Bureau Of Narcotics Research Articles

David Herzberg. White Market Drugs: Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in America.

David Herzberg’s White Market Drugs: Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in America is an important book for casting a well-studied slice of history in a new light. The 1914 Harrison Act and the establishment of the narcotics enforcement regime it spawned have generated a large and impressive historiography. Thanks to scholars such as David Musto, David Courtwright, Caroline Acker, and Rufus King, we know how a confluence of racist xenophobia, progressive reformism, and moralism led to the criminalization of “narcotic” drugs like opium, morphine, and heroin, and how the Federal Bureau of Narcotics’ Harry Anslinger harnessed these forces to make himself drug czar of the United States for the middle third of the twentieth century. This classic era of narcotic control from the 1920s to the 1960s created a criminalized, racialized black market in dangerous drugs responsible for great social and health harm to African Americans and other disadvantaged groups, and after a brief hiatus in the 1970s these harms have been redoubled. There is also a strong and growing literature on the pharmaceutical industry as a player in American social history, particularly in its role in shaping perceptions of health, disease, and proper medical care. Herzberg introduces the concept of a “white market” in drugs—the flip side of the black market cocreated by the narcotics control regime—to bridge this divide and draw the two literatures together into a unified and coherent view of US drug politics over the past century.

Unveiling the Threads – A Case Study on the Forensic Identification and Quantification of Cocaine Impregnated in Fabric Using GC-FID

Drug traffickers use different concealment methods to transport cocaine worldwide. Impregnation of cocaine into fabric, clothing and rubber is one of the concealment methods that drug traffickers use to transport cocaine. In 2018, an individual possessing a Bolivian passport, travelling from Dubai was taken into custody at the Katunayake International Airport, Sri Lanka by the officers of Police Narcotics Bureau. The individual had a baggage of fabric suspected to be impregnated with dangerous drugs, with his possession. The baggage containing suspicious fabric items was produced to the Narcotics laboratory of the Government Analyst’s Department for detailed forensic chemical analysis. Initial tests including presumptive tests and Thin Layer Chromatography indicated the possible presence of cocaine in the fabric items. Further analysis using Gas Chromatography with Mass Spectrometry confirmed that the suspicious fabric contained cocaine. The extraction procedure revealed that the average percentage of powder recovered from the fabric was approximately 27% out of the total weight of fabric items. Gas chromatography with Flame Ionisation Detector was used to quantify the amount of cocaine in the extracted powder. Purity of cocaine thus obtained varied from 28%-30%, and cocaine impregnated in fabric items was in the hydrochloride form. The total weight of cocaine impregnated to fabric items was 901.2 grams.

Detectives, Detectors, and Drug Sniffers: Institutionalizing the Drug Dog Before and After Counterinsurgency

The popularity of drug-sniffing dogs since the 1970s rests on the contributions of a dying technological movement—counterinsurgency science. A comparison of two drug-sniffing dog programs—the Federal Bureau of Narcotics’s detective dog of the 1940s and 1950s, and the Department of Defense’s detector dog of the 1960s and 1970s—documents how federal agents failed to institutionalize drug-sniffing dogs, while Department of Defense researchers succeeded. The disparate outcomes of the two programs illustrate, first, the contingent institutional factors involved in adopting dogs for drug control, and second, the fragile institutional relationships supporting counterinsurgency science and new drug-control strategies after the Vietnam War.

To racketeer among neighbors: spatial features of criminal collaboration in the American Mafia

ABSTRACT The American Mafia is a network of criminals engaged in drug trafficking, violence and other illegal activities. Here, we analyze a historical spatial social network (SSN) of 680 Mafia members found in a 1960 investigatory dossier compiled by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics. The dossier includes connections between members who were ‘known criminal associates’ and members are geolocated to a known home address across 15 major U.S. cities. Under an overarching narrative of identifying the network’s proclivities toward security (dispersion) or efficiency (ease of coordination), we pose four research questions related to criminal organizations, power and coordination strategies. We find that the Mafia network is distributed as a portfolio of nearby and distant ties with significant spatial clustering among the Mafia family units. The methods used here differ from former methods that analyze the point pattern locations of individuals and the social network of individuals separately. The research techniques used here contribute to the body of non-planar network analysis methods in GIScience and can be generalized to other types of spatially-embedded social networks.

