Before Modern Police Forces. America in 1922.

[BridgeTroll]

This unsubstantive argumentation is annoying and boring, and ultimately doesnt even make a point.

I could not agree more... you have yet to make a point.

In any case, I will not debate you  (as indeed it is impossible to debate a non issue about a non fact) in this manner.

Thats fine... you are certainly not required to be in it.

[BridgeTroll]

The abuse of drugs and the attempt to curb use has been a worldwide effort long before Nixon, or Reagan or Clinton or Obama...

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/History/whiteb1.htm

Introduction

This session is going to be about the history of the non-medical use of drugs. Let me say that, because this is going to be a story, that I think it will interest you quite a bit. The topic is the history of the non-medical use of drugs and I think you ought to know what my credentials are for talking about this topic. As you may know, before I taught at the University of Southern California, I taught at the University of Virginia for fifteen years, from 1968 to 1981. In that time period, the very first major piece that I wrote was a piece entitled, "The Forbidden Fruit and the Tree of Knowledge - The Legal History of Marihuana in the United States". I wrote it with Professor Richard Bonnie, still of the faculty of the University of Virginia. It was published in the Virginia Law Review in October of 1970 and I must say that our piece was the Virginia Law Review in October of 1970. The piece was 450 pages long. It got a ton of national attention because no one had ever done the legal history of marijuana before. As a result of that, Professor Bonnie was named the Deputy Director of the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse and I was a consultant to that commission.

As a result of Richard's two year executive directorship of the National Commission in 1971 and 1972 he and I were given access to both the open and the closed files of what was then called the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, what had historically been called the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and what today is called the Drug Enforcement Agency. Based upon our access to those files, both open and closed, we wrote a book called "The Marihuana Conviction- The Legal History of Drugs in the United States" and that book went through six printings at the University of Virginia press before being sold out primarily in sales to my friends at the FBI over the years. It is based upon that work that I bring you this story.


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The Situation in 1900

If you are interested in the non-medical use of drugs in this country, the time to go back to is 1900, and in some ways the most important thing I am going to say to you guys I will say first. That is, that in 1900 there were far more people addicted to drugs in this country than there are today. Depending upon whose judgment, or whose assessment, you accept there were between two and five percent of the entire adult population of the United States addicted to drugs in 1900.

Now, there were two principal causes of this dramatic level of drug addiction at the turn of the century. The first cause was the use of morphine and its various derivatives in legitimate medical operations. You know as late as 1900, particularly in areas where medical resources were scarce it was not at all uncommon for you to say, let's say you would have appendicitis, you would go into the hospital, and you would get morphine as a pain killer during the operation, you would be given morphine further after the operation and you would come out of the hospital with no appendix but addicted to morphine.

The use of morphine in battlefield operations during the Civil War was so extensive that, by 1880, so many Union veterans were addicted to morphine that the popular press referred to morphinism as the "soldier's disease". Now I will say, being from Virginia as I am, that the Confederate veterans didn't have any problems about being addicted to morphine because the South was too poor to have any, and therefore battlefield operations on the Confederate Army were simply done by chopping off the relevant limb while they drank a little whiskey. But the Northern troops heavily found themselves, as the result of battlefield operations and the use of morphine, addicted to morphine.

Now, the other fact that I think that is so interesting about drug addiction at the turn of the century, as opposed to today is who the addicts were, because they were the exact opposite of who you would think most likely to be an addict today. If I were to ask you in terms of statistical groups who is most likely to be involved with drugs today, you would say a young person, a male, who lives in the city and who may be a minority group member. That is the exact opposite of who was most likely to be addicted to drugs at the turn of the century.

In terms of statistical groups, who was most likely to be addicted to drugs at the turn of the century? A rural living, middle-aged white woman. The use of morphine in medical operations does not explain the much higher incidence of drug addiction among women. What does is the second cause of the high level of addiction at the turn of the century -- the growth and development of what we now call the "patent medicine" industry.

