The successful campaign to close the clinics can be credited to the establishment of a semiautonomous federal agency, the Narcotic Division of the Prohibition Unit, which could mount a coordinated and enduring attack from its headquarters in Washington with its own field force of about 170 agents divided among thirteen districts.1 The head of the Narcotic Division, Levi G. Nutt, remained in his post from 1920 until early 1930, outlasting several Prohibition commissioners who succeeded one another as the enforcement of dry laws failed under widespread dishonesty and public contempt. One reason for the poor quality of prohibition enforcement was that jobs were openly filled by political patronage. Even Warren Harding informed Congress in 1922: "there are conditions relating to [Volstead Act] enforcement which savor of nationwide scandal. It is the most demoralizing factor in public life." 2

The Narcotic Division, however, was under civil service. Scandal in its operation occurred less often, although indiscretions discovered in 1929 led to Nutt's removal in 1930. For the first decade of the Narcotic Division's existence, enforcement of the Harrison Act was eclipsed by the drama of national liquor prohibition. Narcotic agents were eventually embarrassed by their association with dry agents, and there were several recommendations by the AMA as early as 1921 that Nutt's agency be separated from Prohibition affairs.3 There were other loud dissidents, Internal Revenue Commissioner Roper among the earliest, who saw no reason for making the tax agency of the government responsible for Prohibition enforcement. Finally, in 1930, Prohibition was transferred to the Justice Department, and narcotic affairs were vested in a new unit, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, which remained in the Treasury Department until 1968, when it too was turned over to the Justice Department and considerably revamped.

Levi Nutt, a registered pharmacist who joined the Treasury Department in 1901, had been an official of the Alcohol Tax Unit, which administered the Harrison Act. Enforcement of the Harrison Act had been, until 1920, a difficult task because the Bureau of Internal Revenue rapidly acquired immense new responsibilities for income taxes and other sources of revenue to prepare for and prosecute World War I, while congressional provision for increased personnel and reorganization lagged. behind.

The Prohibition Unit was established on 22 December 1919, after passage of the Volstead Act had outlined enforcement of the 18th Amendment.4 The first Prohibition commissioner, John F. Kramer, and his force of about 2,500 agents were deeply involved with the great experiment and left narcotic enforcement to the much smaller and distinct Narcotic Division. Expenditures for narcotic enforcement rose from about $270,000 in fiscal year 1919 to slightly more than $500,000 in fiscal year 1920, and for several years thereafter it ranged between one-half and three-quarters of a million dollars annually. The number of agents and inspectors rose from about 170 in 1920 to almost 270 in 1929, and hovered around the latter figure during the Depression.5

From 1915 on there were fewer convictions and arrests of registrants under the narcotic statute than of unregistered peddlers and smugglers. Because the problem was more circumscribed, and narcotic agents numbered a tenth of dry agents, narcotic violations were fewer than Volstead violations during the 1920s.6 But because of the severity of judges and juries, the federal prisons were flooded with narcotic violators. By mid-1928 almost a third of 7,700 prisoners in the one female and four male penitentiaries were Harrison Act violators, more than the combined total for the next two categories—liquor prohibition and car theft.7 This superabundance of narcotics prisoners led, at long last, to federal hospital care for addiction. The Public Health Service was given the thankless task of caring for addicts in narcotic "farms" at Fort Worth, Texas, and Lexington, Kentucky.

The Narcotic Division used threats and intimidation, when necessary, in dealing with uncooperative physicians, and the flow of convicted offenders to federal prisons made these tactics effective. Physicians had been repeatedly called prime offenders in the national narcotic menace, and agents were not disposed to condone "dope doctors." Before World War I the AMA minced no words: the evils of addiction were so great that they

convince the most ardent advocate of states' rights that legislation regulating the sale of all dangerous habit-forming narcotics should be national in scope and absolutely uniform throughout the country. In matters which affect the health of the nation at large the laws should be made by Congress, and their execution should be in the hands of federal rather than state authorities.8

Yet after the 1919 Webb and Doremus decisions, and subsequent enforcement by zealous agents, reputable physicians became uncomfortable. The social and economic position of the registered physician was so sensitive, trials so time-consuming, and appeals so long and costly, that hostile agents could make cases against physicians with impunity and nearly ruin them whether charges were warranted or not.9 Narcotic agents were so unpopular and feared that upon his appointment as Commissioner of Narcotics in 1930, H. J. Anslinger told his agents to "discontinue investigating the corner drug-store and the family doctor and get after the smugglers and racketeers." 10

Both the Narcotic Division and the now wary AMA followed closely each court decision subsequent to the major pronouncements of 1919. The issues of intention and good faith were dealt with by the Supreme Court in March 1922. A New York physician was indicted for prescribing a large amount of heroin, morphine, and cocaine for a patient, an equivalent for nonaddicts of three thousand ordinary doses. The physician was arrested for providing several days' narcotics for the addict's self-administration. The defendant claimed that he was treating drug addiction, but the Court's majority of six concluded that such an enormous number of doses could only be used, as phrased in the earlier Webb decision, "to cater to the appetite or satisfy the craving of one addicted to the use of the drug," and thereby swept away any pretense that the physician's written order was a prescription. The Court held:

Undoubtedly doses may be varied to suit different cases as determined by the judgment of a physician. But the quantities named in the indictment are charged to have been entrusted to a person known by the physician to be an addict without restraint upon him in its administration or disposition by anything more than his weakened or perverted will. Such so-called prescriptions could only result in the gratification of a diseased appetite for these pernicious drugs or result in an unlawful parting with them to others.

Justices Holmes, McReynolds, and Brandeis dissented, stating in the words of Justice Holmes that the good faith of the physician, which was not contested by the federal government, would protect the defendant regardless of his acts, "however foolish." 11 Yet the Court, by a somewhat larger majority than in the Webb and Doremus cases, had eliminated even the intent of the physician as a defense if he should prescribe large amounts of narcotics for an addict.

Uneasy physicians began to protest to their professional organiza-tions and to their congressmen against the threat of indictment which hung over them. Congressman Lester Volk of New York, the physician-lawyer who had been a prominent leader of the medical-economic interests in his state, demanded in January 1922 that Congress investigate the narcotic laws and their administration. Volk condemned a small group of physicians who had formed a "conspiracy" to deprive the medical profession of its accustomed legal rights. He named Alexander Lambert, S. Dana Hubbard, A. C. Prentice, Royal S. Copeland, E. Eliot Harris, and an attorney, Arthur D. Greenfield. These men had dominated the national medical organizations and their committees on drug addiction and had given a false picture of medical opinion on the issue; they also supported the federal government's encroachment on states' rights.12 But the investigation never took place; Volk lost his seat in Congress to Democrat Emmanuel Cellar in the November elections. In the medical profession, however, opposition to federal activity was also becoming more open. Dr. James F. Rooney, a vigorous spokesman for the private practitioner and an opponent of legislation. that would restrain any of the prescribing rights of physicians, was elected president of the New York State Medical Society in March 1921, and the AMA was beginning to waver in its support of federali intervention in medical affairs. By May 1922 the House of Delegates of the AMA emphatically condemned state medicine and urged that such schemes for partial state medicine as the Sheppard-Towner Act for maternal and child care be vigorously opposed.13

Several victories were won by opponents of federal control of narcotics in medical practice. In 1922 the Treasury Department's refusal to register addicted physicians was declared beyond the department's authority, as was its practice requiring one year to pass after a felony conviction before re-registration was granted to a druggist or physician.14 In 1925 a Missouri district court decided that a druggist could fill a physician's prescription although he might have reason to believe that the patient was an addict and was receiving enormous amounts of narcotics.15

Then in January 1926 the Court took the unusual step of inviting a new test of the constitutionality of the Harrison Act. The Court declared that several recent decisions, including the child labor tax case and Linder v. U.S., "may necessitate the review of that question [the Act's constitutionality] if hereafter properly presented." 16

The Treasury Department's revised enforcement program was submitted to Congress in March 1926 for adoption by amending the Harrison Act.17 This time the federal government had to face alert and active opposition from both trade and medical interests. The opposition had been encouraged by two recent Supreme Court decisions which seemed to reverse the trend toward control of the practitioner's judgment in narcotic use. In April 1925 the Court had unanimously reversed the conviction of a Spokane physician who dispensed three tablets of cocaine and one tablet of morphine to an informer of the Narcotic Division. The doctor claimed the informer had described severe abdominal pains such as would come from an ulcer or cancer, while the government claimed the doctor knew the informer was an addict and gave medication merely for her comfort. The Court unanimously held:

[The Behrman Decision of 1922] cannot be accepted as authority for holding that 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 conditions incident to addiction. Enforcement of the tax demands no such drastic rule, and if the Act had such scope it would certainly encounter grave constitutional difficulties.18

Against this background of increasingly critical court decisions which might lead to a decision against the constitutionality of the Act itself, the Treasury Department sought to strengthen it by congressional amendments. If states' rights appeared to be violated, the constitutional basis for these amendments would lie in fulfillment of the international treaty obligations of the United States under the Hague Convention, and would be in accord with the 1920 Supreme Court decision Missouri v. Holland.19 When hearings began in the House in May 1926 the administration asked for seven amendments to give the Narcotic Division authority:

1. To prevent addicted physicians from registering under the Harrison Act and to withhold registration for a year from any registrant who had been convicted of a Harrison Act violation.

2. To remove the necessity of proving venue in the absence of a tax stamp on a package of drugs.

3. To forbid "ambulatory treatment" and to require full recording of all drugs dispensed or distributed except in an emergency.

4. To place some responsibility on the druggist to determine that a prescription was written in good faith.

5. To provide that records of "purchases" of exempt narcotic preparations as well as other kinds of transactions be reported and recorded.

