To those who ask, and sometimes to those who don't, I offer twenty-four sound reasons for winding down the drug war, benefits that will flow from normalizing America's drug-repression policies now. I like "normalizing" because it implies, correctly, bringing ourselves into step with most of the rest of the civilized world.

Here are the twenty-four: huge "peace dividends" in direct savings of now-squandered resources; new tax revenues (taxes high enough to discourage use but not high enough to nourish a large black market); cleaner politics and more honest politicians (just imagine Capitol Hill, the White House, and the Pentagon as "drug-free work places"!); an instant end to drug-related police , shootouts and turf wars; an instant end to most drug-driven crimes by users; unclogged courts; pressures off prison systems; release of prisoners serving disproportionate sentences for otherwise-innocent drug offenses; drastic reductions in corruption at all levels; more efficient law enforcement in non-drug areas; riddance of impure substances and poisonous adulterants sold on the streets; better dealing with AIDS and other infections spread by unsterile needles and procedures; contact with, and help for, drug-abusing mothers during pregnancy; more impact for honest and credible education; better prevention of dangerous drug-impaired activities like flying or driving under the influence; more respect for law, lawmakers, and law-enforcers; reduced jeopardy for the Bill of Rights and personal freedoms; honest counselling, information, and professional advice for those who seek it; more effective treatment, emergency and long term, for those who need it; no more police interference with medical discretion in the use of drugs in therapy; curbs on misuse of the U.S. military and National Guard as police forces; no more drug-related adventuring (even shooting wars!) abroad; no more perversion of foreign policy objectives, or corruption of foreign aid; and regained respect from other nations who now mock us for our ridiculous drug hysteria. (If posterity survives our times, what will it think of us, the leading tribe of the atomic age, explorer of the universe and master of the power of the sun, whose high priesthood decrees death for traders in certain taboo leaves, flowers and grasses?)

Will Reform Result in Increased Use?

The drug warriors, the Rangels and Bennetts and their armies of witless clones, have, really, only one argument in defense of their crusade, and that highly speculative: no one can be sure, absolutely sure, that there won't be a great epidemic of drug abuse when we wipe out controls by criminal sanctions. We are indisputably the world's most drug-saturated populace, and even wise Dr. Koop fears we could "lose a whole generation" if we allowed today's greed-driven marketers of alcohol and tobacco, without restraint in today's perilously deregulated society, to promote a nationwide or worldwide teen-age fling with something like crack or "ice."

These warriors usually cite the 1933 Repeal experience (without ever, I note, attempting to suggest or defend a return to the 18th Amendment). When alcohol was legalized there was a great upsurge in liquor drinking, they say; and look at all the troubles we have had with alcohol since, they say. And do you want to add another problem like that to our present national woes, they ask.

There are compelling answers to these points. No one is certain whether drinking did increase all that much (though no one denies that Prohibition gave us one new phenomenon, the hard-drinking female); the differences between pleasant, widely accepted — and mostly innocuous —beverages, and the traumas of the needle, or choking smoke, or burning fumes, are obvious; and after Repeal the transition was by no means made overnight. Large areas remained dry, protected by the federal Webb-Kenyon Act. All manner of restrictions and regulations were imposed, by federal, state and local authorities. A great variety of experimental controls were tried.

So no matter how violently we reject the drug war, when we finally come to our senses, kindergartners are not going to be spending their lunch money on heroin in school stores the next morning, and the cocaine black market
sustained by adventuresome high schoolers will be not be enough to keep the Medellin cartel in business very long.

The Gambling Model

But anyway, I submit there is a much better and more realistic model to which we might look in assessing drug-law reform, and that is the parallel experience with gambling in America, which has gradually been legalized, step by step, and with minimal social damage, even as we have been escalating the anti-drug crusade blindly towards an unattainable "final solution" (drug-free America) of holocaust-like proportions.

