The Quest for Drug Control: Politics and Federal Policy in a Period of Increasing Substance Abuse, 1963–1981 (review)

The cover photographs on David F. Musto and Pamela Korsmeyer's book aptly illustrate their main message about federal drug policy under four successive American presidents: Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford each gazes somberly downward; Jimmy Carter looks quizzically off-camera. In words, the take-home message is: "As so often happens, a complex environment had resulted in imperfect decision making" (p. 67). Though Musto and Korsmeyer say this about Operation Intercept, Nixon's stepped-up drug searches at the Mexican and Canadian borders, the statement conveys their view of policy: even a clear grasp of the problem is chancy; dimmer yet is the likelihood that a policy emerging from a welter of debate among diverse parties with conflicting agendas will constitute an effective response.

Add to this Musto's view that drug use cycles in response to social attitudes, and we see that "drug use floods and subsides over decades, not in the course of a presidential term or two" (pp. xxi–xxii). The twenty-odd years covered here witnessed an increasing use of psychoactive drugs, despite strenuous efforts of the federal government. This fatalistic assessment emerges from Musto and Korsmeyer's detailed account of the development of federal drug policy in the 1960s and 1970s, as revealed through their examination of presidential papers.

Yet the story also has a narrative arc, extending from efforts to move drug policy toward public health and away from law enforcement in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, to the effective squelching of such impulses—just as some thought they were coming to fruition—in the Carter administration. There is also Sturm und Drang: high hopes, bold promises, reversals of fortune, and scandal intersperse long passages tightly focused on the documents.

If Kennedy had brought drug policy into the White House, it fell to Johnson's advisors to begin reshuffling agency functions in an attempt to rationalize federal drug control. But the dramatic changes came under Nixon, who declared war on drugs and mandated community-based treatment, including methadone maintenance. That he did so in the interest of crime control has been well known. Less-well-recognized points that come out in this analysis include the degree to which the Nixonian initiatives had been proposed in the Kennedy and Johnson years, and the degree to which the deployment of methadone maintenance reflected not just concerns about addicted Vietnam veterans, but also fears of urban blacks in a period of black rage.

Both Ford and Carter articulated limited goals for drug policy without sacrificing a stay-tough stance on enforcement. But to state goals in such terms as "reducing" drug use invited criticism from politicians who could count on Americans' ongoing support for harsh penalties. The period came to a dramatic close as Carter's drug advisor, Peter Bourne, first urged the decriminalization of marijuana possession but later resigned under a cloud.

By now, a surging parents' movement was pressing the federal government to recommit itself to the eradication of drug use. The liberalizers had made two mistakes: in failing to notice the decreasing age of marijuana users, they seemed to condone pot smoking by twelve-year-olds; in casting cocaine as a benign party drug, they missed the drug's potential for compulsive use. When Reagan took office in 1981, the national mood favored the absolutist stand popularized by his wife Nancy as "Just Say No."

Readers wanting an in-depth look at the executive branch's activities in formulating and executing drug policy will find this volume invaluable. The book is accompanied by a CD-ROM containing the primary documents cited in the text, in searchable form.