The ability of the United States to implement policies that empirical evidence strongly suggests have failed is perhaps the one true bipartisan action of the last four decades. In foreign policy a general example that comes to my mind is the continual use of the American Armed Forces in an increasingly futile attempt to maintain U.S. hegemony in whatever region our leaders deem of strategic geopolitical importance from Viet Nam to Afghanistan. Bipartisan dedication to the fiction that making the free-market philosophy the fundamental foundation of U.S. trade policy will compel all other nations to abandon neo-mercantilism and restore American industrial preeminence is another example. On the domestic front, President Obama’s recent comments during the Columbian Summit of the Americas reminded me that the national policy on drugs falls into this category as well. As with other policies President Obama is not really departing from the path trod by the former occupant.
It is difficult to find any evidence that the U.S. policy of criminalization of so-called recreational drugs has ever worked as intended. It is true that compared to 1900 the U.S. has fewer individuals addicted to drugs. In 1900 somewhere between 2% and 5% of the population was addicted to drugs, usually some type of opiate. It is fairly well known that the demographic of the addicted population was quite different from the common idea of the presumptive class of the drug addict of today. The main economic stratum was middle class, the age middling and female addicts out-numbered male addicts. This was primarily due to the heavy use of morphine as a pain killer by the medical profession; the use of opiates and cocaine in many patent medicines and the lack of labeling on these concoctions; and the social stigma attached to alcohol consumption by women, who would use patent medicines in the same way that a drug like valium might be used today while their husbands would have a few drinks with the boys. Because it significantly reduced the sale and use of patent medicines The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 probably did more to alleviate addiction than any other government action since that time.
And then we have the daddy of the all our many anti-drug acts, The Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 which for the first time criminalized the use of narcotics. To assist in enforcement of this Act Congress created the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in 1930 and named Harry Anslinger as its director. He held the post until 1962. I argue that the principal outcome of the Harrison Act was to alter the profile of the most likely narcotics addict from a white middle class, middle aged woman to a poor, black, young male.
The Harrison Narcotics Act did not include the criminalization of marijuana. Indeed, the first federal law criminalizing marijuana did not come about until the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, although 27 states passed laws criminalizing marijuana between 1915 and 1927. The stories associated with the federal law and the state laws are really quite interesting, but are not relevant to what I intend the focus of this diary to be and can wait for another time.
No new federal anti-drug legislative action was taken until the early 1950s when congress passed the so-called Boggs Acts of 1951 and 1952. These acts classified marijuana as a narcotic based on its presumed addictive properties, as well as its role as a “gateway” drug responsible for destroying the lives of the youth of America. The Boggs Act of 1952 set mandatory sentences for conviction. These penalties were far stiffer than any preceding them, but the Narcotics Control Act of 1956 (a.k.a. the Daniels Act) increased these by a factor of 4- to 8-fold. The Daniels Act grew out of the televised hearings conducted by Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. The hearings concerned organized crime in America. The Godfather movies weren’t too far off the mark. The press and public decided that, gasp, organized crime in America not only existed, but that it made most of its money from drugs. Therefore, the only way to combat organized crime and get drugs away from youth was to impose stiffer sentences for distribution, possession and use.
This view held until 1970 when, in the face of two decades of evidence that the dangers of marijuana were vastly overstated and that the laws were doing nothing to stop or even slow drug use, Congress repealed most of the mandatory sentences and also passed the Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act which placed marijuana in a category separate from other illicit drugs. However, by this time the Bureau of Narcotics had merged with the FDA’s Bureau of Dangerous Drugs in 1968 to form the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. This agency quickly gave way to the Drug Enforcement Administration in 1973 giving a strong centralized agency for drug law enforcement at the federal level.
The institutional belief that the most important component to the solution to the problem of drug abuse was criminal penalties took only a brief hiatus from the legislative arena. Then along came Ronnie and Nancy. In 1986 President Reagan signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act which reinstituted mandatory sentences for drug-related crimes. This was followed by the Bush War on Drugs. The history of America’s efforts to combat drug abuse has not been one founded in policies driven by solid public health outcomes. The policy on non-medical recreational drug use is not now, and has never been, driven by evidenced-based medical research. It is based on the assumption that criminalization must be the lynch-pin of public policy in this area.
Yet, even in the face of competition from the re-routing of prescribed narcotics into the recreational market, the use of illicit drugs in the United States remains at a level high enough to support a significant component of the illegal economies of some of our Latin American neighbors. It is clear that our approach doesn’t work and won’t work yet the president stands in front of the leaders of the western hemisphere and declares that we are not going to change anything other than to add what is really a paltry sum to federal programs for treatment of addiction and addictive behaviors. We have a problem. We’ve had a problem all of my adult life and I’m old. But as a country we refuse to admit that how we have tried to solve this problem does not work. As a country we are not going to admit that by providing the market we contribute to the drug industry, the cartels and the drug wars south of our border. We refuse to honestly consider substitution of evidence-based treatment for jail sentences as a way to reduce this market.
American Exceptionalism rules and while it does I fear that our drug policies, like so many of our other policies, will not gain the ends we seek. American Exceptionalism has bred hubris and sanctimony which combined prevent us from seeing reality and possessing the humility to say that our policies might be wrong. Andrew Bacevich makes the point succinctly in his book The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (p. 7). “Realism ----- implies and obligation to see the world as it actually is, not as we might like it to be. The enemy of realism is hubris which ----- finds expression in an outsized confidence in the efficacy of American power as an instrument to reshape the global order. Humility ---- summons Americans to see themselves without blinders. The enemy of humility is sanctimony, which gives rise to the conviction that American values and beliefs are universal and that the nation itself serves providentially assigned purposes.”
The rub, of course, is that anyone who even hints at recognizing the problem with American Exceptionalism will likely follow the political trajectory of Jimmy Carter.