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Drug Legalization, the Drug War, and Drug Treatment in Historical Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2011

David T. Courtwright
David T. Courtwright
Affiliation:
University of North Florida
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Extract

One thing that all parties in the American drug-policy debate agree upon is the desirability of eliminating the traffic in illicit drugs and the esurient criminal syndicates that control it. There are two divergent strategies for achieving this end. The first is the war on drugs. The second, which emerged in the late 1980s as a highly controversial alternative to the drug war, is controlled legalization. What follows is a historically informed critique of both approaches.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 3 , Issue 4: Drug Control Policy. Essays in Historical and Comparative Perspective , October 1991 , pp. 42 - 63
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 0000

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References

Notes

1. Examples of the two types are Musto, David F., The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control, expanded ed. (New York, 1987)Google Scholar, a sequential account grounded in legislative, medical, and diplomatic sources, and Brecher, Edward M. et al., Licit and Illicit Drugs (Boston, 1972)Google Scholar, a lively assessment of drugs and drug laws that draws heavily (and at times selectively) from American and British historical experience.

The seminal work in the field of drug history and policy was CTerry, harles C. and Pellens, Mildred, The Opium Problem (New York, 1928)Google Scholar. The origins and influence of this book are described in Courtwright, David T., “Charles Terry, The Opium Problem, and American Narcotic Policy,” Journal of Drug Issues 16 (1984): 421–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. The White House, National Drug Control Strategy (Washington, D.C., 1989), 7Google Scholar. Bennett's confrontational approach is discussed in Massing, Michael, “The Two William Bennetts,” New York Review of Books 37 (1 March 1990): 29–33.Google Scholar

3. The low figure comes from the 1990 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, the high figure from a Senate Judiciary Committee staff report. See Mike Snider, “Gains Don't Mean Drug War's Won,” and Jack Kelley, “Senator: Survey ‘Wildly Off the Mark,’ “ USA Today, 20 December 1990.

4. Charles B. Rangel, “The Killer Drug We Ignore,” New York Times, national edition, 15 August 1990.

5. National Drug Control Strategy, 64, 75; Courtwright, David, Joseph, Herman, and Jarlais, Don Des, Addicts Who Survived: An Oral History of Narcotic Use in America, 1923— 1965 (Nashville, 1989), 344–61Google Scholar, 365 n. 28; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, Alcohol, Drug, and Mental Health Administration, National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Household Survey on Drug Abuse: Population Estimates 1988 (Washington, D.C., 1989), 29Google Scholar; U.S. Department of State, Bureau of International Narcotics Matters, International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (Washington, D.C.: State Department Publication 9749, March 1990), 19–20.Google Scholar

6. The same was true of Prohibition-era bootlegging, which provided, in the words of crime historian Mark Haller, “a path of upward mobility for those who were among the most marginal of America's urban dwellers.” “Bootlegging: The History of an Illegal Enterprise,” paper presented at the 1980 meeting of the Organization of American Historians, p. 1.

7. This trend is also in evidence in other countries, such as Australia, where controlled legalization has reportedly been endorsed by some prominent citizens. Alex Wodak, “Australia,” The International Working Group on AIDS and IV Drug Use Newsletter 4 (September 1989): 4. In Germany the illegality of methadone maintenance has recently been challenged. Ingo Michaels, “Federal Republic of Germany,” Ibid., 5, and Robert G. Newman, “Is There a Role for Methadone in Germany?” and “Law Enforcement and Treatment: Complementary Responses to the Problem of Addiction,” conference papers presented, respectively, at Frankfurt, 14 November 1987, and for the Gewerkschaft der Polizei, Munich, 3 March 1989.

8. Nadelmann, Ethan A., “Drug Prohibition in the United States: Costs, Consequences, and Alternatives,” Science 245 (1 September 1989): 939–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Trebach, Arnold S., The Great Drug War and Radical Proposab That Could Make America Safe Again (New York, 1987)Google Scholar, made many of the same arguments and charged further than prohibition blocks legitimate therapeutic applications, e.g., marijuana for overcoming nausea experienced by cancer patients. Other arguments, pro and con, are summarized in U.S. Congress, House, Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control, Legalization of Illicit Drugs: Impact and Feasibility: (A Review of Recent Hearings), 100th Cong., 1st sess. Connoisseurs of irony are directed to Mayor Marion Barry's comments on p. 12. Two recent or forthcoming anthologies are Inciardi, James A., ed., The Drug Legalization Debate (Newbury Park, 1991)Google Scholar and Evans, Rod L., and Berent, Irwin M., Drug Legalization: For and Against (Peru, Ill., 1991)Google Scholar. Also recent is Miller, Richard Lawrence, The Case For Legalizing Drugs (New York, 1991)Google Scholar. Miller's analysis is exactly what his title promises: one sided.

