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History of Drugs in America Summary & AnalysisThe Big Picture: Who, What, When, Where & (Especially) WhyAnalytic OverviewDrugs have been central to the American experience, from the very beginning.Christopher Columbus's very first encounter with the natives of the "New World" ended with an exchange of gifts, in which the Indians graciously presented their European visitors with a supply of a powerful and popular local drug—tobacco. Columbus had no idea what he was supposed to do with the unfamiliar dried leaves, and ended up chucking them overboard. But his men soon learned from the Indians the joys of smoking, and carried the habit back with them to Europe. Soon Europe became a continent of nicotine addicts (which it remains to this day).A century later, tobacco rescued the first English colony in North America from the verge of collapse. The first five years of the Jamestown settlement (founded in Virginia in 1607) were disastrous: settlers died off at a frightful rate and failed to develop any crops that could be sold at a price high enough to sustain the colony. Abandonment of the settlement loomed as a very real possibility. Then, in 1612, John Rolfe—best remembered today as the husband of Pocahontas—planted a field of tobacco. The crop sold in London a year later for a huge profit. Soon Jamestown grew little else besides tobacco; without the proceeds from the international drug trade in tobacco, the first sustained English settlement in North America would have failed, and the United States as we know it may never have come to exist.The Big ThreeTobacco was and is one of the "Big Three"—the three most important drugs in American history. The other two are alcohol and caffeine.Tobacco, alcohol, and caffeine? If that threesome seems shocking, it's because those three drugs are so ubiquitous in our society that we often don't even think of them as drugs at all. They are so widely used, and so accepted in our society, that users of the "Big Three" usually don't face the social stigma (to say nothing of the criminal sanctions) suffered by users of illegal drugs like marijuana or cocaine. Habitual users of the "Big Three" drugs almost certainly don't think of themselves as drug addicts.But in truth the differences between the "Big Three" legal drugs and their illegal cousins are almost as much a matter of culture and history as of the intrinsic qualities of the drugs themselves. Caffeine is more addictive than marijuana. Alcohol is more intoxicating than cocaine. Tobacco is more damaging to users' health than ecstasy. Like harder drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine are all taken recreationally, for non-medicinal purposes, because they make their users feel better (or, for addicts, at least help them stave off the withdrawal symptoms that otherwise make them feel much worse).The Timeless Temptation of DrugsThe most basic explanation for the wide popularity of drugs throughout American history of both the "Big Three" legal drugs and the multitude of less prevalent illegal drugs—is that people simply like drugs. Since human beings first discovered, in ancient times, that they could alter their consciousnesses via chemical means, they've had a hard time stopping themselves from doing it. Drugs, by messing around with the internal chemistry of the brain, can temporarily make sad people feel happy; sick people feel well; tired people feel spry; weak people feel strong; shy people feel brave; ugly people feel sexy. Drugs don't really solve any of those problems, of course, but drugs can mask them for as long as the high lasts. And that's enough to keep millions of Americans coming back for more. And that truth didn't begin with the meth epidemic of the early twenty-first century, or the crack cocaine crisis of the 1980s, or the pot-smoking counterculture of the 1960s. That truth reaches back to the very beginning of American history, to the Jamestown colony, where after a full decade of English settlement Captain John Smith found "only five or six houses, the Church downe, the palisades broken, the Bridge in pieces, the Well of fresh water spoiled," but "the market-place, the streets, and all other spare places planted with Tobacco."America's Endless Drug ProblemTo acknowledge that drugs have always been with us is not, in any way, to suggest that drugs are a good thing, or a benign presence in American society. Quite the contrary. Drugs have always had serious consequences for the individuals who use them and for society as a whole. For as long as there have been drugs in America, there has been a drug problem.And for as long as there's been a drug problem, there has been controversy over how best to deal with it. Is drug abuse a social problem, or an individual moral failing? Is drug addiction a