Drug Enforcement Hierarchies

So which drugs should be regulated, and which prohibited? Americans today are familiar with a certain hierarchy of drug regulation and enforcement:

Caffeine is neither regulated nor prohibited: its use is free to all.

Alcohol and tobacco are heavily regulated: both are legal for adults, but subject to high "sin taxes" and certain restrictions, such as age limits, advertising bans, health warnings, and special licenses for distribution, to discourage their abuse.

Certain drugs (opium, cocaine, steroids, amphetamines, Ritalin, OxyContin, Vicodin, etc.) are regulated for medical use and prohibited for recreational use; they are legal only when prescribed by a doctor to treat a medical condition, while off-prescription recreational use is banned.

And other drugs (marijuana, heroin, ecstasy, LSD, psychedelic mushrooms, etc.) are prohibited entirely; they are always illegal, and their use can result in criminal consequences.

It's easy today to imagine that these hierarchies, which have been enshrined in federal law since the passage of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, are natural or timeless, rooted in the innate qualities of the various drugs. In other words, heroin (to take one example) simply is, by its very nature, an illegal drug, while caffeine is not.

But our history suggests otherwise. A century ago, heroin was sold, over the counter and without a prescription, as a cough suppressant. In 1911, the federal government tried (but failed) to shut down Coca-Cola for illegally adding caffeine to its famous secret formula. In the 1920s, marijuana was perfectly legal in most states, but alcohol was banned everywhere in America. After the Civil War, thousands of Americans (including at least two presidents) regularly drank Vin Mariani, a popular (and entirely legal) brand of red wine infused with pure cocaine. Even before the founding of the United States as an independent nation, the Massachusetts General Court attempted to prohibit tobacco (in 1632) and England's King Charles II tried to outlaw coffee houses (in 1675).

In short, most of today's banned drugs have been, in the past, perfectly legal, and most of today's legal drugs have been, in the past, banned. Whether any particular drug should be accepted, regulated, or prohibited is a political, cultural, and historical choice for society to make, not an inherent aspect of the drug's chemistry.

A Very Short History of Drug Regulation

The first drug to be regulated in American history was tobacco. Neither tobacco nor the habit of smoking any drug into the lungs had ever been encountered in Europe before the voyages of Columbus; both the drug and the method of taking it were native to the Western Hemisphere. Europeans had to learn how to smoke tobacco from American Indians. They soon exported the custom (and the drug) back to Europe, however, and by the late sixteenth century Europe had become a continent of nicotine addicts. The rapid spread of smoking through European society appalled many spiritual and political leaders, who regarded the habit as the evil custom of uncivilized heathens. Smoking, in other words, was the Devil's work.

European governments at the time had no power to ban tobacco, but in 1604—three years before the first English colony in America took root at Jamestown—England's King James I wrote a pamphlet, memorably named A Counterblaste to Tobacco, urging his subjects not to smoke the American weed. "And now Good Countrymen," wrote the king, "let us (I pray you) consider, what honour or policy can move us to imitate the barbarous and beastly manners of the wild, Godless and slavish Indians, especially in so vile and stinking a custom?"20 In case his efforts at moral suasion fell on deaf ears, King James concurrently increased the tax on tobacco by 4000 percent.21 (Interestingly, King James's approach to regulating tobacco—combining anti-tobacco advocacy with high taxation—was essentially the same as that taken by the U.S. government since the late 1960s. The recent American effort has been much more successful, however; the fact that King James was a widely despised monarch can't have helped his cause.)

The precedent of the Counterblaste notwithstanding, the American Revolution and subsequent Constitution created a federal government with quite limited regulatory powers, so it was not until the early twentieth century that widespread drug regulation began to take hold in the United States. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 charged the federal government with ensuring that adulterated foods and poisonous drugs would not reach consumers. Dr. Harvey Wiley, the federal agent who led efforts to enforce the act, initially sought to use his powers to target caffeine. "Coffee drunkenness," he said, "is a commoner failing than the whiskey habit... This country is full of tea and coffee drunkards. The most common drug in this country is caffeine."22 As part of his anti-caffeine campaign, Wiley sued Coca-Cola in 1911, arguing that the drink-maker's artificial addition of the stimulant to its secret formula violated the Pure Food and Drug Act's ban on adulterated substances. The judge, however, sided with Coke, and the federal government has not attempted to regulate caffeine since.

Other drugs, however, have fallen under the purview of a more and more stringent federal regulatory apparatus. The Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914 put the federal government in the business of regulating drugs like heroin, opium, morphine, and cocaine, which previously had been sold over-the-counter without restriction. Under the Harrison Act, the drugs could only be distributed legally via the prescription of a licensed medical doctor. Many other drugs have been similarly regulated in the decades since; the government now maintains an elaborate schedule of regulated drugs under the terms of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970.