9. Remarks delivered 10 October 1988; photocopy made available by Dr. Kleber to the author.

10. National Opinion Research Center poll data cited in David Corcoran, “Legalizing Drugs: Failures Spur Debate,” New York Times, national edition, 27 November 1989.

11. Nadelmann, “Drug Prohibition,” 941.

12. Earle, Charles Warrington, “The Opium Habit: A Statistical and Clinical Lecture,” Chicago Medical Review 2 (1880): 443.Google Scholar

13. Courtwright, David T., Dark Paradise: Opiate Addiction in America before 1940 (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 88.Google Scholar

14. Though by no means a perfect estimate. Under-twenty-one drug arrests do not exactly match under-twenty-one drug use because some of the arrests are of young persons recruited to sell drugs precisely because they are young, and thus not liable to the severe penalties that can be meted out to adult dealers. The bias is not large, however, since the vast majority of these teenage dealers are or very quickly become users themselves. (Williams, Terry, The Cocaine Kids: The Inside Story of a Teenage Drug Ring [Reading, Mass., 1989], 8Google Scholar, 39, 47, 58, 85.) It is also possible that arrest data understate youthful prevalence because police are more likely to notice and apprehend older users, more of whom are addicted and consume more drugs, thus committing more crimes. Other things being equal, a twentyfour-year-old addict is more apt to be arrested than a seventeen-year-old experimenting with drugs on the weekend.

15. These statistics are derived from three Department of Justice publications: Age-Specific Arrest Rates and Race-Specific Arrest Rates for Selected Offenses (Washington, D.C., 1986), 120Google Scholar; Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics—1982 (Washington, D.C., 1983), 394–95Google Scholar; and Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics—1988 (Washington, D.C., 1989), 490–91.Google Scholar

16. The late John Kaplan made a similar argument in “Taking Drugs Seriously,” The Public Interest 92 (Summer 1988): 39.Google Scholar

17. Stephen Labaton, “The Cost of Drug Abuse: $60 Billion a Year,” New York Times, national edition, 5 December 1989.

18. E.g., Rufus King, “A Worthless Crusade,” Newsweek, 1 January 1990, 4–5. Among the current group of legalization proponents, King can almost certainly claim seniority; he has been an ardent critic of the drug prohibition policy since the Anslinger era. His major work is The Drug Hang-Up: America's Fifty-Year Folly (Springfield, Ill., 1972).Google Scholar

19. Trebach, Arnold S., The Heroin Solution (New Haven, 1982)Google Scholar, chap. 7; Krivanek, Jara, Heroin: Myth and Reality (Sydney, 1988), 222–32Google Scholar; Susanne MacGregor and Betsy Ettorre, “From Treatment to Rehabilitation—Aspects of British Policy on the Care of Drug-takers,” and Dorn, Nicholas and South, Nigel, “Reconciling Policy and Practice,” both in Dorn, Nicholas and South, Nigel, eds., A Land Fit for Heroin? Drug Policies, Prevention and Practice (New York, 1987), 125–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar and 146–69, respectively.

20. Courtwright, Joseph, and Des Jarlais, Addicts Who Survived, 181–84, 289–90, for historical examples of diversion. The drawbacks and difficulties of controlled legal narcotic sales are discussed in the Vincent Dole narrative in Ibid., 335, and in Kaplan, John, The Hardest Drug: Heroin and Public Policy (Chicago, 1983)Google Scholar, esp. chaps. 3 and 4. What Dole and Kaplan have to say about the difficulties of managing legal heroin supplies would certainly apply to cocaine, which is an even shorter-acting drug.

21. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, Hearings on the Establishment of Two Federal Narcotic Farms, 70th Cong., 1st sess., 26–28 April 1928, 10, 22–23.

22. U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Crime Reporting Program, Age-Specific Arrest Rates and Race-Specific Arrest Rates for Selected Offenses, 1965–1985 (Washington, D.C., 1986), 115–21.Google Scholar

23. U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, Hearings on Drugs in Institutions, 94th Cong., 1st sess., 18 August 1975, 3 vols., III: 3 (quotation), 447–454, 463–544.

24. National Drug Control Strategy, 18. Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics—1988, 605, 612, gives 295,873 as the average daily population for jails in 1987 and 556,748 as the number of sentenced state and federal prisoners at the end of the same year.