medical problem demanding treatment, or a criminal problem demanding punishment? How far can society go to prevent individuals from harming themselves with drugs without violating the individual freedoms protected by the Constitution? What happens when laws passed to prohibit drug use end up causing as many problems as the drugs themselves?The history of drugs in America is the history of Americans' struggle to answer these questions.Economy in History of Drugs in AmericaLooking at the Past Through the Lens of EconomyDrugs Are Big BusinessAddicts are good customers, often willing to pay almost any price to obtain the drugs upon which they have become dependent. As a result, drugs have long been some of the most valuable products on earth. Coffee is today the world's second most valuable legally traded international commodity, trailing only petroleum. A single company, Starbucks, sells more than $8 billion worth of coffee a year. Americans spend more than $50 billion every year on cigarettes, and more than $100 billion on alcohol. Illegal drugs have a smaller market than the "Big Three" legal drugs, but ounce by ounce they are even more precious. Cocaine is literally more valuable than gold, and by a wide margin: the drug has a street value of more than $100 a gram while the precious metal trades at less than $25. Marijuana is currently the United States' most valuable cash crop, with cultivators growing nearly $36 billion dollars worth of the illegal weed every year. (Corn, the nation's second most valuable agricultural commodity, is worth only $23 billion.)6 Drugs command such high prices that drugs are—and always have been—big business in the American economy.Tobacco and American ColonizationIn the early colonial period, the drug trade sustained both Virginia and New England, allowing these beleaguered settlements on the far margins of the British Empire to grow into thriving American societies.Jamestown, Virginia—the first permanent English settlement in North America—was on the verge of collapse when John Rolfe planted its first tobacco crop in 1612. That fateful crop fetched a good price a year later back in London, generating new enthusiasm and financial backing for the Virginia colony. Soon Virginia's entire existence came to center on growing tobacco for export. Surveying Jamestown in 1617, Captain John Smith noted with some dismay that everything in the village was falling apart, but that every "spare place"—including the streets and marketplace—had been carefully planted with tobacco. By 1618, the Virginians produced 20,000 pounds of tobacco a year, and needed more workers to harvest the crop.7 In 1619, the overwhelmingly male population of Jamestown enthusiastically welcomed the arrival in port of an English ship carrying "young maids to make wives." The colonists used tobacco as currency to buy the women, happily paying the price of "one hundred and twenty pounds of the best leaf tobacco" for each girl.8 The arrival of women meant the arrival of sex, and the arrival of sex meant that Virginia's population could begin to sustain itself through natural reproduction. In the same year that the Virginians used tobacco to buy themselves wives, they also introduced slavery to British North America by buying (in their words) "twenty negars" from a Dutch merchant vessel that called at port. For the next 240 years, slavery and tobacco would dominate Virginia society. Slave labor helped the Virginians to expand tobacco production rapidly, from 60,000 pounds in 1622, to 500,000 pounds in 1627, to 1.5 million pounds in 1630.9 Soon the early days of starvation at Jamestown were forgotten, as tobacco profits allowed Virginia planters to begin to take on the trappings of aristocracy. New England Puritans and "Kill-Devil"While colonial Virginia devoted itself to the cultivation of one drug—tobacco—Colonial New England built its own economy around the manufacture of another—rum. Rum is liquor distilled from sugar (or molasses, itself a low-quality byproduct of the sugar refining process). Before the colonization of the Caribbean, both cane sugar and its distilled alcohol were virtually unknown in northern European countries like England. But once exposed to rum's intoxicating charms, Englishmen (and English colonists in the New World) quickly developed a taste for the drink initially known as "Kill-Devil." The earliest known reference to the strong drink in the English language came in 1651, when a visitor to the sugar colony of Barbados noted the island's inhabitants' love for "Rumbullion, alias Kill-Devil," which he described as a drink "made of sugar canes distilled, a hot, hellish and terrible liquor."10 The name "rumbullion"—which was an old Scots-Irish word meaning something like "tumultuous uproar"—eventually became, simply, "rum," and it quickly became the favorite