We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire

by Suzanna Reiss

  In an era when the explicit deployment of race as an explanation for social inequality became increasingly unpalatable, congressmen delicately pointed to the overrepresentation of black “addicts” in FBN reports. A year after the passage of the Narcotics Control Act, Rep. Gordon Canfield (NJ) fretted, “I wonder if it is proper—if I am treading on dangerous ground I hope you will tell me—but I note in your charts presented today that the dope peddlers of the United States apparently prey to a large degree on our Negro population, and that I am sorry to hear.”100 In the midst of mass African-American protests, sit-ins, and marches for economic, political, and social equality, many congressional representatives knew that black people were disproportionately being charged with narcotics violations. It is clear from congressional exchanges that many sought to studiously avoid addressing race directly, even while presuming black criminality. The record of congressional hearings themselves reproduced this avoidance of race, even while it was clearly being given serious weight, as is evident in the notable frequency that conversations about race and drug use proceeded “off the record.” Rep. Otto E. Passman (LA) emblematically exclaimed: “I am not making any racial implications at all, but when you have statistics of this type, then there should be some explanation as to why there are five colored addicts to one white addict.” In response, before going off record, the Commissioner of Narcotics reiterated a frequent explanation that crime was “confined to certain police precincts where you have very bad social and economic conditions,” assuring the Louisiana congressman that “negro” addiction was not a problem in the South (as opposed to the North) —echoing perhaps a frequent assertion that increased levels of freedom for blacks brought increased levels of crime.101

  FIGURE 12. Federal Bureau of Narcotics chart representing drug addiction statistics for 1953–1956, differentiated by race.

  Such attitudes in the 1950s and 1960s bolstered funding for the FBN, and fueled the dramatic expansion of police powers. The Cold War tendency to pursue national security through international covert operations had a domestic counterpoint in the shift toward undercover narcotics enforcement. As Anslinger explained, “We decided to take advantage of the men and the money and the Boggs Act—we had all three—so we stepped into the underworld. We put most of our new men right out into the underworld.”102 By 1957, the commissioner testified that the vast majority of narcotics agents “work undercover. Even our supervisors, we try to have them work undercover.”103 This shift to undercover work depended on a number of transformations including the FBN need to “recruit Negro, Sicilian, and Chinese agents.”104 Along with changes in police personnel came the weakening of civil rights protections. Early in the decade Anslinger described a New Jersey law as “an excellent thing” for enabling officers to arrest “an addict as a disorderly person just like a common drunkard.” He lamented that in Washington, DC, “there is nothing that the police can do. They do not have the power to pick up a man because he is an addict. They must have probable cause. We have a search-and-seizure restriction in Federal jurisdiction.”105 Voicing a common complaint, police frequently demanded “the right to arrest without warrant; the right to search for and seize contraband before and after a valid arrest.” Without them, since 1950 the police had pursued other tactics to “offset some of these handicaps.” Undercover officers increasingly “shifted enforcement emphasis to the purchase of drugs from violators—a method which is slow, costly and inefficient by previous standards, but designed to avoid judicially imposed disabilities.”106 These tactics tended toward the apprehension of low-level violators. As the new drug policy’s most vociferous public critic, a professor of sociology at Indiana University, Alfred R. Lindesmith, described, “penalties fall mainly upon the victims of the traffic—the addicts—rather than on the dope racketeers.”107 Nevertheless, in 1956 many of these “obstacles” were removed. Anslinger celebrated the introduction of “witness immunity” in narcotics cases, explaining, “We never got this type of an informer who is now willing to trade his long-sentence term for turning in his connections.”108 And the Federal Bureau of Narcotics was “given the authority to carry firearms, serve search warrants, and make arrests without warrants” in their pursuit of narcotics law violations.109