6. To confiscate automobiles used in narcotic violations.

7. To make forging or altering narcotic prescriptions an offense.20

The Treasury case, chiefly presented by Narcotic Division Counsel Alfred L. Tennyson and Nutt, had hard going. After two days of testimony the government withdrew the third and fifth recommendations; the ultimate result was that none of the amendments was enacted.21

The Supreme Coures request for a test case of the Harrison Act's constitutionality was later granted. In April 1928 the Supreme Court held, by a six to three decision (Nigro v. U.S.), that the Harrison Act was indeed constitutional.22

After hints of unconstitutionality in the Daughertey v. U.S. decision, the AMA Journal editorially wondered whether the demise of the Harrison Act would be an "unmitigated evil" and compared its invasion of states' rights with that of the Sheppard-Tovvnef Act. The purpose of the Harrison Act, "the suppression of the narcotic habit," had never been proven by the Act's proponents to be closer of attainment than in 1914, according to the journal.23 Oscar Dowling, who had so dutifully cooperated with Nutt in 1920-23, found by 1925 the relationship between the Narcotic Division and the physician in need of repair.24

Still, the controversy over the Harrison Act, contained as it was between the health professions and the government, did not reach the proportions of the national debate over prohibition of liquor. There were parallels, however, between enforcement problems in both liquor and narcotics. To improve the disgraceful state of liquor enforcement, two remedies suggested at the inception of Prohibition were finally enacted: civil service requirements for all employees except the Commissioner, and a separate Bureau of Prohibition in the Treasury Department ( but still including narcotic enforcement). Representatives of the Treasury Department appeared in April 1926 before Congress with a list of proposed amendments, but its requests were about as successful as Nutt's of the following month.25 Assistant Secretary of the Treasury General Lincoln C. Andrews, who had taken effective control away from the Anti-Saloon League's sympathizer R. A. Haynes in April 1925 and reorganized the unit's operation, asked Congress for more authority to control medicinal liquor, to search homes for stills, to stop and search American ships beyond the twelve-mile limit, etc.26 Congress, however, would only set up a separate bureau and authorize civil service standards. It then adjourned without providing funds to carry out civil service examinations. This was very frustrating to the head of the Anti-Saloon League, Wayne B. Wheeler, who had testified at the hearings in April that the fact that the law was difficult to enforce was the clearest proof of the need for it.

With bureau status acquired in April 1927, and an increase in appropriations of more than two million dollars, the Prohibition Bureau continued its difficult task. Eventually civil service standards were established and all previous appointees had to take the examination in late 1927 in order to keep their jobs; to the embarrassment of the bureau, three-quarters of them failed. Through various maneuvers like temporary appointments, and by taking other candidates outside the bureau who had qualified, the field staff was gradually filled out in most positions.27

Establishment of a separate bureau meant little change in procedures for the Narcotic Division. Nutt, now named Deputy Commissioner of Prohibition, continued to send prisoners to federal penitentiaries in large numbers and claimed that the situation was under control. He declared that there were probably fewer than a hundred thousand addicts in the United States and denied accusations that the problem was out of hand.28 Annual appropriations for narcotic control gradually rose during the decade from about half a million dollars in fiscal year 1920 to $1.6 million for fiscal year 1930.29 By 1930 the style of enforcement had settled down to fairly well-recognized procedures and legal boundaries. The clinics. were out of business, doctors were aware of the danger of maintaining addicts and the likelihood of entrapment, and drug companies submitted their manufacturing and trade reports regularly. The narcotic agency led a fairly routine life, punctuated only occasionally by a scandal or a major arrest.

ANTI-NARCOTIC ORGANIZATIONS

The end of World War I reawakened some of the interest which had led to American activity abroad in earlier years. Once again trade with the Orient drew attention to the economic role of opium traffic and addiction. The end of the war also meant that nations could again consider effective restraints on illegitimate opium traffic, particularly that directed toward America. The United States was at first very pleased to cooperate with Great Britain in adding Sec-tion 295 to the Versailles Treaty, making ratification of that treaty equivalent to ratification of the Hague Convention. The League, which President Wilson anticipated the United States would join, was given the international responsibility which the Netherlands government had previously discharged for the Hague Convention.30 If the United States had joined the League, undoubtedly American leadership would have been preserved, but the failure of the Senate to approve the League Covenant meant that America would be for the first time outside the official body responsible for international opium control. This situation would lead to many complications, for American distrust of foreign sincerity with regard to opium control would be reinforced by distrust of the League.

Within the United States several lay groups sought to eliminate the narcotic menace.31 The International Narcotic Education Asso-ciation (1923), the World Conference on Narcotic Education (1926), and the World Narcotic Defense Association (1927) were all creations of the remarkable Richmond P. Hobson, Spanish-American War hero and prohibition propagandist, who publicized the danger of narcotics in every conceivable way. He was particularly anxious to get his message into school textbooks, on radio programs, and into the halls of Congress, where he had once served. The officers of these groups were socially prominent and politically active men and women who eagerly joined him to awaken America to the dire menace of narcotics. Any suggestion that the number of addicts in America was not immense ( like the reassuring report of Kolb and DuMez in 1924 that there were probably only 110,000 addicts in the nation) was met with strong rebuttal.32 Hobson was one of the most active popularizers of the belief that narcotics, particularly heroin, prompted crime and drove users to commit the most horrible acts. He possessed charm and an impressive manner, knowledge of the Prohibition movement (he was the highest paid of the Anti-Saloon League's "special speakers") and a desire to crusade. The LAMA complained of his distortions and exaggerations; Nutt maintained as early as 1926 that he thought there were even fewer addicts than the Kolb and DuMez estimate, but the Hobson associations kept on fighting, spreading fear and producing statements that were faithfully repeated by other national organizations, fraternal orders, and radio networks; all felt that by relaying Hobson's message they were serving their nation.33

The last week of February 19.21 (picked because it contained George Washington's birthday) was denominated by Hobson as Narcotic Education Week. In a national radio broadcast of 1928, the time donated by the National Broadcasting Company, he marked the close of the second annual observance of this call to national awareness by telling about heroin addicts, "the Living Dead":

To get this heroin supply the addict will not only advocate public policies against the public welfare, but will lie, steal, rob, and if necessary, commit murder. Heroin addiction can be likened to a contagion. Suppose it were announced that there were more than a million lepers among our people. Think what a shock the announcement would produce! Yet drug addiction is far more incurable than leprosy, far more tragic to its victims, and is spreading like a moral and physical scourge.

There are symptoms breaking out all over our country and now breaking out in many parts of Europe which show that individual nations and the whole world is menaced by this appalling foe . . . marching . . . to the capture and destruction of the whole world.

Most of the daylight robberies, daring holdups, cruel murders and similar crimes of violence are now known to be committed chiefly by drug addicts, who constitute the primary cause of our alarming crime wave.

Drug addiction is more communicable and less curable than leprosy. Drug addicts are the principal carriers of vice diseases, and with their lowered resistance are incubators and carriers of the strepticoccus, pneumococcus, the germ of flu, of tuberculosis, and other diseases.

Upon the issue hangs the perpetuation of civilization, the destiny of the world and the future of the human race.34

The next year Hobson broadcast: "Ten years ago the narcotic drug addiction problem in America was a minor, medical problem. Today it is a major, national problem, constituting the chief factor menacing the public health, the public morals, the public safety." 35

While attempting to create maximum fear over narcotic addiction and its connection with crime, the International Narcotic Education Association claimed increasing success in their proposed changes in school textbooks to alert youth to the criminal and destructive influence of narcotics.36 Hobson also sought a fund of ten million dollars from public contributions so that his campaign could be put on a permanent, sound footing. He remained active in the 1930s, alerting the nation to a need for stringent marihuana laws, and even devoted the 1937 Narcotic Education Week to that topic, just before hearings on the Marihuana Tax Act began in the House of Representatives.37

Another major narcotics association was modeled after the burgeoning national groups with local chapters which focused on a particular disease ( e.g. the National Tuberculosis Association founded in 1904; the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, 1909 ) : The White Cross, Inc., was founded in Seattle in 1921 as a direct outgrowth of narcotic interest within the China Club, composed of leading Seattle residents who were interested in improving trade with China. Members discovered in 1920 that foreign morphine was being shipped across the United States to Japan to be smuggled into China and also that some American narcotic drugs were going to Japan for eventual use in China.. The China Club persuaded two Washington congressmen to prepare legislation to remedy a situation which was embarrassing to American businessmen.38

Once the China Club had tasted success in Congress, a cadre of local groups and members of the Seattle Chamber of Commerce metamorphosed itself into the White Cross International Anti-Narcotic Society. The White Cross was most active on the West Coast, but affiliates existed elsewhere in the nation. Like the Tuberculosis Association, the leadership became interested in treatment at the local level. By 1926 the White Cross was endorsing the work of Dr. Butler, and it eventually came to espouse narcotic clinics at which addicts could receive their daily supplies.39 Clearly this group aimed in a direction opposite that of the International Narcotic Education Association, which did not believe that drugs causing "degeneration of the upper brain . . . in a few months" should be regularly supplied, thereby perpetuating "the Living Dead." 40 In the late 1930s, when a bill to permit narcotic clinics like Butler's was under consideration in the Washington State Legislature, the full efforts of Commissioner Anslinger and the Hearst Seattle Post Intelligencer were used to defeat the proposal.41 When Hobson died in 1937 his coterie lacked leadership and the associations dissolved; the White Cross became defunct after World War II.

Hobson's associations did not disseminate accurate information on narcotic addiction, but they were a means by which addiction in the United States came to be regarded with fear and disgust. Hobson effectively associated heroin with crime and violence. It is worthwhile to note that Hobson, although not respected by someone like Anslinger, was used as an active propaganda force; he knew influential people and would persuade anyone who listened to him that the Federal Bureau of Narcotics' fight was vital and should be maximally supported. Organizations like the White Cross, which had members at least as sincere and seem to have had more direct contact with the addict than the Hobson organizations had, were fought because they tried to reestablish maintenance, a once-respectable mode of care but one which would have wrecked the prohibitive enforcement law on which federal narcotic controls were based.42 Overall, the propaganda spread by zealots like Hobson was accepted as true, and addicts were perceived as an immense evil which should be blotted out of society.

The emergence of lodges and service clubs, the Moose, Kiwanis, Knights of Columbus, and some Masonic orders, as supporters of antinarcotic legislation and disseminators of narcotic information was another characteristic of domestic antinarcotic activity after World War I.43 The China Club's interest is easily understandable, but other groups, with no specific association with narcotics except that addiction was a threat to their communities, joined the crusade in the corning years. Politicians who were lodge members, like Representative Stephen G. Porter of Pittsburgh, were able to garner national support for stringent measures through their fraternal contacts. Hobson sent millions of pamphlets and information sheets to service clubs, encouraging their interest in fighting the menace.44 Other organizations, like the WCTU and the International Reform Bureau, continued their prewar support of antinarcotic laws. Fighting narcotics became a very respectable and time-consuming activity for clubs in search of a suitable menace. Picturing the opium addict as a beast who threatened homes and safety gave the crusade a little excitement, confirmed the public need for their efforts, encouraged appreciation, and harmed no one except perhaps the addict.

