Federal Narcotics Laws and the War on Drugs

Money Down a Rat Hole

Thomas C Rowe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135798758
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Droit
• Subtopic: Théorie et pratique du droit

We're losing the war on drugsbut the fight isn't over yetFederal Narcotics Laws and the War on Drugs examines our current anti-drug programs and policies, explains why they have failed, and presents a plan to fix them. Author Thomas C. Rowe, who has been educating college students on recreational drug use for nearly 30 years, exposes the truth about anti-drug programs he believes were conceived in ignorance of the drugs themselves and motivated by racial/cultural bias. This powerful book advocates a shift in federal spending to move funds away from the failed elements of the war on drugs toward policies with a more realistic chance to succeedthe drug courts, education, and effective treatment. Common myths and misconceptions about drugs have produced anti-drug programs that don't work, won't work, and waste millions of dollars. Federal Narcotics Laws and the War on Drugs looks at howand whythis has happened and what can be done to correct it. The book is divided into How did we get into this mess? which details the history of anti-narcotic legislation, how drug agencies evolved, and the role played by Harry Anslinger, Commissioner of the United States Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962; What works and what doesn't work, which looks at the failure of interdiction efforts and the negative consequences that have resulted with a particular focus on the problems of prisons balanced against the drug court system; and a third section that serves as an overview of various recreational drugs, considers arguments for and against drug legalization, and offers suggestions for more effective methods than our current system allows.Federal Narcotics Laws and the War on Drugs also examines:

• the creation of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics
  
• current regulations and structures
  
• current federal sentencing guidelines
  
• current state of the courts and the prison system
  
• mandatory sentencing and what judges think
  
• interdiction for heroin, cocaine and crack cocaine, and marijuana
  
• early education efforts
  
• the DARE program
  
• drug use trends
  
• drug treatment models
  
• the debate over legalization

Federal Narcotics Laws and the War on Drugs also includes several appendices of federal budget figures, cocaine and heroin purity and price, and federal bureau of prisons statistics. This unique book is required reading for anyone concerned about the drug problem in the United States and what isand isn'tbeing done to correct it.

Chapter 1

Narcotics and Narcotic Regulations to 1937

THE HISTORY OF OPIATES

Opium and the opiates—natural, semisynthetic, and fully synthetic— compose a class of drugs that are perhaps the most-often misunderstood by the general public. Opium itself is the dried sap from the seed pod of the Papaver somniferum plant. This substance has been known for 6,000 years or more and has been widely used in medicine and as a recreational substance since the time of the ancient Greeks (see Faupel, Horowitz, and Weaver, 2004, Chapter 2, for a history). In terms of medicine, no class of drug has been more useful than the opiates. The natural opiates include opium itself and tinctures of opium (such as paregoric or laudenum), morphine, and codeine. Other opiates include heroin, a semisynthetic opiate made by adding two acetyl groups to morphine, and fully synthetic opiates, which make up a very long list indeed. They include hydrocodone, propoxyphene, methadone, and the fentanyls.

Opiates have several properties that make them invaluable in medicine. Substitutes exist for these but, realistically, nothing works better or is less damaging than the opiates. Opiates have three characteristics that make them important to the medical field. First, they are analgesics. They are wonderful pain killers, and tend to operate on dull pain better than on sharp pains. They work to reduce the sensory input of pain in the brain, and also operate on the emotional response to pain, making it easier to tolerate. A second property is that they are antitussive, meaning they reduce coughing. Third, they operate directly on the intestinal wall to reduce peristaltic activity (rhythmic muscle contractions), making them great treatments for diarrhea.

Unfortunately, the opiates are also addictive drugs. They induce a physiological response to their use, which eventually produces a physical dependence and, because they also dull the mind to difficult situations in life, a psychological craving. The craving for their use is the real problem. Addicts have a very difficult time not returning to opiates even after they have succeeded in overcoming a physical dependence because they experience intense psychological cravings for the drug effects. The same mechanism in the brain (activation of the mu receptor) that dulls pain produces these cravings.

Physically, the opiates are really quite safe. Unlike alcohol, for instance, opiates do not damage the body even if a person is on high doses for extended periods of time. They also do not do any damage to the brain. It is possible to take a lethal dose, but (contrary to what we might be led to believe from television shows or movies), for an addict it takes a massive dose to be lethal (Brecher, 1972). The death that ensues is gradual and is caused by respiratory depression. Many people believe that narcotics, such as heroin, will cause degeneration of the mind or mental faculties. This is simply not true. In contrast to alcohol, which will damage the brain and cause mental deterioration when abused for long periods of time, heroin and the other narcotics are among the most benign of drugs. However, for those who are addicted, cravings will influence lifestyle choices in potentially unhealthy ways.