Evolution of the legislative and administrative system of controlled drugs in Taiwan

Controlled drugs are psychoactive drugs with dependence (addiction) and abuse potentials. They evolved from free-trade goods to scheduled substances that are strictly regulated in the United Nations drug-related Conventions. This paper began with a brief review on the history of addictive substance abuse in Taiwan. Then the progress of controlled-drug-related law enactment and the functions of National Narcotics Bureau and its successor, National Bureau of Controlled Drugs, were succinctly depicted. The experiences of substance abuse prevention and control, which have been accumulated in the past two decades since the methamphetamine deluge, have evolved into a controlled-drug regulatory system that now conforms to the spirit of the three UN anti-drug Conventions in general and a comprehensive system for the surveillance and prevention of substance abuse. However, according to the present substance-abuse problems and future developing trend, it is advised that (1) the operation of scheduling system should be more expertized and the inspection should be further strengthened; (2) whether the narcotic manufacturing maintains the status quo as a monopoly or seeks privatization should be based on the benefit of the general public; (3) in addition to the law enforcement from the supply side, a thorough anti-drug strategy should be equipped with a monitoring and reporting system for early substance-abuse detection and surveillance, a proactive education program that touches the need of the risk groups and a cost-effective and humanistic treatment program.

Racism and Its Effect on Cannabis Research.

Racism and Its Effect on Cannabis Research.

The Politics of Marijuana: Truth Regimes and Institutional Ignorance

During the 20th century, Harry Anslinger (1892-1975) waged one of the most successful disinformation campaigns in US history. Anslinger served from 1930-1962 as the founding commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. When Anslinger launched his anti-cannabis crusade in the 1930s most people viewed cannabis as a harmless weed. Far from viewing cannabis as a danger, many communities celebrated hemp as their economic lifeblood. It was, therefore, a tall order for Harry Anslinger to turn the tide of public opinion against such a well-loved plant, but Anslinger proved more than equal to the task. To bring about the necessary shift in public opinion, Harry Anslinger would have to construct an alternate reality wherein cannabis morphed from a harmless weed into the most dangerous drug known to humanity. Thus, Anslinger concocted his “Reefer Madness” truth regime.

Containing Addiction: The Federal Bureau of Narcotics and the Origins of America's Global Drug War

Containing Addiction: The Federal Bureau of Narcotics and the Origins of America's Global Drug War

El papel del Federal Bureau of Narcotics en el diseño de la política de drogas en México (1940-1968)

The paper examines the role played by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) – a law enforcement body within the U.S. Department of the Treasury – in the design and execution of drug policy in Mexico between 1940 and 1968. Drawing on primary sources from half a dozen collections of documents in Mexico and the United States, the article aims to answer two key questions: “What mechanisms did the FBN use to intervene in Mexican drug policy during the period?” and “What was its true impact and effectiveness?” This case study aims to contribute to research on drug policy in Mexico and study the influence exercised by various U.S. actors and organizations in this regard.

Tort Justice Reform

This Article calls for a comprehensive reform of public tort law with respect to law enforcement conduct. It articulates an effective and equitable remedial regime that reconciles the aspirational goals of public tort law with the practical realities of devising payment and disciplinary procedures that are responsive to tort settlements and judgments. This proposed statutory scheme seeks to deter law enforcement misconduct without disincentivizing prudent officers from performing their duties or overburdening them with extensive litigation. Rather than lamenting the dissolution of Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Federal Bureau of Narcotics or the insurmountability of qualified immunity, reform advocates should acknowledge that the very distinction between constitutional and common-law torts is arbitrary for purposes of individual officer deterrence and accountability. By examining the relationship between Fourth Amendment excessive force jurisprudence and the common-law torts of assault, battery, and negligence, this Article highlights that the analytical distinction between those legal doctrines imposes an improper demarcation for civil liability. If law enforcement agencies concern themselves solely with the constitutionality of their employees’ conduct, training concentrates on the instant moment in which deadly force is used without substantial reflection on the conduct, including antecedent negligence, that led to the confrontation. At the same time, whether an officer can be held personally accountable should not be based on the intentionality of the conduct; rather, the reprehensibleness of the conduct is a more appropriate benchmark for individual liability. By acknowledging that tort law addresses various types of law enforcement activity that do not necessarily rise to the level of constitutional or criminal infractions, legislative bodies can begin conceptualizing public tort law as an important component of criminal justice reform. But to do so, we need tort justice reform.