AMERICAN INTERNATIONAL INITIATIVE IN THE 1920s

The China Club's alarm at Japanese smuggling of drugs into China, combined with anxiety over domestic prosperity, led to a legislative proposal that would affect international trade in narcotics. "We are poisoning our best customer," warned the secretary of the China Club, "a customer that is potentially able to take more American goods than any other nation." Trade with China, which Seattle greatly coveted, had been increasing, but evidence of American complicity in the Japanese drug traffic threatened to worsen our relations with China. Unless we prohibit these drugs from leaving the United States, Underwood warned, "we will continue to be a party to one of the greatest crimes in history, and at the same time destroy one of our best markets for American goods." Just as American altruism at the Shanghai Commission had put British trade in an unfavorable light, this postwar action embarrassed Japan.,, In autumn 1920, as the postwar economic depression worsened, members of the China Club met with Representative John Miller and Senator Homer Jones to prepare a simple amendment to the narcotic laws which would ban all exportation of narcotics from the United States, whether of domestic origin or in transit. The Surgeon General would be given authority to permit crude opium and coca leaves to 'enter for manufacture into necessary domestic narcotics.45

Hearings were held on Miller's bill, HR 14,500, in December 1920 and January 1921, during the last session of the 66th Congress. The subcommittee of the Ways and Means Committee, which heard testimony, was chaired by Representative Lindley Hadley, also of the state of Washington. Representative Rainey, who had framed the most recent amendments to the Harrison Act, had been defeated in the recent Harding landslide along with many other Democrats, yet he participated until his last day in Congress as a member of the subcommittee.

Witnesses provided considerable information on the current problem of American narcotic control. Provision of morphine for Chinese addicts was only one danger that arose from our loose import-export laws. Closer to home, American narcotic exports to Canada showed a great increase after the Harrison Act. The consensus among the witnesses and the subcommittee was that most of the drugs illegally used in the United States were not of foreign origin but were domestic manufactures smuggled back after legal export.46 The proposed act would plug this loophole and attempt to prevent transshipment of foreign products for the economic exploitation of China.

The health professions remained, however, the prime targets of reformers trying to diminish narcotic use in the United States. The renowned surgeon and gynecologist of Johns Hopkins Hospital, Dr. Howard Kelley, argued for stricter controls on narcotic exports to China on grounds of "an interest which is common to many of our citizens. I have investments there." But Dr. Kelly was a tireless reformer in many areas of human life, and his hatred of addiction arose from other considerations as well. Experience had taught him that physicians were largely responsible for the tremendous use of the drug in this country.

The culpability of another profession was pointed out by Henry N. Pringle, speaking for the International Reform Bureau. He maintained that "nine-tenths of the habit-forming drugs are sold by druggists or by persons who get their supply from druggists." The question of cure, which Dr. Kelley viewed so pessimistically, was raised again by Dr. Harvey Wiley, who favored the Lambert treatment as "a really rational treatment for the drug addict," and seconded Lambert's call for the outlawing of heroin. Representative Rainey was particularly incensed at heroin, "a German invention," which sentenced the addict to "sure death in less than ten years." 47

Drug manufacturers opposed the total ban on exports but, as usual, approved the goal of the legislation to stop American compliance in the spread and sustenance of addiction abroad and at home. Open disagreement again arose between reformers and the drug trades. Representative Rainey in particular was angered by a suggestion from one pharmaceutical spokesman that his amendments to the Harrison Act in 1919 were put through in some dark fashion since no hearings had been held. Rainey replied that if the Act remained as Dr. Wright originally wrote it there would have been no adverse court decisions, "but after we had all these hearings with the representatives of the wholesale druggists and the retail druggists, clear down to the veterinary surgeons, the effect of all those amendments was to completely destroy the Act." Rainey went on to declare what numerous opponents of the Harrison Act had suspected, that the federal officials "charged with its enforcement were simply bluffing the thing through" until the 1919 amendments.48

When Nutt appeared at the hearings in the first week of 1921. he had almost no information that would be useful to the committee. He had no knowledge of the amount of opium smuggled into the United States, nor was he "in a position to say" that the use of narcotics had increased in America during the previous five or six years, but he was certain that the Harrison Act "is now being enforced better than it ever was." His most remarkable statement was that, in spite of not knowing the amount of narcotics smuggled into the nation, he estimated "we probably get half of it." He made no mention of the crackdown on ambulatory treatment or clinics which was well under way by the date of his testimony. Witnesses from the Public Health Service were in complete agreement with Dr. Kelley on the danger from the American medical profession which, according to one assistant surgeon general, "does not use narcotics in what might be regarded as a legitimate way." The witness whd represented the "medical approach" was Dr. Charles Terry, who had established perhaps the earliest maintenance clinic under government authority in the United States. In the early years of his clinic he blamed physicians and druggists; even in 1921 he believed many addicts originated from professional malpractice but thought the number was decreasing. Dr. Terry pleaded for a moratorium on further legislation until a congressional investigation could look into the medical side of addiction. He hoped that the public and the majority of the medical profession could be persuaded that addiction was not a depravity or a vicious habit but rather a disease without moral stigma, at least when once contracted. He was heard politely by the Congress but without any sign of agreement. His notion for an investigation into the disease nature of addiction was opposed by Rainey as a duplication of the Secretary of the Treasury's committee, which had reported in spring 1919. But neither Terry nor Rainey had any word of hope for a cure.49

Dr. Terry's attitude toward addiction and its ease of treatment had been severely shaken in the early days of the Harrison Act. He felt he was responsible for the deaths of two children, one an infant who was addicted at birth. The baby died in a few days because Dr. Terry did not realize the need to provide the infant with narcotics. He believed he had also caused the death of an addict by using the Lambert method of withdrawal. The accepted "rational cure" so weakened the heart of a previously healthy woman that she died after several days of cathartics, hyoscine, and belladonna. His examples stressed the need to understand physiology, to move cautiously, and perhaps to maintain some addicts rather than kill by withdrawal.50

In February 1921, two weeks before the end of his term, Representative Rainey submitted a revision of the Jones-Miller proposal, which would permit narcotic exports, if approved by the Secretaries of State, Treasury, and Commerce, upon assurance that the nation to which the materials were exported would monitor the use and disposition of the drugs.51 As finally adopted, the Narcotic Drugs Import and Export Act, approved 26 May 1922, led to the Federal Narcotics Control Board, composed of the Secretaries of State, Treasury, and Commerce to administer it.52 The everyday details were left primarily to the Treasury Department's Narcotic Division. The Act was designed to limit exports to nations which had ratified the Hague Convention and which had an adequate license system; its provisions required proof from consigners that the purposes of the drugs were legitimate and guarantee that they would not be reexported. The Act limited exports to areas where there was a proven opiate shortage.

The Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon, was the only official to oppose a key measure of the Act—the prohibition of in-transit shipments of narcotics—because, he pointed out, to police such a law effectively would require a greatly expanded customs serviCe. Secretary Mellon also questioned the wisdom of restricting the importation of narcotic drugs since this would, in his view, stimulate smuggling. The customs service had an almost impossible task with smuggling as it was, its reports showing "conclusively that smuggling of narcotics into the United States is on the increase to such air extent that customs officers seem unable to suppress traffic to any appreciable extent." 53

American Attempts to Regain International Leadership

After Rainey's defeat in 1920, congressional leadership in narcotic matters was assumed by Republican Representative Stephen G. Porter of Pittsburgh, chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs." Although Rainey was reelected in 1922 and eventually became Speaker of the House in 1933, he no longer took a leading role in narcotics legislation. Porter's national and international renown in narcotic control quickly exceeded that of Rainey. He sought in particular to revise the Hague Treaty which regulated world narcotic traffic and production. Although inexperienced as a diplomat, his chairmanship in the House caused the State Department to treat him with care. Perhaps his two years of medical training, taken before entering law school, gave him interest in and confidence about this medicolegal problem.

Porter became obsessed with the idea that the production of raw opium and coca leaves must be controlled before any other aspect of narcotic traffic was undertaken; without such basic restrictions, international regulation of pharmaceutical manufacturing, for example, or even such domestic laws as the Harrison Act in the United States, were "hopeless." The regrettable outcome of Porter's intransigent adherence to this priority was a curb on American involvement in international control until his death in June 1930.55

Porter's strategy called for Congress to endorse a specific anti-narcotic position prior to international negotiations. He believed President Wilson's failure to obtain Senate approval to join the League of Nations might have misled foreign powers about the power of the executive branch.56 He therefore sought to strengthen the American negotiators' hand by indicating that the American position had strong legislative support.

The State Department's suspicion of conspiracy to prevent the first Hague Conference in 1911 may have been well founded. When the League of Nations undertook to oversee narcotic control through the establishment in December 1920 of the Opium Advisory Committee, the League's custodianship of what had been an American program was closely watched. Within a year American leaders in the antinarcotic movement, such as Mrs. Wright, were extremely displeased by what they saw as obstruction by opium-producing nations, particularly India, represented by its British rulers.57 India had crippled in the Assembly of the League of Nations an Advisory Committee resolution calling upon all nations to restrict the cultivation of poppies and production of opium to "strictly medicinal and scientific" purposes, by striking out the limiting words and substituting "legitimate." This made the resolution meaningless since legitimate would include, for example, smoking opium in India.58

Porter then framed a lengthy Joint Resolution ( HJR 453) calling on certain nations to restrict their production. His resolution faulted Great Britain, the British government of India, and Persia and Turkey with regard to opium production; and Peru, Bolivia, and Java and the Netherlands with regard to coca. Heroin was specifically mentioned as a danger to the young within the United States. The President of the United States was requested to ask these nations to restrict their production on humanitarian grounds and to report the result of his request by December 1923.59

Although the Resolution was aimed directly at the offending nations, not at a conference where a new treaty would be written, plans were begun by the League to call another opium meeting which would take up where the Hague Conference had ended. The plans were developed at a session of the Advisory Committee in May 1923 to which the United States sent Porter as chairman, with Bishop Brent, former Surgeon General Rupert Blue, and Edwin L. Neville of the State Department. Fortified by the Joint Resolution, Porter presented to the Advisory Committee the American program. In essence it was that the use of opiates for other than medical and scientific purposes was an abuse, and that control of production was necessary in order to curb it. The American delegation was prepared to return home should their program, presented as the "settled position" of the United States, fail. Following the presentation of their views 'the American delegates refused to discuss the issue any further. Apparently, the United States' attitude was that it was negotiating with a single international entity, the League of Nations. This would help explain a proposal by Porter to Secretary General Eric Drummond that a narcotic committee be established with ten members, five American and five from the League.

