In 1971, in a speech on crime and domestic affairs, then-President Nixon declared narcotics to be Public Enemy Number One.

The drugs, which in the hands of the likes of Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky and Santo Trafficante had elevated them high up in that galaxy of American evil, the public enemies list, now collectively surpassed even their preeminence. Fact was that Luciano was dead and his successors less than a match for his entrepreneurial talents; Lansky was ailing and barely a step ahead of the indictment and extradition warrants with which Federal Court had been hunting him all over the world; and Trafficante's grip on the Caribbean and Latin American trade was no longer the same effective corner on the world market it had been in the fifties.

The business of supplying and delivering the stuff had become—what to-say?—more democratic than ever before in the century of the American trade, with Southeast Asian farmers and Hong Kong middlemen selling drugs to anyone with the cash to buy, and independent dealers operating on the streets untaxed by the established mafia syndicates and needing nothing from the French connection.

But there was anonymity and a lack of drama in this legion of fresh faces. The anarchy of free enterprise was not as gripping in the public imagination as the monopoly conspiracies and masterminds of the past had been. Drug dealers didn't stare down from the posters on the post office wall nor hold their own on the FBI's ten most wanted list. The crack police were hunting a handful of leftist incendiaries or half-crazed aircraft hijackers, and narcotic agents preferred as a matter of policy to make a hundred marijuana arrests than to trap a single high-level heroin dealer. There were more headlines for marijuana arrests, and better press meant more promotions which meant better pay.

It stood to reason, then, that for the federal government alone to spend 164 million dollars that year tracking down a narcotics trade worth 650 million, and subsidiary crime reputedly valued at another 650 million for more than a quarter million addicts, plus another 366 million on drug treatment, counseling, and rehabilitation services*—no anonymous, native-born, unsyndicated $3,500-a-week trader with a modest amount of air travel in and out of Hong Kong or Paraguay could fit the bill as the most heinous public enemy America had at the time. In the mythology of these things, nothing but the drug itself would suffice. And so it happened that the most effective analgesic known to man and the best cough mixture ever compounded almost exactly a hundred years after its unprescribed use was first legislated a crime in California, became the number one outlaw in the land.

This is a book about the mythology of narcotics that has grownup in the past century, how and why it has grown, the particular purposes it has served, and not least of all, its relationship to the truth—the truth about the drugs themselves and the truth about the people who have used them.

Most of these myths are not now nor ever were simply the figments of an individual's imagination, either unintentionally false out of misconception or ignorance, or else deliberate lies. Had that been the case, the falsehood would have been easy enough to expose long before this, and it would be unlikely that much the same notions that characterized expert and popular opinion about drugs a hundred years ago would still be conventional wisdom today. Nevertheless, it is characteristic of this mythology of narcotics to believe that scientific knowledge has replaced lay ignorance and prejudice about narcotic drugs and their functions, when this is not what has happened at all.

It is simple enough to say at the outset that this is a story of several generations of American people who smoked, sniffed, swallowed, or otherwise ingested compounds and derivatives of opium, including some recent synthetic forms such as methadone, cocaine, and marijuana, all of which have been described, at least until now, as narcotics. The story is part history, inasmuch as most of the events described took place in the past, and part sociology, because the principal focus of the story is on the classes of people who used the drugs rather than on individual drug use as such, and because the story attempts to explain public attitudes and social and legal policy in terms of an enduring and violent conflict between these classes.

There has always been sufficient evidence to make the mythology of narcotics believable, if not verifiable, but in virtually no instance has the evidence been of both the necessary and sufficient kind. Apart from its veracity, the mythology has played a dynamic role in identifying the sides and measures to be taken in the broader social conflict in which the drug issue has invariably been embedded, conflict has typically been between competing elements of a local or regional labor market, when what has been at stake is the preservation of wages in times of acute economic crisis. Labor markets, wage differentials, business cycles, unemployment—these look, at first glance, to be matters far removed from the consumption of narcotics. Notwithstanding appearances, it is the objective of this book to illustrate just how the power and persistence of the drug mythology has derived from its role right in the middle of these things, as motivation and rationalization for the methods used to settle economic conflict and put down the popular unrest that has caused the conflict.