I think some of you, maybe from watching Westerns on TV if nothing else are aware that, again, as late as 1900, in areas, particularly rural areas where medical resources were scarce, it was typical for itinerant salesmen, not themselves doctors, to cruise around the countryside offering potions and elixirs of all sorts advertised in the most flamboyant kinds of terms. "Doctor Smith's Oil, Good for What Ails You", or "Doctor Smith's Oil, Good for Man or Beast."

Well, what the purveyors of these medicines did not tell their purchasers, was that later, when these patent medicines were tested, many of them proved to be up to fifty percent morphine by volume.

Now, what that meant, as I have always thought, was the most significant thing about the high morphine content in patent medicines was it meant they tended to live up to their advertising. Because no matter what is wrong with you, or your beast, you are going to feel a whole lot better after a couple of slugs of an elixir that is fifty percent morphine. So there was this tendency to think "Wow! This stuff works." Down you could go to the general store and get more of it and it could be sold to you directly over the counter.

Now, for reasons that we weren't able to full research, but for reasons, I think, probably associated with the role of women rural societies then patent medicines were much more appealing to women than to men and account for the much higher incidence of drug addiction in 1900 among women than among men.

If you want to see a relatively current portrayal of a woman addicted to patent medicine you might think of Eugene O'Neil's play "A Long Day's Journey Into Night". The mother figure there, the one that was played by Katherine Hepburn in the movies was addicted to patent medicines.

In any event, the use of morphine in medical operations and the sale of patent medicines accounted for a dramatic level of addiction. Again, between two and five percent of the entire adult population of the United States was addicted to drugs as late as 1900.

Now if my first point is that there was a lot more addiction in 1900 than there is today and that the people who were addicted are quite a different group than the group we would be thinking of today, my next point would be that if you look at drug addiction in 1900, what's the number one way in which it is different than drug addiction today? Answer: Almost all addiction at the turn of the century was accidental.

People became involved with drugs they did not know that they were taking, that they did not know the impact of. The first point, then, is that there was more drug addiction than there is now and most of it was accidental.


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The Pure Food and Drug Act

Then the single law which has done the most in this country to reduce the level of drug addiction is none of the criminal laws we have ever passed. The single law that reduced drug addiction the most was the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act.

The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 did three things:

1). It created the Food and Drug Administration in Washington that must approve all foods and drugs meant for human consumption. The very first impact of that was that the patent medicines were not approved for human consumption once they were tested.

2) The Pure Food and Drug Act said that certain drugs could only be sold on prescription.

3) The Pure Food and Drug Act, (and you know, this is still true today, go look in your medicine chest) requires that any drug that can be potentially habit-forming say so on it's label. "Warning -- May be habit forming."

The labeling requirements, the prescription requirements, and the refusal to approve the patent medicines basically put the patent medicine business out of business and reduced that dramatic source of accidental addiction. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, not a criminal law, did more to reduce the level of addiction than any other single statute we have passed in all of the times from then to now.

[BridgeTroll]

More...

http://dpffl.org/wodhistory.htm

A History of U.S. Drug Laws
- or -
How did we get into this mess?
Part 1: 1898-1933
by Bob Ramsey
email:  b.rmz@verizon.net

Introduction
In writing on such an enormous topic, it is necessary to scope the job by stating underlying assumptions very briefly: I believe it is impossible to enforce a law that attempts to control any private behavior in which a significant portion of the population chooses to participate. I don't plan to discuss the reasons why this is so, but to describe how each failed attempt to enforce Prohibition laws has led to further erosion of individual liberties. The bottom line is that, for over eighty years we have been attempting to give an ever-expanding number of police agencies enough power to do the impossible, and we have come dangerously close to destroying America in the process.

I will describe a historical thread of U.S. government attempts to improve society by controlling the inside of people's bodies. Trying (or pretending to try) to extinguish a market for certain agricultural products has created counterbalancing incentives for criminal activity in both the private sector and government. Each failure to achieve the stated goal of national purity has fueled cries for more intrusive government power. Hopefully certain facts presented here will interact with others you already know, and will inspire ideas to begin reversing some very alarming trends.