25. National Drug Control Strategy, 18.

26. Hearings on Drugs in Institutions, 454.

27. Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics—1988, 591, 652.

28. Nash, Robert C., “The English and Scottish Tobacco Trades in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Legal and Illegal Trade,” Economic History Review 35 (August 1982): 354–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Evidence for duty-avoidance smuggling of opium is in Courtwright, Dark Paradise, 16–28.

29. Ten dollars: Kleber, “Drug Legalization,” 3–4. Or less: Kaplan, “Taking Drugs Seriously,” 41.

30. Rubin, Jay L., “The Wet War: American Liquor Control, 1941–1945,” in Blocker, Jack S., Jr., Alcohol, Reform and Society: The Liquor Issue in Social Context (Westport, Conn., 1979), 250–51Google Scholar. Tobacco tax revenues also rose steeply during and after World War II. See Tobacco Institute, The Tax Burden on Tobacco: Historical Compilation, vol. 23 (Washington, D.C., 1989), 1–5.Google Scholar

31. Nadelmann, “Drug Prohibition,” 945.

32. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, Cigarette Bootlegging: A State AND [sic] Federal Responsibility (Washington, D.C., 1977), 1–36Google Scholar, 69–74, 105–7, 111–14; Johnson, Paul R., The Economics of the Tobacco Industry (New York, 1984), 127–132Google Scholar. Something similar has happened with alcohol along the U.S. Canadian border. Federal and provincial taxes have made liquor much more expensive in Canada, with the result that two million and possibly as many as four million cases are smuggled annually. Marialista Calta, “Liquor Smuggling to Canada Is Brisk,” New York Times, 22 November 1987.

33. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, Cigarette Tax Evasion: A Second Look (Washington, D.C., 1985), 5–6Google Scholar, estimated that cigarette tax evasion dropped 45 percent between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s. For the persistence of large revenue losses in high-tax states, see Tobacco Tax Section of the National Association of Tax Administrators, Presentations at the 1987 Annual Meeting (Washington, D.C, 1987), 7Google Scholar; Berry, Michael J., “Tobacco Tax Enforcement,” in Federation of Tax Administrators, Tobacco Tax Section, Proceedings of the 1988 Annual Meeting (Washington, D.C, 1988), 12–13Google Scholar; and Florida, House of Representatives, “Cigarette Industry and Tax Study Commission Report” (Tallahassee: typescript document, 1988), 13, 27–29. I am grateful to Walker Merryman for calling certain of these documents to my attention.

34. Nadelmann himself raises this possibility. “The federal government need not play the leading role in devising alternatives; it need only clear the way to allow state and local governments the legal power to implement their own drug legalization policies” (“Drug Prohibition,” 945). This is not a formula for consistency.

35. Craig Wolff, “In New York, the Brazenness of Illegal Gun Dealers Grows,” New York Times, national edition, 6 November 1990.

36. Among those who have suggested a readjustment of strategy and expenditures are Kaplan, “Taking Drugs Seriously,” 49–50; Reuter, Peter, Can the Borders Be Sealed.’ A RAND Note (Santa Monica, Calif., 1988), 15Google Scholar; Massing, “The Two William Bennetts,” 33; and Avram Goldstein and Harold Kalant, “Drug Policy: Striking the Right Balance,” Science 249 (28 September 1990): 1513–21Google Scholar. “[A] massive shift of available funds is called for, from supply reduction to demand reduction (prevention education, treatment, and research),” write Goldstein and Kalant. “The federal drug war budget would be more costeffective if the presently proposed ratio of supply reduction to demand reduction—71% to 29%—were reversed” (1517).

37. The treatment system and its defects are assessed in Gerstein, Dean R. and Harwood, Henrick J., eds., Treating Drug Problems: A Study of the Evolution, Effectiveness, and Financing of Public and Private Drug Treatment Systems, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C., 1990).Google Scholar

38. U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Energy and Commerce, Subcommittee on Health and the Environment, Hearings on AIDS Issues, 100th Cong., 1st sess., 29 September 1987; and 100th Cong., 2d sess., 19 February and 15 March 1988, part 1, 281–554. The Bush administration has evinced no enthusiasm for needle-exchange programs because they are inconsistent with its zero-tolerance agenda and because they could be viewed as sanctioning intravenous drug abuse. Despite these fears, there is as yet no evidence from any country that needle-exchange programs encourage intravenous drug abuse.

39. Those who wonder why the drug war has made but fitful progress in choking off the cocaine shipments from the Andean nations should consult the excellent study by Lee, Rensselaer W. III, The White Labyrinth: Cocaine and Political Power (New Brunswick, 1989).Google Scholar