or even simple possession.
The above may sound like a description of the atmosphere surrounding the "War on Drugs" proclaimed in the late 1980s and waged in the last years of the Ronald Reagan Administration and the early years of the George Bush Administration. In fact, however, it is a description taken from a book published in 1965 of a "war on drugs" waged a generation earlier, in the postwar years and through the middle 1950s (Lindesmith, 1965: viii). It might equally serve as a description of an era a generation earlier still, in the 1920s, when the culture of drug enforcement in the United States originally took definitive form.
Likewise, a description of Harry Anslinger, head for many years of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, bureaucratic ancestor of the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the first American to be called a "drug czar," sounds strikingly like a description of George Bush's drug czar of 1989 90, William Bennett. Both emerge sophisticated men of relatively worldly and elite background; Anslinger was originally a diplomat, while Bennett was a university professor. Both cultivated a tough cop image in their drug policy roles, and both were distinguished by an unyieldingly aggressive, even bullying approach towards policy critics. (For a character sketch of Anslinger, see Courtwright, Joseph, and Des Jarlais, 1989: 11 13 et. al.; for Bennett, see Lapham, 1989.)
In short, the student of the history of U.S. drug policy is continually struck by the circular quality of official and public attitudes and reaction towards drugs on the part of both officials and the general public. Periodically about once a generation the United States appears to go through a drug "crisis." It happened first in the late nineteenth century, though the public response, as we shall see, was then very different (there was no official response). The crisis atmosphere recurred in the 1920s, and thi...