“While Unpleasant it is a Service to Humanity”:The RCMP’s War on Drugs in the Interwar Period
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1998, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) celebrated the 125 th anniversary of its creation; however, the modern RCMP had actually come into existence in 1920 as a completely different police force from the North West Mounted Police of 1873. In 1917, the force had, with the exception of the northern territories, given up ordinary policing duties to devote its full attention to domestic wartime security and to sending an overseas contingent to Europe. After 1921, the future of the Mounted Police was uncertain. Continuing it in its present form, relegating it exclusively to the north, or abolishing it completely were among the options considered. In the end, however, it survived and eventually prospered, returning to provincial policing duties first in Saskatchewan in 1928 and then in several other provinces in 1932. Why and how the RCMP survived is the subject of this essay. There have been two recent historical interpretations. One points to the RCMP’s intelligence work against radicals, labour, and ethnic minorities as key to its demonstrating its importance within the Canadian state. An opposing interpretation argues that the significance of intelligence work has been overstated and that the real story of the RCMP’s survival related to the cost and efficiency of its work for federal government departments. This essay offers a third approach, looking at the important but little examined “war on drugs" that the RCMP fought in the 1920s. The campaign against drugs was inspired by racist discourses against Asian-Canadians in an era of great fear towards challenges to Anglo-Canadian dominance. Although they firmly believed in the cause for which they fought, the RCMP, employing the same methods that they used against communists and others, also capitalized on the hysteria in an effort to convince the Canadian state of its importance and, in the process, ensure its survival.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".