New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery

Kathleen J. Frydl, “The War on Drugs in America, 1940-1973” (Cambridge UP, 2013)

In 1971, President Richard Nixon declared a “War on Drugs.” We are still fighting that war today. According to many people, we’ve lost but don’t know it. Rates of drug use in the US remain, by historical standards, high and our prisons are full of people–many of whom are hardly drug kingpins–who have violated drug laws. And, of course, it all costs a fortune. What to do? In her book The War on Drugs in America, 1940-1973 (Cambridge University Press, 2013), historian Kathleen J. Frydl argues that there is a better way to control drugs. She points out that prior to the “War on Drugs” the Federal government had controlled the distribution of narcotics and other drugs largely (though not entirely) by means of taxation. The “Federal Bureau of Narcotics” was a branch of the Department of the Treasury. The run up to Nixon’s “War on Drugs” and the war itself changed all that: enforcement of drug laws was transferred to the Department of Justice. Essentially, the Fed had criminalized drug distribution and use and told the states to aggressively pursue distributors and users, or else. According to Frydl, this was a disastrous move. Better, she says, to de-criminalize and even legalize drugs, control them by means of taxation, and support prevention and treatment initiatives. It’s a controversial position, and near the end of the interview we debate it at some length. I hope you enjoy the discussion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Broadcast on:: 09 May 2013
Audio Format:: other

In her book The War on Drugs in America, 1940-1973 (Cambridge University Press, 2013), historian Kathleen J. Frydl argues that there is a better way to control drugs. She points out that prior to the “War on Drugs” the Federal government had controlled the distribution of narcotics and other drugs largely (though not entirely) by means of taxation. The “Federal Bureau of Narcotics” was a branch of the Department of the Treasury. The run up to Nixon’s “War on Drugs” and the war itself changed all that: enforcement of drug laws was transferred to the Department of Justice. Essentially, the Fed had criminalized drug distribution and use and told the states to aggressively pursue distributors and users, or else.

According to Frydl, this was a disastrous move. Better, she says, to de-criminalize and even legalize drugs, control them by means of taxation, and support prevention and treatment initiatives. It’s a controversial position, and near the end of the interview we debate it at some length. I hope you enjoy the discussion.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Hello everybody, this is Marshall Poe, I'm the editor of the New Books Network. And I'd like to tell you that we have a new and improved website. It has two new features that we think you'll love. One of them is a vastly improved search engine so that when you type in keywords, you'll get a bunch of episodes really quick. The other is the ability to create a listener account. And in that listener account, you can save episodes for later listening. So you can create a kind of listening list. We think these features are neat and we think you'll enjoy them. Please visit the site today. [MUSIC] Hello everybody and welcome back to the New Books Network. I'm Marshall Poe, the editor in chief of the network. And we scour the internet every weekend. Look for good books and then we interview the authors of those books. And this week, I'm very happy to say we have Kathleen Friedel on the show. And we'll be talking about her new book, The Drug Wars in America in 1940 to 1973. As I told Kathleen in the pre-interview, I'm sort of involved in the drug wars myself. I work with a lot of alcoholics and drug addicts and another connection. And so I was very interested to read her book to see if I was wasting my time or not. And she has some very interesting things to say about that. And particularly about the history of, I guess the kind of thing that I'm involved in is, I should say, supported by the government, which is an interesting thing in and of itself. So Kathleen, welcome to the show. >> Thank you very much. How are you, Marshall? >> I'm very well, thanks. Could you begin the interview by telling us a little bit about yourself? >> Sure. I am a political historian, and I received my PhD in 2000. And I went to school at a time when there was a revived interest in institutional history or state building. And I was very influenced by those kinds of conversations. But I was also influenced by the longer heritage, if you will, of political history, as it had been written for several generations prior. And it's almost skipped a generation because of the tremendous rise and influence of social history, and then cultural history and its way. And political history, as it was written in the 1990s, was influenced by social and cultural history a great deal. So my first book was on the World War II GI Bill, which I'm happy to say won the 2010 book prize from the National Academy of Public Administration. And that book spent a lot of time discussing the institution of the Veterans Administration and the institution of the United States of Congress. But also, I hope, showed some attention to the influences of social and cultural history, especially scholarship on race. So that was my first monograph. And while I was researching that monograph, I stumbled upon an oral history in the Truman Presidential Archives that made me want to write my next book on the U.S. Drug War. And I can talk a little bit about what it was in that interview, if you'd like, about what I stumbled on. That made me want to write a book on a drug war. And that was an oral history interview by Oscar Ewing, who was a very important official in the Truman Administration. And he had all kinds of responsibilities to do with the GI Bill as head of the Federal Security Agency, which today, through multiple incarnations, is now held in human services. But at that time was known as the Federal Security Agency. Anyway, I read the entire history while I was sitting there waiting for records. And Oscar Ewing mentioned that in his early career he worked as a lawyer for a domestic pharmaceutical company. And as such, he was often traveling to the League of Nations to represent those interests. And more as an aside, he mentioned that the United States at that time had the finest system of drug control in the world, which he characterized as being the envy of the world. And he also characterized it as being the most robust and circumspect. And that really caught my eye because I was already, this was already the year 2000. And nobody would describe the U.S. system of illicit drug regulation and the envy of the world. In fact, it was the target of much, much resentment throughout the world. And so I was really interested to know how we came from being the envy of the world to the target of so much resentment when it came to the drug war. So right then and now I decided to write my second book. I see. So let's begin, actually. I want to begin with a little chronology because I think many people will be surprised about this, especially the earlier period. The book covers 1940 to 1973 and in the first era, which I think in the book is called the, is it called the classical era or what? I'm sorry, I don't remember the exact phrase. You know, it's not my phrase, but it's called the classical era of narcotics regulation. Yeah, can you talk a little bit about that and how we controlled narcotics? And I guess we should include marijuana in that or should alcohol be included? What gets included? Well, if the government had its way, all kinds