The United States government never tried to export its prohibition of alcohol policy. In retrospect, it might be argued that what most sapped the confidence of the prohibitionists was the Great Depression, just as their victory in the First World War had inspired it. Prohibiting alcohol was not a rational policy. It was a moral crusade, an idealistic flourish, and an expression of confidence in America’s power to reform the world from the ground up. As for the booze addicts that Prohibition was supposed to dry out, the return to a legal, commercial market in alcoholic drinks forced American Christians to develop new ways of tending their flock. Since they couldn’t make alcohol go away, the temptation to drink it had to be resisted. By 1934, Bill Wilson had ruined a promising Wall Street career because of his constant drunkenness. Wilson was treated at the Charles B. Towns hospital by Dr William Silkworth, who argued that alcoholism had to be treated as a disease. While in hospital, Bill Wilson underwent what he believed to be a spiritual experience and, convinced of the existence of a healing higher power, he was able to stop drinking. Alcoholics Anonymous, which he co-founded, is based on abstention, in which spiritual awakening replaces dependence on alcohol, and the support of one’s peers replaces the isolation of alcoholism. AA is still the first port of call for people around the world who want help to stop drinking.33
For many years the ban on drugs was much more successful than the one on alcohol. Although the press continued to revel in occasionally scandalous use of cocaine in Hollywood, the drug gradually went out of fashion. In 1930, the New York City Mayor’s Committee on Drug Addiction reported that ‘during the last twenty years cocaine as an addiction has ceased to be a problem’. The laws probably hastened the trend. Fear of what prolonged cocaine use could do certainly reduced demand for recreational stimulants, which was now met by amphetamines, a new class of synthetic drugs which soon became cheaper and more widely available than cocaine.
Notwithstanding the near invisibility of drug addicts, the press and politicians still used popular fear of drugs to mobilize witch-hunts against those deemed undesirable. ‘The anti-marijuana laws were passed during the Great Depression, when an enormous drought in the dustbowl states caused internal migration to California,’ Eric Sterling, the former legal counsel to Congress, told me. ‘California had been Spanish from the sixteenth century until the 1840s, when the United States effectively took it after gold was discovered. A new narrative was constructed, in which the Californians were somehow foreigners, using a foreign drug that made them homicidal.’ Newspapers repeated unsubstantiated claims that ‘the killer weed’ led users, particularly Mexican users, to commit terrible acts of violence, particularly against Anglo-Saxon women. Harry J. Anslinger, the first head of the US Bureau of Narcotics, said that ‘reefer makes darkies think that they’re as good as white men’. In a context of land hunger, the press’s demonization of marijuana users served to justify the robbery and imprisonment of Spanish speakers across California. As Eric Sterling pointed out, it was judged ‘better to employ the good Christian whites who have fled the Great Depression to California, who need jobs’.
The censors also pandered to ignorance and prejudice. From 1934, the Motion Picture Association of America refused a seal of approval for any film that depicted the use of narcotics, a ban that lasted until 1956, when The Man with the Golden Arm, in which Frank Sinatra plays a musician struggling to overcome an addiction to heroin, was successfully exhibited without a seal.34 Even in the hermetically contained, vice-free vacuum that the authorities hoped to create, drug scares still flared on occasion. In the 1950s, the media jumped on a story of how two teenagers in Colorado had suffered terrible hallucinations after accidentally inhaling model airplane glue. This led to another well-meaning nationwide panic, as well as turning a lot of bored and curious young people on to glue-sniffing.
