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An Illustrated History of U.S. Drug Czars

Richard Cortes at Vanity Fair has an illustrated history of U.S. Drug Czars in the War on Drugs. It begins:

The United States spends nearly $50 billion each year on the war on drugs, to little avail: illegal drugs remain prevalent, and drug-funded groups continue to spread violence from Mexico to Afghanistan. The new White House drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, says he wants to end the drug war, but other men in his position have tried and failed to do just that. In this illustrated history, Ricardo Cortes shows how science, politics, ego, and scandal transformed a public-health initiative into a century-long military campaign.

He begins in 1914 with the Harrison Act, but the first sketch is of Henry Anslinger, Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962, who led a public campaign against marijauana. [More...]

Harry J. Anslinger, Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962, believed the plant caused murder and lunacy. He led a public campaign against the plant for four decades, but by the time he finished more people were smoking it than ever. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy named Anslinger ambassador to the United Nations, where he helped draft the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, one of three U.N. treaties that today define world drug control.

Next is Tricky Dicky, who brought the 1970 Controlled Substances Act, which created our drug-scheduling system. Did you know that in 1972,
The National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse said about marijuana:

“We believe that experimental or intermittent use of this drug carries minimal risk to the public health, and should not be given overzealous attention in terms of a public health response.”

...The panel, along with the American Medical Association and the National Institute of Mental Health, recommended decriminalizing the possession and distribution of marijuana for personal use, and the American Bar Association called for reduced penalties. Nixon responded by rejecting the report, declaring “an all-out global war on the drug menace,” and creating the Drug Enforcement Administration (D.E.A.) by executive order in 1973.

Then we get to 1977 and Jimmy Carter and Peter Bourne:

He had campaigned on a platform of decriminalization, and he appointed his friend Dr. Peter Bourne as director of the Office on Drug Abuse Policy. Bourne made it clear that he believed marijuana was not a significant health-care problem and began to explore rescheduling it. The White House pushed the National Cancer Institute to make the drug widely available to patients, and in October the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to decriminalize possession of up to an ounce of marijuana for personal use. The tide of war was shifting.

What happened? Peter Bourne attended a party at NORML:

The incident was discovered... The Washington Post reported that Bourne had used cocaine and marijuana at the December norml party. Bourne resigned from his position at the Office on Drug Abuse Policy within 24 hours. Carter retreated from drug-law reform for the rest of his embattled term.

It all went downhill from there. On to Ronald Reagan, Rudy Giuliani and Joe Biden:

In 1980, Ronald Reagan shifted responsibility for the anti-drug effort from the health department to the Department of Justice. “I would say that this is the most intense federal effort ever against drugs,” said Associate Attorney General Rudolph Giuliani, who oversaw the D.E.A. and the Bureau of Prisons and who orchestrated expansion of the F.B.I. into drug enforcement. Senator Joe Biden began advocating for a Cabinet-level position to coordinate federal agencies—a “drug czar.” So began the era of “zero tolerance.” Reagan’s presidency reversed his predecessors’ drug-control policies, and funding for law enforcement rose to three times that for abuse-prevention and treatment programs.

And then, George H.W. Bush and William Bennett drove the nail in the coffin:

William Bennett, called for an “all-out war on drugs—with more resources for police, more prosecutors, more convictions.” Bennett was the first U.S. drug chief in 20 years with no professional expertise in health or science. He was also a heavy smoker—he went through two packs a day, or about one ounce of tobacco—and promised to kick his addiction upon taking office. In 1990, one year into his term, Bennett proposed extending capital punishment to “drug kingpins.”

I remember when Newt Gingrich echoed that call. But, moving onward, to Bill Clinton, Les Brown and Barry McCafferty:

Incarceration for drug-law violations increased 1,100 percent between 1980 and 2002, yet cocaine and heroin prices fell by 80 percent.

And then, G.W. Bush and John Walters:

The year 2001 brought George W. Bush to the White House. His czar, John Walters, allocated more than $100 billion to the war. Still, illicit drug use among adult Americans during the Bush administration remained unchanged. According to John Carnevale, former director of planning and budget at the O.N.D.C.P., “The strategy totally failed to achieve any progress in this key goal area.… Eight years were wasted.”

Finally, we're up to the present and President Obama and Gil Kerikowske:

President Barack Obama has called the war on drugs “an utter failure.” The drug czar he appointed, Seattle police chief R. Gil Kerlikowske, has pledged to “change the conversation on our drug problem” and abandon the “drug war” metaphor.