Once the myths can be examined in this context it will be seen that they are made up of three types of information in roughly equal parts. They contain misinformation, which is the partial truth that leads to false conclusions; disinformation, which is the falsehood that will be readily believed; and information, the truth which, when set beside the others, will be overlooked, discounted, or ignored. These myths are not the invention of individuals acting singly or in organized groups, for even when claims about drugs can be traced to particular individuals, their widespread dissemination and credibility depend on factors that have been beyond the ability of even the most calculating of conspiracies to influence or vary. There are liars and there are conspiracies of a sort in this story, but identifying them is not as important as understanding the context in which these myths play a part, as well as understanding the social forces which ultimately determine how they function and what the end result will be.

No deception on so great a scale, enduring for so long a time, can be satisfactorily reduced to a conscious conspiracy, even of such otherwise likely candidates as the American Medical Association and the old Federal Bureau of Narcotics, any more than the widespread consumption of the drugs can be laid to the ingenious plans of a singular public enemy or his mafiosi. The reader is best advised to believe those who appear in this story as being capable of wishing such conspiracies of deception and of attempting them, while at the same time not to credit them as individuals with the full achievement of the mythology in fixing public opinion and, through that, the policy decisions of the courts and legislatures.

The principal myths are:

I. The consumption of narcotics was widely diffused throughout American society, at least until 1920. It is widely believed that not until the Harrison Act of 1914 and consequent Supreme Court rulings prohibited the unregulated use of the drugs did narcotics become concentrated in the working class. Before that legislation the typical narcotic addict is thought to have been middle-class, female, and living in the rural areas of the country. The addiction was involuntary, based on ignorance of the true contents or addictive effect of opiate-based patent medicines and tonics. According to this myth, the pattern of working-class or lower-class narcotics use—which has been the acknowledged one since 1920, along with the related delinquency and crime required to finance drug purchases on the black market—have been the effect of the legislation, and an unintended effect at that.

The terminology of class employed here, which will be used throughout this book, is intentionally simplified. Still, the occupational, educational, and income differences which today conventionally distinguish the working class from the middle class apply throughout the period, although, naturally, detailed specification of the criteria would show the result of a steady rise in the relative size of the white-collar work force, general upgrading of educational credentials, and improvement of incomes.

In order to distinguish trends in the distribution of narcotics use, I will regard the middle class as being composed of persons who work as proprietors, professionals, or in technical and managerial functions or who hold what are generally thought of as white-collar occupations. Education and income are higher than the average. The lower, or working, class (the terms are used synonymously here) covers the varieties of blue-collar work, where education and income are at or below average. The dynamics of class and class conflict, which will be spelled out at greater length later on, focus on the differences in labor market power, which are contingent on work skills and union combination and are typically associated with differences of race or ethnic background. These factors will require that we discriminate between different elements of the working class, but for the moment, a simplified class picture will suffice.

Social class is vital to the interpretation of this history, for the truth is, narcotics use in America has always, both before and after the Harrison Act, been predominantly a working-class phenomenon. This has been a specific cause, not a general consequence, of narcotics prohibition when it has been enacted.

2. Present public policy toward narcotics is an inheritance of the irrationality, ignorance, or confusion of the past and can now be superseded and reformed by rational and scientific solutions. The truth is that, from the beginning there has always been reasoned scientific support for both prohibitionist and nonprohibitionist positions, as well as for policies with punitive and medical solutions. Expert evidence on narcotics may have changed—though this too is exaggerated, and the extent of the progress achieved over the years is almost as mythical—but the role of science and the expert is little different now from what it was, say, at the time of the British Royal Commission on Opium of 1890 or the American Philippine Commission inquiry of 1906. Not ignorance but selectivity has determined narcotics policy and will continue to determine it. Scientists are no more reformist than conservative and no less partisan than the rest. Two aspects of this partisanship must be understood. The first is the economic expansion of the medical profession to command the sale and supply of all medical services, including drugs. The second is the expansion of police powers, under political authority, to control and coerce all aspects of working-class behavior, including drug consumption. The first required the economic elimination of the old patent medicine industry, which was accomplished by 1910; the second depended on the reinterpretation and subversion of the Bill of Rights, a process that continues today.