Gambling is as old as drug-taking and alcohol drinking, with a history reaching back to the beginnings of human records, and like those other indulgences, it was seldom disapproved or punished until modern times. In the American colonies lotteries helped finance the Revolu tion, funded early Ivy League colleges, and financed public works. But around the turn of the 19th century, a combination of Puritan morality and concern for the welfare and productivity of the "lower classes" began to generate state anti-gambling laws. "Common gamblers," gambling houses, and riverboat sharks were outlawed, often after some statehouse dignitary had been trimmed by one of them.

What we now honor as the insurance industry was outside the law, and "speculation" in bucket shops, forerunners of today's brokerage houses, was banned with criminal sanctions. Before the Civil War, ubiquitous horse racing fell into disrepute, thanks to crooked promoters with their "dark horses" and switched "horse of a different color." Lotteries too fell out of favor, some states writing anti-lottery provisions into their constitutions.

After the Civil War impoverished states in the Reconstruction South turned to lotteries again, and soon they were being recklessly chartered to fly-by-night individuals and promoted in fraudulent schemes that stirred violent popular reaction. After the Louisiana Lottery Scandals, credited with aggravating a national financial panic and crash in the 1870s, Congress intervened, with a postal ban (1890) and then a direct prohibition from interstate commerce (1895).

Apart from a few timid experiments, there was little legal gambling in the nation from the turn of the 20th century until the 1920s. Everything from back-room poker in the saloons to elaborate casinos for the "Four Hundred" were tolerated as "vice," along with "sporting houses" and a few exotic opium dens and cocaine sniffers. [The only evil, apart from the saloons themselves, that pricked the public conscience was so-called white slaving, which evoked the Mann Act from Congress in 19101. Legal gambling nonetheless began a small comeback through pari-mutuel betting (no "house" and hence no heavy-lidded "promoters" — patrons bet their stakes against one another in a pari-mutuel pool), at special sites like Saratoga, rationalized with sentimental tosh about "the sport of kings" and "improving the breed."

In the aftermath of World War I, along with the lawless speakeasy and the other stresses of Prohibition, illegal gambling began to flourish. The "mob," corrupting everywhere with its bootlegging operations, spread into the racing industry with off-track bookie joints — the ubiquitous "horse parlors." In 1931, when the Wickersham Commission reported to President Hoover, illegal gambling revenues were estimated to be about the same as revenues from illegal drugs, $500,000,000 each, while the revenues from bootlegging were guessed at $2-3 billions. But no one was very uptight about the gambling.

Though Commissioner Anslinger and his Treasury Narcotics Bureau were already making a noisy war on drugs, the main focus of public attention was Mr. Hoover's G-Men and their shootouts with bank robbers, kidnappers, and now and then a bootlegging gang. Hoover, incidentally, always fought to keep his FBI out of drug enforcement, because of its lack of tabloid-page drama and its special corrupting force on all who became involved with it. "Narcs" have always been considered lowlifes by other enforcement agencies.

In 1931 Nevada, faced with competition from Idaho and other states in its divorce monopoly, licensed most forms of gambling. Legal pari-mutuel tracks had by then been established in a few states, and sizeable illegal operations were based on off-track betting, slot machines, urban "numbers," and clandestine casinos. But no one was very worried. There was neither much public concern nor significant complaining about social damage. Some religions excoriated gambling as sin, but most people were tolerant. Politicians aimed their demagogic viewings-withalarm in other directions, and it was believed that local betting — and local corruption — were largely decentralized.

This, it is claimed, changed abruptly after Repeal, in 1933. The heavyweight gangsters, with no more bootlegging revenues, turned principally to taking over illegal gambling. The racetracks, some already mob-controlled, provided a basis for nationwide gambling syndicates, held together by illegal gambling-wire services to bookie establishment. [The Annenberg fortune was founded on muscle-won control of the key race-wire outfit of the times, Continental Press]. Bad guys turned up in Nevada.

In this era the Narcotics Bureau, whose deadly nemesis had always been heroin, launched a new campaign against "the weed of madness," exotic and little-known marijuana, derived from a variety of common
hemp. But Hoover's villains stayed more in the limelight: Capone and Dillinger, Dutch Schultz, Murder Inc., Frank Costello, Bugsy Siegal, Mickey Cohen and the Lanskys.