Although occasionally threatening to leave Geneva, the Americans finally did assist in drafting the Advisory Committee's final statement. This Resolution did not support the American position without reservation, but it did envisage a new world conference to look into the control of production and manufacture. The League Assembly adopted the Resolution in December 1923 and ordered the Secretary General to carry it into effect. As a result of Porter's participation, although he was opposed to American membership in the League, the United States was again taking an important position in the international antinarcotic campaign.60

Porter approached the Geneva Conference with as much care as Dr. Wright had used in planning his representation at Shanghai and The Hague. The strongest possible arguments and pressure had to be marshaled to persuade uninterested or dissembling nations to take action that would mean a financial loss and a difficult enforce-ment problem. To this end he planned two legislative actions. One would prohibit manufacture of heroin; the other would be a congressional resolution that would put in unmistakable language the American demands which, if accepted by the producing nations, would solve the American narcotic dilemma.

THE PROHIBITION OF HEROIN

In March 1924 Porter proposed legislation to prohibit the import of crude opium for the manufacture of heroin. He realized that passage of this bill would not have a major effect on U.S. heroin consumption but, like Wright a decade earlier, he hoped other nations would be induced to pass similar legislation which he thought would solve this country's heroin problem by banning its manufacture all over the world.61 In the exaggeration and staging which created one dominant and prohibitive attitude toward heroin, the hearing resembled the style and goal of the Marihuana Tax Act testimony thirteen years later.

Hearings were held on the bill on 3 April 1924. Testimony from a few witnesses and extracts from other hearings and letters to Representative Porter were all combined to show that heroin was the most dangerous of all habit-forming drugs. The various military services, the Public Health Service, and the AMA had already condemned its use, and many physicians believed it could be adequately replaced for medical purposes by morphine, codeine, or some other substance."62 There were no witnesses in favor of retaining the legality of heroin, although some physicians believed it was useful in very persistent coughs and was less constipating and less nauseating than morphine. Testimony was also heard that heroin was a stimulus to crime as a result of its psychological effects, not just a crime-producer because addicts stole to get money to buy more. In Dr. Lambert's words, heroin "destroys the sense of responsibility to the herd." 63

All witnesses agreed that most users of heroin were between 17 and 25 years of age. The most alarming indication of heroin's danger and attractiveness was that addicts were deserting morphine and cocaine for heroin in droves, and probably over 90 percent of addicts on the Atlantic Coast were now heroin addicts. The medical director of Sing Sing Prison reported that after the 1919 Supreme Court decision the number of addicts in the prison rose from 1 percent to 9 percent by the end of 1923. A representative of the New York City Department of Corrections linked heroin with cocaine, saying that many gunmen took one or the other to get up the courage to commit crimes. In the words of Dr. Charles Richardson, representing the AMA, "Heroin contains, physiologically, the double action of cocaine and morphine . . . more agreeable to take, not followed by nausea . . . nor marked depression afterwards." Although Dr. Richardson's statement linking cocaine with heroin was totally erroneous, it was consistent with the attitude most leading physicians held toward heroin. Later, in 1937, similar language associating the characteristic effects of cocaine with marihuana would be convincingly presented to Congress.

In spite of statements that "heroin addicts spring from sin and crime," Representative Porter repeatedly stated his sympathy with addicts. To Porter "viciousness seldom enters into the matter." He sought the establishment of two institutions for the care of addicts, one voluntary and one involuntary, where they could get the best treatment and, he stated, often be cured. In early 1924 a fairly knowledgeable and sympathetic legislator believed that institutional care, if comfortable, could effect a cure.64

Porter, in his desire to ban the domestic manufacture of heroin, was not oblivious of the smuggling which brought in a large amount of the heroin consumed in the United States. An American statute against heroin was only the first step; the goal was a worldwide halt of manufacture. The ultimate control he sought would include enforced quotas on the growing of poppies and coca bushes, which would necessarily limit manufacture of any opium or coca derivative. Porter summarized in a few optimistic sentences his plans for international control:

Mr. Porter: The Resolution passed by Congress on February 26, 1923, HJR 453, declared that the true intent and meaning of the Hague Opium Convention was that the production of the raw materials should be limited to strictly medicinal and scientific needs. That had always been controverted by certain nations owning colonies in the Orient. At Geneva we got them to accept our construction. The Resolution passed in the last Congress is therefore the accepted construction. In November we return to Geneva with a plan to enforce the convention in accordance with this construction and interpretation.

Mr. Hawley ( Oregon) : And the passage of the bill [to ban heroin manufacture in the United States] is an essential factor in connection with that plan?

Mr. Porter: Yes. In case this bill is passed the United States will be in a much stronger position to urge other nations to do likewise.65

Once again, as in the instance of the Harrison Act, the United States sought to enact domestically the strict legislation which required adoption by foreign nations to bring the desired result in America. But Porter was no more successful in obtaining effective international narcotic control than Wright.

THE SECOND GENEVA CONFERENCE, 1924-1925

Four days after the heroin hearings the House considered and overwhelmingly approved HJR 195. The Senate during consideration of the Resolution added the proviso that the American delegation not sign an agreement which did not contain the "conditions necessary for the suppression of the habit-forming narcotic drug traffic." In this form the Resolution was unanimously adopted by Congress in early May.66 The American negotiating position was firm and left little opportunity for compromise. In many ways it resembled the unyielding Wilsonian position on Senate ratification of the Versailles Treaty, although the tactic was now adopted by a Republican Congress and administration. It was unusual for diplomatic strategy to be so explicitly defined by congressional action, but in Pditer's view HJR 195 gave the strongest possible support to the only position that could effectively stop illicit traffic. Porter led the American delegation to the Second Geneva Conference, which began 17 November 1924. Bishop Brent accompanied him, along with Mrs. Wright, Dr. Blue, Edwin Neville, and William B. Morris, an assistant solicitor in the State Department and an expert on international law.

The opium-producing nations, with the exception of China and Egypt, were not inclined to agree with the American position. The exceptions were not significant: China had no effective control over its warring domestic factions, and therefore could do little to curb production; Egypt produced no opium for export. Moreover, the conference would not agree to ban the manufacture of heroin, lower the amount of narcotics in exempt preparations to 34 grain per ounce, or take measures to stamp out opium smoking in the Far East. Some progress was made in the sharing of statistics and relevant administrative structures. International traffic in cannabis would be limited to "medicinal and scientific" consumption and use. A permanent central board was proposed to oversee the traffic and treaties with regard to narcotics.

Overall, the gains made in this conference were modest. Disgusted by the negotiations, and particularly by the British and Indian delegations, Porter walked out of the conference on 6 February 1925, after almost two months of discussion. Some Americans were proud of the delegation's walkout, for Porter's arduous negotiations had confirmed to the League's detractors that it was as hypocritical and useless as they had proclaimed. Pro-League papers and writers deplored the action. European observers disparaged the United States' abrupt and angry withdrawal from the conference in view of its high consumption of narcotics and particular need for cooperation. The remaining delegates stayed and produced the Convention which most experts, including later the U.S. State Department, agreed was an advance over the Hague Convention. But the United States refused to sign and even contemplated diplomatic pressure to prevent other nations from signing. Porter's reputation was at stake, and his congressional position enabled him to dissuade the State Department from any independent support of the Convention.67

By 1928 the State Department's internal opinion was that the Geneva Convention was better than the Hague Convention except for its "connection with the League of Nations and the substitution of a recommendation for an obligation to apply the restrictions of the Convention to dangerous new drugs." The United States, however, never signed. The League's Advisory Committee continued to meet periodically in Geneva, but the United States no longer sent consultants. The American consul at Geneva, an official inexperienced in narcotics, became an "unofficial spectator." The State Department maintained that the betterment of relations between the U.S. and the Advisory Committee awaited the committee's endorsement of the American position. In 1928 a more qualified observer was sent to Geneva, John T. Caldwell of the State Department's Division of Far Eastern Affairs, who continued as the chief American representative for several years.

The establishment of the Permanent Central Board also met with official silence from the State Department, although the League was anxious to have an American representative on it. Eventually an American national, Herbert L. May, a retired Pittsburgh manufacturer, was selected. He was not a representative of the American government, but he maintained informal contact with the appropriate federal agencies. To refrain from seeming to endorse the League, statistics requested by the Advisory Committee were sent by the United States to the Dutch government at The Hague, which the Dutch government then transmitted to the committee. May would then interpret the American statistics to the Permanent Central Board. Any messages for the League were sent to the American minister in Bern "for transmission in the usual informal manner." The effect of our nonrecognition of the League was to isolate the nation from the international narcotic movement which the U.S. had started in 1906. Subsequent American participation in an international conference to limit the manufacture of narcotics would not come until late in 1930, shortly after the death of Representative Porter.68

THE FEDERAL NARCOTIC FARMS

While waiting for the American display of pique at the Geneva Conference to have an effect, Porter began to move forward on the domestic front. As early as the heroin hearings in 1923 he had advocated federal narcotic hospitals. From other quarters came similar suggestions. As more and more addicts entered federal prisons, wardens complained of overcrowding and the unique difficulties of housing many drug-addicted prisoners. The Justice Department wanted something done about convictions under the Harrison Act—some alternative to traditional imprisonment which had led to more Harrison Act violators in prison than any other class of offender.69

The most concrete and impressive evidence of the need for more institutions in which to house convicted federal prisoners came from the wardens of the Atlanta and Leavenworth penitentiaries, who had urged such action for several years. Put simply, the three federal penitentiaries (including that on McNeil Island in Washington State) had a cell capacity of 3,738 while on the first of April 1928 they had a population of 7,598. Of the prisoners, about 2,300 were narcotic law violators, of whom 1,600 were addicted. The wardens did not like to care for addicts—prisons were not equipped to handle them, they smuggled drugs into the prison, and their association with other prisoners was bad for both groups. As far as cure went, the wardens had many stories about addict-prisoners who returned to drugs within a day of discharge from prison.70

Several congressional recommendations were made in late 1927 and early 1928 for alternative detention of convicted addicts. As usual in narcotic matters, no proposal carried much weight until Porter introduced a bill on 20 February 1928 which he had prepared in cooperation with the Justice Department.71 Originally, final jurisdiction over the narcotic farms, as Porter called them, was vested in the Attorney General, but Porter later decided to shift control to the Secretary of the Treasury. The original mandate to the Attorney General was in keeping with what the narcotic farms were designed to be and became—separate prisons for addicts. The maximum security conditions and cells and bars were familiar to the wardens who transferred thousands of their prisoners; and the Public Health Service officers who were given the job of running the farms and treating the "patients" were not deceived. The two farms retained that name until the mid-1930s, when they were redesignated "hospitals."