  To some contemporaries, the connection between racism, policing, and opposition to black political mobilizations was clear. In a Pulitzer Prize–winning series, reporter Gene Sherman remarked: “The methods of narcotics officers have come under fire lately by some moralists, attorneys and vociferous proponents of civil rights.”110 In a remarkable statement submitted to the newly constituted Federal Civil Rights Commission which the petitioners shared with the Los Angeles Tribune, the “Fellows of Tank 12A-1” of the Los Angeles County Prison protested that narcotics squad police tactics violated their “Constitutional guarantees, railroading men and women to the penitentiary.” Offering an indictment of the powers granted under narcotics legislation, these prisoners suggested their due process rights were violated by the use of secret informers against whom defendants had been denied the right of subpoena. Moreover they argued undercover agents used bribery, in the form of drugs and the promise of reduced sentences, to gain informers’ collaboration, a tactic openly celebrated by the FBN. Explaining that agents deliberately targeted “slum areas” to achieve their “specific goal,” they protested being made “objects for political popularities and gains,” and implored the Civil Rights Commission “to help save what the Constitution guaranteed us.”111 Drug laws were powerful, oppressive tools in a city where the police force “protected its white constituency, [by] keeping in check,” in Police Chief William H. Parker’s words, the “primitive Congolese.”112 This was true across the nation. In striking testimony, Cook County state’s attorney John Gutknecht described the racial politics and legal consequences of narcotics enforcement in his jurisdiction, which included the city of Chicago. Remarking on “the prevalence of Negro defendants among those charged” and noting police operations tended to target people who “operated mainly in the lower/middle branches of the illicit traffic,” the state’s attorney believed: “The white race is responsible for the distribution of narcotics in America, and let’s not kid ourselves. The others are the victims.” The perception that drug enforcement was a tool for maintaining white supremacy, while not popularly embraced, nevertheless seemed to lie just beneath the surface of policy debates. The governor of New Jersey drew upon this reservoir when, in the context of numerous states “passing laws which match or exceed the rigor of the national laws,” he vetoed a narcotic bill passed by the state legislature, “characterizing it as an example of a lynch law.”113

  The racial logic behind the expansion of policing drew upon a seemingly apolitical professional consensus forged among sociologists, psychologists, and other experts that identified specific drugs with certain “types of people” and communities. The incredible expansion of new drug commodities propelled a public health debate about the relationship between habit, addiction, crime, and disease, which along with prison demographics, represented economic, racial, and cultural bias even while asserting scientific neutrality. When asked before Congress, “from what strata of society would you say the largest number of addicts come—the low, middle class, or upper crust?” the FBN commissioner replied, “Unquestionably from below. . . . These fellows mostly have been criminals first and then addiction follows. The type of people they live with, that is where you get addiction. You don’t see addiction where the individual has a good school, a good home and a church.”114 Suggesting poverty bred crime along with the absence of “good” schools and homes clearly appealed to the normative power of white middle-class beliefs. The definition of addiction devised by the World Health Organization for international drug control officials, which emphasized not its impact on the individual body but rather the threat that body posed to the broader community, was adapted to social control initiatives in the United States. Dr. Harris Isbell, the director of the Addiction Research C
enter of the USPHS, and Nathan B. Eddy, his colleague and former member of the WHO’s Expert Committee on Narcotic Drugs, clarified the intent behind the definition of addiction and its relevance for drug control:

  It was not meant to be pharmacological, nor strictly speaking scientific, but practical, and was intended to include the diverse substances currently under international narcotics control. State and national narcotics laws and regulations and international narcotics conventions are designed to prevent or at least limit abuse of cocaine and marihuana as well as of opium and the potent analgesics. Though all of these substances are commonly and loosely termed narcotics, their properties differ so widely that they are similar only in being subject to abuse and in creating social dangers.115