Jangjoo v. Sieg: First Amendment Bivens Claims Precluded Post the Ziglar v. Abbasi Decision

Neither the Constitution nor the United States Code state that a federal official who violates a person’s constitutional rights may be sued for damages. It was the landmark 1971 decision of Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Federal Bureau of Narcotics, of the U.S. Supreme Court that held that a federal agent who commits an unconstitutional search and seizure can be held liable in damages through a right of action implied under the Fourth Amendment. Since then, the Court twice extended the Bivens cause of action into other constitutional contexts. In Davis v. Passman, the Court held that an employee terminated on account of her sex could seek damages from her former employer, a U.S. Congressman, under the Fifth Amendment. In Carlson v. Green, the Court permitted a Bivens action under the Eighth Amendment against senior prison officials who exhibited deliberate indifference to an inmate’s medical needs. The Court then decided eight consecutive cases precluding Bivens actions. In the latest Supreme Court Ruling, Ziglar v. Abbasi, the Court ruled that persons detained after the September 11 attacks could not maintain a Bivens action against federal officials responsible for their detention under harsh conditions. Following Abbasi, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled less than a year later, in Jangjoo v. Sieg, that a federal contractor plaintiff had no Bivens claim against federal officers under the First Amendment. The Supreme Court's recent Bivens review in Abbasi has led to decisions such as Jangoo by other federal courts rejecting Bivens claims according to their interpretation of the Supreme Court's Abbasi decision. In Vanderklok v. United States, the Third Circuit rejected an arrestee's Bivens action against individual TSA officers for violating the plaintiff's First Amendment rights because the Supreme Court has never recognized a Bivens action under the First Amendment and, therefore, under Abbasi, no such action can prevail. The Abbasi U.S. Supreme Court decision precludes Bivens actions unless the actions mirror the three Supreme Court decisions decided previously and summarized above. The impact of Abbasi significantly reduces Bivens actions as a means of recovery for individuals who allege violations of constitutional rights by federal agents. Congress has not yet addressed the consequences of the Abbasi decision.

Breaking the Monopoly System: American Influence on the British Decision to Prohibit Opium Smoking and End its Asian Monopolies, 1939–1945

ABSTRACTThe colonial opium monopoly systems remained a major point of international contention in the decades prior to World War II, driving a major wedge between British and US drug diplomats in particular. The issue typified the deeper divide between Anglo-American drug diplomacy in Asia. The British approach stemmed from imperial realities and a self-perception of pragmatism aiming for gradual suppression of opium consumption via regulation. In contrast, the US approach remained grounded in a disdain for British (and broader European) imperialism in Asia and a moralistic, self-interested zeal driving towards absolute and immediate prohibition in the region. After decades of dispute, in 1942/1943, the US Federal Bureau of Narcotics initiated a campaign to force a change in British and Dutch colonial opium policies in Asia. The British were reluctant to pursue prohibitionist policies, which they feared would be politically destabilising, fiscally detrimental and difficult to implement. However, they eventually acquiesced. This paper systematically examines the US policy advocacy campaign, the British response and Britain's reasons for agreeing to a major shift in colonial opium policy in the region. In so doing, it aims to develop a new and deeper understanding of determinants of this policy change.

Imagining a Global Sovereignty: U.S. Counternarcotic Operations in Istanbul during the Early Cold War and the Origins of the Foreign “War on Drugs”

Drawing on declassified records of the little-known Federal Bureau of Narcotics, this article examines counternarcotics operations in postwar Istanbul in the context of the Cold War and its impact on U.S. officials’ conceptions of national security. Ever-expanding drug control operations demonstrated the emergence of U.S. hegemonic impulses independent of the deepening conflict with the Soviet Union. The article challenges the view that U.S. policy on drug control during the early Cold War era existed primarily as an adjunct of the “deep state.” Actual U.S. policies were shaped by a much more complex set of factors.