of things that are not narcotics would be included under the word narcotic. But let me just start with the classical era and answer the question as asked, which is, you know, people forget that heroin was amorphine were medicines of essential value to the U.S. medical system for many, many decades. cocaine as well was used from additional purposes and that history existed alongside of these drugs used for recreational purposes. And so when we see heroin addicts on the street today who are being policed and feeling the brunt of the U.S. state, what we should really be looking at and seeing in our eyes and kind of an analogy that we are making is that they are the oxycontin addicts of yesterday. You know what I'm saying? Like, this was a medicine. This was a medicine that was used for in the 1930s and 1940s and the 1950s for many, many purposes, some of which would raise a lot of eyebrows today, but it was a new medicine and the medical profession had, you know, some difficulty in narrowing the categories for which heroin could be used. So, for instance, heroin used to be prescribed in some cases in the 1930s for asthma and that would raise a lot of eyebrows today. So, heroin was used for medicine and the trick for the United States government or I should say the dilemma facing it was how to import heroin because it was very much an import and how to import coca leaves or cocaine in a refined form, how to import these things and keep them in listed channels, how to track the distribution of it. And so, in order to do that, in 1914, the government passed the Harrison Narcotics Act and that's typically what people describe as inaugurating the classic era of narcotics control. And, you know, a lot of the scholarship that exists on the drug war, which is great and much of which focuses attention on race and class dimensions and points out that illicit narcotics use was never much pursued unless and until it was taken up by racial minorities like Chinese smoking, ultium or blacks using cocaine in the south. And then, you know, these things kind of crescendoed into hysterical campaigns. That's all true and that's important, but at the very same time, the United States government was importing a tremendous amount of these items, especially heroin and morphine, in order to satisfy the medical need for them. So, I was interested in the story of the Harrison Narcotics Act, the nuts and bolts, so to speak of the Harrison Narcotics Act and how it was implemented. And it was implemented through an office called the Bureau of Narcotics, which ultimately today is our modern day drug enforcement agency, but only through like several steps and different kinds of transfers and political battles. Initially, the Bureau of Narcotics was located in the Department of Treasury. And I go through some pains, and you might have noticed this in the book, I go through some pains to describe the Bureau of Narcotics and why the Department of Treasury was such a natural fit for the Bureau of Narcotics. And this wasn't just an artifact of like prohibition era thinking. In fact, the Treasury was the place to keep this office if what you were doing was importing OPM or importing heroin or importing morphine and levying a tariff on it as soon as it came into the country and then monitoring it by levying attacks at every stage in the process. So, diversion back in say 1935 or even 1955 was the consumption of heroin without the appropriate tax stamp. And one of the important moments in the book comes in 1968 when the Bureau of Narcotics is transferred over to the Department of Justice. And in some ways, a lot of the book is reciting the story of how and why that transfer happened because it's a transfer of tremendous significance. When the Bureau of Narcotics lives in the Department of Treasury, whatever else is going on, and there's a lot going on, including the very moralistic campaign waged against a list of narcotics used by the head of the Bureau of Narcotics, you know, whatever else is going on, when the office is embedded in the Department of Treasury, you're still holding on to this conceit that drugs are a trade and you're going to tax that trade and you're going to levy tariffs on that trade to discipline it and kind of have it keep the shape that you want. When it moves over to the Department of Justice, what you're essentially saying is drugs are a crime and I'm going to try to catch the criminal. Could you tell us, I'm just very briefly, and again this was news to me, what sort of drugs were illegal in say 1935? That is that there were actual criminal penalties for their production distribution and use. Yeah, I mean, so the way to think about it is how did you get your heroin? I mean we don't have, I guess the closest you could come is marijuana after the 1937 marijuana tax campaign act, which is modeled very closely on the Harrison Narcotic Act with the exception being that nobody pretended that there were medicinal uses to marijuana at that time, which again, this all strikes us as very strange, you know, to the modern ear because today we're in the midst of a national conversation which regularly assigns medical value to marijuana and looks at heroin like it's a devil, you know what I'm saying? So it's in 1937, it was actually the opposite, where heroin was viewed as this is a medicine and it can be diverted into illicit channels and if you're consuming heroin without the appropriate tax stamp or importantly enough if you're a doctor dealing out heroin for illicit or what the government judges to be illicit reasons, then you can be threatened with the loss of your license. But actually having a marijuana cigarette in your hand, which had no medicinal value in the eyes of the government, was more damning like say in 1948 than having heroin, you know. So at that point what, I mean, again this is very strange to the modern ear, but already because of some very important regulations that the legal, the legal nations put in in the 1930s before it was dissolved as an institution, it used to be that most of the illicit trade in actual narcotics and I'm using the real term there, not the government's definition of narcotics. Most of the illicit trade in narcotics was performed by the drug companies making the medicine and what they would do was over produce and to be quite honest with you it would be astonishing for me to learn that the same thing wasn't taking place with Oxycontin today. So what they would do is over produce and they would just say well wherever it goes it goes and I'm going to sell this much on the illicit channel but the rest will just go where it goes and the money that I make I will use to lower my price on my illicit product and become a more competitive pharmaceutical company. So the legal nations instituted these regulations designed to sever the illicit and illicit trade in narcotics and they were very successful, maybe too successful because as a result and as other historians have discussed the illicit trade in narcotics went further and deeper underground and actually became the illicit production of narcotics. It was no longer the case that by 1955 at least it was no longer the case that the heroin reaching the shores of the United States had at one point been illicit heroin. By 1955 and certainly by 1965 you're talking about a drug that had started out being criminal from the very get-go. So bring us into the modern era I guess that's when does the classical era end that is and let me say this it would be correct to characterize the way in which the United States controlled what we think of today as illicit drugs through taxation and sort of regulation of that kind fiscal measures. Yes it would be I mean but it's just technically true and so you know it was