Bureau Of Narcotics Research Articles

Commentaries on Pedersen (2011): DOES CANNABIS CAUSE POVERTY TOO? MOVING BEYOND THE MALEVOLENCE PARADIGM

Commentaries on Pedersen (2011): DOES CANNABIS CAUSE POVERTY TOO? MOVING BEYOND THE MALEVOLENCE PARADIGM

Responding to Clandestine Methamphetamine Manufacturing: A Case Study in Situational Crime Prevention

During the 1990s, Oklahoma experienced an increase in clandestine methamphetamine laboratories in operation in the state. Identifying and responding to this problem became a law enforcement priority. Clandestine laboratories were extremely dangerous and volatile, as they posed great risks to individuals and local communities. Initial efforts to control the problem proved difficult, given the availability of all the key ingredients and supplies. In response to this problem, the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (OBNDD) worked to inform the Oklahoma legislature, which passed a number of laws aimed at affecting clandestine manufacturing. This case study explores Oklahoma’s legislative responses to methamphetamine manufacturing and retroactively examines whether these laws fit within the situational crime prevention perspective.

"Selling is More of a Habit than Using": Narcotraficante Lola la Chata and Her Threat to Civilization, 1930-1960

This article uses materials of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and its predecessor, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, and of the U.S. Department of the Treasury to document the thirty-year career of the female Mexican heroin peddler and trafficker Lola la Chata and the efforts of police, government officials, and diplomats on both sides of the border to undermine her criminal empire. By placing women within contemporary studies of drug trafficking, la Chata complicates the masculine constructions of the history of narcotics. An examination of the evidence reveals la Chata's transnational threat and her fluidity and flexibility in responding to policy shifts in Mexico, the United States, and Canada over three decades.

Policing Development: Andean Drug Control & the Expansion of US Capitalism

AbstractThe US Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the United Nations, political elites in Peru and Bolivia, policing and public health officials and an array of scientific experts joined together in an e...

Myth‐making and opiate abuse: An early symbolic interactionist theory of addiction in the fieldwork of Alfred Lindesmith and its opposition

The personal files and notes from Alfred Lindesmith’s only excursion into the field (1935–1937) give a particularly informative view of addiction and addict mythmaking about opiates and opiate addiction. Lindesmith’s work, overseen by Herbert Blumer, was the first empirical validation of the symbolic interactionist perspective and produced a theory of opiate addiction that is still respected and used by sociologists, psychologists, and substance abuse experts. The theory itself produced its own mythmaking in the attempts of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics to refute and suppress Lindesmith’s work and in the construction of its own euphoria mythology of addiction, addicts, and Lindesmith.

A rapid situation assessment of drug use in Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guinea (PNG) is an Asia Pacific country that we hear little about in the drug and alcohol area. Recently at the APEC meeting in Chile, the Australian Prime Minister, Mr John Howard, announced that PNG would be one of the countries of focus with regards to public health programs and HIV AIDS assistance by Australia in the future. This is a timely report of a rapid situation assessment (RSA) of drug use and drug-related harm in Papua New Guinea (PNG) conducted in 1998-1999, with comments on developments since that time. The author of this paper, David McDonald, was appointed as the international consultant to work with the PNG National Narcotics Bureau to undertake an assessment of drug use in PNG, and is well-equipped to report on the drug and alcohol situation in that country. The rapid assessment study was conducted to provide up-to-date, factual information about drugs in PNG that could contribute to the development of a national drug strategy for PNG. The focus was on illegal drugs in accordance with the mandates of the auspicing bodies--namely cannabis and home-brewed alcohol. In keeping with the methodology for rapid assessment, the author utilised multiple information sources including published literature, administrative by-product data, case studies, a key informants' study and structured interviews with drug users. It was found that alcohol--both licit and home brew, as well as high potency cannabis, were the major substance problems in PNG. This paper, based on a more detailed report available through the author, provides a snap-shot of substance use problems in PNG. However, the author reports that problems in public sector management within and external to the sponsoring agency, the National Narcotics Bureau, have meant that the proposed national drug control strategy has not yet been developed.