The situation cooled during World War II, but by the time of the Kefauver Committee in 1951-2, it was estimated that the illegal gambling "take" was in the range of $30 billion annually, with a third to a half of that going to corrupt politicians and law enforcers. Anslinger made another bid, with a new demonology, the fearsome peasants of Sicily, organized into Mafia and impregnable behind their ominous code of omerta. Hoover, nonetheless, kept his lead, scorning Mafia and even the concept of "organized crime" [his chief bugaboos, remember, were always "subversives" and criminals like kidnappers and bank robbers, and his obsession was raising the professional level of law enforcement — he hated bad cops].
People with names ending in vowels were never prominent on the FBI's "Ten Most Wanted" list.

On Capitol Hill the lawmakers, never giving Anslinger large appropriations — his Bureau operated on less than $3 million, with no more than 300 agents — nonetheless had several orgies of grandstanding about drugs in the 1950s, ferocious penalties, including death, in the 1952 Boggs Act and the 1956 Narcotics Control Act, and the marathon Daniels Subcommittee hearings. In 1957, in a fiasco never fully explained, New York State Troopers broke up a cook-out at Apalachin where some bad Italians, including "Mustache Petes" whose names had been household words for years, were indeed found together. The press, with the New York Times always in the forefront of the pack, has been pumping up this "crime conference" ever since, although an attempt to prosecute those who were caught at the meeting was smartly thrown out of court.

The Drug War — Kennedy to Bush

In the next decade, when the Kennedys took the helm and began grooming Robert's image as a fearless crime-fighter, illegal gambling became even more singularly the prime target of choice for publicists and politicians. Anslinger was replaced by a colorless pharmacist, so his Treasury Bureau would not intrude on the limelight focused on Attorney General Kennedy's Justice Department (where the bad blood between him and Hoover was notorious). Racketeers, it was said, were using the huge flow of money from gambling to infiltrate and capture legitimate enterprises. A new concept was enacted into law, not a crime to be committed, but a status to be punished, "dangerous special offender." Fund tracing and money-laundering were innovated and applied. The forfeiture concept was greatly expanded. Government at all levels was mobilized to cope with the phenomenon of gambling-fuelled organized crime.

When the pattern shifted again, with President Johnson in the White House and his arch-adversary Robert Kennedy in the Senate, Johnson set up the Katzenbach Commission (President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice) to head off the possibility that Kennedy might become another Kefauver, and again the emphasis was all on gambling and other gangster-controlled crimes, with narcotics receiving only passing attention. (Mafia had been taken away from the narcotics forces by re-dubbing it Cosa Nostra, and its twenty-six "families" were now a prime target for the Justice Department's Organized Crime Section and its "O.C. Strike Forces"). In 1968 President Johnson removed narcotics enforcement entirely from the Treasury Department and put it in Justice, in a new Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.

It is Richard Nixon, however, the consummate master of "Willie Horton" politics, who deserves most credit for elevating the national drug obsession to its present level of dominance in American life. In 1962, after his defeat by Kennedy two years earlier, he had run for governor of California with a slashing attack on incumbent Governor Pat Brown because the latter had sponsored liberal treatment programs for addicts — "soft on dope." Brown, to whom the Kennedy's owed much, called for help and induced reluctant President JFK to hold a White House Conference on Narcotic and Dangerous Drugs (September, 1962), presided over, of course, by Attorney General Robert, and dominated by Brown and his Californians. This was the first time since President Theodore Roosevelt that the drug problem had been significantly played up from the Oval Office. Nonetheless the Kennedy Administration and its advisers remained relatively conservative on the subject. [Heroin was the threat, and could you guess how many users there were supposed to be in the U.S. at that time? 45,000!]