a very transparent but and really kind of farcical political theater that would take place if you were arrested for instance with marijuana before the 1970 controlled substances act which is the answer to your question that's when it ends and I guess you know just stepping back and taking a look at my book and what is designed to do the classical era of narcotics regulation has been portrayed in the historiography thus far has been portrayed in I don't want to say simplified but has been portrayed as being about only one story which is Harry Ansonner's you know pursuit of the addicts and I guess Michael is trying to say as true as that story is and it is true there's a lot of other things going on things going on with the US state that influence the nature of the controlled substances act of 1970 so prior to that if you were busted with a joint you know the I think I don't think they did this obviously for every arrest but if you were busted with at least a significant amount of marijuana the IRS would actually come out and the agents hated this and assess you with a taxi in addition to the criminal penalties that were levied against you because you were in possession of unstamped or you know improper marijuana the IRS would come out and slap you with a taxi and they needed doing it because it was a taxi that they basically never collected you know I mean if you were arrested you had bigger problems and so it was this kind of political charade that Tim and he very finally you know called the government on in in his successful challenge to the Supreme Court but yes it was definitely we tax drugs that is how we regulate a drug but it was the only I mean I guess the thing I'm getting to is in 1953 right I go by smack legally right okay so if you wanted to get an illicit hit of heroin so if you wanted to get a hit of heroin because of your own dependence or your own recreational I just want to use it yeah that you would have two options one would be to go to a doctor who you knew dispensed it and many people did this many many people did this and much of the bureaus I shouldn't say much because here I am saying that really tried to limit the amount of enforcement he invested in this particular part of his policy portfolio or his enforcement portfolio but the way that many people got illicit narcotics is by going to the doctor and getting a prescription for them and frankly that's how a lot of people get off the cotton today Marshall like that that's that's the best comparison to draw how do people get off the cotton today some of them go on a street corner and they get a dose by dose you know and they pay an illicit price for it but not almost right so they pay a price for the solicit drug some of them go to doctors who they know to be sure dispensing that's how it was doctor shopping yeah yep that's how it was that's what heroin was in this country so go to a doctor what was the other option by it on the street corner right but I guess the thing I understand is that we use the word illicit but if we're regulating it by means of taxation it seems to me that you just be able to sell it I mean cigarettes for example regulated by taxation you just sell them they're not it's not illegal to smoke cigarettes you just sell them there's a tax on them that's how we control them okay so the Harrison Narcotic Act maybe this will be the logical distinction we're searching for here the Harrison Narcotic Act said that you can only get heroin by prescription only it basically invented this category of prescription only that that food and drug administration later added to an important way in the 1950s and also a story I addressed in my book it's a very important story but you needed a prescription from a doctor in order to obtain heroin legally right so if you were found with heroin and you didn't have prescription for it then you were criminally liable you just didn't have to pay a tax exactly yes you are if you were found with un-stamped heroin and this the story in my book tells us that how did we get to that point how is it that Ann Flinger who is the head of the Bureau of Narcotics for a very long time he had a very long tenure how is it that he was able to successfully get in people's face and you know in the face of Congress and say actually instead of just the tax we should be flagging these people with criminal penalties and actually over time let's make those criminal penalties more severe that's a very important story and and that kind of graduating penalty scheme I think shouldn't be treated as linear because there are important choices at every point and there are also treatment advocates really at every point so his his drive in a sense to criminalize possession and and importantly to have possession as proof of a crime that's remarkable you know if I came to where you are Marshall and I stole your car and I had your car the police could come and arrest me and the possession of your car would certainly be very strong circumstantial evidence against me but they would still have to make a case they would still have to make a case about how I got that Ann Flinger was able to successfully persuade us Congress that actually just possession of heroin should be proof of a crime and that's why police and our criminal justice system in a sense gravitate towards so many drug charges because it's it's an easier match for them you know if you're if you have heroin I don't have to make any sort of case against you you have the heroin well so let's tell that story how did uh how did how did these what were really controlled substances that's our modern terminology for them how did these controlled substances become criminalized how did he convince the legislators and and police officers throughout the nation that we should really be going after these people well they were as you can imagine there were different reasons why and one very important reason is because he was able to persuade the u.s. congress and the u.s. public that addiction um had a certain profile to it addiction meant by and large um city residents who were minorities and that's who I'm going to trace now that was not true and and as one of the interesting things that I think my book hopefully tries to get at is how this regime of increasing criminal punishment coexisted alongside a regime that was refusing to regulate um other newer forms of synthetic drugs and those two things are taking place and unfolding at the very same time and they bear a relationship to each other when amphetamines and barbituates come on the scene the government's refusal to regulate them in an meaningful way or attach criminal penalties such as the ones we're talking about is just as important as it's scheme to ratchet up criminal penalties so what happens in the post-war years is that the country experiences um let's say several waves of concern over drugs and in the united states congress there are political officials especially from the south who are deeply vested in um kind of positing this image of of black criminality and illicit drug use is one very key component to that social construction of black criminality and harry aunt linger not only plays into this he helps to sustain it um and this whole idea that illicit drug use is confined to the city and it's confined to racial minorities in the city is it is not just present in discussions about how and why we should ratchet up penalties for on the stam terror line or things like that it's it's a causal factor in in and of itself i mean that's just how prevalent it is that they're relying on on these stereotypes at the very same time um the government is ratcheting up criminal penalties for heroin because of other sorts of ideas that are around at the time and very influential