The Tumescent Citizen

The Tumescent Citizen

Between Coca and Cocaine: A Century or More of U.S.-Peruvian Drug Paradoxes, 1860–1980

Between Coca and Cocaine: A Century or More of U.S.-Peruvian Drug Paradoxes, 1860–1980

The Politics of Heroin in South-east Asia

The Politics of Heroin in South-east Asia

Just What the Doctor Ordered: The Harrison Anti-Narcotic Act, the Supreme Court, and the Federal Regulation of Medical Practice, 1915–1919

Just What the Doctor Ordered: The Harrison Anti-Narcotic Act, the Supreme Court, and the Federal Regulation of Medical Practice, 1915–1919 Kurt Hohenstein (bio) Kurt Hohenstein Kurt Hohenstein is a doctoral candidate studying American legal and political history at the University of Virginia. His article won the 2001 Hughes-Gossett Student Essay Award. ENDNOTES 1. Newspaper clippings relating to the Harrison Narcotic Act, 1915–1946: “Federal Agents Claim Harrison Act Violated Extensively Here,” Atlanta Constitution, June 15, 1915, General Records of the Bureau of Narcotics, Department of the Treasury; Record Group 170 (RG 170), National Archives Building, College Park, MD (NACP). This record will be referred to as Newspaper Clippings, Record Group 170. It consists of two threadbare scrapbooks of newspaper articles, opinion pieces, and editorials about the enforcement of the Harrison Anti-Narcotic Act of 1915. Many of the articles have personal notes on them, being referred from or to a particular person in the Bureau of Narcotics. There is no indication of who kept the scrapbooks, but it is clear that they were maintained by officials who were making enforcement policy for the Bureau of Narcotics. 2. William E. Clayton, Jr., “Federal Government Plans to Counteract States’ New Drug Laws,” Houston Chronicle December 30, 1996, 1. 3. 38 Statutes at Large 785, Chapter 1, December 17, 1914. 4. Ibid., Section 2. 5. Ibid., Section 2(a). 6. See, generally, James C. Mohr, Doctors and the Law: Medical Jurisprudence in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press: New York, 1993). 7. William Butler Eldridge, Narcotics and the Law: A Critique of the American Experiment in Narcotic Drug Cases, 2d. ed., rev. (The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1967), 9. 8. David F. Musto, The American Disease, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 122. 9. 241 U.S. 394 (1916). 10. Ibid. at 399. 11. 249 U.S. 86 (1919). 12. 249 U.S. 96 (1919). 13. Ibid., 98. 14. Ibid., 99–100. 15. Musto, 133. 16. Ibid., 134. 17. Eva Bertram, Morris Blachman, Kenneth Sharpe, and Peter Andreas, Drug War Politics: The Price of Denial (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 70–71. 18. R. Alton Lee, A History of Regulatory Taxation (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1973), 119. 19. For general histories of the Harrison Act, see Charles E. Terry, The Opium Problem (New York: Bureau of Social Hygiene, Inc., 1928); W.W. Willoughby, Opium as an International Problem: The Geneva Conferences (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1925); Musto; Ansley Hamid, Drugs in America: Sociology, Economics, and Politics (Gaithersburg, MD: Aspen Publishers Inc., 1998); and Mike Gray, Drug Crazy (New York: Random House, 1998). 20. For a full discussion of the Mann Act and the enforcement of its provisions by the Department of Justice, see David J. Langum, Crossing Over the Line: Legislating Morality and the Mann Act (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). There are interesting social and legal parallels between the passage and enforcement efforts of the Mann Act and the Harrison Act. For the purposes of this paper, the only issue considered is Representative Mann’s influence on the floor debate of both bills. 21. U.S. Congressional Record (63/1), June 26, 1913, 2193. 22. Ibid., 2194. 23. Lee, 1. 24. United States Constitution, Article I, Section 8. 25. Lee, 9. 26. Ibid., 9–10. 27. Musto, 70. Quoting Dr. Jonathan Pereira, from his standard medical British text, The Elements of Materia and Medica and Therapeutics, published in 1854 and widely used in America. The medical profession believed that opium was “undoubtedly the most important and valuable remedy in the whole Materia Medica” (1036–1046). 28. Musto, 100. 29. Terry, 631. 30. Musto, 31. 31. Terry, 649–650. The ten nations that did not sign the convention were Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, Switzerland, Austria-Hungary, Norway, Sweden, Roumania, Montenegro, and Serbia. 32. Musto, 43–44. It is likely that this appeal had the perhaps unintentional effect of causing some southern congressmen and senators to reconsider their traditionally strong view of states’ rights in the areas of police power regulation, since their vote for the Harrison Act could be seen in the light of this discourse as protection against the rampant and...