The United States’ first genuine drug epidemic spread through New York City. One of its participants remembered just how discreet heroin use was when it first found favour. ‘In 1959, you didn’t see heroin being sold on the streets. The dope addicts hung out in the park—that was it! It wasn’t like they were out to bother people hanging out in front of their buildings. I tell you, the dope addicts then were well-dressed people. The only reason you knew they were dope addicts was because they were always falling over from being doped up. And they worked, they had jobs. True, they took from their own—from their mother or wife—but to go out and mug people, you hardly ever saw that.’35
The year 1961 marked a turning point in the story of drugs in New York City. A shortage of heroin sent once-discreet heroin users ricocheting around the city in search of drugs, and made public what had until then been a very private vice.36 In the same year, the United Nations, in session in New York City, passed the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. Most, but certainly not all, of the most ardent prohibitionists were Americans. Such was the power of the United States, the Convention was basically drawn up by Americans and signed by the other United Nations member states. The Convention committed its signatories to restrict the supply of illicit drugs still further, treat and rehabilitate addicts and punish traffickers. The range of banned substances was expanded to include cannabis and coca leaves. Peru and Bolivia were expected to phase out coca leaf production within twenty-five years. The world would rely on the products of Western pharmaceutical companies for their aspirin and paracetamol, and on Western confectioners for their Coca-Cola and Nescafé. ‘Drugs’, whether for pleasure or the relief of pain, would now become commercial medicines. This was supposed to be the definitive conclusion to the struggle to define and contain magical potions, which had been waged since the mid-nineteenth century.
So it was that a policy principally aimed at combating the use of heroin by a very small minority of Americans inadvertently criminalized several million Andean coca-chewers, who had been chewing coca unhindered for thousands of years. In 1961, heroin seizures in the United States were running at about 1 kg a year. Only 4 million Americans had even tried an illegal drug. By 2003, 74 million Americans had done so.37 The Single Convention has not put an end to drug use. Nevertheless, it has remained in place to this day, with some amendments, apparently clad in iron. Harry Levine, co-editor of Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice (1997), has phrased the universal appeal of prohibition thus: ‘Over the course of the twentieth century, drug prohibition received support from liberal prime ministers, moderate monarchs, military strongmen, and Maoists. It was supported by prominent archbishops and radical priests; by nationalist heroes and imperialists’ puppets; by labour union leaders and sweatshop owners; by socialists, social workers, social scientists and socialites—by all variety of politicians practising all brands of politics in all political systems.’38 The Single Convention is dependent for its survival on the commitment of the United States, but it gives the United Nations enormous clout too, and all governments seem to benefit from the additional police and military powers that the attempt to prohibit drug use requires. In the United States, there are more undercover narcotics police than there are in any other branch of police work. Policing the drugs trade requires intelligence and surveillance operatives who can be diverted into other lines of work. The Watergate burglary, for example, was conducted by former CIA agents from Richard Nixon’s own special anti-drugs team.
There was a dramatic increase in drug use in the late 1960s. Eric Sterling remembers that it took place in a context of enormous social conflict, dislocation and fear. ‘By the mid-60s you had riots, bus burnings, the assassination of President Kennedy in ’63, the assassination of Martin Luther King and Senator Bobby Kennedy in ’68, and the shooting in ’72 of George Wallace, the presidential candidate. You had hundreds of thousands of people marching and sitting in, burning draft cards and burning flags. You had mass events like Woodstock, men no longer wearing their hair short, but wearing it long, all the women waving their brassieres at the 1968 Democratic Convention. There was a sense that society had run off the tracks, and drugs w
ere perceived as this agent that was driving the youth insane. Drug control was part of an effort to put the lid back on.’
As drug consumption went from being an esoteric and marginal activity to one intimately associated with the nascent youth culture, the supposedly comprehensive ban on drug use proved ineffective in controlling the supply of drugs. One fine day in Palm Springs, Elvis Presley fell into conversation with Vice President Spiro Agnew. Elvis wanted to know how he might use his celebrity status to promote the Nixon administration’s anti-drug campaign. So it was that on 21 December 1970, Elvis went to the White House to meet President Richard Nixon. The day before the meeting, Elvis and two of his bodyguards went to the gates of the White House, where Presley handed the guard a handwritten letter addressed to the President, in which he made clear his opposition to the ‘drug culture, hippy elements and Black Panthers’ who, he wrote, hated America. He declared that he wanted nothing but to ‘help the country out’, and asked to be designated a ‘federal agent-at-large’. The next day, Elvis went to meet the President and made him a gift of a Second World War-era Colt .45 pistol. A photograph was taken, in which the two men can be seen shaking hands, Nixon in a suit and tie, Elvis in tight purple velvet trousers, a purple velvet cape slung over his shoulders and an enormous belt buckle. They agreed that ‘those who use drugs are in the vanguard of American protest’. On New Year’s Eve, Nixon wrote a note to Elvis, thanking him for his gift of the pistol, but making no mention of enlisting his aid in the war on drugs. The administration’s ambivalence about engaging ‘the King’ in its anti-drugs campaign is apparent from the correspondence of Nixon’s aides. In an inter-office memo dashed off on the morning of Presley’s visit, Nixon aide Dwight Chapin had suggested that if the President wanted to meet ‘bright young people outside the government, Presley might be the one to start with’. Aide H. R. Haldeman responded, ‘you must be kidding’.