It was not until after World War II that scientists conclusively proved that smoking causes lung cancer and other deadly health problems. The growing awareness of the risks of smoking in the 1960s led to new calls to regulate the drug. In 1966 the government began requiring cigarette packages to carry the now-familiar Surgeon General's warning, "Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined That Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health." (Heavy lobbying from the tobacco industry convinced Congress not to require a clearer, more forceful warning, something like "SMOKING KILLS," which is today the standard warning label in Great Britain.) Five years later, cigarette advertisements were banned from American television; up to that time, cigarettes had appeared in more TV ads than any other product. The regulatory approach toward fighting tobacco use in America over the past four decades has been broadly successful; in 1964, when the Surgeon General began keeping statistics, 44% of Americans smoked. Today the smoking rate stands at 22% and falling.

Like regulatory approaches, attempts to impose drug prohibition also date back to the colonial period. In 1632, the Massachusetts General Court issued a ban on smoking in public places. Even in that tightly controlled Puritan society, however, the ban proved largely ineffectual. Many New Englanders continued to smoke, and efforts to enforce tobacco prohibition were soon dropped. A few decades later, another prohibitionist attempt aimed at users of another relatively new drug on the Anglo-American scene—coffee—failed even more miserably. England's King Charles II, worried that coffeehouses had become "the great resort of idle and disaffected persons," issued A Proclamation for the Suppression of Coffee Houses, which ordered the closure of all cafés in the British Empire. It took less than a week of clamoring protests from patrons of London's increasingly popular café scene to force Charles to change his mind and rescind the proclamation.23 Coffee (and coffeehouses) remained legal in the English-speaking world.

The failure of these early attempts at drug prohibition revealed the difficulty of successfully implementing drug bans that were opposed by the majority of the population. That difficulty was demonstrated most powerfully two centuries later by America's most ambitious prohibitionist experiment—Prohibition (with a capital P) of alcohol, which lasted from 1920 to 1933.

Churches, women's groups, and temperance organizations had been pushing for an alcohol ban in America since the hard-drinking 1830s. They finally prevailed in 1919, when the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, banning all "manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors" in America after 1920. Prohibition may have been the most ambitious experiment in social engineering in American history, and it failed miserably. Millions of Americans continued to drink illegally. Perhaps half a million speakeasies (illegal bars) opened throughout the nation, doing a brisk business in bootleg liquor. The huge black market in alcohol created by Prohibition led to an explosion in violence and organized crime, as infamous gangsters like Al Capone and Bugs Moran fought to control the billions of dollars in profits to be made by trafficking in illegal alcohol. (By 1929, the profits of the bootleg liquor industry—$3 billion that year—were larger than the entire federal budget!) Uncountable ordinary Americans, people with no aspirations to rival Al Capone, became criminals by brewing up their own moonshine booze in bathtubs and backyard stills.

Prohibition likely did reduce total alcohol consumption in America to some degree (although the statistics are a mess due to the immeasurable scale of the black market). But most Americans came to believe that the negative repercussions of Prohibition far outweighed its benefits. Franklin D. Roosevelt won the presidency in 1932, in part, behind his promise to end Prohibition; repeal of the ban on alcohol became one of the first measures of the New Deal to pass Congress. There Prohibition met an ignominious end; as the last few Prohibitionist senators sought to filibuster repeal, angry members of the House of Representatives stormed the Senate, chanting "Vote! Vote! We want beer!" until the holdouts finally relented. Prohibition officially ended with the passage of the Twenty-First Amendment in 1933.

Prohibition (with a capital P) may have been gone, but prohibition (with a small p) has remained the cornerstone of American policy towards illicit drug use ever since. President Richard Nixon coined the phrase, "War on Drugs," in 1971, but the federal government's drug war truly began 40 years earlier. In 1930, the Hoover Administration created the Federal Bureau of Narcotics to lead anti-drug policing at the federal level. Under the zealous leadership of bureau director Harry Anslinger, who served until 1962, the agency vigorously prosecuted drug crimes. During the 1930s, at Anslinger's urging, Congress enacted prohibition against marijuana for the first time and tightened earlier laws prohibiting non-medical use of narcotics.

A perceived explosion of drug use among countercultural young people during the 1960s led to an intensification of the federal government's aggressive prohibitionist approach towards drugs. In 1971, President Nixon declared drugs to be "public enemy number one in the United States... If we cannot destroy the drug menace, then it will destroy us."24 Nixon announced he would launch a "War on Drugs" to fight that menace. Subsequent presidents—especially Ronald Reagan, who joined his wife Nancy in heavily promoting the "Just Say No" movement—have carried on Nixon's fight. Almost forty years after the War on Drugs officially began, we don't appear to be close to winning.

