"... it cannot do much harm to his memory to say that his time might have been better employed in weightier labors. He, however, was apt to ride his hobby his own way; and though it did kick up the dust a little in the eyes of his neighbors, and grieve the spirit of some friends for whom he felt the truest deference and affection, yet ... it begins to be suspected that he never intended to injure or offend."
— Washington Irving, Introduction to "Rip Van Winkle"

I published my valedictory book calling for an end to America's lunatic drug policies 24 years ago.1 The book is strongly polemical because I am an abolitionist, not a reformer. Our unique American obsession with these taboo substances, mostly a few plants that have been known for centuries and grow all over the world, is simply wrong. Desperately wrong. Our "drug problem" is a non-problem,2 and our "war" on drugs is nearly as phony, costly and vicious as the Holocaust (another valedictory statement, last summer, comparing Yankee "drug-free" with Nazi `judenfrei" — closer parallels than you might expect 3).

At the same time as my Drug Hang-Up, David Musto published The American Disease (only acknowledging me with a footnote pointing out a tiny error in the galleys I had sent him), and Ed Brecher came out with his Consumers Union study, Licit and Illicit Drugs, a valuable but mostly bland analysis of the status quo. And while I was being thus smothered, Mr. Nixon and Mr. Mitchell had come to town with their law-and-order trumpeting,4 and had (for the first time) inflated drug-repression issues to major Oval Office involvement:

And I urge all who may be listening .. . to remember that in every home in America, in every school in America, in every church in America, over the television and radio media of this country, in our newspapers, the message needs to get through, that this nation faces a major crisis in terms of the increasing use of drugs, particularly among our young people.

So I gave up the cause, and turned to other challenges (I am inconsistent, I suppose, in insisting as strongly that predatory gambling promotion should not be legalized again, for another round of scandal and corruption,5 as that drug prohibition should be simply abandoned. But you wait and see!)

Arnold Trebach and Ethan Nadelmann fired me up again, in 1988, after I had prepared a summary statement on drug policy for the District of Columbia Circuit Judicial Conference,6 but I was immediately distressed to find that almost all the new generation of reformers seemed to believe that everything started with Nixon, or even with the Reagans. Hundreds of years of history before that are relevant, and some of the strongest arguments for turning our backs on the whole drug scene are found in earlier chapters of the American story, some funny, some silly, some outrageous.

None of the American disaster should ever have happened. Remember that it took a full-blown constitutional amendment to let the federal government hound liquor-drinkers with criminal sanctions (and only 13 years for the nation to wake up and end that folly by another constitutional amendment), whereas we got into drug prohibition at the same time without so much as a shadow of intended authorization in any public act.

Recognition of opium as valuable medicine goes back almost as far as human memory. Cocaine was a mere novelty and nuisance right up to the Reagan era (Freud dabbled with it; the great Sherlock Holmes, fictional creation of a medical doctor, relaxed with an occasional needle full; and it was associated with fringe groups like musicians, criminals and prostitutes). The word "hashish" (a cannabis extract stronger than marijuana) reputedly comes from the same root as "assassin," but when I was a boy the "delight" in an exotic green jelly candy called Turkish Delight was supposedly a mild dash of the stuff.

For centuries we had perfectly workable "legalization" all over the world, including largely tolerant attitudes in the United States: newly isolated morphine and the hypodermic needle, and eating opium for ubiquitous dysentery, were great blessings on Civil War battlefields; toward the end of the 19th century patent nostrums were recklessly loaded with opiates 7; and when heroin was popularized as a medicine, in 1898, it was widely hailed and prescribed as a non-addicting cure for victims of "morphinism" and alcohol.