President Johnson, as we have seen, down played drugs. But when Nixon came to Washington in triumph in 1968, elected on a "law and order" platform and accompanied by tough-talking John Mitchell, and the pair found there was not much the federal government could do about ordinary street crimes, they began trumpeting the war on drugs with a vengeance. Not only was the drug menace inflated as never before, the war was also carried abroad for the first time (where the Executive Branch could act independently without Congress), in disastrous "Operation Intercept" on the Mexican Border, and a noisy assault on poppy-growers in Turkey (never an important opium producer).

President Ford, interestingly, dragged his feet on drug-war issues, and President Carter might actually have led a retreat (he spoke of decriminalizing personal marijuana use and said, right out, that alcohol and tobacco were drugs too) had not a whistle-blower compromised his drug adviser, Dr. Peter Boume, for prescribing a controlled substance to a friend.

There is no need to recount here in detail what has followed since: the Reagan years of blistering rhetoric, profligate budget increases, and the silliness of "Just Say No," followed by today's Bush-Bennett madness.

Gambling Reform Takes Hold

Turning back to the gambling story, after three decades of pounding on the evils and menace of illegal gambling, from the Wickersham Report to the Kennedy years, public attitudes began a gentle shift. Pari-mutuel tracks were now flourishing in more than half the states, often acquiring great power in state capitols, with only an occasional attendant scandal (two governors, Kerner of Illinois and Mandel of Maryland, have served prison terms for racetrack shenanigans). People began to observe the patent illogicality of permitting betting at tracks while waging war on the obliging bookies who took bets elsewhere — and to question the blurred differences between playing the horses and playing the stock market. Nevada was tolerated, alleged mobster-control notwithstanding, and Las Vegas became a glamorous convention and vacation spot. Other states allowed gamblers to make minor inroads. A bouquet of gambling-based commercial promotions and charity-sponsored games made their appearances, often with no change in the laws but merely a relaxed attitude on the part of enforcers.

In 1964, with little fanfare, New Hampshire authorized a state-run lottery, tied at first to the state's racetracks but soon turned into a numbers-drawing operation. The initial selling point was that New Hampshire, with one of the poorest school systems in the nation, would derive needed revenues for education from the play, without new taxes. [This is always the leading argument of promoters of legalized gambling — and always, once established, they say high taxation would simply drive gamblers back to the illegal games.] The New Hampshire operation was staffed from top to bottom with ex-FBI agents and ex-policemen, to reassure everyone that it would remain free of corruption (as most lotteries, still all state-run, have indeed remained).

In 1967 New York followed New Hampshire's lead, this time by a state referendum because the New York Constitution contained a lottery ban. Then neighboring states, pressed by the competition, legalized lotteries one after another, and the trend moved westward. Now there are thirty-one lottery states, plus most of the Canadian provinces. To compete, and to keep up interest and revenues, the games have been expanded to daily and instant play, the prizes have been constantly increased, and in many urban area related illegal "numbers" operations have been effectively preempted.

New York led with the next step, to off-track betting, and recently nearly a dozen states have followed. Other forms of gambling, dog tracks, jai alai frontons, commercial bingo, etc., have spread all over the nation. In many cases the gambling question was put to voters, in local option laws and ordinances or state referenda. Atlantic City, by a squeaky vote in New Jersey, has become a second slots-and-casino mecca, generating pressure on New York and Pennsylvania to follow with "open cities" of their own. Maryland, which rid itself of slots and most other gambling a few years ago, has reopened some of its counties in response to formidable lobbying pressure from private promoters.

It will be recalled that at the turn of the century Congress passed strong federal lottery bans, based on its postal and interstate commerce powers, and a whole web of additional federal anti-gambling laws have been added since. Some of these are still on the books, and for the most part the federal authorities simply ignore them. Illegal gambling action has not ended. Big bettors and "high rollers" do not want to be identified for the tax collector, or to put up with other restrictions imposed on legal play.

