Dear Readers,

With the November elections just around the corner, I thought it might be interesting to take a look back at how Presidents and their respective administrations have addressed the problem of addiction in this country.

We all know that much time, energy and money has been spent over the last several decades to fight the so-called “War on Drugs.” But how much do we really know about the history of this nation’s drug wars?

It has been more than three decades since former President Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs.” Nixon was concerned about reports that many U.S. soldiers were arriving home from Vietnam with heroin addictions. He created a special drug prevention office and appointed psychiatrist and renowned methadone specialist Dr. Jerome Jaffe to run the operation.

Many of you may be surprised to learn that Nixon was the first and only president to put drug treatment ahead of drug enforcement – in 1971, $105 million of the $155 million he requested to fight the war on drugs, was allocated for treatment and rehabilitation of addicts. According to Jaffe, the idea was to make treatment available to first-time offenders, affording them the chance to stay out of prison. Sadly, this trend didn’t catch on in the federal government.

In 1973, Nixon established the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to combat “an all-out global war on the drug menace.” While President Gerald Ford was in office, things were heating up in Colombia, where cocaine production was in high gear – drug traffickers in Medellin killed 40 people in a weekend massacre after Colombian police seized 600 kilos of cocaine.

Unfortunately, this drug war would arrive on our doorstep during President Jimmy Carter’s time in office, with a 1979 daytime shoot out between Colombian cocaine traffickers in Miami’s Dadeland Mall.

When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, he made the war on drugs a priority, creating a cabinet-level task force that combined agents from multiple agencies to fight drug traffickers. Cocaine trafficking continued to be a huge problem: in 1982, nearly 4,000 pounds of cocaine were seized from a hangar in Miami International Airport. Many, including American drug enforcement agents and informants, would lose their lives because of the Columbian cartels and their operations here and abroad.

Meanwhile, First Lady Nancy Reagan launched the “Just Say No” campaign, which many say was doomed to fail because it drastically underestimated the prevalence of drug use in America, and because it focused primarily on white, middle-class children.

Likely due to the success of South Florida’s Drug Task Force, drug smugglers forge agreements with Mexican marijuana smugglers to start moving cocaine into the U.S. via Mexico, which by the mid-1980s, becomes a major trafficking route for cocaine. Meanwhile, a much cheaper but more potent smokeable form of cocaine, known as crack, is beginning to have a devastating impact in New York City’s inner city neighborhoods.

In 1986, Reagan signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which appropriated $1.7 billion to fight the drug crisis. The bill allocated $97 million to build new prisons; $200 million for drug education; and $240 million for treatment. The most significant impact of this new bill was that it established mandatory minimum drug penalties for drug offenses. These mandatory sentences are widely criticized over the next several years for promoting racial disparities in prisons, mainly due to the significant differences in penalties for crack vs. powder cocaine.

In 1989, President George H.W. Bush establishes the Office of National Drug Control Policy and appoints William Bennett to head this office as the “drug czar.” Although Bennett does increase the budget for drug treatment during this tenure, it still receives less than one-third of the total anti-drug budget.

Under President Bill Clinton, in 1993, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed, increasing legitimate trade across the U.S.-Mexico border. An unintended effect of this agreement was that it created even more difficulty for U.S. Customs agents to find narcotics, hidden among legitimate goods.

The so-called “war on terror” has dominated much of President George W. Bush’s presidency, so it is no surprise that his presidency marked the first time in over 20 years that spending on anti-drug programs would decline on a year-to-year basis, with drastic cuts to budgets for treatment and prevention in the fiscal year 2008 budget.

With growing concern over prescription drug availability and misuse, it will be interesting to see how our next President handles our nation’s drug crisis.

Sincerely,

Stephanie L. Muller
Editor
Counselor,
The Magazine for Addiction Counselors
A Health Communications, Inc. Publication

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