Nonetheless, the first evil association with addicting drugs was evil indeed, when the British East India Company, together with some Europeans and a few Yankee traders, forced opium on the Chinese as a means of opening the Celestial Kingdom to two-way commerce, opium silver for silk, spices, and prized oriental artifacts. In 1839 an emissary of the Chinese emperor petitioned young Queen Victoria:

We have heard that, in your Honorable Barbarian country, the people are not permitted to inhale the drug. If it is admittedly so deleterious how can your seeking profit by exposing others to its malefic power be reconciled with the decrees of heaven? You should immediately have the plant plucked up by the very root. Cause the land to be hoed up afresh, sow the five grains and if any man dare to plant a single poppy visit him with condign punishment.... We have reflected, that this noxious article is the clandestine manufacture of artful schemers under the domain of your honorable nation. Doubtless you, the Honorable Chieftainess, have not commanded the growing and sale thereof

No response from the queen is recorded. The Chinese fought two pathetic "Opium Wars" against western forces, in 1842-3 and 1856-8, and the United State shared in the concessions which were then extracted, though thereafter some restraints were imposed on American opium traders at home. (A number of famous American fortunes were founded on trade in the sleek opium clippers, as later some were traceable to derring-do in the bootlegging era.)

What really launched America on its dizzy antidrug crusade, however, was our conquest of the highly resistant Philippines, following the Spanish-American War. There we inherited a mess; the Spanish had contracted out drug exploitation of the native inhabitants, and all restraints had broken down. William Howard Taft, the first Civil Governor, appointed an Opium Investigating Committee to advise him; the Committee liked the model of Japanese control in Formosa, which Japan had seized in 1895, gradual reduction of the large addict population through a government monopoly and a licensing program; but there was another Japanese model, in the Mikado's own total autocracy, which was absolute prohibition:

The Japanese to a man fear opium as we fear the cobra or the rattlesnake, and they despise its victims. China's curse has been Japan's warning, and a warning heeded.

And Congress reacted to the latter, decreeing prohibition of all non-medicinal use, which quickly created a flourishing black market.

At home, public opinion was growing more and more sensitive to the nation's new role as an oppressive colonial power, while the alcohol prohibitionists were gathering moment. At the same time we were developing particularly good relations with China, with our "open door" policy. President Theodore Roosevelt initiated the Shanghai Conference (1909) to deal with the opium problem, which led to the Hague Opium Convention (1912), wherein the high contracting parties agreed to repress opium and cocaine production, trafficking, and non-medicinal use in their own domains. Most of the parties were so indifferent to this commitment, however, that the Convention would never have been ratified if the United States had not contrived to include it in the Paris peace settlement.

Before World War I, other forces were also at work. In the cutthroat rivalries of New York's "400" society, William K. Vanderbilt's first wife, who had divorced him and married O.H.P. Belmont, forged ahead of her successor by moving from the society pages to front page coverage as a suffragette leader.

In those days, lawyers played the role of publicity agents, and the Vanderbilt lawyers, engaged to puff the image of the second Mrs. Vanderbilt, hit upon the idea of an anti-drug crusade (nothing new or fresh about Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" many decades later). "[A] famous lady who had time on her hands, money in the bank, and rivalry in her heart," Mrs. Vanderbilt organized committees, led marches, and pelted Albany and Washington with telegrams, on the theme that helpless people in the lower classes had to be protected from "this poison."

There were other conspicuous crusaders, but Mrs. Vanderbilt deserves major credit for New York's Town-Boylan Act (1914), the first state drug-repression measure, and even for the federal Harrison Tax Act of the same year. The latter Act (touted in part as U.S. compliance with the Hague Convention) imposed a modest excise tax, with registration and record-keeping requirements, designed

to place the entire interstate traffic in the habit-forming drugs under the administration of the Treasury Department. It is the opinion of the American Opium Commission that it would bring this whole traffic and the use of these drugs into the light of day and thereby create a public opinion against the use of them that would be more important, perhaps, than the Act itself.

So this was by no stretch a prohibition measure.

Then came the Great War. It has been true from the beginnings of this nasty saga, as it is true today, that once our tiny drug culture was pushed into the underworld, out of sight, anyone could claim practically anything about its denizens, even with the worst of motives, and, if the media went along as they usually do, ordinary citizens are helpless to resist with common sense. And the oppressed minority is helpless to speak out in protest. Millions of addicts? Drug-maddened fiends at large? Imperilled youth? Deformed babies? Ominous new substances and new epidemics? Sinister plotters undermining the whole nation? Addict-criminals and leper-like "infectors" of society?

Add to that the acknowledged freedom of governments to lie in time of war (cold war, too?), and the scope of say-anything nonsense permitted to the drug warriors is mind-boggling.

