Global Drug Prohibition in Local Context

Cairo’s Qasr El Aini Hospital regularly received opiate addicts in poor health, but a startling new development in April 1929 captured the attention of Dr. Alexander Gordon Biggam, Director of the Medical Unit. Patients with a history of injecting heroin were being admitted with high fevers, and diagnored with falciparum malaria. Shocked by the prevalence of the disease, which appeared confined to networks of injection drug users, Dr. Biggam hypothesized—correctly—that the disease was being spread through contamined blood in shared syringes. “If the theory of the production of this malignant malarial infection amongst the heroin addicts is correct,” he concluded, “we are faced with a problem of considerable importance to the inhabitants of Cairo.”1 In the winter of 1932, a similar novel outbreak of malaria among injecting heroin users occupied Dr. Guy Henry Faget, an Assistant Surgeon at the United States Marine Hospital in New Orleans, a facility serving primarily merchant seamen. “If the hypodermic syringe must be accepted as a means of conveying malaria among narcotic addicts,” Dr. Faget warned, “then a new chapter in the epidemiology of this disease has been opened.”2

Context (archaeology) · Drug · Family medicine · Harm · Harm reduction · Heroin · Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) · Malaria · Medical emergency · Outbreak · Pathology · Political science · Psychiatry · Syringe · Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance · History · HIV, Drug Use, Sexual Risk · Law · Medicine · Virology