Maintaining Orthodoxy: The Depression-Era Struggle over Morphine Maintenance in California

With the closure of the Shreveport Clinic in 1923, the United States entered a 40-year period during which legal opiate maintenance was limited to a small number of registered medical addicts, most of them cancer patients. Addicts were demonized, hounded by law enforcement personnel, and rarely treated outside of jails. Abstinence was the only legitimate goal of treatment. Quite correctly, historians regard the period between the mid-1920s and the mid-1960s as the Dark Ages of American drug policy. Even so, there was resistance to such therapeutic orthodoxy, notably on the West Coast. Indeed, the Los Angeles County Medical Association sponsored a morphine maintenance clinic during the early 1930s, only to see its doctors arrested and the clinic closed by federal authorities in spite ofprotests by the mayor of Los Angeles and the City of Los Angeles' director of public health. Relying on new primary sources, this paper chronicles the struggle between California maintenance advocates and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics during the Great Depression.

Praxis and Addiction: A Reply to Galliher

Galliher suggests my paper is guilty of four failings: (1) it is an attack on Alfred Lindesmith that is ideologically consistent with those mounted by Harry Anslinger and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, (2) it misleadingly casts the intimate between physical reactions and human learning [in Lindesmith's theory of addiction] as a [mindbody] dualism, (3) it ignores the variable impact of drugs on the human actor depending on the cultural and symbolic context, and (4) it erroneously asserts that Lindesmith's commitment to the Blumerian position that humans are . .. free from psychological determinism is theoretically irreconcilable with Lindesmith's policy position that addicts' actions and interpretations are beyond their control. Let me rebut each of these claims in turn. Harry Anslinger was an early and active proponent of a federal war on drugs, and his attacks on Lindesmith were based on his commitment to prosecuting drug users as criminals rather than providing addicts with therapy. My article does not even vaguely imply an endorsement of this policy or the federal war on drugs. As did Lindesmith in his day, I abhor the prosecutorial frenzy embodied in the war on drugs and its transparently repressive, racist, and classist consequences. I favor socially sensitive modalities over strictly medical modalities of addiction treatment and feel that a praxiological understanding of human learning offers sounder theoretical grounding for such modalities than does Lindesmith's exclusively symbolic understanding of human learning. No doubt, Lindesmith's theory of addiction was a watershed achievement in American sociology. By demonstrating the centrality of meaning and social learning to the addiction process, Lindesmith took enormous theoretical strides beyond the biologically and psychologically reductionist theories that had hitherto held the day. Unfortunately, however, Lindesmith's Blumerian social psychology prevented his making conceptually rigorous sociological contributions to our understanding of the visceral, or prereflective and nonsyvmnlbolic, features of drug use, druginduced experience, and addiction. Galliher acknowledges that Lindesmith's theory of addiction posits an intimate between physical reactions and human but, oddly enough, he rejects my assertion that Lindesmith's presumption of such a relationship logically requires a categorical distinction between brute physical reactions and human learning processes. To argue that Lindesmith never explicitly endorsed a mind-body dualism in the abstract is irrelevant. Lindesmith's theory of addiction is logically incoherent unless one accepts the view that human experience consists in two categorically distinct forms of perceptionbodily perception and mental perception. According to this view, bodily perception consists in brute sensations that arise as unmediated outcomes of physical stimuli and are pristinely immune to social influence. Conversely, mental perception consists in the voluntary projection of linguistic categories onto brute sensations and is the sole medium for the meaning, social learning, and practical relevance we find in human experience. This is