In order to understand why the United States eventually passed federal regulations to restrict the opiates, it is helpful to look at their use in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States and in Europe. China also plays a major role.

Most opium in the nineteenth century was grown in India (which included modern Pakistan), Persia (Iran), and Afghanistan. The largest market for the processed opium was China. As early as 1729, China tried to ban opium (Hanson and Venturelli, 2001, p. 229) and at one time opium exports to China made up 14 percent of the official revenue of British India (Palfai and Jankiewicz, 1997, p. 371). Great Britain had a strong economic motivation to want the trade to China to proceed unimpeded. By 1839, China had realized opium addiction was a serious problem. The emperor Tao Kuang ordered strict enforcement of the regulation against importing opium. This caused a war with Great Britain. One result of this war, which ended in 1842, was the cession of Hong Kong to British control. Peace, of course, didn't last. The Second Opium War began in 1856 and ended in 1860 and was fought over Western demands that opium markets be expanded. The Chinese were again defeated. In 1858, by the Treaty of Tientsin, opium importation to China was formally legalized. Godfearing British traders claimed that the hardworking Chinese were entitled to “a harmless luxury”; the opium trade in less respectable hands would be taken over by “desperadoes, pirates and marauders” (BLTC Research, 2005). Soon, opium poured into China in unprecedented quantities. It has been estimated that, by the end of the nineteenth century, more than a quarter of the adult male Chinese population was addicted. Although the opium itself may not have been very damaging, the widespread use of it in opium dens posed the same kind of problems for China as would widespread alcoholism for the modern world. Imagine the effects on the economy alone if one-quarter of your country's workforce were alcoholic.

In the beginning of the twentieth century, the Boxer Rebellion in China began. Ostensibly, this was a movement to throw foreign influence out of China. Of course, the United States and Britain wanted China to be open to all foreign trade. Troops were once again sent to China and, once again, the Chinese were unable to compete with modern armed forces. The opium trade was saved for a third time. This meant the end, for all practical purposes, of the Ching dynasty. However, the dynamics had been changed. Public opinion in Europe and the United States turned against the policy of forcing China to accept an opium trade they clearly did not want, and by 1908 Britain and China had reached an agreement that allowed China to restrict opium imports.

Great Britain would probably be the closest comparison to the United States in terms of culture and, as in the rest of Europe, the use of opiates was widespread. Between 1831 and 1859, consumption of opium increased at a steady 2.4 percent per year (Booth, 1996, p. 51). In 1830, Great Britain imported 91,000 pounds of opium, and reexported 41,000 pounds, about half of it to the United States. By 1860, Great Britain was importing 280,000 pounds per year, and exporting 151,000 pounds.

In the United States, opium use also increased steadily throughout the nineteenth century. Some of this was due to increasing numbers of Chinese immigrants who brought their habit of smoking opium with them, and some was due to the American population joining them in their use of opium, but most of it was iatrogenic (inadvertently physician induced) (Perrine, 1996, p. 47). Physicians would prescribe opiates and many of the people who used them would become addicted. It is doubtful that the physicians themselves considered this a problem because, at that time, the opiates were not considered dangerous and few negative consequences existed for the addicted patient. Indeed, the largest group of white males who were using opiates were the physicians themselves. The most typical users, though, were white women, commonly middle class, who took patent medicines made of either opium or morphine in an alcohol base. These people may or may not have been addicted to opiates, and some of the use may have been for pseudomedical reasons, but it rarely interfered with their ability to function. Just as important, no social stigma was attached to such use.

It should not be concluded, however, that the widespread use of opium was without negative consequences. In fact, a number of social and medical ills were caused by the inappropriate use of opium. Interestingly, however, in both Great Britain and the United States, recreational use of the drug was relatively rare. Instead, it was used for both medical and pseudomedical reasons, and it was cheap and effective for the conditions treated.

Perhaps the most significant problem associated with opium and other narcotic substances was its use to control young children. Working mothers would use it to effectively treat diarrhea, various coughing ailments, such as whooping cough or tuberculosis, as well as cholera and other diseases of the gastrointestinal tract that were widespread; however, they also used it to calm demanding children, which allowed the mothers to sleep through the night. Inevitably, using opiates this way led to health consequences for the children. (It was also the drug of choice of mothers who euthanized unwanted children.)

