Emily Murphy - Drugs and Race

Drugs and Race

Although Murphy’s views on race changed over the course of her life, the perspective contained in her book, the Black Candle, is considered the most consequential because it played a role in creating a widespread “war on drugs mentality” leading to legislation that “defined addiction as a law enforcement problem.” A series of articles in Maclean's magazine under her pen name, “Janey Canuck,” forms the basis of the Black Candle. Using extensive anecdotes and “expert” opinion, the Black Candle depicts an alarming picture of drug abuse in Canada, detailing Murphy’s understanding of the use and effects of opium, cocaine, and pharmaceuticals, as well as a “new menace,” “marihuana.” Murphy’s concern with drugs began when she started coming into “disproportionate contact with Chinese people” in her courtroom because they were over represented in the criminal justice system. In addition to professional expertise and her own observations, Murphy was also given a tour of opium dens in Vancouver’s Chinatown by local police detectives. Vancouver at the time was in the midst of a moral panic over drugs that was part of the anti-Oriental campaign that precipitated the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923. Canadian drug historian Catherine Carstairs has argued that Murphy’s importance regarding drug policy has been “overstated” because she did not have an impact on the drug panic in Vancouver, but that nevertheless “her articles did mark a turning point and her book … brought the Vancouver drug panic to a larger Canadian audience.”

Race permeates the Black Candle, and is intricately entwined with the drug trade and addiction in Murphy’s analysis. Yet she is ambiguous in her treatment of non-whites. In one passage, for example, she chastises whites who use the Chinese as “scapegoats,” while elsewhere, she refers to the Chinese man as a “visitor” in this country, and that “it might be wise to put him out” if it turns out that this visitor carries “poisoned lollipops in his pocket and feeds them to our children.” Drug addiction, however, not the Chinese immigrant, is “a scourge so dreadful in its effects that it threatens the very foundations of civilization,” and which laws therefore need to target for eradication. Drugs victimize everyone, and members of all races perpetrate the drug trade, according to Murphy. At the same time, she does not depart from the dominant view of middle class whites at the time that “races” were discrete, biologically determined categories, naturally ranked in a hierarchy. In this scheme, the white race was facing degradation through miscegenation, while the more prolific “black and yellow races may yet obtain the ascendancy” and thus threatened to “wrest the leadership of the world from the British.”

Murphy’s ambiguity regarding non-whites is reflected in scholarly debates, but what is not controversial is that the Black Candle was written “for the express purpose of arousing public demands for stricter drug legislation” and that in this she was to some degree successful. This motivation may have influenced her racial analysis by playing to the popular prejudices of her white audiences. On the other hand, she may have deliberately tried to distance herself from those prejudices, especially the ones propagated by the more vulgar and hysterical Asian exclusionists in British Columbia in order to maximize her own credibility and sway her more moderate readers.