High Times

High Times John Tytell (bio) Bop Apocalypse: Jazz, Race, the Beats & Drugs Martin Torgoff Da Capo Press www.dacapopress.com/book/hardcover/bop-apocalypse/9780306824753 393 Pages; Print, $26.00 Bop Apocalypse is a highly coherent, comprehensive and quite compelling account of the fusion of jazz history, the combustible and sometimes compromising influence of drugs, and the emergence of the Beat writers. Even if some of Torgoff’s ground has been previously covered, he weaves his narrative more fluently than some of his predecessors and with more pickle and punch. His book is not a blow-by-blow job, not a numbing parade of fact as much as a gestalt history using a synthesizing lens focusing on a conjunction of revealing events like the detail of a young Jack Kerouac sharing a table at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem with his first wife and Billie Holiday, or the bop musician Charlie Parker downing eight doubles on a dare (what downed Dylan Thomas) before performing at the Hi De Ho Club in Los Angeles in 1946. The scope of the book is large: the beginning of jazz in New Orleans after World War One; its development in Chicago in the 1920’s and Harlem in the 1930’s; the immediate repression by Harry Anslinger and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics; the impact of jazz and drugs on the Beats at the end of World War Two and their ability to artistically disseminate the news of that impact. Torgoff is a gifted storyteller and he begins with a striking anecdote told to him by the writer Terry Southern. Picking cotton in Texas in 1936, on the way to fishing for bullheads in a pond surrounded by weeping willows and cottonwoods, he saw a cow sprawled on the ground in what seemed contented bliss. The field hand accompanying him noticed an uprooted green plant and explained that the cow had eaten “red dirt,” or loco-weed: i.e. Marijuana. In a time when a national paranoia about this weed had been cultivated by federal agents, Southern began searching for more. By the time he wrote the celebrated campfire scene for Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider, Southern had “smoked thousands of joints, sharing them with some of the most interesting cultural figures of his age….” Bop Apocalypse is organized with a series of sharply drawn vignettes: Anslinger, the country’s first drug czar, an inveterate liar and xenophobic racist who declared the drug war; the musician Muzz Mezzrow, the “White Mayor of Harlem,” who began dealing weed and whose 1946 autobiography Really the Blues was read by a student at Columbia University, Allen Ginsberg, “as if it were the Rosetta Stone”; the genial and generous Louis Armstrong who played music that could make people stand on their chairs and shout,” and who understood that the musicians in his band could function on marijuana without suffering the after effects of alcohol. Another key connection was Jack Kerouac who as a student at Columbia frequented a club in Harlem where a new evolution in jazz was created. The edgy, dissonance of Bop was formed in Minton’s cellar by musicians like Lester Young and Charlie Parker. Torgoff offers elegant accounts of Young, known as the Epitome of Cool, and Parker, the Icarus of that cellar. The use of heroin, Torgoff maintains, “spread in direct proportion to the cult of Parker’s admirers and Anslinger soon created a special file on musicians.” It is estimated that 75% of jazz musicians became addicted to heroin in the 1940s and 1950s, and Torgoff compassionately explores the dynamics of this phenomenon. For Jackie McLean, one of the musicians Torgoff interviewed, it was the best way to overcome a perplexing stage fright; for others like Holiday it was compensation for a terrible despair. Paradoxically, for the authorities, it became the most convenient excuse for repression. Part of the richness of Torgoff’s tapestry is his reliance on interviews he conducted over the past quarter century like the one he did with Herbert Huncke in 1992. A catalyst underground figure whose term “beat” became the signifier for a generation, Huncke was living in a basement on...

The Value of Connections: Evidence from the Italian‐American Mafia

Using declassified Federal Bureau of Narcotics records on 800 US Mafia members active in the 1950s and 1960s, and on their connections within the organized crime network, I estimate network effects on gangsters’ economic status. Lacking information on criminal proceeds, I measure economic status exploiting detailed information about their place of residence. Housing values are reconstructed using current deflated transactions recorded on Zillow.com. I deal with the potential reverse causality between the economic status and the gangster’s position in the network exploiting exogenous exposure to potential pre-immigration connections. In the absence of pre-immigration data I use the informational content of surnames, called isonomy, to measure the place of origin. The instrument is valid as long as conditional on the characteristics of the gangsters (including the region of birth and a rich set of controls about the gangsters’ legal and illegal activities) such exposure influences the gangsters’ importance inside the network (called centrality) but not the preference for specific housing needs. A standard deviation increase in closeness centrality increases economic status by between one forth (OLS) and one standard deviation (2SLS).