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Where to begin?
The first federal law that regulated consumable products was the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906. But really the first time Congress became involved in drug laws was after the ten-week Spanish-American War in April - July of 1898. For the first time, Congress was responsible for a colonial empire that included the Philippines. Instead of being mere servants of a self-sufficient American people, Congress suddenly became the paternal masters of millions of "ignorant savages" who were virtual wards of the state.[1]

And also for the first time, Congress was forced to deal with drug policy. The former Spanish government of the Philippines had a drug policy, and obviously the U.S. had to do either the same thing or something else. And the Spanish drug policy in the Philippines was this: the government controlled the sale of all opium, and you were only allowed to buy opium if you were Chinese. The Americans initially ignored this curious situation, but the Filipinos rebelled in February 1899, causing us to take this colonialism thing more seriously. Few Americans know that there was a 28-month Philippine war involving 50,000 U.S. troops, who killed 200,000 to 600,000 people before we convinced the Filipinos we were their best friends.[2]

The McKinley administration sent the Republican Party's rising star, Howard Taft, to the Philippines to straighten out the mess. Taft was an energetic and able administrator who established civil rule and began economic development. His experience in tackling public problems both in the Philippines and as President from 1909-13 is of special interest, since he later became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court from 1921-30, which means he served through most of Alcohol Prohibition.

One of Taft's many initiatives was to establish a commission in 1902 to study what to do about the opium policy inherited from the Spanish.[3]  The commission's leader was Reverend Charles Henry Brent, who had been serving as Assistant Pastor of a small Episcopal church in Boston before volunteering to be a missionary in the new U.S. possession. Brent was soon named Episcopal Bishop of the Philippines and ministered to its newly appointed American rulers. He thus became one of the first Americans in this century to discover that government expansion creates exciting career advancement opportunities. Brent studied the situation and came up with a plan to continue the Spanish policy, except with a three year phase-out period to wean the Chinese of their habit humanely. But when Taft asked Congress to pass a law implementing this, reformers heard about it. They were outraged that the US government would promote this horrible habit in a helpless population, and insisted on immediate total opium prohibition.

In trying to stop opium imports, Brent learned that most of the opium came from Hong Kong, some 3 or 4 hundred miles away, and quickly surmised that opium traffic was international and could only be addressed internationally. So he began advocating an international conference on opium, which won acceptance largely because other nations (such as the U.S.) wanted to break British dominance of trade with China.

A small international commission met in Shanghai in 1909, attended by the countries most active in Far East trade. It settled little, but gave reformers a picture of each participant's motives. The British and Dutch were making money, the French didn't care. Indeed the British stated that opium smoking was the Chinese equivalent of drinking liquor or beer, and they had no problem with it. The Chinese wanted to show they were not to be taken lightly, and the Americans were seeking their place as an international power. A larger convention was scheduled in the Netherlands at The Hague for 1910, and was to include all the major world powers. But many nations like Italy, Turkey, Germany and Switzerland dragged their feet, and the next conference was delayed.



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Assumptions in the early 1900s
Before moving on to the 'teens, I'd like to give some flavor of the underlying assumptions at the time. Things have changed so much since 1900 that today it is difficult to comprehend what a free market used to be like. In those days a uniformed federal agent might bring heroin to your door that you had ordered from Sears Roebuck... along with the rest of your mail.

And the wording of the Food and Drugs Act of 1906 is very telling. Its intent was to "assure the customer of the identity of the product purchased, not of its usefulness." The law literally stated "not of its usefulness." In those days Congress didn't consider its place was to judge for the American people what was useful or not. It was a major step just to try and help the people make informed decisions.

The law called a product "misbranded," "if the package fails to bear a statement of the quantity or proportion of any alcohol, morphine, opium, cocaine, heroin, alpha or beta eucaine, chloroform, cannabis, chloral hydrate, or acetanilide."