So it came to pass, when we faced the dreaded "Hun" and "Boche," who ate babies and raped nuns and surprised us with gas warfare, that the propagandists of that day practically carried us away, more reckless, even, than their fearless emulators today: German agents plotting to saturate our training camps with dope; others offering schoolchildren poisoned candy which would instantly turn them into heroin maniacs (so patriotic mothers were urged to bring their tots home for lunch every day); and this "bloodcurdling story of German fiendishness" from the "fit-to-print" New York Times editors (Dec. 18, 1918):

Into well-known brands of German toothpaste and patent medicines — naturally for export only — habit-forming drugs were to be introduced; at first a little, then more as the habit grew on the non-German victim and his system craved ever-greater quantities. Already the test had been made on natives in Africa, who responded readily; if the German Staff had not been in such a hurry German scientists would have made their task an easy one, for in a few years Germany would have fallen upon a world which cried for its German toothpaste and soothing syrup — a world of "cokeys" and "hop fiends" which would have been absolutely helpless when a German embargo shut off the supply of its pet poison.

In New York a brief "war" was even launched under the Town-Boylan Act against cocaine, which was credited with causing insanity and saturating grammar schools. Harlem was unsafe because of the drug-maddened children roaming there, and one estimate put the total number of fiends at large in the city at 200,000.

But all this was minor compared with the next series of events. The 18th Amendment was implemented by Congress in the Volstead Act (1919) , also a tax measure, so enforcement fell to the Treasury Department, which already had the Harrison Act, and the hastily recruited T-Men (Treasury had never had much enforcement authority) were a rowdy and overbearing bunch. Attorney General Harry Daugherty (of Teapot Dome fame) told them, "All questions of individual liberty, inalienable rights, and states rights are foreclosed. There is no guarantee of any liberty except the law."

Recognizing that there would indeed be some number of truly addicted users who were dependant on unregulated supplies and would need relief (Treasury officially announced the number to be between 200,000 and 4 million), the authors of the Harrison Act included a broad exemption for "the dispensing or distribution of any of the drugs ... to a patient by a physician, dentist, or veterinary surgeon ... in the course of his professional practice only."

Doctors thought this exclusion meant they would deal with the needs of bona fide addicts, helping them stabilize their habits or withdraw gradually, and in some communities with large addict populations drug clinics were established. But the Treasury forces attacked medical practitioners by a cynical trick played on the United States Supreme Court. First, a few "scrip doctors," who were abusing their medical licenses by selling prescriptions to all corners — plainly not "in the course of professional practice" — were indicted and convicted, and the Court, rightly outraged, affirmed.8 Then — and here was the trick — an odious member of this company, a doctor-peddler named Behrman, was indicted for selling thousands of doses, not in bad faith, but "as treatment for the purpose of curing the addict."

See it? If good faith was no defense, the amount was irrelevant, and no doctor could safely give or prescribe any amount. The Court in sustaining the indictment in the Behrman case (1923) split; three justices, the giants Holmes, Brandeis and McReynolds, dissented. Holmes wrote for them:

It seems to me wrong to construe the statute as creating a crime in this way without a word of warning. Of course the facts alleged suggest an indictment in a different form, but the Government preferred to trust in a strained interpretation of the law rather than to the finding of a jury upon the facts.

Armed with this "Behrman indictment," T-Men commenced a reign of terror against doctors, indicting and convicting quite a few, and the clinics were forced to close. Real addicts, who had never dreamed of entering the underworld, or dealing with it, were forced to turn to an instant black market.

Only two years later an upstanding member of the profession, Dr. Charles Linder, fought back. Entrapped by a Treasury addict-stool-pigeon, who told him she needed morphine for pain and then testified she was really only an addict, he was convicted, pressed his appeal to the High Court, and was completely vindicated. This time Justice McReynolds wrote for a unanimous bench:

The enactment under consideration levies a tax, upheld by this Court, upon every person who imports, manufactures, produces, compounds, sells, deals in, dispenses or gives away opium or coca leaves or derivatives therefrom, and may regulate medical practice in the States only so far as reasonably appropriate for or merely incidental to its enforcement. It says nothing of "addicts" and does not undertake to prescribe methods for their medical treatment. They are diseased and proper subjects for such treatment, and we cannot possibly conclude that a physician acted improperly or unwisely or for other than medical purposes solely because he has dispensed to one of them, in the ordinary course and in good faith, four small tablets of morphine or cocaine for relief of conditions incident to addiction.