Elvis Presley died from heart failure in 1977. The coroner put his death down to ‘undetermined causes’, but some speculated that Elvis’s obesity and the ten drugs found in his bloodstream at the time of his death may have played a part. Elvis was known to have tried Dilaudid, Percodan, Placidyl, Dexedrine, Biphetamine, Tuinal, Desbutal, Escatrol, Amytal, Quaaludes, Carbrital, Seconal, methadone and Ritalin. What help could such a prolific drug user possibly offer to anyone waging a ‘war on drugs’? Elvis’s love of drugs and his hatred of ‘drug culture’ shows that the distinction between legal and illegal drugs can’t be explained in terms of their chemical properties. Of much greater importance than the drug itself in determining the response of officialdom is the social position of the drug user. In the 1960s the press ran stories of how LSD dissolved human chromosomes and produced two-headed babies. In the 1970s, journalists warned their readers that PCP, better known as Angel Dust, gave its users superhuman strength, and was so powerful that the police needed super-strength stun guns to subdue them. None of the drugs that Elvis chose to use and abuse was made the subject of such scare stories.
Despite the scare stories, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War protests, and the threat of riots had drawn the police away from drug law enforcement. The Knapp Commission Report of 1973, which was written in response to the shooting of an undercover narcotics officer in Williamsburg, New York, revealed the shocking extent to which the city’s police had been corrupted by the drugs business. Thereafter, the police concentrated their resources on high-level sellers, which took the heat off street dealers and users. A third factor favouring drug users was that in the 1970s the government of New York City was practically bankrupt. Police officers were laid off, and the lack of street-level drug law enforcement gave drug dealers the run of almost every park in the city.
Then a congressional delegation returned from Vietnam, warning that as many as 40,000 US troops had become addicted to heroin. Celerino Castillo III, a former Drug Enforcement Administration agent from Texas, remembers the extent of the epidemic well. ‘If the soldier was well liked, someone would pump a bullet in his body, and the family would be told he’d died a hero’s death. If the consensus was that the dead soldier had been an asshole, he would be sent home with nothing more than needle pricks in his arms.’39 ‘The Vietnam War had a big impact on our communities,’ a former gang member called Luis Rodriguez told me when I travelled to Los Angeles to look into the origins of the prison crisis in California. ‘A lot of poor working-class kids were sent to war, and many came back traumatized, addicted to heroin, and knowing how to kill people. And they contributed to the gangs, making them better organized, and probably a little nuttier.’