drink of the British Empire. (In 1655, the Royal Navy began issuing its sailors a daily ration of half a pint of rum each, a tradition that lasted until 1970.)Perhaps unduly influenced by The Scarlet Letter and H.L. Mencken's pithy definition of Puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy," we tend to imagine the Puritan settlers of colonial New England as an unerringly stern and foreboding lot. But New England's Puritans were happy to become both prodigious consumers and major producers of "Kill-Devil." In the 1650s, New Englanders opened dozens of distilleries, importing molasses from the West Indies for processing into over-strength rum. As early as 1661, the General Court of Massachusetts ruled that excess rum production in the colony had become a menace to society. But neither the General Court nor the Puritan ministers could stop the colonists' love affair with their "hot, hellish and terrible liquor." In 1686, the prominent Massachusetts preacher Increase Mather lamented the "unhappy thing that in later years a Kind of Drink called Rum has been common among us. They that are poor, and wicked too, can for a penny or two-pence make themselves drunk."11 Still rum consumption continued to rise. By 1770, New England was home to 143 separate distilleries, which produced nearly 5 million gallons of the liquor every year. That same year, the 1.7 million people who populated the thirteen colonies combined to drink down 7.5 million gallons of rum; that's more than four gallons each for every man, woman, and child in America.12 Drugs, Slaves, and the Birth of CapitalismSuch heavy demand for rum made the liquor the mainstay of the colonial New England economy. By the eve of the American Revolution, rum accounted for more than 80% of the region's exports. The rum trade drew New England merchants into the growing international marketplace that would soon give birth to modern capitalism. New England traders imported molasses from the West Indies, distilled it into strong rum, and then sold the liquor abroad—especially in Africa, where it could be traded for valuable cargoes of slaves. The slaves could then be sold again, at great profit, to the tobacco farmers of the American South or, more commonly, to the sugar planters of the West Indies—who would send back molasses, which would then be distilled into rum to start the cycle anew. This triangular trade in rum, slaves, and molasses turned Newport, Rhode Island, into the most important slave port in North America; by 1776, Rhode Islanders controlled 60-90% of the American slave trade.13 The transformation of the sleepy Puritan settlements of New England into the driving engine of a burgeoning American commercial empire simply cannot be explained without understanding the foundational role of the rum/slave trade.Neither colonial Virginia nor the New England colonies were founded for the purpose of supplying the British Empire with drugs. But in both regions, settlers quickly found themselves organizing their societies and economies around the production and export of tobacco and rum, respectively. The rise of the American economy into the greatest generator of wealth in human history began with the seventeenth-century drug trade. Coffee, Cigarettes, and Modern AmericaLater, as the American economy matured into the modern system of corporate capitalism in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, drugs continued to play an important role.After the Civil War, coffee led the way as branded, individually packaged products displaced bulk commodities in the American marketplace. In 1865, a Pittsburgh grocer named John Arbuckle took advantage of an exciting new technology—the paper bag—to develop the nation's first popular coffee brand. Arbuckle sold pre-roasted coffee beans in prepackaged one-pound sacks, under a colorful new label touting the brand, "Arbuckle's Ariosa Coffee." Before Ariosa, consumers had to buy green coffee beans in bulk from their local grocer, then roast the beans themselves at home. The convenience and relatively consistent flavor of Ariosa won converts from coast to coast, and the gold and red Ariosa label became a common sight from the teeming cities of the eastern seaboard to the lonely prairies of the western frontier. (A certain affection for the brand still exists in the West, where Ariosa continues to sell as "cowboy coffee" today.) Ariosa (and other brands that soon arose as competitors) helped to fuel a surge in American coffee consumption; in 1872 Harper's Magazine observed that "the proud son of the highest civilization can no longer live happily without coffee... The whole social life of many nations is based upon the insignificant bean; it is an essential element in the vast commerce of great nations."14 A similar process occurred in the tobacco industry. Prior to the 