Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [226]
The Harrison Act was not in itself particularly controversial. Rather, as one scholar has put it, it seemed like a “routine slap at a moral evil.” Nobody defended drug use. The road of addiction seemed to lead downward, almost inevitably, to crime and insanity. Moreover, drugs were associated with unpopular subgroups. As David Musto observes, “Cocaine raised the specter of the wild Negro, opium the devious Chinese, morphine the tramps in the slums.” These drugs were like infectious pestilences; they were liable to burst out of their dens and hovels and spread among respectable people unless they were firmly dealt with.137
Webb v. United States (1919) was a test case. Webb was a practicing physician in Memphis, Tennessee; Goldbaum was a retail druggist in that city. Webb prescribed morphine for habitual users; Goldbaum filled these prescriptions. Was this acceptable under the Harrison Act? The Supreme Court, in a brief opinion, said flatly no. To prescribe drugs not as a “cure” but to keep the user “comfortable by maintaining his customary use” was a “perversion” of the meaning of the act.138
This was not entirely unreasonable, as a reading of the statute. There were certainly abuses. One reads accounts of “dope doctors” who, for a trivial fee, were pleased to write out prescriptions for drugs.139 The Minnesota drug statute, passed in 1915, made it unlawful to “prescribe for the use of any habitual user.”140Still, the net effect of Webb was to make addiction itself a crime; to put the drug trade, and drug use, completely beyond the pale, and on a national level.
At first, to be sure, the drug problem did not loom very large in national consciousness. The Columbus, Ohio, police, who arrested almost two thousand people for liquor violations in 1929, made exactly nine arrests for “violation of narcotic laws.”141 The federal government was somewhat more active. More than half of the women inmates of the Federal Industrial Institution for Women, in Alderson, West Virginia, in October 1935, were in prison on narcotics charges (264 out of 505).142 Congress established a Federal Bureau of Narcotics in 1930. Harry Anslinger directed the Bureau. He believed, quite passionately, that the drug trade was a massive national threat.143 The Bureau was a tireless source of propaganda against marijuana and the way it destroyed young minds. The Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 added this substance to the list of the damned.144
Since then, the federal government, and most state governments, have never looked back, never wavered, always stuck like glue to a single policy of prohibition, prohibition, and more prohibition: interdiction at the source, the arrest of users and pushers, draconian punishments, and, on the official level, no understanding, no mercy, no letup in the war. In the sixties, marijuana and harder drugs burst out of the ethnic enclaves; they became part of the lifestyle of young rebels and would-be rebels. This generated still more panic.
Because of this national panic (some of it justified) and because any major problem in our day is a federal problem, the federal government was sucked further and further into the pit of drug-law enforcement. In 1973, Congress created a Drug Enforcement Administration. The size of this agency has swollen in the last two decades. The “war on drugs” now consumes billions of dollars every year; it is fought in the streets, in the air, along the coasts, and even in foreign countries.
The public hysteria over drugs is not, of course,