at the time harry answering our um successfully portrayed heroin addiction as contagious for instance and the whole idea of contagion is something that um not just u_s_ historians but historians have been paying paying more and more attention to not just about communicable like diseases but other things that that get i um portrayed as being contagious like social contagion um so this whole idea of contagion is very important in the 1950s when harry answer comes before the u_s_ congressons as well it's important to throw this certain specific set of people in jail because they're contagious and addiction is contagious and it has a remarkable um kind of similarity really to um rhetoric about the soviet union and containment like it's important to just sequester this quarantine it and and keep it where it is um in you know and it's very very militant so that is also influential alongside race as also influential in um the congress ratcheting up criminal penalties but one thing that i think my book gets that that really other people haven't looked at at all is the way in which this specific depiction of drugs as being the an evil cabal the way in which that frees the business interests and commercial interests of this country to pursue trade abroad and at home relatively free of government interference i try to tell the story of the u_s_ customs bureau throughout the 1950s alongside the u_s_ bureau of narcotics because i think it's very interesting the u_s_ customs bureau has a very i would say realistic appraisal of what drug what the drug trade is and their approach to it is that it's it's everywhere it's a part of trade the more trade we have the more drugs we have and the best thing that you can do um in order to check this trade and you know keep it at least the illicit components of it keep it um low as low as possible is to perform routine inspections well this is something that business interests in this country find to be in a mess side it will slow them down it's just yet another bureaucratic step so the the whole portrayal or depiction of the drug trade and the criminalization of it is being evil you know fairs u_s_ business interests of these kinds of these kind of routine interference or checks um and i think i think that's an interesting part of the story and and you know i don't know that anyone's ever talked about that um before so i'm very happy to put that business angle so to speak or that more materialist interpretation right but just to interrupt you for a second the businesses weren't growing marijuana i'm sorry but just to interrupt you for a second the businesses weren't growing marijuana no they weren't growing in this is what marijuana trade um is described as an importation trade for the purposes of the marijuana tax act but not even congress believes that you know they think it's you know there are some great moments in some testimony in the early nineteen fifties when harry and singer tries to explain his refusal to um regulate amphetamines and barbituates by pointing to the fact that they're not international trade and hail boggs is a temple neither is marijuana come on you know this is grown domestically you know it's grown throughout the united states so you're perfectly right you know this this is not um this bearing the business interest of interference in international trade is not to do with marijuana mm-hmm let's see yeah let's see hmm so then if i understand you correctly what you're saying is that um harry and slinger and and his cohort were very interested well let me just ask the question directly okay now a naive i guess naive um uh historian like me would simply say that harry and slinger recognized that illicit drugs cost the united states an enormous amount every year in terms of lost tax revenue in terms of lost productivity in terms of lots of things and they also destroyed families and people and that was the primary reason why he wanted to stop the illicit drug trade yeah i mean i don't think that that's naive um i think the problem that you encounter is that harry and slinger um ran an extremely corrupt force to do it and the internal and i hope that my book gets at some of this the internal discussion almost invalidate um the public pronounce announcements that harry and slinger's making for instance in the 1950s he said he sits there and says well i have an addict role of 60 000 addicts you know which is i mean it's not hard to hear the kind of mccarcy i tones to harry and slinger's you know public pronouncements he survived an addict role i have the names of every addict on on this role and you know the new york office which for many years was the most important of the bureau of narcotic his district offices you know wrote to harry and slinger says you know we chose this addict role and it's ridiculous and most people on it don't even use drugs and you know a lot of people we know who use drugs aren't on it and so these kind of discrepancies that harry and slinger was well aware of the disconnect so to speak between his public pronouncements um regarding drugs and and obviously you know it's not difficult to have sympathy with pronouncements like addiction ruined lives and ruined families and can ruin communities that's something that sadly we see lived out on a day to day basis um in our own world today so i mean obviously one can have sympathy but his racially charged um the picture of that use which he knew to be at variance with the actual um you know community of illicit drug users and his own forces in confidence and corruption i think invites skepticism regarding his ultimate purposes so in what we were uh the what his forces corrupted i'm sorry in what way were his forces corrupted they were complicit in the illicit drug trade mm-hmm yeah they took money you know this is this is an end that i try to argue and i very much believe that this is a problem that's endemic to narcotics enforcement mm-hmm i see um yeah it's difficult to separate those things out and i you know you you do you do a good job of it in the book uh and i did recognize the mmm i don't know if i'd call it McCarthyite but i did recognize some of the uh some of the the i guess loaded language that you found at that time but i guess the thing that to me you know is is that uh that this wasn't real problem then and yeah i guess i'm a McCarthyite um marshal i'm just referring to this whole thing of i have the names and i have a list of the people who are doing this incredibly nefarious thing that that has a definite resonance and connection to the language of joseph McCarthy and this whole you know the whole pursuit of communist like i have names and i have a list right sure yeah sure that's right so how did law enforcement um i'm just interested to know this how does law enforcement officials react to the criminalization of all these things because it seems to really up their workload okay so this is one of the stories i really love telling and this is to me um one of the reasons why it's important to write a book uh like the book i wrote because this story will get lost in other kinds of narrative it's not easy to persuade local law enforcement or pursue drugs no sir it's not you know it's not easy and actually marshal at some point if you want to say more about your own work with adequate you very interested to hear about that but um the law enforcement in this country used to have a vice squad and one of the things i say is actually we're dealing with um major police departments that have in effect been transformed into you know the whole thing has been transformed into vice squads with a primary interest in narcotics and the transition between that world the transition between okay we have a huge police department only one section