1870s, almost all American smokers bought their tobacco in loose-leaf form and smoked it in pipes. Then American tobacco manufacturers developed the technology for mass-production of standardized cigarettes, dramatically lowering the price of tobacco and changing forever the way most Americans smoked their nicotine. (In 1883 the New York Times inveighed against the country's new habit in a seemingly bizarre editorial: "The decadence of Spain began when the Spaniards adopted cigarettes and if this pernicious practice obtains among adult Americans the ruin of the Republic is close at hand."15) The Republic did not fall, but Americans' cigarette consumption skyrocketed from 42 million in 1875, to 500 million in 1880, to 2.2 billion in 1889, to 100 billion in 1920.16 Following the lead of Arbuckle's Ariosa Coffee, cigarette manufacturers sought to sell their standardized, mass-produced drug products through colorful brand names and evocative advertising. Lucky Strike, Pall Mall, and Camel became some of the most prominent brands in American business history, selling nicotine to an ever-growing number of consumers. By 1930, it seemed that just about everyone smoked; a History of Tobacco published that year concluded that "a glance at the statistics proves convincingly that the non-smokers are a feeble and ever dwindling minority. The hopeless nature of their struggle becomes plain when we remember that all countries, whatever their form of government, now encourage and facilitate the passion for smoking in every conceivable way."17 Less than a decade later, scientists published the first study linking smoking to lung cancer, and tobacco's march to world domination began to slow. Still, the rise of the American tobacco industry through the 1920s closely mirrored that of modern American capitalism as a whole.Coca-Cola, the Drug-Based Drink of the American CenturyAnother drug-based product, Coca-Cola, became the iconic brand of the twentieth-century American economy. An Atlanta chemist named John Pemberton invented Coca-Cola in 1886 as a potentially useful medical tonic-the formula contained the stimulant drugs found in the South American coca leaf (the source of cocaine) and the African kola nut (a source of caffeine). Pemberton marketed his concoction as a patent medicine, a supposed cure-all for a variety of ailments. (Competitors in the patent-medicine market at the time included both cocaine and heroin, both sold over the counter by Bayer and other prominent pharmaceutical companies.) In the early days, Coca-Cola attained some local success in Georgia drugstores, but the product only really took off when the company stopped marketing Coke as a drug and rebranded the sweet formula as a tasty beverage. In 1895, Coca-Cola launched a new advertising campaign encouraging consumers to "Drink Coca-Cola, Delicious and Refreshing." Sold as refreshment rather than medicine, Coca-Cola would soon become the quintessential drink of the twentieth century, as American as apple pie. By the 1970s, Americans would drink more cola than coffee, and Coca-Cola would become one of America's most recognizable cultural and economic exports. International critics of the global domination of American culture even coined the term, "Coca-Colonization," to describe the worldwide penetration of American brands. Today Coke is available in more than 200 countries, and nearly three-quarters of the company's sales occur outside North America.While Coca-Cola's success came from repositioning itself as a thirst-quencher rather than a medicine, the drink's very name reminds us that the product is and has always been a drug. The company dropped intoxicating cocaine from its famous secret formula long ago, but Coke rivals coffee as America's leading source of caffeine, and Coke is by far the largest source of that drug to be consumed by children. (One indication of the drug's significant contribution to Coke's success: the caffeine-free version of the soda accounts for a miniscule proportion of sales.)In 1911, the U.S. government even tried to shut Coca-Cola down for violating the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act. The government, led by Dr. Harvey Wiley—who considered caffeine to be a poison on par with strychnine—charged that the unnatural addition of caffeine extract to the Coca-Cola formula violated the Pure Food and Drug Act's ban on adulterated food products. In the end, the judge ruled against the government, making the world safe for Coca-Cola. Coke's recipe for success—selling a small dose of a popular drug, packaged in an enjoyable form, marketed with catchy advertising—proved to be an irresistible, world-changing formula.Recent Drugs Entrepreneurship: From the Frappuccino to the "Ready Rock"Coke's formula has been mimicked, in a way, by two of the most successful drugs