3. Addiction is the inevitable outcome of prolonged narcotics use, and that addiction itself, a physiological condition chemically induced, deprives the addict of his capacity to control consumption, let alone stop it, which impels him to irrational extremes of behavior, including violent crime. The truth is, from the very beginning, the consumer's control over the size of dosage and frequency of use has varied over a very wide range. Today, and virtually since 1920—at any point in the range, at any dose with whatever frequency—use of the drug is called addiction. But intermittent, or occasional, use, regulated by social norms and self-willed without internal compulsion, physiological symptoms, or irrational behavior during withdrawal from the drug has been observed regularly throughout the twentieth century, among Indians as reported to the Royal Commission on Opium, among native Chinese by the Philippine Commission; among Chinese in America, as vie see in Table 2.1, it was thought that occasional users outnumbered the regular or addicted ones by more than two to one. The Vietnam War has confirmed officially what has long been known, that heroin addiction, whatever it is, is reversible in a matter of days or weeks without coercive deterrents or medical treatment, with conscious volition instead and without noticeable aftereffects. With the return of the Vietnam addict, researchers have only just begun to find evidence of the occasional controlled use of heroin among conventional users—where it has been all along.'

These, then, are the foundations of the mythology of narcotics. No account of the drug problem in America today nor policy formula for dealing with it, whether in favor of prohibition or against, in favor of harsher criminal sanctions to deter narcotics use or gentler clinical therapy to overcome it, does not draw on these myths. They are the instruments of public deception, and deception is the mainspring of public policy. To interpret these myths at their source and analyze them in their social context is vital and urgent if the deception is to stop turning its predictable and destructive cycle.

Public concern about narcotics use and drug addiction is a repeating thing.2 The record of press agitation, of legislative debates and enactments points to a recurrence of this concern every 20 or 30 years during the past century.

We are in such a period now. Typically it begins when the problem is discovered anew. The first stage is the mass dissemination of that fact, speeded through society by the terrible fright that it produces. But since discovery also involves criticism of the existing public institutions whose job it is to manage the problem—such as doctors, police, and prisons—this discovery is met with sharp denials from those in authority. Stage one generally concludes with their credibility shot to pieces.

Stage two involves the formulation of a theory of the problem and its causes, plus measures to deal with it. These often threaten the power of the existing drug authorities, if "new policy" means new people or new institutions to implement the measures. Since policy depends both on theory, to make it palatable, and power to make it work, there is a tight nexus between theory and power. It can happen, therefore, that the ambition for power is a strong stimulus for the development of theory in this area, and the acquisition of new power is usually accompanied by new theory to rationalize a new system. Theoretical innovation in such situations is dubious perhaps, as the continual reappearance of the mythology of narcotics shows, but the systems for administering and controlling drugs are highly competitive and have changed radically from period to period. Thus the present period has seen bitter fights for sovereignty over the drug problem, at first between federal agencies and local governments, until control finally went to a new bureaucratic instrument, the White House Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention (SAODAP).3

The third stage involves the routinization of theory and policy. The institutional challenge is over with, and the winners get the chance to test their claims that the political and bureaucratic struggles of the earlier stages are paying off, that the cause for concern is being liquidated. At this stage a certain optimism begins to appear. Former Attorney General Kleindienst told police officials in 1972 that "there never has been a time when Federal efforts have been so effective against the drug traffic," and that the President "has some solid results to show for this tough policy."4

The fact that these periods of concern do recur and that they are alike in many respects, as I will show, suggests that the problem itself is a recurrent one. If this is true, of course, the stage of optimism with which each period concludes is as cyclical and illusory as the other forms in which public concern manifests itself. Just how the dynamics of public concern actually affect the dynamics of narcotics use is not clear, although, since neither the agents of public opinion nor the authorities have a sense of the history of the narcotics issue, and because this history has not until recently begun to be written, it is a lot easier to imagine that the concern, when it arises, is effective in reducing the problem to a size that is manageable.

In the longer, historical perspective this seems less true. The problem, and the concern about it, as it is reflected in public policy, appear to pursue more or less independent courses. True, they are functionally related, of course, but not in the way common sense would indicate.

I said that new institutions for dealing with narcotics addiction will bring with them new theories of the problem and how to deal with it. The novelty here is more apparent than real. Consider three images of the addict, drawn from several distinct periods of concern.

Many females are so much excited sexually by the smoking of opium during the first few weeks that old smokers with the sole object of ruining them have taught them to smoke. Many innocent and over-curious girls have thus been seduced.5

If instead of these girls, adolescents of either sex—or indeed individuals of any age—are substituted in the observation, the analysis is reduced to the opinion that the use of the drug is immoral, a vice, and that at the initiation of drug use, what happens is that the innocent are seduced.