But not much has changed, particularly with respect to marijuana:

Obama’s 2010 budget, however, would allocate $15.1 billion to fund the Office of National Drug Control Policy–$1 billion more than President Bush’s final budget request. The plan calls for an increase in every aspect of drug-war funding except drug-use prevention (which decreases by 11 percent), and again the largest share of resources would go to domestic law enforcement.

So what has changed? When it comes to the most widely used illegal drug in the U.S., not much. “Marijuana is dangerous and has no medicinal benefit,” Kerlikowske recently said, contradicting the testimony of thousands of physicians and patients, not to mention the federal government’s own findings...

The sketches are really good, but the story is even better. Nice job by Richard Cortes.

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  • Display: Sort:
    The extent (none / 0) (#1)
    by JamesTX on Thu Jul 30, 2009 at 01:40:48 AM EST
    to which the drug policy is irrational is hard to draw attention to in isolation. So much of it is based on attitudes and myths which are so deeply ingrained that nonsense sounds like logic. We have two basic debates going in this country. Health care and drug policy. The best way to demonstrate the nonsense of both is to compare the underlying reasoning and motives cited for both. They think we need to have our loved ones and our own lives destroyed over drugs of questionable toxicity, out of a sense of "protecting us". They think we don't have a right to health care, though. We have to earn that. I think a whole lot of the confusion about who the government is and what they are doing and why could be cleared up if we just started taking their talking points from health care and applying those arguments to drug policy, and taking their talking points from drug policy and applying it to health care! I think that would be very illuminating.


    he believed no such thing. (none / 0) (#2)
    by cpinva on Thu Jul 30, 2009 at 02:21:02 AM EST
    Harry J. Anslinger, Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962, believed the plant caused murder and lunacy

    what he believed was that by convincing both the public and congress that it did, he could (and did) create his own little, taxpayer funded fiefdom.

    mr. anslinger succeeded far beyond even his wildest expectations. science fiction and racism were anslinger's weapons of choice, along with the ad executives he hired to promote his version of america's "drug culture", reality rarely ventured even a toe in.

    sadly, mr. anslinger's vision remains the central thesis of our present-day "war" on drugs.

    If the public (none / 0) (#4)
    by JamesTX on Thu Jul 30, 2009 at 09:05:26 AM EST
    understood more about Anslinger and the early days of drug prohibition, there wouldn't be a drug war. This man was evil incarnate. His statements and his philosophy would get him summarily fired from any public position today. He was a liar.

    Parent
    And that's why the Kennedy Brothers cashiered him (none / 0) (#6)
    by SeeEmDee on Thu Jul 30, 2009 at 03:35:16 PM EST
    After Rufus King had sent tape recordings of his radio debates with Anslinger to the Kennedy White House. You can't help but wonder what else might have happened to the DrugWar had John Kennedy never gone to Dallas, for Anslinger was the DrugWar, personified.

    Parent
    The article was titled incorrectly (none / 0) (#3)
    by SeeEmDee on Thu Jul 30, 2009 at 06:46:30 AM EST
    It should have been titled "Drug War as Culture War." For the history of the War on Drugs from its' very inception was based upon prejudice and bigotry, not science and reason.

    An excellent 'graphic novel' approach at illustrating just how insane the DrugWar is, can be found here. It can't get any plainer as to who wanted the DrugWar...and why.

    The Richie Roberts character... (none / 0) (#5)
    by kdog on Thu Jul 30, 2009 at 10:04:22 AM EST
    in "American Gangster" nailed it...

    Judges, lawyers, cops, politicians. They stop bringing dope into this country, about a hundred thousand people are gonna be out of a job.

    And thats why the drug war isn't designed to end.

    Some "drugs" can, (none / 0) (#7)
    by jondee on Thu Jul 30, 2009 at 03:58:25 PM EST
    in some cases, help people get a glimpse of the divine within -- which threatens to put Jimmy Swaggart and the guys in the funny hats out of work, also.

    Read Food for Centaurs by Robert Graves.

    Parent

    I will... (none / 0) (#8)
    by kdog on Fri Jul 31, 2009 at 10:09:43 AM EST
    you haven't failed me on a book reco yet my friend.

    I always found it more spritually fulfilling than the houses of worship and hustle...though if you share the powers that be can and will crack down hard.

    Parent