelling salesman, which does not appear to be documented in the reports to the League of Nations, many pharmacies still acted negligently or were even reluctant to comply with the law and the implementing ordinance. Some of them ranked their duty of care towards patients above their duty to follow the law. The extent to which this was a pretext put forward in court to conceal commercial interests cannot be determined from the available sources.⁸⁵ The national pharmacists’ association, for its part, objected to what it considered unreasonable implementing provisions and unfair treatments compared to the industry. It was at least partially able to gain the support of the federal authorities.⁸⁶ At the same time, the cantons appear to have been slow to enforce the regulations, especially regarding pharmacists and physicians. When the 1927 report notes that “nineteen administrative fines were imposed, fifteen in the Canton of Ticino and four in the Canton of Geneva, for inadequate keeping of registers,” it seems reasonable to assume that the other cantons had not carried out any inspections in their pharmacies during the reporting period.⁸⁷

Five years later, the signatory states were asked to provide information on the control of pharmacies, as these “might constitute an important source of supply for the illicit traffic.” After a detailed description of the regulations and the measures taken, the Swiss report stated that the procedures applied had “proved to be satisfactory and only a few unimportant isolated cases of contravention on the part of pharmaceutical chemists” had been registered. “Since the entry into force of the Federal Law on Narcotic Drugs … no Swiss pharmaceutical chemist has been implicated in any of the illicit traffic cases with which the Advisory Committee on Traffic in Opium has had to deal, nor has any Swiss pharmaceutical chemist been in touch with international drug traffickers.”⁸⁸ However, as Jakob Tanner shows with respect to the “case of Müller and associates”, controls were anything but rigorous and Switzerland was by no means untouched by transnational trading activities.⁸⁹ It is telling that the report provides information on the status of the legal proceedings in this very case immediately before the quoted section.⁹⁰

Despite the 1951 revision of the narcotics law, which strengthened prohibition, little changed in the two decades after the Second World War. This is illustrated exemplarily by the case of a physician living in the canton of Zurich that kept the authorities busy in the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, he was a typical opiate user, as dependence on such substances was still found mainly among health care professionals.⁹¹ Three attempts at withdrawal in psychiatric clinics between 1950 and 1952 were unsuccessful. As a result, he was obliged to “send duplicates of all order forms and prescriptions to the cantonal physician” from 1953. When he failed to do so, his licence to dispense narcotics was revoked. However, an “additional blocking order …, which would have led to a communication to all doctors and pharmacists, was again omitted in order to protect him.”⁹²

After a brief period of normalisation in 1961, the licence was revoked again because the physician had ordered large quantities of narcotics for a non-existent patient. Criminal proceedings were instituted but because he refused to make any statement about the use of the purchases and “hid behind the doctor’s privilege, the district court acquitted him … on grounds of evidence.” Five years later, he was again on record as having bought a total of 1,970 ampoules of morphine, over 300 ampoules of the methadone brands Heptanal and Ketalgin and 7,000 tablets of amphetamine from a pharmacy in Schaffhausen. He appealed against the reintroduction of the ban by declaring that he had “not been ‘addicted to morphine’ any more since the year 1953.” The vast majority of the narcotics, he explained, had been for a patient “currently in the Canary Islands. The remaining 5% were administered to various other patients.” Regarding the amphetamines, he claimed that he had used them “for the treatment of obesity, neuroses and other illnesses.” The appeal was rejected, partly because the patient himself stated that he had only received 30 to 40 ampoules.⁹³

As this back-and-forth between an opiate and amphetamine user and the authorities indicates, the situation in the post-war period was in many ways similar to that of the 1920s and 1930s. Pharmacies remained a popular source of supply, the law continued to be enforced with restraint, especially when members of the middle and upper classes were involved, and the typical consumption patterns had not changed substantially. As I argue in my conclusion, this was to shift abruptly shortly afterwards.

Conclusion

In the first phase of the history of opiate retailing in modern Switzerland, the era of the panacea theriac, the suppliers were artisanal producers and small traders of various origins. In addition to health policy concerns, the focus of regulation was on economic aspects: from the protection of domestic trades to the efforts to professionalise of physicians and pharmacists. Probably due to its low opium concentration, theriac does not appear explicitly in regulations concerning opiates. In general, however, they were considered anything but harmless. The introduction of industrial opiates in the early nineteenth century therefore only led to gradual changes. Nevertheless, while physicians and pharmacists brought increasing amounts of morphine to the customers, new patterns of use and particularly the of the concept of addiction put pressure on this business towards the end of the nineteenth century. The criticism came not least from competitors in the drug trade, while the authorities remained on the sidelines in the interests of pharmacists, physicians and industry.

It was only in the third phase, in the context of global prohibition efforts, that retail trade in these goods was further restricted in Switzerland. But implementation of the law remained lax, and pharmacists and physicians continued to dispense opiates in a rather liberal manner. It is important in this respect to bear in mind that throughout these second and third phases, opiate dependence in Switzerland was a matter of a relatively small number of people. “There is no increase in drug addiction in Switzerland,” the federal government regularly reported to the League of Nations in the 1930s and 1940s.⁹⁴ Even if we lack reliable figures, it was probably not wrong in this assessment. This explains in part why the authorities in their everyday practice only reluctantly enforced prohibition. Another part of the explanation, of course, is the economic interests of both industry and legal retail trade.

From this perspective, which focuses on actual behaviour, the codification of prohibition in the 1920s represents less of a break than a moment in a long series of regulatory steps. A fundamental change in patterns of law enforcement, consumption and retailing only occurred in the 1960s. On the one hand, opiates became increasingly popular in the counterculture, which, after a rather short phase of self-supply, led to a professionalisation of wholesale and retail.⁹⁵ By this time, the approach of the authorities, on the other hand, had already changed significantly. The background to this development was the media-fuelled fear of a “drug wave” from the United States of America, cold war myths such as that of drugs as soft weapons of communism, and not least the increasing prohibitionist tendencies at the level of diplomacy and international police cooperation.⁹⁶ They preceded transformations of demand and supply in the context of the counterculture, rather than being a mere reaction to them.⁹⁷

Indeed, the intellectual climate of the cold war, the Americanisation of international crime control and the “war on drugs” had a direct impact on law enforcement in Switzerland. They contributed significantly to the fact that, during the following decades, repression was seen as the only answer to rising opiate consumption. In comparison, the way the matter was addressed in the interwar and post-war periods shows a certain flexibility, which is likely to be related to the small numbers involved, but also to the class background many retailers and customers.