Domestic Policy: Drugs and Energy

For Monday, Davidson, ch. 15.

DRUGS

Senators Orrin Hatch, Harry Reid, Barbara Boxer, Charles Grassley, Don Nickles, and Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld in Traffic (2000)

The Early Days: WAR changes things

Civil War wounded warriors develop opiate addictions

1897 Sears Catalog

1885 ad:

War and Race

• Spanish American war and opium in the Philippines
• First International Opium Convention
• The impact of race, 1914

Legislation

• 1909   – Smoking Opium Exclusion Act Banned the importation, possession and use of "smoking opium". Did not regulate opium-based "medications". First Federal law banning the non-medical use of a substance.
• Harrison Act of 1914.  To implement it, Treasury started the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in 1930

Prohibition

Marijuana Tax Act of 1937

Then came the Sixties

LSD

Illicit drug use really did increase during the 1970s. 

Public Opinion

War on Drugs 1971

John Ehlichman:

You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

The Controlled Substances Act of 1970

DEA 1973

The Len Bias Law of 1986

Rudy and Alfonse go undercover  in very convincing disguises

Drug Czar 1988

Crack 1989

The bag at 1 minute in, the response at 25 minutes

ENERGY

US Crude Oil Production