Although the word has never been officially applied to drugs, US
federal drug policy began evolving into prohibition ninety-two years
ago when agents of the Treasury 'tax unit' created by the Harrison Act
started arresting doctors complying with the new law because
they were prescribing for 'addicts'. That 'unit' eventually
became the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) under Harry
Anslinger in 1930.
In
1937,long after the Holmes-Brandeis Court had
ruled 'addiction' to be a medical menace best dealt with by rigid
federal control of all prescriptions for opiates and coca products, Anslinger used the same fear-based tax ploy to gain control over all products of the hemp plant. A critical difference was that while Harrison allowed some medical
use of opiates and cocaine under strict control, similar allowances
were not made for cannabis by the MTA.
Anslinger was a thuggish
bureaucrat whose great skill was protecting FBN turf; his technique was simple: use arrogated authority over all things 'narcotic' to block
unbiased studies of 'addiction.'
The emergence, several years after his sudden departure from
FBN, of pot-smoking hippie demonstrators experimenting with a
melange of new 'psychedelics' while urging both radical social
change and an end to the Viet Nam war gave Richard Nixon one of the
major items on his 1968 wish list: a federal police agency
he could control. Although Watergate ultimately frustrated him,
the DEA and NIDA-- both outgrowths of his sweeping 1970
Controlled Substances Act (CSA)–– became important to Ronald Reagan's
first-term decision to intensify Nixon's drug war. Since then, the DEA
has retained Anslinger's authoritative role as the major 'official'
source of drug information, while NIDA has become sponsor of 85% of
academic studies of 'drugs of abuse' and thus able to skew both
their design and interpretation in support of our never-admitted policy
of prohibition.
We now have an utterly dishonest 'control' policy which
three quarters of the general public see as a failure beyond fixing;
yet federal bureaucrats are free to spend billions boosting as
successful. Beyond that, our powerless 'drug czar,' is merely a
purveyor of propaganda fashioned from selected data supplied by a
self-interested federal police agency and augmented by 'research'
sponsored by another 'scientific' agency created to study a
'disease' (drug abuse) for which objective diagnostic criteria are
lacking and total abstinence has been decreed the only acceptable
goal of treatment. Among the few reliable statistics allowing a peek at what four decades of such insanity have actually accomplished: over
two million prisoners in our jails and prisons, the arrest of over three quarters of a million people each year for cannabis violations, and several thriving illegal drug markets which can't be precisely measured
by standard econometric techniques–– precisely because they are
illegal.
This rant is intended as background for the deconstruction of
a recent Op-ed by Professor Mark Kleiman, who has made a comfortable
living and achieved a considerable academic success by teaching drug
policy 'analysis,' most recently at UCLA.
Doctor Tom