entrepreneurs of recent times: Howard Schultz of Starbucks Coffee, who hooked millions of Americans on Frappuccinos, and "Freeway" Ricky Ross of South Central Los Angeles, who hooked thousands of Americans on crack.Starbucks revolutionized the way Americans drank coffee. For most of the second half of the twentieth century, the vast majority of Americans drank cheap, industrially-processed instant coffee, usually prepared by boiling it in a percolator. The coffee produced carried its caffeine kick but generally tasted awful. During the 1960s and 1970s, a few iconoclasts began selling whole coffee beans, which customers could grind and brew fresh at home to achieve a better flavor. Among those iconoclasts were Alfred Peet (who started Peet's Coffee in Berkeley, California) and the founders of what we now know as the Starbucks empire. Starbucks began as a small storefront in Seattle's Pike Place Market, selling whole beans (which, ironically, originally came from Peet's in Berkeley) in bulk to customers who wanted to brew their own strong coffee at home. It wasn't until 1984 that Starbucks began experimenting with the format so familiar today, opening a small espresso bar to sell ready-made espresso drinks inside the Seattle shop as an add-on to the primary business of selling whole beans. After 1987, when Howard Schultz took complete control of the company, Starbucks fully remade itself into the retail coffeehouse that has since conquered the world. Starbucks sold its coffee as a symbol of urbane sophistication, and a tasty one at that; the company's invention of sweet new coffee concoctions like the Caramel Macchiato and the milkshake-like Frappucino led some to quip that the company made its fortune not by selling coffee but by selling sugar, whipped cream, and chocolate. Like Coca-Cola, Starbucks found a wildly popular method of packaging America's most popular drug, caffeine, with a sweet taste and desirable image. From 1987 through 2006 the company enjoyed explosive growth, forever changing Americans' coffee-drinking experience.Just as Howard Schultz and Starbucks transformed the way Americans take their coffee, a Los Angeles hustler named "Freeway" Ricky Ross transformed the way they take their cocaine. As cocaine rose in popularity in America during the 1970s, nearly all users took it in powder form, snorting the drug into their bloodstream via the nose. A few users, however, began experimenting with smoking the drug, which they found gave a more intense high. Smoking cocaine, however, required a complicated process of chemical adulteration to transform the powder into smokable "freebase." Making freebase was difficult and dangerous; the popular comedian Richard Pryor infamously set himself on fire while trying to cook up freebase in 1980.Enter "Freeway" Ricky Ross, an illiterate, smalltime drug dealer from South Central Los Angeles. In 1980, Ross figured out how to cook up his supply of cocaine into large batches of a cheap, impure version of freebase. The drug could then be sold, ready to smoke, in small doses, saving customers the trouble and danger of cooking their own freebase out of powder. Ross called his product "Ready Rock," but today we know it better as crack. "Ready Rock" made "Freeway" Ricky Ross into one of America's richest drug dealers. By 1983, he had conquered Los Angeles and built distribution networks into dozens of other cities across the country. He was moving more than $1 million worth of cocaine every single day, netting between $100,000 and $200,000 in profit. Thanks in no small part to the street entrepreneurship of "Freeway" Ricky, America found itself beset with a crack cocaine epidemic18If he had prospered in any other line of work, "Freeway" Ricky Ross might be seen as a hero of the American Dream, a self-made business success and entrepreneurial genius. But unlike Starbucks' Howard Schultz, Ricky Ross went into business on the wrong side of the law, and eventually Ross had to face the consequences. By 2006, Howard Schultz was worth more than $1 billion, while "Freeway" Ricky Ross was serving out a twenty-year jail sentence in federal prison. The starkly divergent fortunes of two of the country's most successful recent purveyors of popular drugs suggests that the biggest action in the American drug market remains in the sale of legal drugs.Law in History of Drugs in AmericaLooking at the Past Through the Lens of LawFighting Drugs: Regulation vs. ProhibitionEfforts to fight drug use in America date back just as far as the drug use itself—which is to say, to the earliest days of European settlement in the country. Every single drug ever to achieve widespread use in America—from caffeine to crack—has been subjected, at one time or another, to attempts at serious government restriction. Various forms of restriction have been applied to different drugs at different times, but by taking the long view we can see that all American anti-drug efforts have fallen into one of two broad approaches to dealing with drug problems in society: regulation and prohibition.Regulation accepts that citizens will use a given drug, but imposes extra taxes and certain restrictions (like age limits, health warnings, or special permits for sellers) on its use. The idea is to reduce use of the drug by increasing its cost and restricting its availability, without criminalizing its use.Prohibition, in contrast, simply makes it illegal to sell or use a particular drug. The threat of criminal punishment is intended to deter citizens from using the drug at all.Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages as public policy. Regulation allows for more nuanced policy and generates revenue for the government through collection of "sin taxes," but sends the message that the government officially condones citizens' use of the drug being regulated. Prohibition, on the other hand, sends a clear message that use of the prohibited drug is not acceptable, but creates expensive and socially destructive problems of enforcement when some people inevitably use the drug anyways. Through 400 years of drug use in America, neither regulation nor prohibition has solved the drug problem, but both approaches have, at times, been effective in mitigating the negative impacts of drugs on American societies. For all their faults, the two approaches remain the best we've got.Drug Enforcement HierarchiesSo 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 RegulationThe 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.A Very Short History of Drug ProhibitionLike 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 AmericaLooking at the Past Through the Lens of LaborDrugs and Work Don't Mix?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 LaborersBefore 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 WorkerBut 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.Hopped-Up Truckers and Juiced-Up BallplayersCaffeine 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?Gender in History of Drugs in AmericaLooking at the Past Through the Lens of GenderWomen's Movement = Temperance MovementSince 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 Drunkest AmericansThe 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.Female Consequences for Male AlcoholismMen 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 Temperance CrusadeThe 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.From Prohibition to MADDProhibition marked the zenith of the temperance movement. In the end, however, Prohibition proved to be temperance's undoing, for Prohibition proved to be an utter fiasco. Millions of Americans continued to drink illegally, and a lucrative black market in booze fueled a shocking rise in organized crime and violence. By 1932, a large majority of the American population favored Prohibition's repeal, and Franklin D. Roosevelt won the presidency in 1932 in no small part because he promised to let Americans ease the pain of the Great Depression with beer. Alcohol has been legal for American adults ever since.Yet faint echoes of the original temperance movement as a powerful female moral crusade can still be seen in our own time. In 1980, Candy Lightner, the mother of a 13-year-old child tragically killed by a drunken driver, founded Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) as a grassroots organization dedicated to fighting drunk driving. MADD's appeals to the female moral authority of bereaved mothers proved to be politically potent, and the group's agenda expanded from opposition to drunk driving to opposition to drinking in general. MADD's advocacy was instrumental in changing many state and federal policies related to alcohol, most significantly the 1984 federal law that increased the drinking age to 21 nationwide.War in History of Drugs in AmericaLooking at the Past Through the Lens of WarWar and Drugs"War is h--l." That was the simple, sad verdict of one of America's most celebrated war heroes, General William Tecumseh Sherman, whose brutal tactics in subduing the South helped the Union win the Civil War. Sherman and his men—like their fellow soldiers in every American war before or since—understood from bitter first-hand experience that the realities of military life during wartime were horrific. The rhetoric of war emphasizes a set of abstractions—glory, honor, patriotism—but the lived experience of war, for its participants, offers a set of very real miseries—hunger, thirst, heat, cold, sickness, injury, stress, boredom, fear, death. Thus the full version of General Sherman's famous quote (delivered to the graduates of the Michigan Military Academy in 1879): "There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all