Federal Employees, Torts, and the Westfall Act of 1988

The Federal Employees Liability Reform and Tort Compensation Act - better known as the Westfall Act - was rushed into law in 1988 to avoid what was expected to be a crisis in exposing federal workers to court suits. The law was intended to overturn the Supreme Court's January 1988 decision in Westfall v. Erwin, which greatly expanded the potential liability of legislative and judicial employees as well as employees of the executive branch. Once faced by such a threat - and perhaps especially because the decision threatened congressional workers - Congress acted promptly. By November, Congress had held hearings, the House and Senate had agreed on language of a new bill, and President Reagan had signed the bill into law. Any gridlock that existed on this matter between the executive and legislative branches simply evaporated when the Court handed down its ruling. The law's purpose is ...to protect federal employees from personal liability for common law torts committed within the scope of their employment, while providing persons injured by the common law torts of federal employees with an appropriate remedy against the United States (sec. 2[b]). The intention was to overturn the Westfall decision and thereby restore protections to executive-branch workers, extend those protections to legislative and judicial workers, and reinstitute the procedures by which persons who were harmed could bring suit against the government rather than against individual workers. Seldom is anything as easy as it seems. The law may have achieved its key purposes, but numerous other problems arose in the process. An Overview of Torts A tort is a civil wrong independent of contract, meaning that the harm did not stem from a breach of the contract. Constitutional torts involve harm stemming from violation of one's constitutional rights. Since the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (1971), federal employees can be held personally liable for violating someone's constitutional rights. In the Bivens case, narcotics officers made a warrantless search of a residence in the early morning. Cases commonly arise in which constitutional torts are alleged (see the Blohm; Krueger, Lutz; Rauccio; and Saul cases).(1) The Supreme Court ruled in 1994 that the Bivens remedy can only be used in suits against individuals and not in suits against the government (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation v. Meyer). A second type of tort and the one of concern in this article is the common law tort. These torts involve such behavior as negligence, defamation, harassment, and emotional distress. The third type is the federal statutory tort, in which a person's rights under a federal law are abridged (Anderson and Pellett, 1990). It is common for people to file suits that allege both constitutional and common law torts have been committed (Pelletier and Rallis). A single action or event, as in the case of assault, can be both a tort and a crime. The key mechanism for common law tort cases against the federal government is the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) of 1946. The federal government has partially waived its sovereign immunity to allow suits against itself. Under this law, suits are filed in district courts which apply state tort law to the federal government as though it was an individual in the state where the alleged event occurred. As will be seen below, exceptions contained in the FTCA bar several types of suits against the government. Westfall v. Erwin All of the furor in Congress to write the Westfall Act and much of the legal maneuvering since its passage stem from William Erwin receiving soda ash burns in his eyes and throat while working as a civilian warehouseman at an army depot in Alabama. He and his wife sued Rodney Westfall, Erwin's superior, and other workers at the depot for negligence in the handling and storage of this toxic substance. Erwin contended the bags of soda ash should never have been stored in the warehouse, that the soda ash had been allowed to spill from bags, and that he had not been warned of their presence in the warehouse. …

Reviews and Short Notices: The Americas

Reviews and Short Notices: The Americas

A Brief History of Methadone in the Treatment of Opioid Dependence: A Personal Perspective