And the Court blasted the Behrman indictment in the following strong language:

The /Behrman/ opinion cannot possibly be accepted as authority for holding a physician who acts bona fide and according to fair medical standards, may never give an addict moderate amounts of drugs for self-administration in order to relieve the conditions incident to addiction, and if the Act had such scope it would certainly encounter grave constitutional difficulties. 9

That — a clear holding that doctors could "treat" addicts and the condition of addiction, including the prescription and dispensing of controlled substances — was the supreme law of the land until the Harrison Act was repealed and the exemption for physicians wiped out in the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970.10 But, with rare exceptions, the doctors never again stood up for their rights (and responsibilities).

In 1930, the deputy commissioner of Prohibition for Narcotics was disgraced by scandal, and President Hoover set up a separate Federal Bureau of Narcotics, headed by Commissioner Harry J. Anslinger, who reigned as absolute drug "czar" until his removal by the Kennedys in 1962. He had come to Treasury from a budding career as Foreign Service Officer in the State Department. (I knew him pretty well, a ferocious stop-at-nothing adversary, but, though I think I may have had a little to do with the end of his career, a sometimes gracious personal acquaintance.) Anslinger not only dominated U.S. policy, but thanks to the indifference of most League of Nations and U.N. drug representatives, he also ran international drug organizations like a personal fiefdom.

His bureau's annual reports11 doubled as accounting to Congress and official reports to the international drug agencies, and he often used them to bootstrap his views, levering Congress to follow what he was pushing abroad and pressing United States positions on the rest of the world. He was skillful at cultivating followers on Capitol Hill; any lawmaker who wanted to posture back home as a fearless drug-fighter would be overwhelmed by bureau props and bureau support. His tacit rival in bureaucratic empire-building was, of course, J. Edgar Hoover, and he kept neck and neck with the G-Men though he never had more than 300 agents and annual budgets of only a few millions. His attitude toward doctors, whom his men constantly harassed even in the use of morphine as an indispensable analgesic, was:

There is complete cooperation and a feeling of confidence between the enforcement officer — he does not act like a policeman, in other words. He is more in the nature of a fatherly advisor And one thing about these professions: they lean on the enforcement officer a great deal for advice. ... Now and then you will find there is a weak link, probably in a state. ... We always catch up with him very quickly, and certainly he is brought to heel very quickly.

(If a British Home Office drug inspector had said that about any of the doughty members of the British Medical Association I used to know, you would have heard outraged roars all over England!)

In the '30s, Hoover's men pulled ahead of Anslinger with the spectacular Lindbergh case and their gang-busting shoot-outs against "Public Enemies." The Narcotics bureau had held front-page attention battling sinister Chinese "tongs" and periodically announcing that drugs were once again sapping American willpower, ravaging America's youth, etc. But Anslinger needed something new. So he set out to demonize marijuana, with help from the usual small claque of nutty crusaders.12

Cannabis — common hemp — in its stronger forms, notably hashish, was known and used centuries before the birth of Christ. It still has valuable medicinal uses. In modern times, several elaborate studies — by a British Royal Commission in 1894, by the U.S. Army in the Panama Canal Zone, 1916- 1929, by the LaGuardia administration in New York City designed by the New York Academy of Medicine, 1939-40 ("publicity concerning the catastrophic effects of marijuana smoking in New York City is unfounded"), by Baroness Wooten in England, 1968, and the LeDain Commission in Canada, 1972, and finally by the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse (Shafer Commission), 1972 — all concluded the substance was relatively harmless.

(SHAFER:) The most notable statement that can be made about the vast majority of marijuana users — experimenters and intermittent users — is that they are essentially indistinguishable from their non-using peers by any fundamental criterion other than their marijuana use.

There is no reputable report in the annals of medicine of a death directly attributable to the physiological effects of cannabis.