The' need for the farms was obvious to Congress. Representative John J. Cochran, who had earlier prepared a similar measure, told his colleagues on the day the Porter bill passed the House without opposition, "Notice has been served on the Congress that the great increase in the population at the Federal penitentiaries makes it imperative that either the Porter bill be enacted into law or two additional pentitentiaries constructed." Yet this practical reason was overcast with a humanitarian sentiment which had previously failed to persuade Congress to make federal provision for the general treatment of addicts: Representative Cochran went so far as to claim for the farms that "2,000 or 3,000 men and women, slaves to habit-forming drugs, will be placed on these farms and be subject to treatment and eventually cured." 72 Everyone associated with the narcotic farm proposal enthusiastically endorsed it—except the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service, who would have the responsibility to operate the institutions.

Porter took a moment in the hearings to rebut the "slander" made against the United States in the Second Geneva Conference, that the United States had an inordinate number of addicts and high opiate consumption.73 The reason for the denial was quite frankly stated:

I say this because in these international conferences we are constantly faced with these exaggerated statements put out by various organizations which are quite embarrassing. In fact, it is a slander upon the American people.74

Nutt agreed with Representative Porter, averring that "these foreigners can not show us we are greater users than a good many of the foreign countries." Yet no evidence against a high opium consumption in America was presented to refute past studies of the State Department, the Public Health Service, and the Treasury Department report of 1919, or testimony before Congress until the Second Geneva Conference when the slanderous charge was thrown at Porter.75

The Porter Narcotic Farm bill became law on 19 January 1929, but the Lexington farm was not opened until 1935, and the Fort Worth farm not until 1938. The cure rate at these hospitals was not „impressive, but there never had been a well-substantiated high cure rate from any form of treatment. Operation of the farms by the Public Health Service was under the eye of both the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics so that the physicians were often disaffected, feeling that they were doing the dirty work of the other agencies.76 Research was performed with some interestihg results, although no cure was found. One function the farms performed was to provide training for the later leadership of the National Institute of Mental Health. The conditions under which the psychiatrists worked helps explain their disenchantment with the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and the "legal approach" toward addiction. Not until the late 196os were the bars removed from the Lexington facility and the cells turned into rooms. These farms had been exactly what the wardens envisioned in the mid-1920s—additional prison space for convicted addicts. The institutions provided segregation and the best in medical treatment, but they were by no means rural retreats for the unfortunate addict, supposedly to be restored to health and permanent abstinence through medical treatment.

ESTABLISHMENT OF THE FEDERAL BUREAU OF NARCOTICS, 1930

As soon as the farms were authorized, Porter began to work for the establishment of a separate government agency to enforce the Harrison Act and represent the nation in foreign conferences. Again part of his motivation seemed to be the creation of a model which he hoped foreign governments would follow. A separate agency with domestic and international responsibilities would mean better enforcement and better cooperation with other nations in the prevention of smuggling, and the nations could keep in constant communication instead of meeting at occasional conferences.77

The right moment for a separate agency came in 1929. Friends of the Harrison Act had long regretted the close association between narcotic and liquor law enforcement, the latter steadily declining in public esteem and respect during the decade. But Nutt had stayed on in narcotics through Democratic and Republican administrations, trying to catch erring physicians, peddlers, and smugglers; he was becoming a permanent bureaucratic fixture.

Then misconduct in the operation of the federal narcotics office in New York City and the questionable actions of members of Nutt's family led to his transfer from the Narcotic Division and his replacement by Harry J. Anslinger, then Assistant Commissioner of the Prohibition Bureau with responsibility for foreign control. Nutt's troubles began the night before the 1928 elections which brought Herbert Hoover into the White House. An unknown assailant shot Arnold Rothstein, the liquor, gambling, and narcotics racketeer. Rothstein died tvvo days later, leaving voluminous records, letters, and other documents which were said to implicate a number of prominent citizens, including key members of the New York City government. The destruction of some of these incriminating papers and the secrecy thrown around them by legal agencies brought considerable popular criticism, but little action.78 A grand jury investigation caused some of the names in the documents to filter out. One surprise was the discovery that among those employed by Rothstein were CP. Mattingly and Rolland L. Nutt, son-in-law and son of the Deputy Commissioner of Prohibition. The former operated a law and accountancy business in New York and gave retainers to Rolland Nutt, a Washington attorney, to represent the firm before the Treasury Department in tax cases. In 1926 Nathan Rothstein had given his power of attorney to both Mattingly and Rolland Nutt to represent him when an additional tax assessment for the years 1919, 1920, and 1921 was lodged against him. The grand jury which investigated in 1929 and 1930 the enforcement of narcotic law in New York City looked into the matter and heard Rolland Nutt testify that he had never met Rothstein—he just represented him on behalf of L. P. Mattingly and Company. Rothstein's records revealed that Mattingly had borrowed from him "from time to time and for personal purposes sums totaling $6,200. This had taken place while Rothstein was widely considered the organizer of a worldwide narcotics smugglingr organization bringing drugs into the United States. Levi Nutt testified that he knew nothing of his relatives' association with Rothstein. The grand jury concluded that although the acts of Mattingly and Rolland Nutt might be "thought indiscreet, we find no evidence that the enforcement of the narcotic law was affected thereby." 79

The grand jury also discovered "wholesale padding of the record of the local Federal narcotic office in New York" beginning in Ap 1929 under telephoned orders from the assistant deputy prohibition commissioner for narcotics, who testified that he did so on Mr. Nutt's verbal order. Nutt also denied these allegations. The jury asked the Secretary of the Treasury to take "severe action" against all those responsible for the misrepresentations in the records.

The conduct of federal narcotic agents in New York was also investigated, with the conclusion that there had been "gross dereliction and incompetence." The release of the man higher up, if he wascaught, but the arrest of small offenders strongly indicated collusion between some of the agents and the important sellers of narcotics, but there was not enough evidence to indict for bribery. Other corrupt practices reported were agents' failures to inform the U.S. attorney of evidence important for a successful prosecution, and an agent's reversal of testimony after an indictment had been secured on his original testimony. One agent appeared to be a drug user himself, and even after evidence to this effect was given to the division in July 1929, he was still working in the New York office in Februar 1930. The task of the jury was incomplete, in its opinion, when its report was submitted on 19 February 1930.

Ten days later Levi Nutt was removed as the head of the Narcotic Division and Anslinger was appointed. Nutt became field supervise of the Prohibition agents and then head of the Alcohol Tax Unit in Syracuse until his retirement. Anslinger became Acting Commissioner of Narcotics upon the creation of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics on 1 July 1930 and was appointed Commissioner of Narcotic by President Hoover on 25 September, serving until his retirement in 1962.

Anslinger's career had been in diplomacy after World War I, with no specific duties in the narcotics field. Yet this was excellent training for the new job, in Porter's opinion. Porter questioned "whether a medical officer would measure up to the requirements necessary in an international conference" and he believed the "international aspect . . . is really more important than the domestic." 80 The new commissioner could always get the opinion of the surgeon general when necessary but the man to lead the American battle for narcotic control would need to be versed in diplomatic wiles. Anslinger was untainted by scandal and he had a creditable record for achieving international agreement to hinder liquor smuggling. These factors, plus his patriotism and his belief in the menace of certain foreign ideologies such as Communism, gained not only Porter's support but also, in Anslinger's opinion, the crucial support of William Randolph Hearst.81

Porter had other reasons for preferring a separate bureau. The Federal Narcotic Control Board established by the Jones-Miller Act of 1922 was a cumbersome apparatus for making decisions on routine matters. It was doubtful that the Board had convened even once. A commissioner could be given the board's authority and would also be able to provide a continuity abroad at international conferences which the current arrangement could not provide. Nutt's role had been domestic; Representative Porter was a member of Congress; the State Department experts came and went; there was no one to take the international aspect of narcotic control as his concern and stay with it over the years. Porter complained: "In all of our conferences our Government has been represented by subordinates, and about the time I get one trained to help me he is shifted off to the Far East or some place else and we have to take up and train a new man." 82

When his bill became law in spring 1930, Representative Porter had accomplished the separation of narcotic and liquor law enforcement ( the latter went to the Justice Department when the FBN came into existence). He had obtained by the accident of public scandal a commissioner who had the kind of diplomatic training he believed necessary for the ultimate control of smuggling, and he had consolidated most of the scattered federal activities in narcotic control into the hands of one man and one agency. But on 27 June, before the FBN became a reality, Porter died in Pittsburgh at age 61. Anslinger would begin his career in the Federal Bureau of Narcotics with a determination not to repeat the unpopular enforcement procedures that were destroying thé Bureau of Prohibition.

NOTES

1 L. F. Schmeckebier, The Bureau of Prohibition: Its History, Activities, and Organization, Monograph no. 57, Institute for Government Research (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution [Lord Baltimore Press],
1929), pp. 7-35, 136-45, 150-51, 170-72, 225-28, 309-12, for descriptions of the responsibilities, bureaucratic structure, salaries, and appropriations for narcotic enforcement.

2 "Presidential Message," Cong. Rec. 64, pt. .z : 215, 67th Cong., 4th Sess., 8 Dec. 1922.

3 "Report of Committee on Narcotic Drugs of the Council on Health and Public Instruction," JAMA 76 : 1669-71 (1921). Malachi Harney, a longtime enforcement officer in the Treasury Department, both in liquor and narcotics, recalls that the narcotic agents were sorely embarrassed by their close association with Prohibition agents who had lost public respect. Narcotic agents also performed a task which was much less controversial than dry agents ( my interview with Harney; 4 June 1970, Washington, D.C.).

4 L. F. Schmeckebier and F. A. Eble, The Bureau of Internal Revenue: Its History, Activities, and Organization, Service Monograph of the U.S. Government, Institute for Government Research (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1923), pp. 61-62.

5 Schmeckebier, Bureau of Prohibition, pp. 309-12. The number of agents and the appropriations and expenditures can be followed in the annual appearance of narcotic officials before the House Appropriation Committee.