  This focus on “social dangers” left room for discriminatory application of the law according to subjective representations of what constituted a threat to the dominant social order. This definition led to the targeted policing of specific communities, and enabled the ongoing production, testing, and consumption of drugs by other people. Citing studies conducted on inmates at the USPHS narcotics farms, these scientists warned that the new synthetic drugs varied in their potential to generate addiction and implored a “need for flexibility” so as not to hamper research into a “nonaddicting pain-relieving drug.” They also went on to advise that “the amphetamines, the barbiturates, or other sedatives” not be subject to control since their “clinical experience leads us to believe that most persons will handle and use these drugs as prescribed.”116 These allowances for drugs most widely consumed at the time by white middle-class housewives or teenagers studying for exams speak to social bias. The hoped-for power of the laboratory to create nonaddictive painkillers was paired with the “clinical” belief that some drugs (and by extension, some people) did not pose a social danger.117

  Debates about addiction sharply reveal this duality. Embedded in the process of designating legality was the recognition of the power of drugs to effect positive change and to pose threats, a calculus profoundly influenced in any given circumstance by the broader context of cultural, racial, and political conflict. One common fear was the alleged power of drugs to incite people to frenzy and economic depravity, as expressed by Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana: “As I understand it, the drug addicts, once they get into the habit, will do anything to get the drug, and that means of course, they will steal, they will rob, and they will do anything,” to which Anslinger responded, “That is very true, Senator, because they do not work. They just live a life of crime.”118 Such sentiments fueled belief in a drug crisis and sustained fearful enthusiasm for extreme coercive measures. In the words of a federal judge: “What would they do if a man came in bringing tuberculosis germs and infected the public with tuberculosis germs? A person like that should be executed. And yet by bringing narcotics in this country they were bringing in something worse than tuberculosis germs. I think the death sentence would not be an inappropriate sentence.”119 In another example, a prosecutor’s vision neatly contained the productive and destructive potential of drugs in a simple plan: “The plan calls for the hospitalization of addicts on a massive scale . . . some of these . . . might be work camps; others might be on farms . . . others—more immediately available—would be existing institutions, such as mental hospitals with beds that have been emptied through the miracle of tranquilizers and improved therapy, or tuberculosis sanitariums vacated by the new wonder drugs.” A clear line existed in this critic’s mind between the wonder drugs and those producing addiction: In “good conscience” the state “ought not engage in administering narcotic drugs to individuals for indefinite periods, when such drugs, ultimately . . . will impair health, and when, by lulling patients into euphoria, they will destroy ambition and industry.”120

  Countering demands for harsher penalties were people such as Dr. Hubert S. Howe, who headed a New York Academy of Medicine study questioning the criminalization of drug consumption. Howe argued it was the withholding of drugs and the black market itself that turned drug users into criminals: “The public has yet to grasp the fact that addicts are dangerous when they are without drugs, not when they are with them. . . . The only way to get rid of the black markets is to undersell them.”121 Such arguments sought to reposition the addict as threats to themselves rather than to the larger society; and by extension cast “addiction” as an illness that should be treated through the controlled disbursement of medicaments rather than the controlled confinement of bodies. When such arguments were presented to Senator Price Daniel’s Narcotics Subcommittee in the 1950s, Time reported on the subsequent discussion asking, “Should dope addicts get their dope free from the government?” The magazine described how “The proposal split the experts—doctors and law enforcers—right down the middle.”122 Even affirmative arguments still drew upon the logic of legality embedded in the drug control regime by characterizing government-regulated disbursement of drugs to addicts a “legitimate medical use.” However, the social origins of the notion of “addiction,” which had been embraced by scientists and policymakers alike, militated against disentangling the disease from the criminal. The perceived negative social impact of “addiction” was what had come to define the phenomenon. The subcommittee declared, “any provision of low-cost drugs to uncured users was immoral and that it had failed in all countries that have tried it.”123 The “immorality” of the “provision of low-cost drugs” might promote rather than undermine “addiction.” For these policymakers it was addiction—the consumer—that generated the illicit traffic in drugs and social dangers, not the other way around.124