But no matter. Congress did Anslinger's bidding:

Marijuana is used largely in the form of cigarettes, which cause delusions and produce insanity and often lead to atrocities that only a drug-soaked mind could conceive. Marijuana is a sinister drug that has only recently become available and popular among the younger element.

President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Marijuana Tax Act, adding it to the Harrison Act pattern, in August 1937. And Anslinger had his witless chorus of Rangels and Schumers and Solomons then as now:

SENATOR DANIEL: As I understand it from having read your book, an habitual user of marijuana or even a user to a small extent presents a problem to the community, and is a bad thing. Marijuana can cause a person to commit crimes and do many heinous things; is that not correct?

MR. ANSLINGER: That is correct. It is a dangerous drug and is so regarded all over the world....

SENATOR WELKER: Mr Commissioner; my concluding question with respect to marijuana: Is it or is it not a fact that the marijuana user has been responsible for many of our most sadistic, terrible crimes in this nation, such as sex slayings, sadistic slayings, and matters of that kind?

MR. ANSLINGER: There have been instances of that, Senator....

But Anslinger did one revealing flip-flop that shows how recklessly he played his games. Asked in the House hearing on the bill if there were any connection between marijuana and other addictions, he replied, "No sir; I have not heard of a case of that kind. I think it is an entirely different class. The marijuana addict does not go in that direction." And he told the Senate, 'The opium user is around 35 to 40 years old. These users are 20 years old and know nothing of heroin or morphine." Then, subsequently:

SENATOR DANIEL: Now, do I understand it from you that, while we are discussing marijuana, the real danger there is that the use of marijuana leads many people eventually to the use of heroin, and the drugs that cause them complete addiction; is that true?

MR. ANSLINGER: That is the great problem and our great concern about the use of marijuana, that eventually if used over a long period, it does lead to heroin addiction....

When the Kennedy brothers arrived on the scene, President Kennedy appointed an Ad Hoc Panel on Drug Abuse to confer with his Science Advisor, and at the outset things looked promising. The panel found the total number of users in the nation to be only 45,000, 13 and wrote:

The general public has not been informed of most of the important facts related to drug abuse and, therefore, has many misconceptions which are frightening and destructive.... Though this drug [marijuana] has long held the reputation of inciting individuals to commit sexual offenses and other antisocial acts, the evidence for this is limited.... It is the opinion of the panel that the hazards of marijuana use have been exaggerated and that long criminal sentences imposed on an occasional user or possessor are in poor social perspective.... Important as the drug problem is, it is often grossly exaggerated in the daily press, and hysteria replaces sober judgment in many judgments and decisions. The exploitation of this tragic waste of human talent must cease to function as a promotion for mass media sales.

But alas, the Kennedys may have done more harm than their predecessors. They eased Mr. Anslinger into retirement and downgraded his bureau so the Kennedy image-makers could better groom Attorney General Robert as a brave crime-fighter, without competition from Treasury (President Johnson followed through by moving everything to Justice). But they diluted the definition of "addiction" to the fuzzier "drug abuse, and proposed adding barbiturates and amphetamines to the proscribed categories as "dangerous drugs."

Society's gain will be illusory if we reduce the incidence of one kind of drug dependence, only to have new kinds of drugs substituted. The use of these drugs is increasing problems of abnormal and antisocial behavior, highway accidents, juvenile delinquency, and broken homes. An especially disturbing aspect of the alarming increase in the illegal traffic in these drugs is their particular attraction to juveniles because of the ease with which they can be obtained and their extremely low cost in comparison with narcotic drugs.

An Advisory Commission appointed by President Kennedy also brought in the dangers of LSD-25, ether, and airplane glue,14 lumping them with the others as "psychotoxic (mind poisoning)" substances.

At this time FDA Commissioner Larrick, an up from-the-ranks drug inspector, made a bid to turn his agency into a gun-toting prohibition force by saturating the media with tales of carnage on the highways caused by truck drivers' use of black-market amphetamines — over and over a sinister truck-stop counterman would be shown rolling pills to a burly driver, and then the scene would cut to a flaming highway wreck. In 1965 a flood of bills were introduced in Congress.