It is implicit in this sentence that, back then, Congress took for granted the legality of a free market in all drugs.[4]

One point I'd like to discuss before moving on is what percent of the population uses opiates regularly. At the time the Food and Drugs Act was passed, it was estimated that 3-5 percent of the adult U.S. population used opiates regularly, mostly in patent medicines whose contents were a trade secret. When people were informed as to the contents of their favorite remedies, many people quit using them. The percent of Americans using opiates habitually fell to somewhere around one percent, virtually the same as it is today when you include users of both illegal and medically prescribed opiates. And this was in a climate where just about everybody had some kind of opium preparation in their medicine cabinet and used it at least occasionally for headaches or diarrhea... and must have known what an opium high felt like.

And I should mention cocaine. The Spanish Conquistadors found the Peruvian natives chewing coca leaves when they arrived around 1530. The Spanish encouraged the practice since it seemed to make the Indians work longer in the silver mines with less food.

Refined cocaine first became generally available in the early 1880's. At first it was greeted with great enthusiasm. Pure and cheap, it was at often given to workers in Southern cotton fields to increase productivity. A Pope and a US president endorsed coca products. The original 6 1/2 ounce bottles of Coca-Cola had about one grain of cocaine in them, which is about a sixteenth of a gram. An aspirin tablet is 5 grains.

Sigmund Freud is well known for his enthusiastic writings about the benefits of coca use[5], but within two years decided it was better left alone. By 1905 it was considered to be a social problem. The stuff seems to make people feel 'worthy.' One New York politician complained "It makes working men feel like millionaires, which they're not!" Especially alarming to Southerners was that it seemed to make a Black man feel just as good as a White man. When Southern politicians instinctively objected to federal drug legislation on State's Rights grounds, they were quickly brought around by sensational stories about cocainized Negroes raping White women.[6]

[BridgeTroll]

I'm not sure since you have yet to make one...

[macbeth25]

Bridge Troll -- I'm curious:  Your material was interesting and informative but what are the numbers in brackets?  Are they footnotes?  If so, where are the references?  I apologize for not understanding their purpose. 

[NotNow]

StephenDare!,

Just to be sure, you are aware that the United States has maintained a paid, full time, professional Army since the revolutionary war, right? You are aware that you brought up the military in Post #2 of this thread, right?   You are aware that there is a difference between the National Guard, State Guard, Army Reserve, organized militia, and unorganized militia, right?  You understand that the definition of "standing army" is a paid, professional military force, right?  There WAS a demobilization after WW2, you are aware of that, right?  A larger peace time military was maintained following WW2 based on the Cold War and the new preeminent stature of the United States as a world power as well as the doctrine of being able to fight on two fronts at any time.  You are aware of that, right?  You are aware of our treaty obligations under NATO and SEATO, right?


Can you tell me the difference between a modern Sheriff's Office or a County Police Force, and what you call a "paramilitary municipal Police force"?  When you say "least informed members (who) mistake themselves as the law", who exactly are you accusing of this?  When you say "licensed to murder people in uniforms", who exactly are you accusing?  What murder?  What "license to kill" are you referring to exactly?  What, exactly, is your training and experience in law enforcement organizations?  

What city, exactly, was referenced in the tome "Babbitt" that you reference?  What is your basis for claiming that the militia response referenced in the book is realistic?  Would you agree with the characterization of "Babbitt" as a satire and critical of American culture?  If your answer is yes, how do you justify using this as a "factual" reference?

Although you seem to not want to admit it, everyone else here easily sees your motive to do away with modern Police Departments, presumably in favor of "militia".  Is there a working example of this anywhere?  How would you propose using militia to respond to everyday crime?  When you said that "evidence doesn't support that idea (using Police vs. militia), what "evidence" exactly do you mean?

