The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs

Chapter 2 - Creating the Myth of the "Nam Junkie": Mass Media and the Rise of a Drug Scare

creating the myth of the “nam junkie” mass media and the rise of a drug scare Illegal drug abuse by military personnel in Vietnam was a “cause célèbre” surrounded by considerable rhetoric, conjecture and emotion from people of different political and philosophical persuasions.—Morris “Duke” Stanton, military psychiatrist, 1976 The screaming headlines said it all. In February 1969 the Washington Post published articles titled “Turn On, Tune In and Fire Away” and “GIs Deep into Drugs.” The U.S. News & World Report subsequently declared, “Marijuana— The Other Enemy in Vietnam”; and Newsweek, “A New GI for Pot and Peace.”1 All these stories gave the impression that the military had been subsumed by a torrent of addiction and that soldiers were subverting American war aims by going into battle stoned. Written at a time of escalating atrocities and the expansion of the war into Cambodia and Laos, they helped to divert attention from the suffering of millions of Indo-Chinese, while generating what one analyst termed a “Pharmacological Gulf of Tonkin”—blowing the scope of the illusory drug crisis far out of proportion.2 In the original Gulf of Tonkin incident , policymakers fabricated the idea that an American naval armada suffered an unprovoked attack by the North Vietnamese to justify the initiation of a sustained aerial bombardment campaign and declaration of war. Now, new myths were being created to justify the escalation of the War on Drugs. Drawing on the sensational testimony of several congressional subcommittee hearings , the mass media played an integral role in promoting a climate of fear surrounding drugs, in part by spuriously linking them to the nation’s military breakdown. Fixated on the pathologies of American veterans to the 38 creating the myth of the “nam junkie” neglect of deeper social variables, they attributed to them potent pharmacological properties disproportionate to their actual effect. They also raised alarm about the return of addicted soldiers to civilian life. This in the end helped to refocus public debate away from the consequences of the war itself and to harden social attitudes toward drugs, binding them in the public consciousness to the tragedy of Vietnam. “You Could See Punctures Up and Down Their Arms” Drugs and an Army in Anguish The myth of the addicted army was born in the mid-1960s when the media began to report rumors of rampant drug abuse in Vietnam.3 By mid-1968, following the publication of Steinbeck’s “The Importance of Being Stoned in Vietnam,” marijuana had become what psychiatrist Roger A. Roffman termed a “hot potato” in the press, in his view as a result of a “history of misinformation and hyperbole” surrounding the drug in the United States and the “reefer madness” campaigns of Harry J. Anslinger. During his tenure as head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) from 1930 to 1962, Anslinger was highly influential in promoting the belief that marijuana precipitated acute mental breakdown, paranoia, and aggression .4 In order to boost funding for his agency, he frequently broadcast stories of individuals committing terrible crimes and even murder under the influence of drugs. A favorite story involved a twenty-one-year-old Floridian of Mexican descent named Victor Lacata, who allegedly hacked up his whole family with an axe while high on marijuana.5 In a 1970 Playboy interview, Anslinger derided proponents of the 1960s counterculture for promoting “Hitler-type lies” surrounding marijuana, which he believed was capable of destroying American society from within. “History is strewn with the bones of nations that tolerated moral laxity and hedonism,” he observed. “Legalizing pot will make highways worse than a second Vietnam.”6 During the Korean War, Anslinger had exaggerated the scope of military addiction and suggested that “Red China” was covertly supplying American troops with opium as an act of sabotage, a charge reported uncritically as fact by the mainstream press.7 In a 1953 book titled The Traffic in Narcotics, he wrote, “The Communists know that a trained soldier becomes a liability and security risk from the moment he first takes a shot of heroin. They have planned well.”8 These comments epitomized Anslinger’s characterization of drug use as a moral evil linked to enemy subversion. The portrayal of the situation in Vietnam by media pundits and government officials was, in hindsight, little different. mass media and the rise of a drug scare 39 During the late 1960s and early 1970s the media...