Congress hereby finds and declares that there is a widespread illicit traffic in depressant and stimulant drugs moving in or otherwise affecting interstate commerce; that the use of such drugs when not under the supervision of a licensed practitioner; often endangers safety on the highways (without distinction of interstate and intrastate traffic thereon) and otherwise has become a threat to health and public safety.

Safety on the highways? In the midst of hearings where members of Congress were falling over one another to give support for the bill which resulted (Drug Abuse Control Amendments of 1965), a witness appeared for the American Trucking Association:

Specifically, we wrote in a formal inquiry to the Interstate Commerce Commission [which required detailed reports of all truck accidents with more than $50 damage] ... last year and asked the /CC whether they could specify how many amphetamine-connected truck accidents had occurred in the past 10 years. The Commission Chairman replied that they had seven years' records, with approximately 25,000 truck accident reports being filed every year, and that they felt that they had 13 provable accidents involving amphetamines. ... So it was, in effect, 13 out of 25,000 a year over a seven-year period.

Thirteen accidents in 750,000 with drugs officially reportedly involved! But did that slow the lawmakers? Not at all. They scolded the witness:

MR. PICKLE: My comment, more than a question, is that it is surprising to me that ... you would say that the statistics are exaggerated or that your industry as such has not done something concrete to find out the source of these pills.

The bill sailed through the House 402 to 0, and the Senate dispensed with hearings, on a report that soared to new heights.

Today, the dangerous drugs are popular among people in all walks of life ranging from truck drivers to students to suburban housewives. But they have made their greatest impact in the ranks of our teenage population. These white-collar youths' have taken to these drugs by the tens of thousands. And their number increases every year. ... The dope fiend was a myth in the past, but it is becoming a real threat today in the person of the user of dangerous drugs. The addicted sex fiend was a myth as related to the sexually passive user of opiates, but this type of deviate is becoming a reality among the young people hooked on the amphetamine and barbiturate drugs. ... Thus, we are faced today with a crop of crippled people in the most vital productive segment of our population and they are helping to mutilate and undermine our society and our most basic standards of behavior

The Daniel Subcommittee had likened addicts to lepers, each "infecting" others with addiction, and had recommended life-quarantine for "incurables." This was picked up and coupled with the idea of involuntary civil commitment for "treatment" in the 1960s. In President Johnson's first message to Congress, he said, "The return of narcotic and marijuana [sic] users to useful, productive lives is of obvious benefit to them and to society at large. But at the same time, it is essential to assure protection for the general public."

So Congress gave us the Narcotic Addict Rehabilitation Act of 1966:

It is the policy of the Congress that certain persons charged with or convicted of violating Federal criminal laws, who are determined to be addicted to narcotic drugs, and likely to be rehabilitated through treatment, should, in lieu of prosecution or sentencing, be civilly committed for confinement and treatment designed to effect their restoration to health, and return to society as useful members. It is further the policy of the Congress that certain persons addicted to narcotic drugs who are not charged with the commission of any offense should be afforded the opportunity, through civil commitment, for treatment, in order that they may be rehabilitated and returned to society as useful members and in order that society may be protected more effectively from crime and delinquency which results from narcotic addiction.

And most states rushed in with "Little NARAs." This launched the enormous, mostly parasitic "treatment" establishment we support today, but, in many instances, with inadequate or nonexistent treatment facilities, it has simply allowed enforcement authorities to lock up users for having needle tracks on their arms when they can't be caught in possession.

I became a bit-part actor on this scene while Harry Truman was President. I was legislative counsel to the Kefauver (Crime) Committee and became embroiled in the then-bitter controversy over the Boggs Act mandatory minimum sentences (vicious then, vicious now). Then I dug out the BehrmanLinder story (see footnote 9). I visited the federal hospitals at Lexington and Fort Worth — and was told by the Public Health Service's Medical Director at Lexington (wearing an intimidating four-stripe naval uniform because Public Health Service's officers used to have to board all kinds of vessels as quarantine officers):

I'll deny it if you quote me, but I believe a hypothetically normal person can use a needle of morphine the way a hypothetically normal person can use a cocktail.

