We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire

by Suzanna Reiss

  These were the substantive stakes behind disagreements described earlier over the seating of the Chinese Representative at the United Nations. Due to its ongoing support from the United States, the exiled and defeated Chinese nationalist government in Formosa (Taiwan) represented all of China at the United Nations, meaning it was responsible for submitting estimates on drug requirements for the continent ruled by the PRC. These estimates formed the basis for judgment on compliance and potential sanctions. This was why the PRC was “always complaining” that it was bound by drug-needs statistics submitted by a hostile regime. Political affiliations clearly influenced designations of legality and “legitimate” participation in the international drug trade. Since the PRC government was not granted political recognition, it had been denied a “legitimate” role in negotiating the drug market. As historian William O. Walker describes, Anslinger diligently sought to “cast the Chinese as international outlaws on the subject of opium.”64 When the Chinese government legally tried to sell stocks of opium, which had been seized from factories run by Japanese occupation forces during World War II, the US-led Western economic embargo against Communist China ensured its exclusion from the legal market. As Anslinger said, “They offered that legitimately, but no country would take it on.”65 While scholars have pointed to the lack of evidence behind heated accusations of illicit Communist dope pushing during the Cold War, they have tended to overlook the fact that by virtue of Communist exclusion from the narcotic drug market, any opium the PRC might produce for export was predestined for illegality according to the logic and regulations advanced by the international drug control regime.66 Drug control in this context offered both an ideological framework for challenging the readiness of colonized peoples for self-determination, limiting the economic and political power of Communist countries, while structuring participation and designating legality within the marketplace according to the interests of capitalist countries.

  POLICING THE CRISIS

  Cold War posturing and colonial conflict animated tensions at the United Nations in debates over competing visions for international drug control. These international dynamics also shaped US national drug policy, informing people’s beliefs about the threat posed by narcotics and people who consumed or trafficked in them. Fears of communism and racially inflected ideas about self-determination filtered into and fueled domestic anxieties producing a veritable “moral panic” in the 1950s about drug crimes. Stuart Hall and colleagues detailed how such panics are social phenomena and are “about other things than crime per se” when he detailed how the heady mix of race, youth, and crime became an ideological conduit for the widespread belief in Britain in the 1970s that the social order was disintegrating and “slipping into a certain kind of crisis,” which generated in turn an authoritarian consensus around the need for “law and order.” Two decades earlier, the United States was gripped by a similar sense of crisis with analogous ideological underpinnings that sparked a crackdown on drug “crimes.” The social construction of these crimes, the way they were understood and defined, as well as the social forces that were constrained or contained by, or benefited from, them, are essential for understanding the origins and underpinnings of the subsequent decades-long US “war on drugs.”67

  As people lined up before Congress to testify in support of US ratification of the 1953 Protocol, the chair of the Senate Subcommittee of the Committee on Foreign Relations deployed a paranoid discourse increasingly common to Cold War public culture:68

  First, if our American people can be made aware of the fact that Mao Tze-Tung is engaged in undermining the health and the morale and the strength of our boys in the services, and secondly, if they can get, as you say, a picture of this dirty business, that it is not just a few skunks around the corner that are handling it, but that it is the result of people in high places, like Mao Tze-Tung, who is using it [opium] as a weapon to deteriorate the morale and health of this country, then the people of this country will become aware that we have to “stop, look, and listen” and think about it.69

  The Chair of the Committee on Foreign Relations, Alexander Wiley, warned the “American people” of subversion lurking in their midst, advising that they “stop, look, and listen” and be on guard against drugs being used as a weapon to attack “this country.” He invoked international enemies to call for internal vigilance and policing. A parade of witnesses echoed these sentiments, with a journalist testifying that “dope warfare” was an “instrument of policy with Red China,” followed by a New York City Police Department inspector, the president of pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co., Inc., and the Secretary of State for UN Affairs, all warning of the dire need for aggressive drug controls. Mrs. Duncan O’Brien of the New York Federation of Women’s Clubs cut to the chase: “Our Communist enemy has invaded. They are shooting our youth with drugs instead of bullets.”70 As the United States promoted its drug regulatory vision internationally, such images were mobilized in the 1950s behind the passage of extraordinary legislation that vastly expanded domestic police powers. In a decade marked by dramatic conflict over racial equality and civil rights, the social panic and attack on drug “crimes” could be used to recast dissent and nonconformity as dangerous “contagions” threatening the very fabric of American society—rhetoric grounded in the power of modern drug technologies and public health concerns regarding the spread of disease.71