6 The average number of federal liquor convictions with prison sentences during the years 1922-24 was about 31,000 annually, the average sentence between zo and 30 days. For the same period the annual-'average number of federal narcotic convictions with prison sentences was about 4,000 with an average sentence that grew from io months in 1922 to 14 months in 1924 ("Hearings before the House Appropriation Committee," Treasury Dept. Appropriation Bill 1926; 4 Dec. 1924, 68th Cong., 2nd Sess., p. 472). Sentences for Harrison Act violations continued to rise until the average in 1928 was 's year 10 months ("Hearings befow the House Appropriation Committee," Treasury Dept. Appropriation Bill 1930, 23 Nov. 1928, 70th Cong., ist Sess., p. 473). The number of violations of the Harrison Act from fiscal year 1916 to the nearest hundred
(p. 475):
1916: 1,900    1921: 4,300    1925: 10,300
1917: 1,100    1922: 6,700    1926: 10,300
1918: 1,300    1923: 7,200    1927: 8,9o0
1919: 2,400    1924: 10,300    1928: 8,700
1920: 3,900
The decline in violations after the first Jin Fuey Moy decision (1916) is of interest, as is the rapid rise in violations when a separate narcotic division was created in 192o and after the Supreme Court decision against maintenance in 1919.

7 At the close of fiscal year 1928, just before the two narcotic farms were authorized by Congress, the number of prisoners in federal penitentiaries for violation of the Volstead Act was 1,156 ( Schmeckebier, Bureau of Prohibition, p. 79). Those imprisoned for drug law violations were 2,529 and those for auto theft 1,148. The total number of prisoners was 7,738 so that the Harrison Act engendered the largest class of violations and represented about a third of all prisoners (p. 143).

8 Editorial, JAMA 6o : 1364 (1913).

9 In one rare instance a high FBN official admitted that enforcement in the 192os was perhaps as bad as the physicans and druggists claimed. Speaking at the Fourth Annual Conference of Pharmaceutical Law Enforcement Officials in Toronto on 25 August 1932, H. T. Nugent, Field Supervisor of the FBN, told how the new Narcotics Commissioner, Harry Anslinger, hoped that new rules for the agents would cut down on harassment of health professionals. According to Nugent, Anslinger thought that cooperation with the professionals would work "better than if we undertook to go out and, as the field man sometimes term it, black-jack them into line." Two months after assuming office, Anslinger issued orders that no agent should begin criminal investigation of professionals without written orders from the agent in charge, a copy of which was also sent to the commissioner's office. Nugent explained: "In that way he hoped to eliminate the complaint, and probably the justifiable complaint on the part of some of the professional men against the desire of some of our field men to build up a good record at the expense of the professional classes, and made up probably a lot of petty cases which we didn't feel should be called to the attention of the United States Attorney, or even reported to the Bureau." As a result of these measures, "we find now that the number of cases reported in professional classes has improved materially . . . that instead of getting a lot of petty cases, we are getting cases that have merit" ( Stenographic typescript of Proceedings, located in box 31, American Pharmaceutical Association Archives, Washington D.C., pp. 86-87).

10 "Hearings before the House Appropriation Committee," Treasury Dept. Appropriation Bill 1933, 14 Jan. 1932, 72nd. Cong., 1st Sess., p. 376.

11 U.S. V. Behrman, 258 U.S. 280, decided 27 March 1922; also ibid., p. 289; that good faith was not a defense was suggested by the New York attorney Arthur D. Greenfield in "Some Legal Aspects of the Narcotic Drug
Problem," N.Y. Med. J. 110 : 100-03 (1919).

12 "House Investigation of Narcotics," House Res. no. 258, 67th Cong., 2nd Sess., 4 Jan. 1922, Cong. Rec., vol. 62, pt. 1, p. 8o8. Earlier, in November 1921, an investigation was approved by the American Public Health Association, perhaps following up Dr. Terry's suggestion to the House Committee in January 1921. It was endorsed by the House of Delegates of the AMA on 23 May 1922. Volk's onslaught against the Narcotic Division is found in Appendix to the Cong. Rec., House, 62, pt. 13 : 13, 340-45, 67th Cong., znd Sess. (i922), and a second attack against the coterie of his enemies and a defense of Dr. Bishop and addiction maintenance is found in Cong. Rec., House, 62, pt. 10 : 9, 789-96, 67th Cong., 2nd Sess., 30 June, 1922. Rebuttal to Volk's attack on prominent New York physicians such as Alexander Lambert was given by Rep. Ogden Mills, who demanded some proof from Volk that, among other allegations, these physicians and Greenfield profited from sanitaria; see Ccmg. Rec., House, 62, pt. 2 : 1885, 67 Cong., znd Sess., 24 Jan. 1922. For a picture of the combat over maintenance which is as conspiratorial as Volk's but on the opposite side, see A. C. Prentice, "The Problem of the Narcotic Drug Addict" JAMA 76 : 1551-54 (1921).

13 The resolution adopted had been prepared and submitted by Dr. Rooney, House of Delegates, "Proceedings of the St. Louis Session, 23 May 1922," JAMA 78 : 1715 (1922). State medicine was defined as "any form of medical treatment provided, conducted, controlled, or subsidized by the federal or any state government," with a few exceptions, such as to the uniformed services and in cases of communicable disease, mental health, and the indigent sick

14 Amendments to the Harrison Narcotic Act, Hearing before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Ways and Means, House, 69th Cong., 1st Sess., 21-22, 26 May 1926 (GPO, 1926), pp. 5-6. The government's practice was declared unconstitutional in Starnes v. U.S., 282 Fed. 236, decided 21 July 1922, and the decision was applauded by the AMA in "Lawless Law Enforcement," JAMA 85 : 680-81 ( 1925); also see "Strengthening the Harrison Narcotic Act," editorial, JAMA 86 : 1473-74 ( 1926).

15 Eckert v. U.S., 8th Circuit Court of Appeals (8 Fed. Rept. [2] 257), 6 Aug. 1925.

16 U.S. v. Daugherty, 269 U.S. 360, decided 4 Jan. 1926, pp. 362-63.

17 HR si, 612 printed in Amendments to the Harrison Narcotic Act, hearings pp. 1-2.

18 Linder v. U.S., 268 U.S. 5, decided 13 April 1925, at p. 22.

19 252 U.S. 416, decided 19 April 1920.

20 L. C. Andrews, Secretary of the Treasury to Rep. William R. Green, chairman, House Committee on Ways and Means, 29 March 1926; letter reprinted in Amendments to the Harrison Narcotic Act, hearings, p. 2.

21 Testimony of L. C. Nutt, Amendments to the Harrison Narcotic Act, hearings, 26 May 1926, pp. 46-49.

22 276 U.S. 332, decided 9 April 1928. The majority opinion was written by Chief Justice Taft, who was joined by Justices Stone, Sanford, Van Devanter, Holmes, and Brandeis.

23 "United States Supreme Court Distrusts the Harrison Narcotic Act," editorial, JAMA 86 : 627-28 (1926).

24 Oscar Dowling, "Three Great National Health Problems," JAMA 85 : 484-88 ( 1925). Dowling chose for discussion drug addiction, rabies, and venereal diseases. He was discouraged by the battle against addiction; he believed the Harrison Act had made little progress and represented "an attempt to cure a deep rooted evil with one stroke of the pen." He criticized the lack of planning to care for addicts, and so on. Dowling's views were somewhat confused and did not add anything new to the debate, but his comments do reflect anger at government interference, which arose undoubtedly as much from his personal experience with Nutt's agency as from the growing resistance of the AMA, of which he was a high official, to federal encroachment on the states' powers to control the practice of medicine.

25 The National Prohibition Law, Hearings of a Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, April 1926, 69th Cong., 1st Sess.

26 Charles Merz, The Dry Decade ( Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, reprinted 1970), pp. 186-87.

27 Schmeckebier, Bureau of Prohibition, p. 57. The Wickersham Report stated that 59% had failed (Report on the Enforcement of the Prohibition Laws of the United States, National Commission of Law Observance and Enforcement, House Doc. no. 722, 71st Cong., 3rd sess., 7 Jan. 1931, p. 15).

28 Nutt estimated 110,000 addicts in the United States in 1925 ("Hearings before the House Appropriation Committee," Treasury Dept. Appropriation Bill 1927, 2 Dec. 1925, 69th. Cong., 1st Sess., pp. 438-39). The following year he reported on a survey conducted by the 300 narcotic agents in May 1926 which revealed only 95,000 addicts. Details of the survey were not revealed ("Hearings before the House Appropriation Committee," Treasury Dept. Appropriation Bill 1928, 18 Nov. 1926, 69th Cong., 2nd Sess., p. 345). In May 1924, Drs. Kolb and DuMez had estimated about rro,000 addicts in the U.S.

29 "Hearings before House Appropriation Committee," Treasury Dept. Appropriation Bill 1933, 29 Nov. 1929, 71 Cong., 2nd Sess., p. 345. The appropriation for 1930 was $1.4 million, and a deficiency appropriation raised the total to $1.6 million. At these hearings Nutt estimated that there were fewer than ioo,000 addicts in the U.S. and strongly disagreed that the addiction problem was increasing (p. 350).

30 Arnold H. Taylor, American Diplomacy and the Narcotics Traffic, 1900— 1939 ( Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 141-45.

31 The International Narcotic Education Association "undertakes to organize, develop, and standardize narcotic education in the schools . . . of this country and ultimately of other countries" (Narcotic Education 1 : 6 [1927] ). Other organizations with somewhat similar goals include Charles B. Towns's International Narcotic Association, which began apparently in late 1918 and of which little is known ( Memorandum from Hygienic Laboratory to the Surgeon General, USPHS, 22 April 1919, PHSR). In the hearings on Establishment of Two Federal Narcotic Farms (House Judiciary Committee on HR 12,781 and HR 13,645, 26-28 April 1928, 70th Cong., 1st Sess., rev. print. 1928), Mrs. Sarah Graham-Mulhall submitted a statement on behalf of the World Anti-narcotic Union, which she described as "containing millions of the greatest mothers, wives and sisters in the Union," and which apparently was closely associated with women's clubs. Mrs. Graham-Mulhall was president of the New York City Federation of Women's Clubs ( pp. 87-90 ). She had served as a deputy commissioner of the short-lived New York State Narcotic Control Commission. Another group, the Narcotic Drug League, brought together in 1922 the leaders in the American antinarcotic campaign, including Bishop Brent, Dr. Alexander Lambert, Mrs. Graham-Mulhall, and Prof. Joseph Chamberlain, all of whom strongly supported the most stringent interpretation of the Harrison Act. For a description of this meeting see Survey
4 Feb. 1922, p. 218.