Like Prohibition, the War on Drugs has achieved a real measure of success in reducing overall drug use. Proportionally fewer Americans smoke marijuana today than they did in the 1970s, for example. And there is no ambiguity in the federal government's strong message to its citizens: "just say no" to drugs, or face the consequences.

But, like Prohibition, the War on Drugs has had many socially undesirable side-effects. The most obvious costs are, well, costs; total state and federal government spending on the War on Drugs—encompassing education, treatment, interdiction, enforcement, prosecution, and incarceration—likely exceed $50 billion a year. That is money that could be spent on other programs or returned to taxpayers through tax cuts. Less obvious costs include the heavy social consequences of crime and punishment. Like Prohibition, the War on Drugs created a huge black market in drugs, fueling runaway growth in both violent criminal drug-trafficking activity and in drug-focused law enforcement operations. As a consequence, many American cities have been menaced by violent gangs that are sustained by drug profits. Meanwhile, millions of people have been ensnared by the criminal justice system for drug-related crimes. Today more than 2.3 million people are imprisoned in America. That's seven times as many as in 1970, just before the War on Drugs officially began. (The number of nonviolent drug offenders imprisoned today is higher than the total prison population—for all crimes—in 1970.) Largely as a result of the War on Drugs, the United States now has a higher proportion of its population locked away behind bars than any other society in the history of the world. The social costs for heavily impacted American communities have been immense.

Labor in History of Drugs in America

Looking at the Past Through the Lens of Labor

Today most of us are familiar with the concept of the "drug-free workplace." Drinking and drug use is banned on most job sites, many companies drug test their employees, and an entire office of the federal government (the Department of Labor's Drug Free Workplace Alliance) exists for no purpose other than to encourage companies to institute anti-drug programs for their employees. The message is clear: drugs and work do not mix.

But the history of drugs and labor in America has actually been much more ambiguous. While sentiments similar to those motivating the drug-free workplace movement can be traced back to the early years of the American republic, so too can instances of employers condoning or even encouraging certain drug use as a means of increasing worker productivity.

From Wet Apprentices to Dry Wage Laborers

Before the rise of modern industrial capitalism in America, artisans manufactured goods in small workshops organized along the lines of Europe's medieval guilds. A master craftsman worked and usually lived right alongside his team of young apprentices, with the workshop functioning as a kind of all-male family. Among these artisans, it was common for master and apprentices to take a break from work every so often to share a drink of rum or hard cider, typically enjoying a dram or tankard right there on the shop floor. This tradition of communal workplace drinking surely slowed the workshops' economic output, but it also made the work more tolerable while strengthening the family—like social bond between master and apprentices.

By the 1820s, however, the Industrial Revolution had taken hold in much of America and the old-fashioned artisan workshop gave way to the modern capitalist factory. Men who would have been master craftsmen became factory bosses, while boys who would have been apprentices became wage laborers. The fraternal bonds of community cultivated by the old workshops were lost as industrial workforces divided into often-antagonistic classes of employers and employees. The new factories, organized to maximize production, had no use for workers taking a break to drink intoxicating liquor, and drunkenness on the job was banned as an impediment to industrial safety and efficiency. (It's worth noting here that the initial response of the workers, freed from the round-the-clock supervision of artisan masters by their transformation into wage laborers, was to embark upon an orgy of drunkenness outside the workplace. Americans in the late 1820s drank more than ever before or since. The social and economic costs of America's seeming transformation into a "nation of drunkards" led to the rise of a powerful temperance movement, and soon to a general expectation of sobriety for all workers.) In short, America's capitalist transformation meant that employers came to demand maximum productivity from their workers. And maximum productivity from workers meant that the traditional shop floor drink (to say nothing of the shop floor drunkard) had to go. Thus was the drug-free workplace born.

Caffeine and the Industrial Worker

But just as alcohol was being eased out of the workplace, other drugs were being eased in. These new drugs, not coincidentally, tended to increase rather than decrease the productivity of the workers. The new workplace drugs—caffeine and nicotine foremost among them—helped workers endure the long hours and brutal conditions of wage labor in the early years of the Industrial Revolution. Workers in nineteenth-century factories often worked ten, twelve, or fourteen-hour shifts. They needed some way to sustain energy, suppress hunger, and maintain focus just to survive.

The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain, and the British developed the first (and perhaps most famous) new tradition of industrial workplace drug use: teatime. By mid-afternoon, a worker might have already been on the job for six or eight hours, with another four or six still to go. A short rest and a cup of hot tea provided just the lift needed to make it to the end of the shift. Even the now-traditional British style of taking tea—with plenty of milk and sugar—served an important industrial purpose: the tea delivered a dose of stimulating caffeine, while the sugar provided a short-term energy boost and the protein in the milk helped to suppress the appetite. It seems strange to say it today, but teatime—something most of us now associate with old ladies and tea cozies—played an integral role in enabling the Industrial Revolution.

