This study combines quantitative and qualitative data in an examination of historical patterns in the sentencing of narcotics offenders in five Upper Canadian cities for the years 1908 to 1953. The analysis reveals that while an emerging emphasis on crime control, primarily reflected in distinctions between narcotics trafficking and possession offenses, changed patterns of judicial decision making over this period, a sensitivity to issues of social class nonetheless endured. While in the earlier part of the twentieth century sentencing decisions resulted in more severe treatment of working-class offenders, by the middle of the century this sensitivity was expressed in the disproportionately lenient treatment of upper-class narcotics offenders, combined with a more uniform but also more severe concentration on working-class offenders who became overwhelmingly the target of narcotics law enforcement.