I wrote other stuff, gave lectures, got into debates, and did radio and TV, but mostly I worked within the American Bar Association. We set up a Narcotics Committee in the ABA Criminal Law Section, and got the Association to memorialize Congress asking for a full review of drug laws and drug policies; Congress responded, but with the Daniel Subcommittee, which was Anslinger-dominated from the outset. We got permission to approach the American Medical Association, believing if our sister professions joined forces, the lawyers could help the doctors get the bureau's odious narcs off their backs, and quell the hysteria.

Our Joint ABA-AMA Committee on Narcotic Drugs came up with a set of modest proposals which contemplated further study and some possible reforms.16 We submitted it to Commissioner Anslinger, who responded:

...after reading this report I find it incredible that so many glaring inaccuracies, manifest inconsistencies, apparent ambiguities, important omissions and even false statements could be found in one report on the narcotic problem. My suggestion is that the person (unquestionably prejudiced) who prepared this report should sit down with our people to make necessary corrections. We do not wish to censor the report. Our concern is to have you submit for consideration a factual document, regardless of policy, whether it be narcotic law enforcement, clinics, the British System, hospitalization or penal provisions. It would then be possible for those who are to recommend appropriate action to have the facts at their disposal.

But Anslinger did not stop there. He cobbled together a fantastic mess of criticisms and irrelevant bureau-approved statements, and published it in a format designed to be confused with ours, with a deceptive title and cover,17 and his agents distributed this to bar association and medical society meetings all over the country — until the press picked up the strange phenomenon of the U.S. Treasury Department officially printing and distributing such junk (one of his "commentators" had called the U.S. Supreme Court "hysterical").

Both the AMA and the ABA Houses of Delegates approved the report, but Anslinger, threatening our Treasury-shy foundation donors, cut off our funding, so our work would never have been published in final form if Lindesmith had not arranged it, three years later.18

I helped found the ABA Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities (the Board of Governors would not let us call it "Civil Rights" Section, which it was intended to be), and played a part, through the new section, in getting the ABA to approve the allowance of small quantities of marijuana for personal use. But all that good work has now been wiped out.19

As an abolitionist (repeal all criminal sanctions, start over with labeling and quality controls and restrictions on advertising, etc., review all drugs-only prison sentences now being served, approach drug misuse problems in educational and health contexts only) I am unhappy with most of what is happening today.

"Harm reduction" bothers me as a sort of cop-out, simply trying to make a wicked system work better (like trying to improve living conditions for antebellum Mississippi cotton-pickers). I fear today's hordes of professional grantsmen are going to turn our reform movement into a reform establishment (we should be trying to work ourselves out of jobs).

"Interdiction" is fatuous. So is "drug-free." Indiscriminate testing should be unconstitutional.20 "Treatment" for pot smokers? The bottom line anyway is that treatment for people who don't want help is wasted, and that those who do, don't need much.21

It would not surprise me to see the cuckoos who talk of capital punishment and the headsman's axe try to revive the Roman cross for drug offenders. And my overwhelming nemesis is newcomers like Califano, sponsored by a great university, gorging on foundation funds, hyping the "war" and calling for escalation to the scale of the Manhattan Project.

Ugh! •

Rufus King & is an attorney in Washington, DC, and is a member of the Drug Policy Foundation's Advisory Board. King was awarded DPF's 1989 Alfred R. Lindesmith Award for Achievement in the Field of Scholarship.

NOTES

1 The Drug Hang-Up: America's Fifty-Year Folly, W. W. Norton, NY, 1972 (2nd printing, Chas. Thomas, Springfield, IL, 1974, in the Drug Policy Foundation's Reformer's Catalog).

2 How could anyone honestly overlook the NIDA-DAWN official figures: only a few thousand "drug related" fatalities in the nation's 250,000,000 population every year, in the range of bathroom accidents and spills from bicycles? Or ignore the comparable ravages of tobacco (450,000) and alcohol (100,000 killed, 15,000,000 incapacitated)?

3 Open letter to Joseph McNamara, June 1996.

4 As Edward Jay Epstein has pointed out, after all their posturing as fearless crime-busters, when Nixon and Mitchell got to Washington they discovered that very little ordinary crime is within federal enforcement jurisdiction, so they hit on drug repression, and drug repression abroad, which is exclusively federal foreign policy — et voila! the supreme foolishness of "interdiction." (Imagine Andean governments trying to stop Virginia farmers from growing truly lethal tobacco.)