32 The longest and most direct rebuttal of the Kolb—Du Mez study came from New York's warden of the City Prison, S. W. Brewster, whose essay, "Survey of the Prevalence and Trend of Drug Addiction," appeared in a Hobson-inspired hearing before the Committee on Education of the House of Representatives (Conference on Narcotic Education, Hearings on HJR 65, 69th Cong., 1st Sess., 16 Dec. 1925, pp. 177-90). The resolution for which the hearing was held had been introduced by a strong supporter of Hobson, Rep. Walter F. Lineberger of California. It called on the federal government to participate in Hobson's Conference on Narcotic Education to be held in Philadelphia in the summer of 1926. The record of the hearings illustrates Hobson's ability to publicize his views and his own role. Hundreds of replies from prominent Americans and requests for support of the conference were printed. Rep. Lineberger wrote, on Captain Hobson's request, to 5,000 county and city superintendents of education; presidents of colleges, universities, and junior colleges; state presidents and secretaries of Parent–Teachers' associations; and "distinguished citizens from Who's Who in America." These letters stressed the dangers of heroin addiction, claimed that there were more than a million addicts in the United States, and enclosed copies of Hob-son's "The Peril of Narcotic Drugs," which Lineberger had introduced into the Congressional Record when Hobson's earlier campaign to print at government expense 50,000,000 copies was not authorized by Congress. The description of heroin was particularly misleading. The letter to the names taken from Who's Who, for example, stRtes that "heroin changes a misdemeanant into a desperado of the most vicious type," while the Hobson pamphlet became almost lyrical on the hazards of heroin to evolutionary progress. The conference, according to Rep. Lineberger, was primarily to meet the menace of heroin, which had caused "orgakiized banditry" in all parts of the nation (hearings, p. 10). Gerhard Kuhne, of the Department of Correction of New •York City, claimed that 75% of crime would be eliminated if drug addiction could be stopped, for he claimed that drugs were "a false stimulant" to crime. Alcohol, on the other hand, he considered a minor cause of crime (hearings, p. 175). For the AMA's rebuttal of the Hobson statistics, see "Drug Addiction in the United States," JAMA 82 : 1974-75 ( 1924 ).

33 Hobson's success with the media illustrates his efficiency and the existence of a prepared audience. In 1924 Hobson tried to get a congressional appropriation for the printing of "The Peril of Narcotics—A Warning to the People of America," so that every home could have a copy. But, aside from the cost, the Federal Narcotics Control Board denied Hobson's claim that one ounce of heroin would cause 2,000 addicts and found fantastic Hobson's warning that, "In using any brand of face powder regularly, it is a wise precaution to have a sample analysed for heroin" (Federal Narcotic Control Board, the Secretaries of State, Treasury and Commerce, to Senator George H. Moses, chairman, Committee on Printing, U.S. Senate, 27 May 1924, in Conference on Narcotic Education, hearings, pp. 2-3). Hobson brushed aside such carping for he fought a "biological struggle for the life of our people and the species" (hearings, p. 5). One witness supporting Hobson assumed that the large number of addicts in federal prisons reflected addiction as a cause of crime, instead of their being in jail as the result of Harrison Act violations. The most concise and forceful opponent of Hobson was Dr. Kolb who refuted in detail Hobson's exaggerations. Yet Dr. Kolb did not favor maintenance of addiction merely to satisfy addiction, and he wished continued enforcement of the Harrison Act. He simply did not think that addiction was the major threat that Hobson described; in fact, he said, "addiction is really a very rare thing throughout the United States." Dr. Kolb also denied any difference between morphine and heroin (hearings, pp. 33, 28). A somewhat revised version of "The Peril of Narcotic Drugs," along with some other propaganda of the Narcotic Education Association, was later printed in the Congressional Record at Rep. Lineberger's insistance (Cong. Rec. House, 66, pt. 4 : 4088-91, 18 Feb. 1925, 68th Cong., 2nd Sess.). This extract from the Record was distributed via franked mail to leaders of American institutions, as he described in Conference on Narcotic Education ( see above, ch. 8, n. 32). A general outline of Hobson's approach to the media, textbook publishers, etc., can be found in Richmond P. Hobson, "The General Status of Narcotic Drug Education in America," Narcotic Education s : 4-7 ( 1927 )•

34 "The Struggle of Mankind against Its Deadliest Foe," broadcast I March 1928, printed in Narcotic Education 1 : 51-54 ( 1928).

35 "Extract from an Address by Richmond Pearson Hobson, Broadcasted over KMTR, Los Angeles, 28 February 1929," printed in Narcotic Education 2 : 67-69 ( 1929 ).

36 E, George Payne, "Narcotic Addiction as an Educational Problem," Narcotic Education 5 : 26-30 (1931). Payne was Director of Education for the World Conference on Narcotic Education, and Professor of Educational Sociology in the School of Education, New York University.

37 Hobson to Harry J. Anslinger, Commissioner of Narcotics, ii Dec. 1936 ( AP, box 12).

38 Exportation of Opium, Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Ways and Means on HR 14,500, House, 66th Cong., 3rd Sess., 8 and ii Dec. 1920 and 3 and 4 Jan. 1921 (GPO, 1921), p. 10. The interest of the China Club in narcotics is described by its secretary, William K. McKibben, and the formation of the White Cross from the China Club was described by a Seattle Times reporter, J. J. Underwood, in the House Committee on Foreign Affairs hearings (Limiting Production of Habit-forming Drugs and Raw Materials from Which They Are Made, Hearings on HJR 430 and HIR 453, 67th Cong., 4th Sess., 13-16 Feb. 1923, rev. print. pp. 63-67). By the latter date McKibben was executive secretary. The name the China Club selected, "The White Cross: International Anti-Narcotics Society," may have been original with the founders, or may have had some connection with an earlier reform movement called The White Cross which began in England in 1883 and spread to the U.S. the following year. The latter had chapters scattered across the nation and had as its goal the preservation of the purity of women and especially the prevention of prostitution; although only men could belong, one of its goals was women's suffrage which was seen as integral part of giving women the power to protect themselves from exploitation (B. F. DeCosta, The White Cross: Its Origin and Progress [Chicago: Sanitary Publishing Co., 18871).

39 McKibben to Butler, g July 1925 (BuP); the White Cross also supported a measure in the Washington State Legislature to permit addiction maintenance in 1940 ( see below, ch. 8, n. 41).

40 Hobson stated, "It would be more accurate and psychologically more useful as a warning to youth to portray narcotic drug addiction in its true colors, that of an incurable living death" (Narcotic Education 2 : 55 [1929]). Interestingly, New York City warned youth in a radio spot broadcast in spring 1972 against "the living death" of heroin addiction.

41 Harry D. Smith, District Supervisor, Minneapolis, to Commissioner of Narcotics, 15 Sept. 1939 (FBN file no. 0145-18, "Interstate Narcotic Association"). A bill to authorize clinics was considered by a committee of the Washington State House of Representatives and successful opposition to it was mounted by the FBN and other groups. The Chicago-based Interstate Narcotic Association also favored a clinic system but is better known for its fight against "marihuana—the weed of madness," illustrated by its often-reprinted poster warnfng parents and children of the "killer weed." The Association also sold marihuana seals to support its Work. The White Cross of California had attempted to inaugurate a narcotic clinic in Los Angeles in 1934 but was unsuccessful.

42 Anslinger's lack of respect for the efforts of Hobson, whom he considered a dilettante who lived off the wealthy financial backers of his antinarcotic efforts, was revealed in my interview with Anslinger. In his words, organizations like the White Cross, which were once considered supportive of federal activity, "went sour" and endorsed clinics—"barrooms for addicts" or "morphine feeding stations"—two terms he favored for the concept.

43 The Knights of Columbus in 1922 "launched upon a ruthless campaign for the nationwide suppression of opium and other narcotic evils" ( Survey, 4 Feb. 1922, pp. 718-19). In Rep. Porter's hearings on HIR 453 (Feb. 1923), numerous service clubs and lodges took official stands in the fight against drug abuse, including the Loyal Order of the Moose, The Grotto, Mystic Order of Veiled Prophets of the Enchanted Realm (a Masonic order); and the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, as well as many local organizations, women's clubs, etc. President Harding was a member of the Grotto, his Secretary of Labor James J. Davis was Director General of the Loyal Order of Moose. Davis was planning, when he appeared before the Porter Committee, to meet soon with officials of the National Fraternal Congress to coordinate a more extensive campaign by its constituent members against drug abuse.

44 Hobson, "General Status of Narcotic Drug Addiction in America," Narcotic Education z: 6 (1927); Hobson estimates that in twelve months prior to July 1927, 2.5 million documents were mailed to educators, clubs, etc., and 200,000 letters were mailed, one-third typed, the rest mimeographed. "The very large volume of work is accomplished on a modest budget," explained Hobson, "because we utilize the services of the public printer and the congressional frank, and the machinery of education and of great organizations."

45 Exportation of Opium, hearings, pp. 115, 121. Concern was expressed by Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan when urging passage of the Harrison Bill and allied proposals in 1923 ("Abolition of the Opium Evil," House Doc. no. 33, 63rd Cong., 1st Sess., 21 April 1913, p. 5). In 1922 the House report on the Exportation and Importation of Narcotic Drugs reemphasized the damage to China's purchasing power by addiction and consequent decrease in trade with the U.S. (House Report no. 852, 67th Cong., and Sess., 27 March 1922, p. 6).

46 See U.S. Treasury Dept., The Treasury Department's Special Committee of Investigation Appointed March 25, 1928, by the Secretary of the Treasury: Traffic in Narcotic Drugs (GPO, 1919), p. 7. This report provided statistics on the rapid rise in narcotic exports to Canada after passage of the Harrison Act. See also Exportation of Opium, hearings, pp. 132-33.

47 Exportation of Opium, hearings, pp. 22, 36, 39-40.

48 Exportation of Opium, hearings, pp. 81-82, 49.

49 Dr. J. W. Scherechewsky, Assistant Surgeon General, USPHS, Chief of the Division of Scientific Research explained that the U.S. "probably consumes more narcotic drugs per capita than almost any other country in the world right now" (Exportation of Opium, hearings, pp. 133, los--o8).

50 Limiting Production, hearings on HJR 430 and HJR 453, p. 1070. In this hearing Terry still maintained that 75% of addicts were made so "through the therapeutic use of drugs in sickness" ( p. 1°9).

51 Prohibit Importation of Opium: Report to Accompany HR 16,118, House, Committee on Ways and Means, 66th Cong., 3rd Sess., 21 Feb. 1921, H. Report 1345. Rep. Rainey introduced HR 16,118 on 17 Feb. 1921.