h--l."25 And for centuries American boys (and, more recently, girls) trapped in the h--l of war have found some measure of escape through drug use. Nearly every major American war has resulted in a major American drug problem.The Civil War, Morphine, and the "Army Disease"The Civil War (1861-65) was, by far, the costliest in American history in terms of loss of life. More than half a million Americans died in the conflict. Many hundreds of thousands more suffered horrific injuries and debilitating illnesses during their terms of service in the Union or Confederate Armies. The pain and suffering endured by soldiers on both sides was immense.Doctors and surgeons attached to both armies sought to ease the misery of sick and wounded soldiers by prescribing millions of doses of a recently-discovered wonder drug: morphine. A derivative of opium and a chemical cousin to heroin, morphine is a powerful narcotic that could be used to relieve pain as well as to treat diarrhea and dysentery (which were common and deadly gastro-intestinal afflictions among the troops). Doctors in the Union Army alone issued more than 10 million doses of morphine during the war.While morphine certainly did ease the immediate suffering of sick and wounded Civil War soldiers, the highly-addictive drug also created a generation of addicts among Civil War veterans. The sad figure of the morphine-addicted, disabled Civil War veteran could be encountered in just about any American town in the late nineteenth century. The problem got so bad that the most commonly used term for drug addiction was "The Army Disease." Accurate statistics for the period are hard to come by, but historians believe that as many as 200,000 to 500,000 Civil War veterans suffered from morphine addiction, in some cases for decades after the war ended in 1865.Doughboys, Instant Coffee, and CigarettesThe First World War (1914-19) brought new forms of misery to the men who fought in it. Advances in military technology—the machine gun, poison gas, the flying bomber—ran far ahead of advances in military tactics, which hadn't changed much from the days of Napoleon a century before. The result was a brutal stalemate along the entrenched Western Front, punctuated by futile attempts to storm enemy lines by frontal attack into machine gun fire. The human cost was unthinkable; on 1 July 1916, the British Army suffered 57,000 casualties in a single day at the Battle of the Somme, failing to capture any German territory in the process. Even for soldiers not engaged in such ill-fated offensives, life in the trenches of the "War to End All Wars" was awful. Even the war's impact on the English language gives a sense of how unpleasant it was; World War I gave us new words and phrases like trench foot and shell shock; front line and no man's land; gas mask and camouflage; to strafe, to barrage, to conk out; even blotto and bulls--t.American soldiers endured trench foot, shell shock, and bulls--t in part by taking heavy rations of cigarettes and coffee. Coffee kept the men warm and gave them energy; cigarettes suppressed their hunger and calmed their jittery nerves. Perhaps most importantly, the familiar everyday rituals of boiling coffee or lighting cigarettes lent a sense of normalcy to the inhuman and terrifying landscape of the trenches. A journalist visiting the front lines in 1917 noted that coffee was "THE most popular drink of the camp," taken with every meal and frequently in between.26 Tobacco—more addictive than caffeine, of course—was even more important. General John J. Pershing, supreme commander of the American Expeditionary Force, once said, "You ask what we need to win this war, I answer tobacco, as much as bullets. Tobacco is as indispensable as the daily ration. We must have thousands of tons of it without delay."27 In the end, American "doughboys" (the slang term for WWI GIs) consumed prodigious quantities of both caffeine and nicotine. The army's Director of Munitions estimated after the war that virtually all American servicemen drank coffee, and 95% smoked tobacco. By the time the war ended in November 1918, the American Expeditionary Force was going through a staggering 37,000 pounds of coffee and 14 million cigarettes every day.28 Not only did the Great War create a new generation of young American men habituated to daily smoking and coffee-drinking, but it popularized modern new forms of ingesting both drugs. Traditionally, Americans had purchased both coffee and tobacco as unbranded, bulk products. They roasted and ground their green coffee beans at the grocery store before boiling the drink at home; they smoked their tobacco in loose-leaf form, in hand-packed pipes, or (if they smoked cigarettes at all) in hand-rolled cigarettes. These slow, traditional ways of preparing coffee and tobacco for