Starting at the latter part of the nineteenth century and through the early twentieth century, events are reviewed to provide a sense of the climate and setting in which early methadone research was conducted. The discovery of methadone by the Germans in the later stages of World War II is described. At that time, methadone was not recognized to be a narcotic analgesic. The first report of the properties of methadone published in the United States in 1947 is summarized, and its early use in the treatment of the opioid abstinence syndrome is noted. However, the utility of methadone as a maintenance drug was not recognized until 14 years later. Despite strong resistance from the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics, research progressed from the recognition of the unique properties of methadone to substantial clinical application. Finally, methadone is placed in a current context describing a second wave of acceptance based not solely on the reduction of crime but on the prevention of the spread of AIDS.

Physician traces drug attitudes from 'reefer madness' to reality

Soon after Prohibition ended in 1933, a debate was begun in the United States as to whether marijuana was a dangerous drug. The chief proponent of marijuana being a harmful drug was Harry Anslinger, then Acting Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. He argued, with only anecdotal evidence, that marijuana was physically dangerous, led to insanity, corrupted youth and was as dangerous as heroin.

All the commissioner's men: The federal bureau of narcotics and the Dewey‐Luciano affair, 1947–54

(1990). All the commissioner's men: The federal bureau of narcotics and the Dewey‐Luciano affair, 1947–54. Intelligence and National Security: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 171-192.

The Scope of Police Immunity from Civil Suit Under 42 U.S.C. Section 1983 and Bivens

This article will review the doctrine of immunity developed by the United States Supreme Court insofar as it affects lawsuits filed against law enforcement officials pursuant to U.S.C. Title 42 Section 1983, that is, a civil rights action filed against state officials, and its federal counterpart, an action filed against federal officials for violation of a citizen's constitutional rights under the authority of Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. In addition, the article will address the extent to which the doctrine of immunity, as set forth by the Court, adequately safeguards the rights of citizens and, at the same time, protects law enforcement authorities from frivolous civil lawsuits that unduly inhibit the performance of their functions.

Stable Force in a Storm: Harry J. Anslinger and United States Narcotic Foreign Policy, 1930-1962

The creation of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) in 1930 marked the inception of an integrated domestic and foreign narcotic control program in the United States.' An antiopium conference held in Shanghai twenty-one years earlier had convinced United States officials that drug limitation involved more than ad hoc law enforcement. Effective control required a policy that took into account a variety of internal and external considerations. Despite that recognition, the United States had failed prior to the establishment of the FBN to devise a unified antidrug strategy.2 Harry Jacob Anslinger of Pennsylvania, the commissioner of narcotics from 1930 to 1962, would undertake that task. Anslinger's statutory authority allowed him considerable flexibility in the formulation of drug control policy. The commissioner was empowered to regulate commerce in drugs used for medical and scientific purposes, to enforce federal narcotic laws, and to assist the State Department in conducting antidrug diplomacy. As a skillful administrator, Anslinger used the organizational structure of the FBN as a power base from which he supervised the conduct of United States antinarcotic policy. A record of maintaining and expanding his bureau's budget and staff testifies to the commissioner's managerial talents. Evidence, too, of his bureaucratic expertise can be seen in his efforts to secure the passage of the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, the Boggs Act of 1951, and the Narcotic Control Act of 1956-all of which strengthened federal drug control laws. In addition, he managed to keep the FBN intact despite attempts by several administrations to revamp the federal bureaucracy. In the mid-

The Puzzle of the Social Origins of the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937

Several recent studies of the origins of the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, while analyzing the same data sources, have surprisingly come to differing conclusions. Contrary to the results of most of these studies, there is insufficient evidence to conclude that there was a major effort by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics to generate a public marihuana crisis to create pressure for this legislation. Indeed a review of newspapers as well as the Congressional Record does not demonstrate a nationwide marihuana crisis. Moreover, this legislation is not the important legislative change implied by these studies, but merely a symbolic gesture involving a Bureau promise of no increased funding required by this law's passage.