In the last decade, drug usage has become a matter of great concern in American society. Questions abound about who uses drugs and why. Surveys that purport to answer questions such as these remain suspect because of fears that respondents either may be lying or, in fact, may not be the real habitual consumers of drugs. The presumed link between drug usage and violent crimes is an act of faith in a society that perceived itself to be under siege from drugs throughout the 1980s. No prominent public official, whether it was President Ronald Reagan or William J. Bennett, who served as President George Bush's first director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, could ease the sense of alarm and foreboding evoked by drugs. How could the traffic in drugs be stopped? How would America's streets be made safe again?

Drug wars. Few topics generate more ccontroversy or provoke more debate. Few topics conjure up more futile and dismal images among the American population. Few topics are more synonymous with defeat. Never has our government been mired in a conflict so enduring or fought against an enemy so utterly impossible to conquer. For seventy-five years—nearly four times longer than both World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam combined—the federal government has been waging an endless war against seemingly impossible odds.

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.

Imagine, if you will, that you live in the richest, most influential nation on earth. This is a country whose political system has been consciously adopted by neighboring heads of state seeking to duplicate the same stability and prosperity in their own societies. It is a country that has certainly experienced unprecedented growth and cultural achievement in its past two hundred years and thus contains some of the most magnificent and intellectually exciting urban centers in the world. You would be justifiably proud to live in such a place.

If Indochina goes, several things happen right away. The Malayan Peninsula, that last bit of land hanging on down there, would be scarcely defensible—and tin and tungsten that we so greatly value from that area would cease coming. … So, when the United States votes $400,000,000 to help that war, we are not voting for a giveaway program. We are voting for the cheapest way that we can to prevent the occurance of something that would be of the most terrible significance for the United States of America—our security, our power, and ability to get certain things we need from the riches of … Southeast Asia.—President Dwight Eisenhower, speech to Conference of Governors, 4 August 1953.

The general public in the United States has been inundated during the 1980s and early 1990s with information about narcotics abuse, trafficking, and control. From journalists, politicians, law enforcement officials, and the medical community, the American populace ascertained that illicit drug use and trading have recently become among the nation's most intractable problems. Repeatedly, those sources reported that the consumption of cocaine, especially “crack”, had reached epidemic proportions, that drug-related violence overran the country's major cities, that youths should (according to First Lady Nancy Reagan) “just say no” to the purveyors of addictive substances, and that Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush had declared war on drugs. Americans learned too that only partial gains had been made against narcotics abuse and trafficking. Such a realization proved difficult for them to fathom following the 1988 presidential election campaign with its antidrug rhetoric, after the enactment by Congress of the Omnibus Drug Act of 1988 (which created a cabinet level “drug czar”—the director of the office of National Drug Control Policy in the Executive Office of the President), and given the stormy two-year tenure of William Bennett in that post. Of greater concern by 1991, evaluations of the nation's antinarcotics endeavors by the press, government authorities, and other informed observers indicated that the fundamental strategy of drug control was in dispute. Notwithstanding compelling arguments which insisted that the narcotics problem would continue until the domestic demand for drugs ended, federal government efforts have generally sought to eliminate foreign narcotics production and the smuggling of those substances into the United States.

The drug problem in the United States and elsewhere has historically received intermittent attention, most often when the problem has reached crisis proportions in a certain locale. In such times, one of the natural focal points of discussion has been the role that other nations play in supplying drugs. It has not been unusual for foreign states to be accused of being the source of the problem, while others have been identified, in varying degrees of culpability, as accessories. This often has created conflict, especially when an accused nation has viewed the issue differently. Under these circumstances, states have frequently attempted negotiations in hopes of reaching some sort of agreement that will accommodate all the affected parties.