5 Gambling and Organized Crime, Public Affairs Press, Washington, DC, 1968.

6 Perspectives on the U.S. Drug Problem: Selected Highlights and Low Points," Drug Policy Foundation, Drug Policy 1989-90, A Reformer's Catalogue, pp. 15-29, 1989.

7 One prominent physician of the period observed, "Thousands of women were addicts of opiates, with no thought of wrongdoing, who would have gone on their knees to pray for a lost soul had they seen cigarette stains on the fingers of a daughter."

8 These were clear cases, but judges seem often to have been brainwashed like everyone else. See S. Wisotsky, "Not Thinking Like Lawyers: The Case of Drugs in the Courts," 5 Notre DameJournal of Law, Ethics and Public Policy 651, Fall 1991.

9 See "Narcotics Bureau and the Harrison Act: Jailing the Healers and the Sick," 62 Yale Law Journal 736 (1953).

10 'Space does not permit elaborating the true story of the British "system" — their Dangerous Drugs Act of 1920 was closely similar to our Harrison Act, but under the "Rolleston Rules" physicians did care for addicts, who were registered with the Home Office, and for more than four decades, until they succumbed to violent American pressures and an invasion of refugee-addicts from here, there were only a few hundred addicts in the whole United Kingdom. This was one of Lindesmith's causes. And see Schur, Narcotic Addiction in Britain and America, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1956.

11 The Drug Policy Foundation has an almost-complete set, "Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs," and they should be read more widely for understanding of the Anslinger years.

12 Most prominent of these, father and son Earl Albert and Robert Rowell, though wrong about the "weed of madness," were right about one thing, tobacco cigarettes made puffing one's first reefer much easier.

13 After the wild estimates at the end of World War I, the Kolb-DuMez study (1924) reassuringly set the number of addicts at 110,000. When Anslinger took over, he soon claimed his bureau was holding the number in the 60,000 range. That dropped significantly when World War II interrupted all nonmilitary traffic (and smuggling), but only reached 69,000 before the Nixon "war" era. I believe no addict-population figures, even today's, are worth much; they are too easy to manipulate for anyone's special purposes.

14 See "How to Launch a Nationwide Drug Menace," in Brecher, Licit and Illicit Drugs, Little Brown, NY 1972.

15 In an earlier period, when the popular focus was on juvenile delinquency, Commissioner Anslinger told a congressional committee, "The bureau ... is convinced that the majority of the young persons engaged in the narcotic traffic are of the hoodlum type and not school children. When arrested for a narcotic violation many of these young persons have prior arrest records for violations other than narcotics." (No matter that for many years juvenile arrest records have been sealed and unavailable almost everywhere.)

16 Narcotic Drugs," Interim Report of the Joint Committee of the American Bar Association and the American Medical Association on Narcotic Drugs, New York, 1958.

17 Comments On Narcotic Drugs," Interim Report of the Joint Committee of the American Bar Association and the American Medical Association on Narcotic Drugs by Advisory Committee to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, U.S. Treasury Department, Bureau of Narcotic Drugs, Washington, DC (there was in fact no such "Advisory Committee").

18 Drug Addiction: Crime or Disease?, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN 1961.

19 See "The Unwinnable War on Drugs, Why the ABA Should Pull Out," ABA Criminal Justice, Vol. 7, No. 3, p. 10, Fall 1992.

20 Look at the Ninth Amendment and imagine what would happen to drug prohibition if the courts ever interpreted it literally — people have inviolable personal rights! Sweet and Harris, 'Just and Unjust Wars: The War on Drugs ," 87 Northwestern Law Review 1302, 1,352ff., Summer 1993.

21 In the mid-1960s, Vincent and Marie Dole, whom I knew before they were married, hoodwinked the enforcement establishment with methadone. Methadone is a synthetic opiate developed by the Germans when their supplies of opium were cut off in World War II. The Doles said it "cured" addicts by "blocking" their craving for heroin. True. But it is simply a substitute. So we now have many addicts in "treatment" that works, controlled maintenance dosages, not necessarily aimed a total abstinence.