52 Public Law no. 227, 26 May 1922, 67th C011g., 211d SeSS.

53 Andrew Mellon to J. W. Fordney, chairman, Committee on Ways and Means, House of Representatives, 22 June 1921, printed in Importation and Exportation of Narcotic Drugs: Report to Accompany HR 2193, House, Committee on Ways and Means, 67th Cong., 2nd Sess., 27 March 1922, H. Rept. 852, pp. 19-20.

54 Porter (1869-1930) studied medicine for two years before entering law school and gaining admission to the bar in 1893; he served in the House from 1911 to his death (Biographical Directory of American Congressmen, 1774-1961, pp. 1471-72).

55 Taylor, Narcotics Traffic, pp. 232-41.

56 Porter to Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, 12 Feb. 1923, printed in Limiting Production of Habit-forming Narcotic Drugs and the Raw Materials from Which They Are Made: Report to Accompany HIR 453, House, Committee on Foreign Affairs, 67 Cong., 4th Sess., 21 Feb. 1923, H. Rept. 1678, pp. 5-6. In the report submitted by Rep. Porter he emphatically declared that "no domestic law . . . can control this [narcotic] traffic; [the] only effective and permanent remedy . . is to be obtained by the concurrence of the producing countries . . . in behalf of the moral and physical welfare of our people," to limit production of plants from which the drugs are made to strictly medicinal and scientific purposes (pp. 4-5).

57 Taylor, Narcotic Traffic, pp. iso-59.

58 Limiting Production, 21 Feb. 1923, House Rept. 1678 pp. 4-5; condemnation of the Assembly's action was also contained in Hearings on MI 4,3o and HJR 453, p. 2.

59 Hearings on IIIR 430 and HIR 453, p. 2. Public Resolution no. 96, 67th Cong., 4th Sess., passed 2. March 2923.

6o Taylor, Narcotic Traffic, pp. 146-70.

61 Prohibiting the Importation of Opium for the Manufacture of Heroin: Hearings on HR 7079, House, Committee on Ways and Means, 68th Cong., ist Sess., 3 April 1924, pp. 41-43.

62 Ibid., pp. 2-3, 39. The American Association of Pharmaceutical Chemists had opposed the use of heroin in 1917 (N.Y. Times, 8 Aug. 1919). The Public Health Service considered the national prohibition of heroin a wise step also ( Surgeon General Rupert Blue to William McAdoo, Chief Magistrate, City of New York, 14 May 1919, PHSR).

63 Prohibiting Importation, hearings on HR 7079, P. 5. The Commissioner of Health of Chicago, Dr. Herman N. Bundesen, asserted that "the root of the social evil is essentially in our dope, our habit-forming drugs [the] main cause of prostitution and crime" (Hearings on HIR 430 and MR 453, pp. 72-75). Other examples of growing attribution of crimes to heroin use by responsible officials in the early 1920s are: W. G. Shepherd, "Youth + Drugs Crime" ( American Legion Weekly, 30 Now 1923, pp. 7-8, 27-30): "Insane daring, utter merciless and vicious cruelty are characteristics of the dope fiend's crimes" (p. 27); "It is estimated that there are 2,000,000 drug fiends in the United States" (p. 28). F. Wallis, (Commissioner of Corrections, City of New York, Former U.S. Commissioner of Immigration), "The Menace of the Drug Addict" (Current History, Feb. 1925), pp. 740-43): "Heroin . . . is the most insiiilious and crime-inspiring of all drugs. When we consider that the United States uses more of these powerful opiates than all the leading nations of Europe combined we begin to understand why there are more murders in a single American city than in all the countries of Western Europe" (p. 741); "In my opinion no measure is too radical or severe that would prohibit the manufacture and sale of habit-forming drugs" (p. 743).
R. H. Lampman, "Heroin Heroes: An Interview with Capt. Richmond Pearson Hobson" (Saturday Evening Post, 20 Sept. 2923, pp. 41-42): "The great expansion of narcotic addiction in America, given impetus by heroin, dates from about 1910, and . . . the great increase in crimes of violence in the United States has a parallel rise . . ." (p. 41).

64 Prohibiting Importation, hearings on HR 707g, p. 24, statement of Dr. Amos O. Squires, Chief Physician, Sing Sing Prison. Hobson seized on the increase of "900V in heroin addicts (from 1% to 9%) without explaining that it came after the antimaintenance enforcement of 1919, or that the "peak" was merely 132 addicts in a prisoner total for one year of 1,450 in 1922. He used the simpler statistic to dramatize the peril to the nation. For example, Hobson introduced the figure in a "Sample Lesson for Senior High School":

Teacher: The actual number of drug addicts has been estimated to be from 250,000 to 2,000,000. Prison authorities at Leavenworth in 1921 reported 15.5 percent of drug addicts and in 1922, 24 percent. The chief physician at Sing Sing says there was an increase in addicts of goo percent from 1919 to 1922. What do these figures show?
Pupil: That it is becoming a more serious problem all the time.

(Cong. Rec., House, 66, pt. 4 : 4088-91, 18 Feb. 1925, 68th Cong., 2nd Sess.); see Prohibiting Importation, hearings on HR 7079, p. 47, for statement of Sidney W. Brewster, Asst. Superintendent and Deputy Warden of the Reformatory Prison at Harts Island, New York City.

For Richardson's disclaimers after making dogmatic and exaggerated statements, see p. 11; for Blue, see pp. 28-29; also Dr. Hobart A. Hare to Rep. H. G. Watson, 1 April 1924, reprinted on pp. 18-19; for discussion see p. 14. Porter (see pp. 51-52) believed also that most crime by addicts was caused by their need to buy more opiates, but he did not press the point against witnesses who gave the impression that heroin had an effect of stimulating a person to crime by its psychological action; see his questioning of Dr. Squires (p. 22).

65 Prohibiting Importation, hearings on HR 7079, p. 41.

66 Public Resolution no. zo, 68th Cong., 1st Sess., 15 May 1924. Porter held hearings on HJR 195 in February; the resulting publication was some-tiring of a handbook on American attitudes toward narcotic control and was consciously directed at foreign governments that would be present at the forthcoming Geneva Conference (The Traffic in Habit-forming Drugs: Hearings on HJR 195, House, Committee on Foreign Affairs, 21 Feb. 1924, 68th Cong., 1st Sess.): For Senator Lodges's amendment see Appropriation for Participation of the United States in Two International Conferences for Control of Narcotic Drugs: Report to Accompany HJR 195, Senate, Committee on Foreign Affairs, 68th Cong., ist Sess., S. Report. no. 499, 5 May 1924, p. 1.

67 Taylor, Narcotic Traffic, pp. 171-209, esp. pp. 207-08.

68 Porter's attitude can be summarized by an excerpt from a letter to the Secretary of State: "An effective remedy cannot be secured by compromise," Porter to Hughes, 12 Feb. 1923 (Traffic, Hearings on HJR 195, p. 35)•

69 Establishment of Two Federal Narcotic Farms, hearings.

70 Ibid., p. 18; H. E. Mereness, "Some Remarks on the Narcotic Situation as Applying to the Federal Prison System," pp. 133-39. Mereness, Inspector of Prisons, estimated the chance of cure as "a thousand to one against success" (p. 138). Similarly a physician-representative from New York, William I. Sirovich, in a lengthy speech in the House, stated that addicts always relapsed because of their "peculiar psychopathic constitutionally inferior types" (Cong. Rec., House, 72: pt. 5 4975-81, 71st Cong., 2nd Sess., 7 March 1930). Rep. Porter, who spoke at the end of Rep. Sirovich's speech, agreed (p. 4980).

71 Albert S. Gregg, "United States Narcotic Farms," Narcotic Education 2 : 9-10 ( 1928 ).

72 Cong. Rec., House, 69, pt. 9 : 9412-13, 7oth Cong., 1st Sess., 21 May 1928.

73 Establishment of Two Federal Narcotic Farms, p. 42. Porter's arguments against the high use of narcotics in the U.S. rested on an analysis made by Edwin L. Neville of the State Department, who claimed that the rate of per capita opium consumption quoted against the United States, 36 grains annually, was an error based on total imports and not on consumption. The year in which this would have been grossly in error was 1919, when a large proportion of the imported American opium was exported to Japan, but it would not have been true of import figures prior to 1915. For Neville's argument see Neville to Porter, 13 Feb. 1924 ( in Prohibiting Importation, hearings on HR 7079, pp. 42-43). When Porter was asked whether he was familiar with the earlier statistics he replied, "I have never read the testimony" (p. 43). Porter based his rebuttal to foreign charges of massive American narcotic use on the official import statistics, which gave an average of 8 grains per capita annually, a figure close to that of other Western nations. For a further statement of Porter's position see W. W. Willoughby, Opium as an International Problem: The Geneva Opium Conferences (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1925), pp. 1-7, 304-06.

74 Establishment of Two Federal Narcotic Farms, p. 42.

75 Porter's argument was that on official statistics the U.S. consumption of opiates was similar to other nations; figures on smuggling were difficult to estimate for any nation and therefore could not be used to compare American and foreign consumption. Porter's aim was apparently to defend against assigning to the U.S. the cause for America's drug problem, which he often said was increasing and a great menace, and to trantfer the cause to foreign and uncooperative, perhaps even conspiratorial, governments.

76 From my interview with Anslinger it appears that the PHS officers were occasionally "brought to heel" as irregularities were detected by FBN agents ( interview, Hollidaysburg, Pa., 30 May 1970).

77 Bureau of Narcotics: Hearings on HR 10,561, House, Committee on Ways and Means, 7-8 March 1930, 71st Cong., 2nd Sess., p. 13. Porter declared that he was convinced of the "wisdom of separating narcotics from Prohibition, for the very simple reason that there is absolutely no relationship between the two. The latter is highly controversial and the former is not."

78 Newspaper accounts are summarized in Leo Katcher, The Big Bankroll: The Life and Times of Arnold Rothstein (New York: Harper's, 1959). For Rothstein's entry into narcotics and revelations from documents left after his death, see pp. 290-99, 337-99.

79 "Presentment and Report by the Grand Jury on the Subject of the Narcotic Traffic," January, Morning Session, 1930, filed 19 Feb. 1930; reprinted in Bureau of Narcotics: Hearings on HR 10,564 pp. 73-77.

80 Bureau of Narcotics, Hearings on HR 10,561, p. 45.

81 From the Anslinger interview.

82 Bureau of Narcotics, Hearings on HR 10,562, p. 57; see testimony of Alfred L. Tennyson, legal advisor to the Deputy Commissioner of Prohibition in charge of narcotic law enforcement; also p. 51.