In 1905, in a report to Congress which was influential in establishing the legislative course on narcotics for the next 10 to 15 years, a committee of the Philippine Commission reported the testimony of one witness:

•    • . judging from experience, one must say that moral sensitiveness is deadened, or the activity of the brain concerned in the aesthetic sense suffers with the brain generally. Moral torpor and indifference gradually supervene, and this is most noticeable, in those who previously to the habit had in every way an exceptionally immoral character. But the moral state varies, for the unfortunate victim under the influence of the drug is not the same person as when he is suffering from the pangs of deprivation. . . . The fact is that the majority of persons seek the aid of opium to refine their sensuality.6

There is confusion here as to whether the drug acts on the brain and in a physiological sense produces "moral torpor," or whether using the drug itself is evidence of moral failing, or whether the consequences of drug use in the addict's behavior (elsewhere Dr. Lin mentions unwillingness to work, inability to control oneself) are what produce the immorality and vice. But the same theory appears again during World War I, this time in an article by an army doctor who had interviewed enlisted men whose drug use (cocaine, opium, heroin) had been uncovered by the military authorities:
.
•    • in the majority of all cases there is some inherent or acquired moral weakness, otherwise the man would not fall in the first instance. His particular peculiarities of make-up are not removed by any form of medical treatment and if he uses drugs to any appreciable degree it is entirely probable that the power of moral restraint is permanently damaged.7

King was a little surer than the earlier witness that "moral weakness" leads to drug use and is not simply a consequence of it, although the consequence is to reinforce the weakness and make it irreversible. It is important to note that once the problem is defined morally, it is effectively removed from all possibility of treatment. As we shall see, such a perspective leads to a policy of quarantine and imprisonment for all drug users.

In an important recent article on heroin addiction—important because one of the authors is the newly appointed chairman of the President's National Advisory Commission for Drug Abuse Prevention and because it illustrates what the Republican Administration promises to implement in this area—the image of the addict is still cast in the moral mold; only the words are different:

The addict is intensely present-oriented. Though "dabblers" or other periodic users may save heroin for a weekend fix, the addict can rarely save any at all . . . almost none have the self-control to go to sleep at night leaving unused heroin behind. . . . How many addicts living this way can manage a reasonably normal family life and work life is not known, but clearly many cannot. Some become heroin dealers in order to earn money, but a regular heavy user seldom has the self-control to be successful at this enterprise for long. . . . It is this craving for the drug, and the psychological states induced by its use, that are the chief consequences of addiction; they are also the most important consequences about which, ultimately, one must have a moral or political view. . . •

Today it is philosophically harder for us to accept the idea that as a society we should make people show self-control or be moral, unless their vice causes harm to others. James Wilson repeats the recurring theme that drug addicts are hedonists, though the old connection between that and the demand for sexual gratification has dropped out of sight, since researchers have shown that, in fact, the use of opiates reduces erotic interest and drive.9
Pleasure remains seductive, though:

The simple fact is that heroin use is intensely pleasurable, for many people more pleasurable than anything else they might do. . . . All of us enjoy pleasure; an addict is a person who has found the supreme pleasure and the means to make that pleasure occur.19

To some, this is immoral enough—it is pure hedonism—to justify depriving addicts of their liberty,n but in the present stage of social evolution, the enforcement of morals seems too coercive and autocratic, at least when the moral is stated in absolute terms. A utilitarian defense is necessary, instead. The typical utilitarian approach to the narcotics problem is the same one today it has always been: narcotics cause crime.

Dr. Boone, a long-time resident of Shanghai, told the Philippine Commission inquiry in 1905:

I see no difference in the effect of the drug upon Europeans and Chinese. Its moral effect on the Chinese is often to make him a criminal. Opium smokers are prone to lying and to acts of malicious mischief, such as incendiarism, etc. The police courts of Shanghai show that the use of opium and crime in Shanghai are intimately associated.12

The same argument was extended to the use of cocaine by Hamilton Wright in 1910. Wright was probably the person most responsible for the passage of the Harrison Act four years later and the initiation of the federal drive against drugs. "This new vice, the cocaine vice, the most serious to be dealt with, has proved to be a creator of criminals and unusual forms of violence, and it has been a potent incentive in driving the humbler negroes all over the country to abnormal crimes." 13
Note that what is alleged here is not merely an association or correlation between drugs and crime—which might, of course, be the effect of another factor again—but rather that drug use actually inspires the criminal to act and is the root cause of such acts.
Captain King sticks to the straight associational claim:

The fact that men do begin the use of drugs through associations formed in the "red light" districts is established. . . . As further evidence in confirmation of the dangers above attributed to association with this class of women, I cite the following: At certain posts large numbers of soldiers appeared to be becoming seriously delinquent, as evidenced by the numbers coming here [U.S. Disciplinary Barracks] from organizations stationed there."