  Religious leaders, the media, teachers’ organizations, youth congresses, and state and local officials all echoed congressional fears that the “drug cancer operating among troops of the United Nations in Korea” was only one site of a broader illness infecting US society: “Red treasuries swell as free world consumption of drugs mounts. The social aspect of the menace is evident in its degenerating effects upon our youth, here at home.”72 Cardinal Archbishop Francis Spellman and evangelist Billy Graham both visited US soldiers in Korea and decried the “frightfully high number” of narcotic addicts among them.73 Journalists sought out firsthand testimony at places like the Stateville-Joliet prison in Illinois where almost half the inmates were veterans, the majority “Negroes,” and a significant minority “admitted addicts.” One Korean war veteran at Joliet, “who shall be called James, a Chicago negro, 26,” when interviewed explained, “I believe the Chinese Reds are to blame for making ‘junk’ so cheap and easy to get. . . . It’s one way to undermine the enemy soldiers. A lot of my friends thought so too, but we kept on using it.”74 The acknowledgment of enemy treachery raises interesting questions as to the private, political, or other reasons soldiers “kept on using it,” but for readers of the Daily Defender, the story ended there. Appealing to a similar curiosity, the New York Times tracked the number of soldiers sentenced and discharged “on narcotics charges.”75 The FBN reassured the public it was working to contain the threat returnee soldiers might pose by getting “the Army to notify the chiefs of police, where the boys return to their home communities, so that they do not become sources of infection and start peddling.”76

  Depicting veterans as potential “sources of infection” was indicative of a broader tendency to link (illicit) drug consumption with the potential for criminal delinquency. There emerged a widely remarked-upon relationship between drugs, delinquency, racial identity, and social pathology. As one NYC prosecutor explained, “addiction, then, is a disease of high social contagion that not only may produce criminality . . . but also tends to attack those persons whose resistance to anti-social activity is, for a multitude of reasons, notoriously low.” He tellingly left it to “psychiatrists and sociologists” to explain its high incidence “among the negroes and Puerto Rican” youth.77 A Times Youth Forum meeting in Los Angeles on how to “improve the welfare of youth in the United States” illustrated the reach of this emerging consensus. Teenagers aired their belief that without a “happy home,” spiritual and vocational guidance, and good role models, “Communism will be used to fill in the gaps, narcotics to numb the sting of discouragement and delinquency as the counterw
eapon to fight the world.”78 The director of Chicago’s Crime Prevention Bureau, Dr. Lois L. Higgins, warned an audience at the National Biology Teachers’ Association: “While we join other free nations to resist the threat of Communism in other parts of the world, our Communist enemies are waging a deadly and tragically successful war against us here at home. Narcotic drugs are some of the weapons they are using with devastating effect.”79 At a health fair in Chicago, Higgins simplified this message: “Youthful narcotics addiction is one facet of the hydra-headed threat of crime and communism.”80 The image of corrupting forces threatening American youth was deeply embedded in the racial politics of the era. A 1956 article in Reader’s Digest entitled “We Must Stop the Crime that Breeds Crime!” warned readers: “Formerly concentrated in the Negro, Puerto Rican, Mexican and Chinese sections of a few large cities, addiction has spread during the last ten years to smaller metropolitan areas and taken in youths of every race.”81

  Drug control in this context recast domestic upheavals as foreign infiltration while elaborating a strengthened system of social control and policing that particularly targeted African American, poor, and immigrant communities. It eschewed the language of race with a seemingly neutral and socially beneficial discourse of protecting (white) “youth” against criminal contagion.

  Jacquelyn Dowd Hall describes that by the early Cold War, “antifascism and anticolonialism had already internationalized the race issue and, by linking the fate of African Americans to that of oppressed people everywhere, had given their cause transcendent meaning. Anticommunism, on the other hand, stifled the social democratic impulses . . . narrow[ing] the ideological ground on which civil rights activists could stand.”82 Much as red-baiting sought to sever black American political mobilizations from the international context out of which they came, so too did accusations of criminality. The Ku Klux Klan attacked integration as communist-inspired and attacked acts of civil disobedience as amoral flaunting of the law. A full decade before presidential candidates like Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon would run on political platforms invoking “law and order” as a not-so-veiled appeal to white supremacist resentment towards black civil rights, a “rhetoric linking crime and race” had already become “fused in the public mind.”83 While officials distanced themselves from the position that crime was caused by biological or racial factors, the social sciences provided a seemingly race-neutral framework for explaining the preponderance of crime among certain racial groups. This slippage was a critical component of a new large-scale policing and prison system that grew in tandem with the victories of the civil rights movement. Appealing to fears of contagious subversion, law enforcement measures worked to recast cultural, racial, and political manifestations as criminal threats to public safety. Scientific presumption that pathology caused crime functioned as a mechanism for perpetuating the politics of Jim Crow segregation, denial of political rights, and the maintenance of economic inequality within a liberal articulation that elided its white supremacist foundations. This was nowhere clearer than in the manufactured drug crisis that led to unprecedented policing, escalation of criminal penalties, and the targeting of poor, immigrant, and especially black communities during the 1950s.