  Such debates persist to this day, but their translation into policy persistently reflected the historical construction of ideas about collective well-being. This explains in part the sympathy accorded to the physician addict, a group that reportedly accounted for the “highest incidence of narcotics,” in stark contrast to the sensational accounts of social dysfunction used to describe its manifestation in policed communities.125 In a typical example, the Science News Letter dismissed the phenomenon: “Most doctors need a good night’s sleep, more vacation time, and release from tension. Without it, they are in greater danger from temptation than any layman, because of their easy access to the drugs.”126 These exceptions extended to classes of drugs themselves, such as the tranquilizers and barbiturates, increasingly common antidotes for white suburban anomie. Explaining to Congress why such drugs were not covered by the Narcotics Control Act, Anslinger said, “the control would be so tight that I think it would cause hardship . . . we see those drugs do more good than harm to people with so much tension in the country today.”127 The line demarcating legality, and the productive and destructive power of drugs, was culturally determined. The same Congressman Sieminski who linked drugs with race rebellion in Africa responded to FBN statistics by advocating the value of drug consumption in certain contexts: “I hope that when people . . . see your figures, they will take a genuine interest in helping their own kind. . . . This is a challenge for man all over. Tranquilizer pills seem to be an approach in this direction. They say, it is helping man integrate himself into society.”128 In emblematic contrast, one psychologist described the pathology of drug use in black culture: “the specific drug used by [black] musicians is reflected in their music and is related to the degree of their acceptance by society. Alcohol was often used by early Dixieland musicians with their raucous rhythms, marijuana was linked with musicians playing the more sensitive and lighter swing music, and heroin use is associated with the complexities and emotional flatness of the ‘cool’ music of today. This music is described by musicians as being ‘way out’—the same expression they use to describe the effect of heroin.”129

  REBEL MUSIC

  Training a boy to blow a horn no longer insures that he will not blow a safe. It may well blow him into delinquency, for who can deny the close association between jazz and delinquency?130

  Threads of anticommunism, white hostility to civil rights, exp
anded police powers, and an awareness of international dimensions to domestic upheavals came together in the public linking of jazz and narcotics. By 1957, “If the average man in the street was asked what sort of people take dope, the chances are he would give ‘jazzmen’ as one of the answers.”131 Jazz’s groove, the antiracist, anticolonial politics of many of its luminaries, as well as its appeal to racially mixed audiences, placed it at the vanguard of protest movements, sparking considerable fear, hostility, and violence from forces defending the status quo. A surprising number of social scientists probed what ethnomusicologist Alan Merriam and sociologist Raymond Mack referred to as “the Jazz Community,” drawing attention to the interplay between musicians and their audience. Recognizing the music’s revolutionary potential, they acknowledged, “The anxiety felt about jazz in the dominant white culture stems further, in the view of a number of writers, from the fact that jazz is a music of protest.” Yet as they survey the literature on jazz they describe the frequency with which notions of immaturity and social pathology (echoing the terms used to stigmatize other cultures in the service of “development” initiatives) were used to stigmatize the music. For example, an article entitled, “A Theory on the Psychology of Jazz,” described how “there are few, if any, other causes (with the possible exception of Communism) which can satisfy the needs of the adolescent so fully . . . because of basic psychological correlations between their needs and what the jazz community offers them.”132 The deceptive neutrality of academic inquiry nevertheless provided ideological justification for very material attacks on jazz musicians. Describing police responses to jazz performances in Los Angeles at mid-century, trumpeter Art Farmer explained, “The police started really becoming a problem. I remember, you would walk down the street, and ever time they’d see you they would stop you and search you.” Farmer described jazz’s racial transgressions as particularly threatening, “The police . . . the only thing they saw anytime they saw any interracial thing going on was a crime . . . it was a crime leading to prostitution and narcotics.”133 Bassist Charles Mingus had similar impressions of New York City in 1959: “the Police Department really enjoys harassing any club where a healthy integrated feeling is a little too out in the open.”134