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.