At some point most Americans lost the mother country's deep affection for tea, but on this side of the Atlantic coffee has long served much the same purpose. In this country, workers' coffee rituals never became quite as standardized as the Brits' 4pm teatime, but the coffee break—which was invented in 1952 as a marketing ploy by the Pan American Coffee Bureau—has become a ubiquitous feature of the workday in every American office and jobsite.

Caffeine is a legal drug that boosts worker productivity, and thus its use by workers has been not only condoned but actively encouraged by employers for two centuries. But caffeine is not the only drug used to help workers work harder, faster, or smarter. Other drugs—including some illegal drugs—serve the same purpose in many job-specific circumstances. Some long-haul truckers, who drive the lonely highways in ten-hour shifts, take amphetamines to keep from dozing off and wrecking their rigs. Some exhausted stockbrokers take Ritalin or cocaine to keep focused during hundred-hour workweeks. Some aging baseball players take steroids to keep hitting the home runs that keep fans coming to the ballpark. In all of these cases, governments have declared the productivity-boosting drugs to be illegal and employers have officially banned their use. Yet workers are rewarded for the artificially strong performance that these drugs enable, and society in general is at least partly complicit in demanding levels of productivity only made possible with chemical assistance. Can our society's goal of a drug-free workplace truly be reconciled with a simultaneous expectation that its truckers should be able to drive all-night shifts and its leftfielders should be able to hit 72 home runs in a season?

Looking at the Past Through the Lens of Gender

Since the early nineteenth century, American women's movements have often been closely linked to American temperance movements—that is, efforts to limit or prohibit alcohol consumption. A strong argument can be made that temperance—not suffrage, not feminism—has been the most powerful women's social movement in American history. But why?

The story begins in the early nineteenth century, when powerful forces unleashed by the Industrial Revolution upended traditional social structures and cultural norms in American communities. In the 1820s, efficient new technologies of industrial production made alcohol cheaper than ever before, just at a time when millions of Americans were struggling to adapt to the unprecedented demands of a new market economy. The result was an orgy of bacchanalian excess, as the citizens of the young republic—especially young men striving to secure a place in the emerging middle class—drowned their anxieties in an ocean of liquor. Horrified religious leaders lamented that the United States was "fast becoming a nation of drunkards," and the statistics suggest that they were right. By 1830, annual alcohol consumption skyrocketed to 9.5 gallons of hard liquor, plus 30.3 gallons of beer or hard cider, for every American man and woman over age 14.19 (By way of comparison, that's more than three times as much alcohol as the average American drinks today.) This was America's drunkest generation.

Men were responsible for the lion's share of America's prodigious boozing during the hard-drinking 1820s. Yet American women paid a disproportionate price for male alcohol abuse during the period. Some women suffered the awful, timeless consequences of male drunkenness—aggression, domestic violence, and rape. Other negative impacts were more narrowly rooted in the specific legal and social structures that prevailed in early nineteenth century America. The most important of these was the doctrine of couverture in marriage, which ruled that upon their wedding a husband and wife legally merged into one person—the man. The woman, legally speaking, ceased to exist as an independent entity, losing all control over her property and many other legal rights. The law thus made women completely dependent upon their husbands. It is not hard to see how this dependency could have devastating consequences if a woman's husband succumbed to alcoholism, for the wife had no legal means of protecting herself from the alcohol-fueled mistakes of her partner. Through no fault of her own, the wife of a drunkard could find herself in a state of financial ruin, cast out of the emerging middle class.

The alcoholic excesses of the 1820s led to the rise of a powerful temperance movement in the 1830s, with women joining clergymen in the front ranks of the anti-alcohol crusade. Founded by a group of prominent religious leaders in 1826, the American Temperance Society (ATS) sought to encourage "total abstinence from ardent spirits." Somewhat surprisingly, the ATS quickly attracted more than 1.5 million members, becoming the largest and most powerful mass organization yet seen in American history. And a majority of the Society's supporters were women. They turned temperance into a great moral crusade that achieved remarkable results: between 1830 and 1845, alcohol consumption in America fell by three-fourths. The ATS-led temperance crusade may well have been the most successful anti-drug campaign in American history, and the successes of the temperance campaign inspired other social reform movements; many veterans of the temperance movement also became prominent abolitionists and suffragists.

Having curbed the worst excesses of the drunkest generation, the temperance movement pushed on in hopes of winning a complete ban on alcohol. In the late nineteenth century, the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) followed in the ATS's footsteps to become a powerful mass organization, advocating for a complete prohibition against alcohol sales in America. In 1919—not coincidentally, a time when millions of American men were temporarily out of the country fighting World War I—the women who dominated the temperance crusade won their greatest victory. Congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment, imposing Prohibition on a nationwide scale. Starting in 1920, the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcohol became illegal throughout the United States.