The Effect of Legal Gambling

Though there are now pari-mutuel tracks in 41 states, the largest action these days is undoubtedly on sports events other than racing, nearly all clandestine. The stakes on football and baseball playoffs and other sports-page competitions are still enormous. The media regularly features reports of odds, point spreads and detailed information that could only be legitimate "news" to gamblers. But the social consequences are negligible, despite anecdotal reports of fathers blowing their paychecks and mothers gambling away the grocery money. A small cottage industry has grown up to "treat" gambling "addicts," and write footnoted treatises on "compulsive" gambling, and there are a number of sparsely-attended chapters of Gamblers Anonymous scattered around the country.

There is also, surely, some corruption, because substantial illegal gambling operations, like big drug rings, can never be operated for long without coming to the attention of the authorities, but corruption is not on the old scale because "protection" is no longer very important, or worth much when gambling is not vigorously prosecuted or seriously punished.

Every now and then there is still a flare-up of publicity when some long-familiar alleged Godfather is "rubbed" out, or some Cosa Nostra "family" is rounded up once again for the media. But the Strike Forces have been disbanded, and much-publicized gangster prosecutions not infrequently end in acquittals.

It is noteworthy that President Nixon and the politics of the drug war probably played a direct part in this cooling of anti-gambling fervor. In 1970, in one of its catchall "omnibus" crime bills, Congress set up a high-powered Commission on the Review of the National Policy Toward Gambling, apparently intended by its congressional sponsors to revive concern about organized crime, and divert attention from drugs. There was a struggle over the leadership of this Commission, however, and the White House won. The chairmanship went to a Charles Colson friend, Charles Morin, and the Commission's three-year study was pro-gambling from the outset (its principal staffers went from it straight into the gambling industry).

The Commission's findings were: people are going to gamble, no matter what, and a large majority of Americans accept this; gambling is a social issue, and therefore should be left to the states (federal restraints should be removed); or perhaps it should be legalized so everyone could control it with his own theological and ethical convictions; it is uncertain whether gambling interferes with the work or thrift ethics of the nation, but in any case gambling operations should be left to private entrepreneurs rather than being state-sponsored; taxes on illegal gambling — (legal winnings should be entirely exempt from federal income taxes).

The Commission warned that legalizing gambling might cause more Americans to gamble (though it published a survey showing that 61 percent of the adult population already indulged the vice). Estimates of gambling revenues were probably too low, the Commission asserted, but illegal gambling was mostly run by local mom-and-pop businesses, and not by organized crime. It scorned the notion that crime syndicates were taking over and corrupting legitimate businesses with gambling money.

In short, after more than a century of public hostility and politician's railings against gambling — undeniably a useless and sometimes harmful personal indulgence — the nation simply calmed its exaggerated alarms and, step by step, with little fanfare, "normalized" the activity. Associated problems have not disappeared. But the more extreme laws have either been repealed or are widely ignored, and regulation is becoming more and more reasonable and effective. The transition was not a sudden shift accomplished overnight, but for the most part it was made by cautious advances. And no great part of the population, not even crazy teenagers, has been much harmed.

Rufus King is an attorney with Berliner, Corcoran & Rowe, 1101 Seventeenth St., N.W., Suite 1004, Washington, D.C. 20036-4798. (202) 293-5555.

References

Commission on the Review of the National Policy Towards Gambling — Gambling in America. Washington, GPO (1976)

Ezeell, John S. —Fortune's Merry Wheel. Cambridge, Harvard University Press (1960)

Kefauver, Estes — Crime in America. Garden City, N. Y., Doubleday (1951)

King, R. — "The Control of Organized Crime in America," Stanford Law Review. (December 1951)

King, R. — Gambling and Organized Crime. Washington, Public Affairs Press (1968)

King, R. — "Looking for the Lost Mafia," Harpers (November 1977)

Kobler, John Ardent Spirits. New York, Putnam (1973)

Lee, Henry —How Dry We Were. Englewood Cliffs, N. J., Prentice — 1

Hall (1958) National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement — Report on the Cost of Crime. Washington,

President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice — The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society. Washington, GPO (1967)

U.S. Senate Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce — Third Interim Report & Final Report. Sen. Reps. Nos. 307 & 725, 82d Congress (1951)