White Drugs in Interwar Egypt: Decadent Pleasures, Emaciated Fellahin, and the Campaign against Drugs

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, British and Egyptian officials, medical doctors, and the Egyptian press reiterated that country was plagued by “white drugs”: cocaine and heroin. Kozma’s article demonstrates how, in addition to presenting drug consumption as a social problem, discourse on the topic voiced social concerns about class, gender, colonialism, and social change. It explores both medical and popular discourses of drug consumption, focusing on notions of nation, gender, and class. Kozma’s article thus examines how a global phenomenon, namely the increased consumption of and trade in drugs and the attempt to curb the former, was experienced and represented in the Egyptian local case.