of which is responsible for drug enforcement to in fact we have a huge police department that is primarily focused on drug enforcement is not easy and it's not uncontested so i try to trace the story of how and why drug and the drug enforcement portfolio expanded into what we now know it to be and um so one of the things again that i think gets lost in other narratives is that in 1955 your average cop you know especially a cop who was not in New York City probably couldn't even recognize heroin use when he thought you know it wasn't necessarily on the street and it wasn't it wasn't something that he was being trained to police right so what the cops in most urban police departments used to do was call the vice squad and the vice squad if they saw any suspicious activity the vice squad would come in and they would typically have extremely corrupt officers who had some sort of relationship to the drug dealer in the first place and the the standing agreement between the two is and i get into this here in washington DC was that the you know the dealer would hand over certain small time you know street dealers in exchange for being left alone and the dealer would also hand over money to the police so we have the situation and by the end of my story um we have police departments who have basically signed agreements and that's actually what they are they're signed agreements with the newly created drug enforcement agency to take over street level policing from the Bureau of Narcotics and the Bureau of Narcotics now the DEA says okay now we're going to focus on the big turkeys and the international dealing dealings and you the urban police department or whatever will take over will take over when it comes to street level enforcement of narcotics and one of the things that I argue one of the reasons why we have that transition is because police are desperately searching for new ways and new tools to retain the kind of discretion that they were accustomed to having and that discretion came under assault um as a result of police professionalism kind of emerging from within the ranks of police and civil rights reform from outside of it and those two forces you know it used to be that um in Washington DC and other urban centers there were tremendous number of arrests every year for public drunkenness right and the Supreme Court invalidates that in 1956 and you can no longer arrest for public drunkenness you just can't and there were arrests in in my city in Washington DC for things like loitering these are incredibly impressed incredible discretionary tools you know the police are making all kinds of decisions about who they want to arrest for what um you're on arresting you for just loitering which means I just don't want you standing here you know so these things get taken away from police because they're recognized correctly as um you know instruments of social control and in their play incomes the tools of the drug enforcement um you could be arrested for possession of heroin you could be arrested if you were in the house well somebody else had heroin you could be arrested on a street corner when you're near heroin you know and these tools are not a perfect fit from the amount of discretion that police forms had but by and large they take over and the amount of arrests that police start making for narcotics offenses skyrockets in 1969 1970 and then thereafter and people always say to me well isn't that because drugs are skyrocketing as well and of course that is true especially because of the Vietnam War there's an influx of very pure heroin into this country because of a new Southeast Asian connection and a golden triangle but that those arrest rates never go back down again you know even as we cycle through you know we have peaks and crusts and then we have troughs in drug availability and pricing and so forth the arrest rate stays the same and in the mid-1980s when Ronald Reagan collects all of these tools and asserts them with new force and vigor they go skyrocketing up so did you want to say more about the kind of work that yeah I do in just a second but I have a couple more questions one of them is so we should really so this is a big moment 1971 Richard Dixon declares war on drugs war on drugs why does he do that well there were several forces influencing him um you know over the weekend I took part in the discussion and um in between commercial breaks that the people are on the table were so eager to establish Richard Dixon's um bona fides as as a reformer as a legitimate reformer because as president although he declared a war on drugs um he he spent more much more on treatment than he did on actual enforcement um and and I you know I participate in that let's say acknowledgement of Nixon's um priorities but I also quibble with it a little bit because he actually did a lot of things to you know give us this world that we have today including both during the DEA etc etc but in any event one of the things that was influencing him most um was his commitment to treatment which in turn was a commitment that came from all of the coverage of US soldiers in South Vietnam and the problems with Maryland there and there's a longstanding commitment on the part of the federal government to care for disabled soldiers when they come home and this is you know truly the one of the country's oldest commitment and soldiers were coming home with heroin addiction that was really publicized and according to some scholars greatly sensationalized um and it because of that Nixon made all kinds of investments in treatment um because he had to you know they're he had to explain or he had to embrace um US soldiers heroin addiction which you know that kind of addiction sat uneasily next to the kinds of addiction that Harry Anselinger had talked about throughout the 1950s and 60s as morally dubious people here we have US soldiers coming home um you know they are the nation's youngest you know resource we cherish them they're coming home they have heroin addiction so Nixon actually supported all kinds of treatment initiatives in Washington DC including methadone maintenance clinics in a hope that they would be kind of testing grounds or proving grounds if you will for how to deal with um heroin addiction um among soldiers in south US soldiers in South Vietnam so that was one very big influence on um Nixon's decision to clear a war on drugs in 1971 another um and this is what I would tell the people who are on the table over the weekend if I had had the time another very big um influence is just a sheer political calculation you know that Nixon was um convinced that the law and order rhetoric which he um espoused and repeated often with the key way in which he was able to recruit especially white ethnics to his so-called silent majority you know to entice voters who had previously been part of the democratic party coalition um since the era of the new deal to entice them over to um vote for um to vote for a republican so there is that there is also the case that you know drugs are becoming you know the level of street crime or property crime committed for drugs from 1969 to 1971 is is something that needs to be just taken at face value as one reason why president Nixon would declare a war on drugs the perception is especially within the cities that this is a problem that's gotten out of hand and it's taking too much of a toll on the fabric of our everyday life um and so that's another reason um why Nixon would declare a war on drugs but in fact prior to his declaration he had made important moves um including the controlled substances act that signaled he was aware of um i would say the state building opportunities um that transferring and consolidating the drug policy portfolio represented