consumption were impractical at the front, however. A man hunkered down at the edge of no man's land had no time to roast coffee or pack a pipe. So the army embraced new mass-produced and branded coffee and tobacco products that allowed the men to ingest both drugs immediately, with minimal preparation work. Thus did instant coffee and pre-rolled cigarettes become standard features of doughboy life. And the brands that dominated the front lines—George Washington's Instant Coffee, Camel and Lucky Strike cigarettes—became the brands that dominated the thriving civilian economy of the Roaring Twenties after the doughboys came home. World War I may not have made the world safe for democracy, as President Woodrow Wilson famously hoped, but the war certainly made the world safe for instant coffee and cigarettes, two drug products that would go on to dominate the American market for much of the twentieth century.Fighting the Good War, "Blind A--hole Drunk"The Second World War has been more heavily mythologized than the First, and when Americans today think about World War II they are less likely to imagine the awful realities of combat than they are to invoke a set of highly sanitized ideals: the "Good War," the "Greatest Generation," "Their Finest Hour." But the men who fought the war—who endured kamikaze attacks and firebombings and blitzkrieg offenses—needed something stronger than patriotic ideals to survive the fight against global fascism. They needed booze.World War II soldiers drank much more heavily than their World War I predecessors. By 1941, Prohibition had long since ended and little prohibitionist sentiment existed to restrict soldiers' access to alcohol. Beer was readily available on every army base, and every American officer received a standard ration of one bottle of hard liquor every two weeks. Alcohol became the American GI's preferred method of dulling fear and escaping horror. John Garcia, an American soldier who participated in the brutal fighting against entrenched Japanese troops on Okinawa, began drinking a fifth and a half of whiskey (that's almost a third of a gallon!) every day. "It was the only way I could kill," he said. "I'd get up each day and start drinking. How else could I fight the war?"29 James Jones—an American sergeant in World War II who would go on to win the 1951 National Book Award for his first novel, From Here to Eternity—vividly described the role of alcohol in waging the "Good War": "In my outfit," he wrote, "we got blind a--hole drunk every chance we got."30 Good statistics are difficult or impossible to come by, but it is certain that alcoholism accompanied many GIs home from the war. In fact, our very conception of "alcoholism" as a disease is a product of the aftermath of World War II, when a nationwide epidemic of alcohol abuse led doctors to reclassify problem drinking as a medical condition rather than an individual moral shortcoming.Heroin and the Tragedy of VietnamThe longest war in American history occurred in Vietnam (1959-75), where American soldiers spent all of the 1960s and half of the 1970s mired in a demoralizing and ultimately futile struggle to prop up an unpopular South Vietnamese government in hopes of preventing Communists from winning control of all Vietnam. The American troops charged with fighting a difficult counterinsurgency campaign in unforgiving jungle terrain were mostly draftees who didn't want to be there. Unsurprisingly—especially considering the explosion of drug use at home at the same time during the countercultural 1960s—many American soldiers in Vietnam turned to dope to help them get through their tours of duty.Like their countercultural counterparts back home, American soldiers in Vietnam made marijuana their illicit drug of choice. Marijuana was widely and cheaply available in Indochina, and various sources estimate that anywhere from 20-50% of American servicemen were at least occasional users, despite efforts by the military to crack down on the drug. By 1969, Military Police were arresting more than a thousand soldiers a week for marijuana possession. Less prevalent than pot, but more troubling, was heroin, which is much more addictive and personally destructive than marijuana. Investigations by Congress and the Nixon Administration in 1969 found that as many as 15-20% of American soldiers in Vietnam were regular heroin users. Representative Robert Steele, the Connecticut Republican who led the congressional investigation, declared that a "soldier going to Vietnam runs a far greater risk of becoming a heroin addict than a combat casualty."31 While Steele's rhetoric may have been somewhat overblown, subsequent investigations suggested that at least 40,000 Vietnam veterans came back from the conflict as heroin addicts. ................
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