Mississippi, Race, and Civil Rights: Some Recent Books

REVIEW-ESSAY PANTHEA REID Louisiana State University Mississippi, Race, and Civil Rights: Some Recent Books Editor’s note: The following review-essay covers selected works nominated for the 2017 nonfictionawardpresentedbytheMississippiInstituteofArtsandLetters.JasonMorgan WardreceivedtheawardforHangingBridge:RacialViolenceandAmerica’sCivilRights Century. Founded in 1978, MIAL is dedicated to celebrating the rich cultural heritage of Mississippi and to recognizing outstanding achievements by visual artists, musicians, and writers with close ties to the state. I have served on the MIAL Board of Governors and as the coordinator of the nonfiction category since 2015. I was acting in that capacity when I invited Panthea Reid to serve as the nonfiction judge. It was an added benefit that she was willing to share her views on the books most likely of interest to readers of Mississippi Quarterly. – T.A. I LEFT BATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA, FOR PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY, IN 2001, Princeton for Blacksburg, Virginia, in 2016. My last trip to the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference was in 1993. Thus I write at some distance from the Deep South, geographically and chronologically, but I’m still a southerner. At that last Faulkner conference, a young woman who accompanied the participants to dinner at the Taylor Grocery insisted that Oxford, Mississippi, was the best place ever to live. I recall her remark vividly because it reminded me that James Meredith, who had been heckled, abused, and threatened just thirty-one years before, had hardly found Oxford the “best” place to live. There is the quandary: why is Mississippi so good to some, so egregiously horrid to others, so loved and hated? At the close of Absalom, Absalom!. Quentin Compson answers his Canadian roommate Shreve ambiguously: “I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!.” (311). Like Quentin, more than a century after that scene which Faulkner set in Massachusetts, we southerners continue to be torn between love and hate, loyalty and disgust. In The End of White Christian America, Robert P. Jones uses three buildings (the United Methodist Building, 1923, in DC; the Interchurch Center, New York City, 1960; and the Crystal Cathedral in Grove City, California, 1980) as gauges of religious evolution in a country which by 2050 will no longer be a majority-white nation. Jones considers the 578 Panthea Reid effectiveness of accusations against Barack Obama for being neither Christian nor American to be symptomatic of evangelical ignorance and prejudice, especially in the South. He notes, however, that some few churches, even in Mississippi, as well as in the North, “are already pioneering a new kind of Christian community that transcends the color line” (180). Jones cites Walker Percy’s 1965 indictment of Southern Christians for the “Great Southern Sin of Silence” (Jones 221; Percy, “The Failure and the Hope” 329). Jones offers a “A Eulogy for White Christian America.” His “Benediction” did not, however, anticipate Donald Trump’spresidency.Ihopehe’swritingasequelexplaininghowTrump’s anti-Obama myths galvanized disgruntled fundamentalists to demonstrate that “White Christian America” wasn’t dead after all, not yet. Memoirs are by definition self-absorbed, but they must not be merely self-centered. Charlie Spillers writes about himself, but his focus is larger. Though it’s only partly set in Mississippi and is not about race (the color line seems fairly inconsequential both to law breakers and enforcers), I include here his Confessions of an Undercover Agent: Adventures, Close Calls, and the Toll of a Double Life. It describes strata of existence to which most of us who read the Mississippi Quarterly are oblivious, rather as genteel white southerners, especially women, for centuries were oblivious to the intimidation that kept black people “in their place.” Spillers begins with a blockbuster preface listing “a wide-ranging cast of characters in the criminal world” (xi). After that list of unsavory types, he explains that they all had one thing in common —him! He was each of them, working undercover with the Baton Rouge Police Department and then the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics. This memoir includes high drama, close calls, riotous episodes, and appalling outcomes, especially deaths of associates at the hands of corrupt drug smugglers and thieves. Ten years of undercover work threatened his marriage and his health, but he learned “quick thinking,” “planning, directing, and...

PRODUCTION AND TRADE RELATED ISSUES OF OPIUM POPPY CULTIVATION WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO BARABANKI DISTRICT, UTTAR PRADESH, INDIA

Opium poppy has been cultivated in India since the 10th century and used as remedies for a variety of ailments. After Independence, the Indian government has taken control on its production and usage. Licit cultivation of opium for medicinal purposes is carried out in India only in selected areas under strict licensing policy. India is one of the world's top producers of licit opium and is the sole producer of licit opium latex. To meet India's share of anticipated world demand, the India government set a licit opium harvest target of 1200 tons. At present Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh of India are promoting licensed cultivation under the control of Central Bureau of Narcotics (CBN). The average opium latex yields in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh are 53.82, 55.79 and 44.77 kg/ha, respectively. As per CBN report, 603 poppy growers covering 213.69 ha of total sown area were given license to grow poppy with targeted minimum qualifying yields of 52.0 kg/ha. Based on discussion with poppy growers, an average yield of opium latex produces 25 kg, opium seeds (posta dana) 400 kg and fruit scalps 400 kg per acre basis with the cost of cultivation of Rs. 25000 and net profit of rupees one lakh.