mm-hmm so i don't remember that i was so i was just much too young for it but i remember it's aftermath uh of the of the war on drugs and of course it's still with us today so um let me switch gears just a little bit i want to read one sentence from the preface to your book which i quite like uh and it is this um this history implicitly suggests and i explicitly argue that the drug war quote-unquote is not the only or best way to handle drugs i want to note the outset however that the paramount virtue of alternative schemes is merely that they are less bad although superior to a militant drug war legalization and decolonization are far more worthy goals in their own right so it might understand then that you support our far from worthy goals our far is that what i said yes but you said no you said far more and i did far from worthy goals limited i'm sorry i think i think it's so ever more yeah uh right i think that yeah that's my meaning right our far from worthy goals in their own right i didn't know that anyway far from worthy goals in their own right legalization decriminalization so um legalization into criminalization and here's where i will talk a little bit about my experience so uh it might understand from this that you you you you in favor you favor something like this you think that you sort of uh you know on a an affair and balance the counting um i can't believe i used that phrase that the uh yet historian would say you know this war on drug things just now working and uh we should go back to kind of a different sort of regulation of drugs is that correct yeah okay okay um i guess one question i have and this is one that i i've uh had for a long time and i asked people that are in favor of uh decriminalization legalization is it have we already done this and it's turned out pretty disastrously and it's with alcohol i mean yeah that's yeah i mean 30 million americans are alcoholics i hope you noticed marshal that um in the book when i bring up alcohol it's um you know it's funny when people read it they think oh you know it's just like alcohol so everything's okay you know or actually the right and it's telling them what i'm bringing it up is more like it's just like alcohol and hence present some serious yeah issue i mean yeah the numbers on alcohol are pretty pretty striking you know i mean like one in 15 people that ever pick up a drink comes in alcoholic something in 20 or 30 million americans are addicted to alcoholic cost us trillions of dollars every year um you know treatment alone costs us that and not to mention the destruction families and so on and so forth you know and this is this is a very well regulated industry uh you know you just stamps on it yeah although less so now i i don't know if you if you're you caught the uh washing a monthly article about the growing strengths of the distributors in the u.s. congress and how this was like maybe washington monthly from two or three months ago um but but what we think of as a well regulated alcohol industry and i'm sorry to interrupt and i'm going to address the larger points that you're bringing up but what we think of as a well regulated alcohol industry which by the way took a long time um you know the story of the repeal of prohibition and um and and the well regulated alcohol industry that we supposedly have today that's that's an interesting story in and of itself um you know it didn't just happen that we snapped our fingers and all these people came out of their you know illegal skills and said i can probably legal now it's true you know that's a very complex then contested story in its own right and not you know i'd love it if somebody wrote that story i refer to it but i was writing a different book anyway our our very well regulated um alcohol industry is starting to look a little bit more like britain where a very few powerful alcohol companies control the distribution train and are looking to let i mean to put it simply if not crudely just add more alcohol to the distribution networks and and you know so actually that's an that's an issue that has always warranted our attention alcohol is an issue that's always warranted our attention and warrants it even more right now just for very specific political reasons but you know you're right i mean that alcohol presents the alcohol is the drug that most people commit a crime while under the influence of and most people commit a crime in order to get you know people think oh it's heroin or something else it's not alcohol and it's completely legal substance so i have a great sympathy for you or i think mark climate i think a lot of people have drawn attention um to you know alcohol is not anything to shrug off in fact you know out boosting his his criminologist um at quantity melon he's been in the field for a very long time and i hope he won't mind me saying that he was um he told me a story when in the 1980s he went before the u_s_ sentencing commission to testify against the sentencing disparity um between crack um and cocaine so that the the infamous hundred-to-one uh disparity that president alwahma only very recently put an end to and reduced it down to 16 to 1 so he appeared before the u_s_ sentencing commission in the late 1980s when the crack epidemic was at its most fierce and the public um the public perception of crack um as nefarious as crack is as a drug the public perception of crack and the story is being told about it were even you know worse than than the reality of what was taking place on the street so it was politically not a moment when you wanted to descend so to speak crack and so so albums being appeared um before the u_s_ sentencing commission and he saw on the list of witnesses before him are all these doctors you know medical doctors and he thought man you know i'm dead i'm toast and you know what i have to say about the injustice of this disparity these doctors are going to come all before me and say you know tell these stories about crack babies remember that remember yeah so actually what he found was the doctors came before him and got up and said yes um a pregnant woman who takes uh crack can damage her fetus but that's nothing compared to what a pregnant woman does you know the damage that a pregnant woman can do to her fetus by taking just cocaine and that is nothing compared to the damage that is done when a pregnant woman drinks alcohol and in fact alcohol was the most dangerous for a developing fetus so when you talk about the dangers of alcohol and i want everyone to know this about the book this book is not um endorsed by like normal or you know what i'm saying like this book is not a book if only think about the money you know it's gonna be great you know what i'm saying and i say something i'm a i think for practice maybe the introduction about this but you know this is not a book that's in search of better drugs you know what i mean like a lot of these drug reformers out there are just really in search of legal access and better drugs and and this is this book was written by an author who can even tolerate allergy medicine you know so it's um it really is for me marshal that that prohibition just doesn't make sense and you're not achieving the goals that you want to achieve and and i agree with you that the repeal of prohibition expanded the legal market share of alcohol meaning more adults participated in alcohol regularly and and that in turn exposed and and i'm not totally sure on the science here but i think it's safe to say that the the greater the experimentation the greater the risk risks of addiction are right so i think that you're really in a situation with the war on drugs where we're spending so so very very much money and wreaking so much damage especially in certain communities