Wilson is more careful to distinguish criminal behavior before drug use and after, but as he makes clear, to make the utilitarian case for suppression of narcotics use, it is not necessary to establish the exact direction of the relationship so long as its existence, and the consequent harm to others, can be verified:

Despite the fact that many addicts were criminals before addiction and would remain criminals even if they ended their addiction, and despite the fact that the theft losses to addicts are considerably exaggerated, there is little doubt that addiction produces a significant increase in criminality of two kinds—stealing from innocent victims, and selling heroin illegally to willing consumers.°

Once the fact of harm to general social welfare is established, the warrant for a policy is out. What the policy will be has always been determined by the theory of how drug use is acquired individually and spreads socially, and this—the theory of contagion—has scarcely changed since the 1880s. If drug addiction spreads like an infectious disease, the theory goes, the way to stop it is to identify the infected and lock them up so they can neither go on "infecting" others nor cause the social damage that justifies a quarantine as strict as prison.

Kane, in 1882:

It was soon found that smokers coming East were constantly making converts, so that in a few months' time small and large towns like Truckee, Carson, Reno and many others, each had their smoking dens and their regular customers. Each new convert seemed to take a morbid delight in converting others, and thus the standing army was daily swelled by recruits.16

An American Federation of Labor pamphlet of 1902:

The police have largely broken up these [Chinese] laundry opium joints, but there are hundreds, aye thousands, of our American boys and girls who have acquired the deathly habit and are doomed, hopelessly doomed. . . . Is it right or just to knowingly expose our children or the children of our neighbours to such dangerous contamination, even though it be not direct . . . an evil so entirely destructive to our domestic idealsr7

King again:

Experience here confirms me in the belief that many persons, at least early in their use of drugs are very pleased with their effect and enthusiastically spread the doctrine. . . . This, in my opinion, forms the most important chapter in the whole matter; • . . nothing can be more potentially harmful in [an army] company than one or two drug users, who may readily corrupt twenty or more men in a relatively short time. Hence, a more constant and earnest effort to weed out every user at the earliest possible moment is positively indicated. . . . Practically the only hope that exists for a permanent cure in the case of either morphine or cocaine users is the placing of them in an environment where it is difficult or impossible for them to get the drug. It is also important that the environment be such that they will have the moral support of more strongly endowed persons who have their interests at heart's

In 1951, to the Federal Commissioner of Narcotics, H. J. Anslinger, this meant bluntly that "the immediate need in New York is not education but a quarantine ordinance which would confine these users in a controlled ward of a city hospital until they are pronounced cured by medical authorities.' 19

Finally, in Wilson's paper, the same theory points to the same result:

In the great majority of cases, not only was the new user turned on by a friend, but the friend himself was a novice user still exhilarated by the thrill of the high. . . . Suppose that law enforcement was directed at the user rather than the dealer. Taking users off the streets in large numbers would tend to reduce the demand for, and thus the price of, heroin. . . . Suppose, finally, that coupled with law enforcement aimed at known users there were a selective strategy of identifying and restraining the agents of contagion. . . .20

These excerpts articulate a remarkably unchanging ideology of drug use, a system of beliefs which identifies the addict in a combination of moral and psychological terms, illustrating the process by which addiction spreads in quasi-medical language and underwriting a range of enforcement policies with the utilitarian argument that addiction causes social harm.

This last element is the key to the punitiveness that has characterized narcotics policy from the beginning. If the harm done by drug addiction were suffered only by the addict himself, then notwithstanding the antihedonism of our culture, prison would not be the place to deal with him. This is perfectly evident in the treatment given morphine addicts early in the century, who happened to be physicians or who chanced to occupy relatively high social status. Alexander Lambert, then president of the American Medical Association and a highly influential public advocate of drug prohibition, went so far as to turn class differences among addicts into two distinct treatment policies. "It is usually a just differentiation," he told the AMA narcotics committee in 1921,

that the heroin addict is of an inferior personality compared with morphinist . . . morphine is the drug of the stronger personality. . . . The social and public health problems of the narcotic drug question are practically confined to the addicts of heroin and cocaine, and their hospitalization and after-care. The problems of the morphine addicts belong more to general medicine and are more easily solved and show no tendency to become a social menace.21

The plain fact, and one I will return to again, is that the lower- or working-class addicts used heroin or cocaine, often both, and the middle- or upper-class addicts, principally medical men among the few there actually were, used morphine. The latter group were designated by Lambert and the AMA committee as being "otherwise normal," viewed with sympathy rather than moral condemnation and proposed for private medical treatment that might involve, at least initially, maintenance of the habit. According to the committee's report, the working-class addict was either a "correctional case," a "mental defective," or "social misfit." Prison was the mode of treatment recommended.

