Paper short abstract:

This paper is about the medicinal use of opiates in prewar Japan. It shows that only in 1934, following the increasing problematization of drug consumption by doctors and intellectuals, the Japanese government introduced a law aimed at the prevention of drug addiction.

Paper long abstract:

In recent decades, historians have turned their attention to the economic and social effects of the opiate trade in the Japanese empire between the establishment of Japan's first colony in Taiwan in 1895 and the end of the Pacific War in 1945. In contrast, the use of opiates on the Japanese mainland has received scant attention. This paper argues that the Japanese were not modest consumers of opiates. Opiates advanced to a compound of patent medicines and hypodermic morphine was prescribed against a wide range of diseases in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Only in the 1920s, Japanese doctors and intellectuals increasingly raised concerns about the rising number of opiate addicts and failing withdrawal therapies. However, the Japanese government only introduced a law aimed at the prevention of drug addiction in 1934.