The Value of Connections: Evidence from the Italian-American Mafia

Using declassified Federal Bureau of Narcotics records on 800 US Mafia members active in the 1950s and 1960s, and on their connections within the organized crime network, I estimate network effects on gangsters' economic status. Lacking information on criminal proceeds, I measure economic status exploiting detailed information about their place of residence. Housing values are reconstructed using current deflated transactions recorded on Zillow.com. I deal with the potential reverse causality between the economic status and the gangster's position in the network exploiting exogenous exposure to potential pre-immigration connections. In the absence of pre-immigration data I use the informational content of surnames, called isonomy, to measure the place of origin. The instrument is valid as long as conditional on the characteristics of the gangsters (including the region of birth and a rich set of controls about the gangsters' legal and illegal activities) such exposure influences the gangsters' importance in- side the network (called centrality) but not the preference for specific housing needs. A standard deviation increase in closeness centrality increases economic status by between one forth (OLS) and one standard deviation (2SLS).

The Law: No Relief in Sight: BarringBivensClaims in Torture Cases

Imagine this scenario: You are an American citizen. Based on a belief that you are a threat, you are ordered captured and detained by U.S. authorities. While being held pursuant to policy memoranda and orders issued by high-ranking officials in Washington, DC, you are subjected to acts of cruel and unusual physical treatment, which, in your view, violate the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution as well as the United Nations Convention against Torture. Should you be able to file a civil action seeking damages against those high-ranking officials in the executive branch who authorized your torture or should they be shielded from suit on grounds of national security and official immunity? In the recent past, four such cases--known as Bivens actions--have made their way through the federal courts to the appellate level. This article reviews those cases and concludes that, given recent decisions, the plaintiffs in such suits are likely to have their claims barred. Bivens Actions When an official operating color of state violates someone's civil rights as established by the Constitution and federal law, victims have the right to sue for damages under 42 U.S.C. section 1983. (1) Yet, no such federal statute creates a cause of action against federal officials for violating those same civil rights. As a result, victims of civil rights violations by federal officials historically turned to state courts to seek redress, often with mixed results given the diversity of laws across the 50 states. (2) In 1967, Webster Bivens brought suit against six agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics for violations of his Fourth Amendment rights in federal court. (3) Bivens alleged that the agents entered and searched his residence without a warrant and arrested him without probable cause. Arguing that he great humiliation, embarrassment, and mental suffering, Bivens sought $15,000 in damages from each of the agents for their unlawful conduct. (4) district court accepted the federal government's view and dismissed on grounds that federal law did not create a cause of action against officials operating under color of federal law for violations of civil rights and, moreover, even if it did, the agents were operating in their official capacity and thus were immune from suit. Seizing on the district court's cause of action determination, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal. (5) Supreme Court, however, disagreed and reversed. Writing for the majority, Justice William Brennan cautioned that power, once granted, does not disappear like a magic gift when it is wrongfully used. An agent acting--albeit unconstitutionally--in the name of the United States possesses a far greater capacity for harm than an individual trespasser exercising no authority other than his own. (6) Noting the inherent danger in overstepping one's authority, the Court added that the pursuit of a civil action was an appropriate measure for someone whose rights were violated by an official of the executive branch: Historically, damages have been regarded as the ordinary remedy for an invasion of personal interests in liberty. (7) Because the Supreme Court did not discern any special factors counseling hesitation in the absence of affirmative action by Congress, it held that Bivens was entitled to recover money damages for any injuries he has suffered as a result of the agents' violation of the Amendment. (8) As he wrapped up his opinion, Justice Brennan admonished, The very essence of civil liberty certainly consists in the right of every individual to claim the protection of the laws, whenever he receives an injury. (9) Even though Bivens dealt specifically with a violation of the Fourth Amendment, it opened the door for lawsuits alleging violations of the various amendments of the Bill of Rights. (10) Of particular relevance to the post-9/11 torture cases discussed below, in Carlson v. …

The Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the States, and the Origins of Modern Drug Enforcement in the United States, 1950–1962

Over one million drug arrests occur in the United States each year, the vast majority of which are made at the state and local levels. This study examines the time period when state and local governments began to aggressively police illegal drugs, and we seek to determine the extent Harry Anslinger, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics Commissioner, actively encouraged these governments to expand drug enforcement and adopt more punitive sentences. The study found that although Anslinger and his agency worked to influence state and local drug policy in the United States, they enjoyed varying levels of success from state to state. By the mid-1950s, a new intergovernmental enforcement regime had emerged where the federal, state, and local governments adopted punitive drug laws and invested resources in policing drugs. Drug enforcement remains the dominant policy approach in the United States.