This situation was what apparently prompted the 1868 Poisons and Pharmacy Act in Great Britain. This act restricted the sale of opiates by allowing only chemists (pharmacists) to sell it and required that every bottle carry a label stating the contents were a poison and displaying the skull-and-crossbones symbol. Initially, the act did what it was intended to do—by 1880 there was a significant drop in infant mortality in Great Britain. However, by 1900 it had climbed back to where it was prior to 1868 (Booth, 1996, pp. 64–65).

A distinction should also be made between those who used narcotics for medical reasons and those who used them recreationally. The latter made up a small group in the nineteenth century, and they even were the minority until nearly the middle of the twentieth century. Users who control their use and receive relatively pure drugs seldom have problems. Addicts who use impure narcotics and who do not control usage have profound problems. Consider this description of the addict who follows that spiraling path:

The first symptoms of physical decline are inflammation of the mouth and throat, gastric illnesses and circulatory disorders which can weaken limbs so far as to paralyze them… . Quite often because of their constant physical lassitude and moral turpitude, they do not bother to take any interest in personal hygiene …

As addiction deepens, the addict grows even more mentally and physically lethargic, lacking concentration and becoming forgetful. The body debilitates and becomes emaciated as appetite for food is lost: the voice grows hoarse, constipation develops with amenorrhoea and sterility in women or impotence in men.(Booth, 1996, pp. 88–89)

The author goes on to name a number of secondary complications that result from the miserable lifestyle that addicts typically lead. Two points are to be made here. The first is that although this occurred from time to time in the nineteenth century, it was quite rare among even those people who used morphine intravenously. The second is that most of the ills associated with narcotic addiction are due to lifestyle changes and are common to other forms of drug-addicted populations. That is, most of what the general public associates with narcotic addiction is a result of sociocultural factors, not that of narcotics per se. For example, if a typical person in the United States were asked to describe their image of a narcotic addict, they would probably describe someone with poor personal hygiene, slovenly in appearance, and as looking less than robust in health, and they would no doubt attribute all of this to the drug itself. It is unlikely they would describe a well-dressed person whose company might be desirable, and it is even less likely that someone such as their personal physician, a trusted professional, would come to mind as an example of a narcotic addict.

In contrast to this view, it is quite clear from a multitude of examples that if one has access to medically pure substances and sterile means of delivery, narcotics addiction is not debilitating either physically or mentally. Perhaps the most famous example of this is that of Dr. William Steart Halstead, one of the “big four” of Johns Hopkins University Hospital and a surgeon of impeccable reputation (sometimes called the father of modern surgery), who was a morphine addict from age thirty-four until his death at age seventy (Brecher, 1972).

One of the major players in the events that led to the eventual ban on narcotics in the United States was Hamilton Wright. In 1902 the United States acquired the Philippine Islands from Spain as part of the spoils of the Spanish-American War. Wright was named to the International Opium Commission and was a delegate to the Shanghai conference, which sought to control the international opium trade. This eventually led to the Hague Opium Conference in 1911. Wright was unalterably opposed to opium and morphine and used propaganda to promote his ideas. The tactics he employed may have even served as the model for Harry Anslinger and his famous campaign against marijuana, which produced such movie classics as Reefer Madness (1936).

At the start of the twentieth century, cocaine use was not considered much of a problem, at least when compared with opiates. Nevertheless, when the first legislation was proposed to limit opiates, this included cocaine. (This is how cocaine became defined as a narcotic by Congress.) Several good reasons exist for why cocaine should be a controlled drug. When abused, it produces a paranoid reaction. This reaction is indistinguishable from a psychotic state that results from a functional mental disorder, and it may take weeks to rectify itself after discontinuation of the drug. This aspect of cocaine was recognized as early as 1890, as was its addictive nature (Brecher, 1972, p. 275). Instead of depicting the true dangers of cocaine, to further his cause, Wright suggested that “negroes in the South were taking cocaine which put white women at risk, presumably from fornication” (Booth, 1996, p. 198). To understand why Wright chose this tactic, one must consider the culture of the time. To the public, this was both a believable and easily understood argument; understanding addiction was more difficult. When one cares more about a cause than the truth, factual presentations typically take a backseat.