The importance of social class in both the theory of addiction and the determination of policy is not easy to pinpoint because it is so often expressed in quasi-medical or quasi-psychological terms. Lambert's "inferior personality-stronger personality" is typical; King, speaking of soldiers, spoke of drug users as being "defective individuals,"

inherently so; a few of them definitely insane, most of them, however, belonging to the great borderland between mental stability and definite mental disease or positive defect. . . . A medical writer has referred to these people as "second-class human beings." They seek to slide through life with the least difficulty possible, with few or no cares and no responsibility and the minimum effort, mental and physical.22

As late as 1951, Harold O'Keefe, the chief of social service at the Lexington (Kentucky) hospital for addicts, repeated the stereotype of the working-class addict as if it were a well-established psychological datum:

His dependency upon drugs seems to encrust the element of general dependence in his character, providing a kind of moral lethargy. Frequently the result is a well-nigh spineless being in whom the sinews of personality are flaccid at best.23

Lethargy, flaccidity, laziness, passivity, inordinate sensuality—these are recurring images of the addict. The point here is that this stereotype was applied only to the working-class addict—and not only the addict, for it was and is still applied to the working-class individual in general.

"The addict is intensely present-oriented" is the way Wilson and his colleagues summed him up. But this trait is also commonly invoked to describe or account for working-class involvement in promiscuous sex,24 violent gangs,25 in juvenile delinquency in genera1.26 Combined with other character traits, it has been adopted in a theory of working-class political attitudes and behavior, among which are support for strongmen in government, patriotic wars, militarism, and the strict enforcement of morals—in sum, what has come to be called working-class authoritarianism."

This is not the place to dispute all of these claims at once. I want to point out, however, that they are all related to a central organizing myth, that the function of this myth is to legitimize and bolster the defenses in law, custom, and morality that middle-class America has built to protect the inequities of wealth and value on which it feeds. An attack on one part of this myth can accelerate the demise of the whole, thereby exposing the social injustice it hides.

Once the class bias of narcotics law and policy can be seen, however, the utilitarian case for it can no longer be regarded as philosophically neutral or objective. As the quoted excerpts above illustrate, so long as the policy issue is confined to the crime that results from addiction, the general social good is clearly enhanced by a reduction of both the incidence of crime and its cause. If, however, the criminal activity into which narcotic users step or fall is the consequence of an altogether different pattern of choice for working-class addicts—if, to be exact, inequality of income and social well-being between the classes makes the criminal choice more likely or necessary for the working-class addict than for the middle-class addict—then the policy of crime reduction will in no way alter the balance of social evil that the initial inequality represents. Indeed, to the extent that inequalities of this kind go together with narcotics use, the narrow application of utilitarian principles in this case simply adds to the sacrifices one class of society must make to improve the net balance of satisfaction for the other.

This, in a general way, is what in this book I intend to establish concretely. It will not be enough to show that the picture of narcotics use that has prevailed to date has frequently been founded on error or misconception. The recurrent nature of elements of this picture—of the mythology of narcotics, in short—suggests that what is at stake here is more than the correction of well-intentioned errors. Fundamentally, what is involved are the conflicting conceptions of social justice and the bitter struggle to implement them that is going on.

*Expenditures are for fiscal year 1972. The estimated outlays for 1975 are to be nearly 50 percent higher. See Sibyl Cline, The Federal Drug Abuse Budget for Fiscal Year 1975 (Washington, D.C.: Drug Abuse Council, Public Policy Series 5, July 1974), p. 2
The estimated values of the narcotics trade and crime related to it have been extrapolated from several sources, in particular, George F. Brown and Lester Silverman, The Retail Price of Heroin, Arlington, Va.: Public Research Institute, 1973; and a number of papers by Max Singer of the Hudson Institute, Croton-on-Hudson, New York. They are highly speculative, and are noted here only to indicate how much narcotics officials thought they were chasing with what they were spending.