History of the War on Drugs – About.com News & Issues

By Tom Head

At the turn of the 20th century, the drug market went mostly unregulated. Medical remedies, which often contained cocaine or heroin derivatives, were freely distributed without prescription--and without much consumer awareness of which drugs were potent and which were not. A caveat emptor attitude towards medical tonics could have meant the difference between life and death.

The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 targeted toxic drugs, and was expanded to address misleading drug labels in 1912. But the piece of legislation most relevant to the War on Drugs was the Harrison Tax Act of 1914, which restricted the sale of heroin and was quickly used to restrict the sale of cocaine as well.

And into this new national enforcement framework came the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, which attempted to tax marijuana into oblivion Marijuana had not been shown to be dangerous, but the perception that it might be a "gateway drug" for heroin users--and its alleged popularity among Mexican-American immigrants--made it an easy target. More

Not that it did so alone. The Boggs Act of 1951 had already established mandatory minimum federal sentences for possession of marijuana, cocaine, and opiates, and a committee led by Senator Price Daniel (D-TX, shown left) called that the federal penalties be increased further, as they were with the Narcotic Control Act of 1956.

But it was Eisenhower's establishment of the U.S. Interdepartmental Committee on Narcotics, in 1954, in which a sitting president first literally called for a war on drugs.

So when the Nixon administration looked for ways to block the import of marijuana from Mexico, it took the advice of radical nativists: close the border. Operation Intercept imposed strict, punitive searches of traffic along on the U.S.-Mexican border in an effort to force Mexico to crack down on marijuana. The civil liberties implications of this policy are obvious, and it was an unmitigated foreign policy failure, but it demonstrated how far the Nixon administration was prepared to go.

Nixon also targeted the trendy, psychedelic image of illegal drugs, asking celebrities such as Elvis Presley (shown left) to help him send the message that drug abuse is unacceptable. Seven years later, Presley himself fell to drug abuse; toxicologists found as many as fourteen legally prescribed drugs, including narcotics, in his system at the time of his death.

The addition of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to the federal law enforcement apparatus in 1973 was a significant step in the direction of a criminal justice approach to drug enforcement. If the federal reforms of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 represented the formal declaration of the War on Drugs, the Drug Enforcement Administration became its foot soldiers.

It is not insignificant that the policy also came with political benefits. By portraying drugs as a threat to children, the administration was able to pursue more aggressive federal antidrug legislation.

Then along came crack, cocaine processed into little rocks at a price non-yuppies could afford. Newspapers printed breathless accounts of black urban "crack fiends" and the drug of rock stars suddenly grew more sinister to white middle America.

Congress and the Reagan administration responded with the Antidrug Act of 1986, which established a 100:1 ratio for mandatory minimums associated with cocaine. It would take 5,000 grams of powdered "yuppie" cocaine to land you in prison for a minimum 10 years--but only 50 grams of crack.

So when Senator Joe Biden's 1994 Omnibus Crime Bill included a provision allowing for the federal execution of drug kingpins, it indicated that the War on Drugs had ultimately reached such a level that drug-related offenses were regarded by the federal government as equivalent to, or worse than, murder and treason.

What is confusing is the issue of what happens when a state declares that a drug can be made legal with a prescription, and the federal government bullheadedly insists on targeting it as an illegal drug anyway. This happened in 1996 when California legalized marijuana for medical use. The Bush and Obama administrations have arrested California medical marijuana distributors anyway.

So far, the Obama administration's actual drug policy enforcement has not differed significantly from that of the Bush administration. But the War on Drugs has always been a rhetorical convention--you can't declare war on inanimate objects, social phenomena, moods, or abstractions--and it's a rhetorical convention that has determined the way our country views drug policy enforcement. Acknowledging that this is a policy initiative, not a war, is a good step.

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History of the War on Drugs - About.com News & Issues