In 1906 the Philippine Opium Investigation Committee reported its findings. These constitute Senate Document 265, read into the record of the first session of the 59th Congress. In terms of a useful document for Congress, 276 pages on the trafficking and use of opium in Japan, Formosa, China, Hong Kong, Saigon, Burma, Java, and the Philippines was probably too ambitious. The members of the committee were Edward Carter, Charles Brent, José Albert, and Carl Arnell. The Senate document called opium use “one of the gravest, if not the gravest, moral problems of the Orient.” It was rife with racial bias, which was not surprising for the white men of the committee and the era in which it was written. Consider this statement about China: “There are no outdoor games in China or, indeed, any games in a gambling sense. Absolute dullness and dreariness seem to prevail everywhere. As these two demons drive the Caucasian to alcohol, so they drive the Chinese to opium.” The report went on to state that the Chinese race may have reached a point in development at which the ability to be amused may have atrophied and disappeared (p. 29).

The committee recommended that only opium needed for medical purposes be brought into the Philippines, that the government should have a monopoly on its distribution, and that only males over twenty-one years of age should be given a license to use the drug (and that should be restricted to only those already addicted). They also said addicts should be given free hospital access for treatment for their condition. Foreigners who used opium illegally should be deported at the time of their third offense. Finally, the committee recommended that opium poppy cultivation should be made illegal in the Philippines.

The year 1909 brought the first federal regulation to narcotic drugs. President Theodore Roosevelt convened the Shanghai Opium Commission ostensibly in order to aid the Chinese Empire in dealing with their opium problem. To some degree, it appears to be political window dressing. The act was debated and passed as Public Law 221 while the Shanghai Commission was in session in February 1909. It was “an act to prohibit the importation and use of opium for other than medicinal purposes.” In other words, its purpose was to prevent the importing of opium for use in opium dens. The debate on the bill (HR 27427) was notably brief. The bill was introduced by Sereno Payne of New York in the House of Representatives. Quick passage was urged so that the hand of the resident could be strengthened for dealing with the Shanghai Commission and its recommendations. The only real objections to the bill concerned not the intent to ban opium smoking in the United States but whether the ban would have unintended consequences. In what today can only be described as ironically prescient, Representative Warren Keifer of Ohio worried the bill might have the effect of promoting manufacturing of opium in the United States and Representative Joseph Gaines of West Virginia suggested it might merely stimulate illegal imports (i.e., a black market). In the end, these arguments did not hold sway and the bill was passed without objection.

Other attempts to regulate the narcotics trade were introduced in Congress over the next five years, but without success. The first serious use of the law to limit narcotic use was passed in 1914.

THE HARRISON NARCOTICS ACT

Partly as a response to political pressures and partly as a result of fear of the spread of the Chinese drug problem, an act was introduced to the U.S. House of Representatives by Francis Burton Harrison of New York. It had the rather stilted title of “An Act to provide for the registration of, with collectors of internal revenue, and to impose a special tax upon all persons who produce, import, manufacture, compound, deal in, dispense, sell, distribute, or give away opium or coca leaves, their salts, derivatives, or preparations, and for other purposes.” This act, introduced as House Resolution 1966 and passed as House Resolution 6282 by the 63rd Congress, became Public Law No. 223, effective December 17, 1914. For all practical purposes, despite a previous act that forbade the importation of smoking opium, this was the beginning of all federal regulation of recreational drug use.

Several authors have suggested that the intent of the act was merely to regulate trade and collect a tax. Brecher (1972), for instance, suggests such an interpretation. However, if you read the committee reports prior to the debate on the House floor and the debate itself, a very different picture arises.

In the report of the Committee on Finance (Ways and Means Committee, in Senate Reports, Vol. 1, of the 63rd Congress, 2nd Session on Senate Bill 6552, report #258, pp. 3–4), the debate decried the rapid increase of opiate use in the United States. In comparing the United States to Europe, it was noted that five European countries with a total pop...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Narcotics and Narcotic Regulations to 1937
• Chapter 2. Narcotics and Narcotic Regulations from 1937
• Chapter 3. Agencies of Enforcement
• Chapter 4. Interdiction As a Strategy
• Chapter 5. Failures of Incarceration
• Chapter 6. What Works: Part I Education
• Chapter 7. What Works: Part II Drug Treatment
• Chapter 8. The Legalization Debate
• Chapter 9. Recommendations
• Appendix I
• Appendix II
• Appendix III
• Appendix IV
• Appendix V
• Bibliography
• Index