-
Chapter 8 - The Crackdown: The Reagan Revolution and the War on Drugs
- University of Massachusetts Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
the crackdown the reagan revolution and the war on drugs I could be some dumb scum bag ho that have a lot of money to push my campaign and all I got to say is “drugs” and they’ll elect me immediately. Drugs is the best thing for politicians in America, man!—Harlem crack dealer, ca. 1986 In 1989, journalist Jefferson Morley smoked a rock of crack cocaine and wrote about his experience for the New Republic in “What Crack Is Really Like.” Though Morley was known to indulge in recreational drug use, the piece held deep political significance: it was written as a parody of the sweeping drug sensationalism that he saw pervading the country. Morley concluded that crack was not instantaneously addictive, as it was portrayed in the media, but produced a mere mild euphoric high followed by a brief hangover the next day. “If all you have in life is bad choices,” he wrote, in attempting to highlight the structural variables of race, class, and socioeconomic background that shape addiction patterns, “crack may not be the most unpleasant of them.”1 Besides selling magazines and earning the ire of presidential drug policy adviser William Bennett, who called the author a “defector in the drug war,” Morley’s journalistic stunt captured the zeitgeist of the late 1980s. This was best described in the title of a book by Mike Gray, Drug Crazy.2 By mid-decade, public opinion polls showed that a majority of Americans viewed drugs as among the worst social problems and national security threats plaguing the nation; they were supporting renewed prohibition policies in ever greater numbers.3 The Reagan administration made drug control central to its broader mandate of reviving the nation’s prestige and eradicating the “culture of permissiveness of the 1960s,” which stood guilty, Reagan said, of “contaminating the larger the reagan revolution and the war on drugs 167 society.”4 Though not always explicitly, Vietnam and the enduring myth of the addicted army had an important impact on social attitudes toward drugs in the 1980s and on the determined character of the Reagan antidrug crusade. Reagan officials frequently claimed that “narco-guerrillas” and “terrorists” in Latin America deliberately trafficked drugs into the United States as an act of warfare and sabotage. This claim harked back to similar accusations made against Communist traffickers earlier and tapped into deep-rooted anxieties surrounding the ramifications of drug use in post–Vietnam America, including its purported link to the spread of violence, crime, and an erosion of national strength and power. Reagan’s War on Drugs was designed to address these problems. It also sought to revive public confidence in American social institutions, including the military, purportedly ravaged by drugs during the 1960s and ’70s. Misreading Public Opinion The Carter “Failure” The political underpinning of Reagan’s drug war was partially tied to the shortcomings of predecessor Jimmy Carter, who had left himself susceptible to attack by failing to placate popular concerns over drugs. Commissioner of Customs William Von Raab characteristically commented that before 1981, “fighting the drug war was sort of like being with the Brooklyn Dodgers. It was sort of wait until next year.” Carter saw himself more as part of a winning tradition and had increased federal drug control programs, placing an emphasis on supply-side interdiction.5 With the Middle East supplanting the Golden Triangle as a major source of heroin, Carter boosted federal aid to UN crop substitution and rural development programs in Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan’s Upper Helmond Valley, and he supported the formation of an antidrug unit in the Afghan national police. He also expanded military and police assistance in the Andes, in response to the growing export of cocaine, and backed a major eradication campaign in Peru’s Upper Huallaga Valley (UHV) in which American-trained security forces were given broad powers of search and seizure and detention.6 In Colombia, Carter tripled the foreign aid budget and signed an extradition treaty with President Julio Turbay Ayala mandating the deportation of high-level traffickers. In Mexico, he simultaneously helped coordinate what journalist Jack Anderson characterized as a Vietnam-style war involving search-and-destroy missions and aerial defoliation campaigns—including flights over marijuana fields—that soiled the land.7 [54.175.59.242] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:50 GMT) 168 the crackdown Domestically, Carter’s administration boasted about the arrest of several prominent traffickers, including Harlem kingpin Leroy “Nicky” Barnes, who had been...