and achieving so so very little i mean it's all of those things at once that inclines me to say this is not the best way to go about this you know price and purity for every single drug except for marijuana um the prices have all of those indicators have gone in the war wrong direction since we started this war on drugs heroin is cheaper now and it's more pure and it's more available right cocaine is much cheaper now it's actually ridiculous how cheap cocaine is compared to before we started this war on drugs and people say to me you know enforcement supporters say to me that's because the sources of production have expanded and i say that that's because you've motivated the sources of production to expand because anytime you prohibit something you add to the profit margins you know people take tremendous risks in carrying contraband they make a lot of money doing this you know El Chapo you know Joaquin Guzman in um in Mexico it's very difficult to estimate his wealth because it's all earned in the underground economy but he Forbes you know puts him on the list of the world's wealthiest men that cannot be that cannot five dollar heroin and Guzman leading the world in wealth that cannot be the world that we want when it comes to illicit drug regulation so that that tone of um resignation if you will that you're picking up on in the preface is is where i sit on this issue politically and emotionally it's it's not a it's not a drugs are great and you know there are there are people out there who are like you know what addiction itself is just a social construction and and i'm not one of those people i think it's i think that Alfred Lindesmith who's a longtime addiction researcher you're probably familiar with him um he argued a very long time ago that addiction is informed by certain contextual um variables and so i mean i guess in that sense you can call addiction a social construction but these people who almost seem to shrug it off that that my book isn't there you know my book won't help them but say in their fight you know yeah well that's all very wise i think i mean when i think about um how to best let's say uh well there's a kind of analogy between what people say about guns and what people say about drugs and you know about guns people say you know we should limit guns in this way in that way um and they constantly bring up people who go into schools and shoot kids right far in a way the greatest number of fatalities that are the result of gun violence or suicides far in a way and so you know if our if we want to put our money in the sort of most structured place we should try to prevent people from committing suicide with guns um and i think similarly you know uh alcohol is so much more damaging than any other drug that it's a dwarfs every other drug and we don't pay pretty much any attention to it well that's really not true we do pay attention to it and i know that we do but i agree not enough and i one of the things when i thought that i just want to be clear about what i endorse um i do endorse the legalization of marijuana which is to say legal production legal sale legal distribution and taxation so the other drugs um i only support decriminalization and i support internationally moving the pursuit of illicit drug production from the tools of enforcement over to the tools of trade and there are specific things that i mean by that which have to do with um signing trade agreements possibly through the WTO and the Department of Commerce in this country that will help us influence the availability price and potency of these drugs which is ostensibly what we're trying to do with the gun and the badge right now but we're driving those indicators in exactly the wrong direction right so this is not a well it's fine you know let's let's go by hell and in the store kind of book this is a book about how can we do this better and maybe looking at our past when we did approach this problem in a very different way we'll help us think about how we can how we can think about this how we can move forward more productively and in in a cost-benefit way i mean if you did a cost-benefit analysis of our drug war then a policy of you know passing out lollipops and holding hands would be this you know i mean that's how much we're spending right now and that's how much it cost us this drug war right now but one of the things i do say and i want to just want to bring this to your attention because you're an advocate when it comes to raising awareness of the dangers of alcohol i just think our whole you know what kills more people than gun violence by the way our traffic has a lot more i mean so many words and a lot more i mean i would i would like to see more attention right now in colorado in washington there's questions about how do you test when somebody's behind the wheel if they're high in marijuana those are important questions and stuff but i would like to see regardless of the drug i don't care if it's actually cotton i don't care if you have a prescription for it why are you driving you know what i mean i would like to see the whole driving questions separated out and considered on its own merits whatever it is you're under the influence of whether it's alcohol whether it's some listed um drug that you have a prescription for or an illicit use of oxycontin or whatever you know i just think that the traffic thing needs to be separated out and considered on its own merits regardless of whether something's criminal or not criminal mm-hmm yeah um i guess the thing that gives me pause when people say that drugs that is not alcohol should be decriminalized and um legalized is again this historical awareness that we have a natural experiment that we performed with one such drug alcohol and it had not turned out well at least in my mind and uh although it could be entirely different i don't know if a middle class people would go out and do smack if they could buy it at the 7-11 uh maybe they would maybe they wouldn't i don't know but uh i do know a lot of people yeah i wouldn't want that either yeah right and and i i don't think any of us want that but one thing i am aware of it again this has to do with some of the work that i do with these people is that they are all aware that these things are bad news and um you know we've gotten to the point in the United States where alcohol is just not really considered even getting blind drunk is not really considered a bad thing i don't know yeah you're you're preaching the choir here i can't tell you how many times i've had this conversation especially with young students yeah it's it's just seems to me we've gone a little bit too far in the direction you see you know that these are these are the constitution does not give you a uh a right to get effed up as far as well and it doesn't it doesn't deprive you of one either except insofar as you represent a public safety threat to other but but the constitution shouldn't be our guiding principle for how we conduct ourselves in our daily lives just because we're free to do something i mean we should do it yeah and i it's a very sticky problem you know i mean i it is a very sticky i was very little i'm glad we're having this conversation we're so i'm glad that you picked out my book because it's refreshing to talk to somebody who has things to say about alcohol use today um because you know again on this panel that i was on over the weekend yeah the people drew a comparison to prohibition um and said you know that didn't work so you know why do we still have a drug war and i actually am sympathetic to that i don't think that prohibition um produced you know but but i am also you know emotionally and i would say politically sympathetic to the points that you're making which is