  Drugs and war fused in domestic politics as the public and government responded fiercely to sensational portrayals of the “narcotics menace,” and as the FBN successfully linked projects of international and domestic drug control. By the 1960s, congressmen celebrated Commissioner Anslinger as “the No. 1 American general in this fight against narcotics addiction in our United States,” along with the new “legislative weapons necessary to win this war.”84 Just a decade earlier, when the Welfare Council of the City of New York pursued an investigation “for the purpose of determining the nature and extent of ‘teen-age’ drug addiction in New York City,” the purported crisis of “teen-age” addiction was not common knowledge: “The project committee encountered difficulty in obtaining statistics from public agencies and soon discovered that most public agencies have not kept very close check of the incidents of ‘teen-age’ addiction. This failure was principally due to the fact that there was no such awareness on the part of most public agencies of the existence of such a situation.”85

  A spate of local and national hearings and investigations helped raise “awareness” of the alleged crisis as part of an effort spearheaded by the FBN and fulfilled by Congress to revise the nation’s drug laws. Sensational media coverage fueled public uproar. As Newsweek reported in June 1951, “Last week the verbatim confessions of teen-age addicts filled up more newspaper columns than the MacArthur hearings.” Such youth testimonials of arrest for using “marijuana, heroin, morphine, or cocaine” underwrote the buildup to legislative action.86 By 1951, the crisis inspired radical proposals: “Recent disclosures of teen-age addiction may result in the passage of more stringent laws. Already there are demands for legislation which will make the sale of narcotics to minors punishable by death.”87 When a congressional committee held hearings that year to revise narcotics legislation, the chairman declared, “A drug addict is something more than a criminal. Because he is enslaved to dope he is, in a sense, also a ‘disease’ spreader. . . . Because their moral fiber has been destroyed, victims of dope, like victims of smallpox, must be quarantined for their own protection and for the protection of the rest of society.”88 The fear of an “epidemic of narcotic addiction among younger people” had a profound impact on national drug policy.89

  Between 1951 and 1956, as historian John C. McWilliams notes, there was “a dramatic increase in the number of Washington legislators who proposed federal statutes for the greater control of narcotics,” with twenty-six bills presented in 1951 alone. The passage of the Boggs Act in 1951 introduced mandatory minimum sentences for narcotics law violations as well as a number of measures to “make it easier for prosecuting attorneys to secure convictions.”90 A radical law enforcement tool, the mandatory minimum sentence undermined judicial discretionary power and rapidly “more than doubled the average prison sentence of federal narcotics offenders.”91 Even prior to the Boggs Act, the FBN boasted that with only 2 percent of “Federal criminal law enforcement personnel,” bureau arrests accounted for “more than 10 percent of the persons committed to Federal penal institutions.”92 Between 1946 and 1950, a 20 percent decrease in people sentenced to federal prisons was accompanied by a 20 percent increase in those “sentenced for narcotic violations.”93 Five years later the Narcotics Control Act in 1956 once again escalated penalties dramatically. Selling narcotics to juveniles now carried “a maximum sentence of death upon recommendation of the jury,” and the act maintained mandatory minimum sentences, while extending their maximum duration: “For the first possession offense, the penalty was two to ten years’ imprisonment with probation or parole. For the second possession or first selling offense, there was a mandatory five to twenty years with no probation or parole; and, for the third possession or second selling and subsequent offense, the violator was sentenced to a mandatory term of ten to forty years with no probation or parole.”94

  State laws largely mirrored the regulations adopted at the national level, with some dissent. In 1958, Missouri lowered penalties for a first-time drug conviction since, as the circuit attorney in St. Louis explained, “We found that juries simply would not send a man up for two years on the strength of a marijuana cigarette found in his possession.” Yet this incident, according to a journalist for the Nation, “marked the rare occasion when an agency of any government questioned the authority or wisdom of Anslinger” (who, it might be noted, quickly retaliated by withdrawing the bulk of FBN officers from the state).95

  The escalation of penalties for illicit drug consumption had deeper roots than the sensational coverage that directly preceded the passage of legislation.96 While congressional testimony and media coverage seemed to confirm a popular demand for action, the FBN itself was a critical force cultivating the perception of a crisis. Statistics regarding the national incidence
of addiction were based upon police reporting of arrests for narcotics law violations. All persons arrested for illicit narcotics possession were classified as “addicts,” and the increased number of arrests created the perception of an increasing incidence of criminality. As enforcement—and reporting—escalated, so too did the incidence of crime, leading in a circular fashion to the perceived need for more policing. In the wake of public hearings on addiction in New York in 1951, “the size of the Narcotics Squad was doubled.”97 With the passage of the Boggs Act in 1951 and the Narcotics Control Act in 1956, the FBN received the two largest budget increases in its history.98 The expansion of police powers was also connected to the presumed race of narcotics law violators. The FBN targeted “the teen-age problem [that] is in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles” and focused most of its policing in the predominantly poor and black neighborhoods of those cities.99 As a consequence, throughout the decade, charts submitted to Congress to justify narcotics enforcement budgets reinforced the association connecting minorities, addiction, and crime.