[civil42806]

StephenDare!,

Just to be sure, you are aware that the United States has maintained a paid, full time, professional Army since the revolutionary war, right? You are aware that you brought up the military in Post #2 of this thread, right?   You are aware that there is a difference between the National Guard, State Guard, Army Reserve, organized militia, and unorganized militia, right?  You understand that the definition of "standing army" is a paid, professional military force, right?  There WAS a demobilization after WW2, you are aware of that, right?  A larger peace time military was maintained following WW2 based on the Cold War and the new preeminent stature of the United States as a world power as well as the doctrine of being able to fight on two fronts at any time.  You are aware of that, right?  You are aware of our treaty obligations under NATO and SEATO, right?


Can you tell me the difference between a modern Sheriff's Office or a County Police Force, and what you call a "paramilitary municipal Police force"?  When you say "least informed members (who) mistake themselves as the law", who exactly are you accusing of this?  When you say "licensed to murder people in uniforms", who exactly are you accusing?  What murder?  What "license to kill" are you referring to exactly?  What, exactly, is your training and experience in law enforcement organizations?  

What city, exactly, was referenced in the tome "Babbitt" that you reference?  What is your basis for claiming that the militia response referenced in the book is realistic?  Would you agree with the characterization of "Babbitt" as a satire and critical of American culture?  If your answer is yes, how do you justify using this as a "factual" reference?

Although you seem to not want to admit it, everyone else here easily sees your motive to do away with modern Police Departments, presumably in favor of "militia".  Is there a working example of this anywhere?  How would you propose using militia to respond to everyday crime?  When you said that "evidence doesn't support that idea (using Police vs. militia), what "evidence" exactly do you mean?

Notnow, BT give it up theres no use!

[NotNow]

But it is funny to watch!

[gmpalmer]

lessee -- there's a "speed limit" at the corner of 65th and Clinton of 15 mph.

but very few people drive that slowly.

according to the city, it will take a death or injury to get a speedbump installed.

now, were there no laws against such a thing, I could go to wal-mart tonight, buy some concrete & yellow paint, and have a safer curve right by my house by tomorrow.

but those speed-limit laws, they work so well.

just like restraining orders.

anyway, Portugal decriminalized all drugs seven (I believe) years ago and addiction, crime, etc are all down significantly.

[civil42806]

"I certainly have no possible response to someone who in all likelihood has never read Babbitt, as no right thinking person could use it in the context without flesh peeling irony."

The barbarians!!!!

[NotNow]

You are an amusing person, StephenDare!  Don't get your "right thinking" little head all emotional about it.  Grown men are in charge of the military and police forces.

[BridgeTroll]

I see that there being no answer, lets continue.

So sorry that I did not answer promptly... I make it a point to try and turn off the computer early in the evening.  Perhaps we can agree to discuss during normal working hours...

I guess this discussion revolves around what is meant by "war on drugs".  If the meaning is the Nixon to modern day definition then you are correct.  There was no war to the extent we now experience it.  I have been attempting to show that societies and governments have known since the early 1900's and prior the deleterious effcts of narcotics on society.  Attempts by governments to curb its use and misuse have ramped up ever since.  The Harrison Narcotics Tax Act and the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906 were the first skirmishes of what we now see as a "war".

Teddy Roosevelt seems to have appointed our first drug czar in 1908...

Theodore Roosevelt appointed Dr. Hamilton Wright as the first Opium Commissioner of the United States in 1908. In 1909, Wright attended the International Opium Commission in Shanghai as the American delegates. He was accompanied by Charles Henry Brent, the Episcopal Bishop. On March 12, 1911, Dr. Wright was quoted in as follows in an article in the New York Times: "Of all the nations of the world, the United States consumes most habit-forming drugs per capita. Opium, the most pernicious drug known to humanity, is surrounded, in this country, with far fewer safeguards than any other nation in Europe fences it with.

You seem to be concentrating on marijuana and you do not get any argument from me that criminalizing it's use is heavy handed at best.

[BridgeTroll]

you were incorrect in the statements

Which statements?

[BridgeTroll]

OK... you claim "the statements" are incorrect.  Are they all incorrect?  two? three?  I believe them to be correct.  Please be so kind as to show me  the error of my ways.

[BridgeTroll]

   My statements are correct and yours are incorrect.  Guess which ones of your are wrong...