addiction is nothing to shrug off and actually any substance use disorder any substance use disorder is nothing to shrug off and it's nothing to treat lightly and these movies like these this movie that i haven't seen it and probably you haven't either but this movie called like the hangover that's about people can't remember where they were and what they've done that's not okay no it's not okay and that's not a normal amount i mean the truth is just to put my own substance use out on the table the truth is sometimes i do have two glasses of wine you know and like sometimes i have more than i should but it's never the case that i don't remember where i've been you know what i mean it and to valorize that in our popular culture is to do damage i you're talking to the you preaching the choir on that one more yeah i don't know how to you know i don't know that this is such a complicated question on the one hand you want people to be free i'm a big advocate of liberty on the other hand you don't want people killing themselves and then on the third hand as they say you certainly don't want them going and messing other people's lives up when they're uh uh inebriated or stoned or whatever they are and uh you know how you um or just the cost of addiction i just don't know you know i just don't know yeah i don't know what you probably yeah i know very well i don't i don't know i don't know exactly what to do about any of it the thing one thing i would say though is that i think it is good that there is now this general perception that things like heroin are bad you know and even the attics know it's bad i mean when the people i work with like heroin is a bad thing nobody should do it the thing is my a martial so it's criminally what i think what you're saying is when something's criminal it adds to the stigma and that's good the thing is we're in the middle of an overdose epidemic right now it's an epidemic a hundred people dying a day this is one of the most unheralded epidemics on the pages in the newspaper i've ever seen and that epidemic is at the hands of licit narcotic synthetic narcotic drugs like oxycontin right so these you know stigma or no stigma right these drugs are these drugs are doing their damage and there's no reason to uh perpetuate this math and justice called the drug war you know when we have other drugs doing all kinds of damage i mean we should be having a conversation about substance use and disorder in my opinion that conversations should have nothing to do with throwing people in jail just because they're on drugs mm-hmm yeah i think they should be thrown into treatment but that's just me and i don't again that's a sticky thing too that you know a lot of us deal with it because because in some cases the courts will mandate people to go to treatment of various kinds and you know the civil liberties people don't like that particularly and well and they don't like health care reform universally either and and the affordable care act the president of llama um path successfully represents one of the greatest opportunities to expand treatment for substance use disorders that i've ever seen and i don't know why it's not being talked about before it represents an opportunity in two respects one is it mandates health court health care cost cutting um and that the system in a sense as a system has to achieve these certain savings well untreated addiction to anything alcohol or anything untreated addiction costs the system twenty percent more than treated addiction the number one i mean imagine you as somebody who works um in the arena of alcohol use independence you know how many addicts are on this country have various drives so imagine the savings that could be achieved if we moved over to a world if the medical profession and the health care industry underwent a professional renaissance much in the same way as they did when it came to mental illness and depression in the 1990s if we had a similar renaissance in the medical care profession in the health care industry when it comes to substance use disorders that would achieve savings the second way in which the affordable care act represents an opportunity um for treatment advocates like you or like me is that the health the affordable care act allows states to expand medicaid now initially that was mandatory that states would have to expand the categories of those who are eligible but the supreme court overturned that particular component of the affordable care act and i don't think that that's gotten enough attention because that was actually an important part but in any event in those states that actually voluntarily opt to expand medicaid um to low wage income earners that in and of itself represents a new opportunity to treat different substance use disorders because for the first time under the affordable care act substance use disorders and addiction will be defined as a mental illness and must be covered and you cannot be turned down for a pre-existing condition under the um affordable care act so we are we are at the we are at the let's say the beginning of what i hope will be new attention new kinds of institutional attention to treatment and the importance of treatment the availability of treatment and also the sophistication of treatment because right now um treatment tests incredibly well you know when measured against other options because untreated addiction obviously isn't effective and it is so costly so we're still not at a moment when we know well what kinds of treatment programs work work for whom and when i mean obviously there are there are good studies going forward about people who are dual diagnosed so people who have um substance use disorders but also have a serious mental illness that um residential treatment programs work well for them and close monitoring works well for them i mean there are basic things but you know we still could know more and we still should know more and so i don't i don't know why we're not talking about it i don't know why the political conversation hasn't moved in this direction of the affordable care act represents an incredibly incredible opportunity to reawaken and we stimulate the interest and availability of treatment in this country hallelujah testify uh no i agree with all of that so we've taken up a lot of your time too much of your time we've been talking with uh Kathleen fredell about her book the drug wars in america 1940 to 1973 let me close the interview Kathleen with a uh our traditional final question on uh new books in history uh and that is what are you working on now oh um thank you for asking that right now um i've just finished a project proposal on the future of retirement um which will be a history of um certain legislative changes in the late 1970s to the way in which retirement was structured in this country and different financial vehicles that were um favored over and above but say social security and so really the political uh the political impetus of the book if you will is why people in my generation um and younger really uh at this point in our at this point in our political um conversation have no retirement to look forward to i've got a tent that's what i have something really good that's really what the book is about so the future of retirement and why why it has no future and what we can do to change that yeah well um uh good luck on that project and i hope we can have you on again uh again um marshal poh the editor-in-chief of the new books network and you've been listening to Kathleen fredell talk about her book the drug wars in america 1940 to 1973 i want to thank everyone for listening but i especially want to thank Kathleen for being on the show today thank you all right bye bye thank you you [BLANK_AUDIO]