“Castaways of the White Pleasure”: Six Decades of Hungarian Discourse on Narcotics

Abstract

In 1924 Hungary ratified and codified the 1912 Hague International Opium Convention, the first international drug control treaty. However, the new law that regulated and later criminalized the usage of narcotics in Hungary was not the result of internal debate and had no real domestic political will behind it. In contrary, this law was the result of external demands as Article 230 of the post-World War I Trianon Treaty required Hungary to join the Hague Convention. This paper examines what the contemporary Hungarian attitude towards drugs and drug users was. In order to answer how this attitude developed and changed, the following study examines how the contemporary media, artists and intellectuals and various governmental and non-governmental organizations discussed and represented the issue of narcotics.