The post-Vietnam heroin epidemic in the US was a genuine problem that demanded a comprehensive response from public health authorities, but the matter was subsumed by President Nixon’s broader fight against hippy culture. Nixon’s war on drugs started out as an assertion on the part of nominally abstemious, white, Christian America against opponents of the establishment, for whom drug use had become emblematic over the course of the 1960s. Jack Cole is the executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, an organization of police officers disillusioned by their inability to enforce drugs laws effectively. ‘I joined the narcotics unit of the New Jersey State Police in 1970, at the beginning of the war on drugs,’ he told me. ‘The term “war on drugs” was coined by Richard Nixon, but it had nothing to do with drugs, and everything to do with the fact that he was running for the Presidency for the second time and he thought that it would be nice if this time he won. He knew that if he was a strong anti-crime guy that would get him a lot of votes. But boy, if he could be in charge of a war, how those votes would pour in! He went to campaign for the Presidency in New Hampshire, and while he was up there he wrote a letter to his mentor Dwight Eisenhower. “Ike,” he wrote, “it’s just amazing how much you can get done through fear. All I talk about in New Hampshire is crime and drugs, and everyone wants to vote for me—and they don’t even have any black people up here.”’ After a briefing with Nixon in 1969, H. R. Haldeman, by now the President’s top aide, noted in his diary that ‘Nixon emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes that, while not appearing to do so.’40
Tony Papa served a life sentence for cocaine trafficking before joining the Drug Policy Alliance, the principal organization campaigning for an end to America’s war on drugs. He experienced at first hand the punitive drug policies introduced by Nelson Rockefeller, the then governor of New York. ‘Rockefeller aspired to be President. He wanted to look really tough on crime, because he figured it would appeal to the Republicans, so he created what became known as the Rockefeller drug laws in 1973. The idea was to capture the drug kingpins and curb the drug epidemic that supposedly existed in New York at that time. He made the toughest laws in the nation. Fifteen years to life for sales of two ounces [approximately 60 grams] of coke or possession of four ounces.’
Nixon’s war on drugs was politically expedient, as it turned attention away from the disastrous escapade in Vietnam, while preserving the military culture that had inspired the war in the first place. Despite its appeal, it was flawed from the start, not only by its disregard for the epidemiology of drug use, but also by the instability of the core values animating America’s Christian soldiers. In 1972, Richard Nixon appointed the Shafer Commission to look into America’s drug control policies. Among the issues it raised, the commission’s report pointed out that ‘the national religious community has failed to address its most important task: the elaboration of values upon which individual choice could rest. The decline of moral certitude regarding drug consumption has left a void. The religious community has a major responsibility to confront the profound philosophical, moral and spiritual questions raised by the drug problem.’41 The Shafer report went on to assert that there was no link between marijuana and crime; that alcohol was far more dangerous than marijuana; and that personal use of marijuana should be decriminalized. This was not what th
e good Christian Richard Nixon wanted to hear. ‘Every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish,’ he raged.42
The United Kingdom’s Misuse of Drugs Act of 1971 was also coloured by the politicians’ backlash against the popular culture of the 1960s. In the parliamentary debates prior to the passage of the Act, British MPs gave vent to their indignation at ‘youth culture’ and the new moral values it championed. But in the backrooms, talk was of a national identity crisis rather than the health risks associated with drug use. Britain had been withdrawing from its colonies one by one since 1945, a humiliating experience only made worse by the devaluation of the pound, and Franco-German domination of the European Common Market. National Front supporters were marching in the streets, with their own ideas of who was to blame for Britain’s loss of standing in the world. Before the passage of the Act, the UK had had a relatively liberal drugs policy. Heroin addicts could be prescribed enough of the drug to manage their addiction without being forced to buy from the black market. But MPs felt that a stand had to be made. On the face of it, cracking down on drug use ruffled few feathers and threatened no vested interests. The only illegal drug that most people had even heard of was cannabis, and only hippies and Rastafarians were likely to object to a toughening of sentencing guidelines.
MP Peter Jackson tried to table an amendment which would have included nicotine on the list of dangerous drugs enshrined in the Misuse of Drugs Act. The outright rejection of the Jackson amendment in Parliament showed that the dangers to health posed by drugs were a relatively minor consideration. Far more important was the government’s assertion of its right to make distinctions between good and bad drugs, irrespective of the harm they caused, or the opinion of scientists, teachers or doctors. In other contentious debates about matters of personal behaviour and individual choice, like pre-marital sex, abortion and homosexuality, the state was ceding ground to popular pressure to institutionalize more liberal attitudes. In passing the Misuse of Drugs Act in 1971, Britain’s politicians drew a line in the sand, asserting that when it came to drug use, the government had every right to intervene in the private lives of its citizens.
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