Eric Schneider, author of Smack: Heroin and the American City, among other books, is a historian at the University of Pennsylvania.

Let’s all pause today to wish a happy 100th birthday to the War on Drugs. And what a century it’s been!

Twenty-five years ago, the stated goal of the United States’ anti-narcotic efforts according to the Department of Justice was to “disrupt, destroy and dismantle drug trafficking enterprises.” That same year, the U.S. government pumped almost $8 billion into anti-drug efforts, including $600 million in prison construction alone. It was just a typical fiscal year during the height of the drug war. But two and a half decades later, despite this dizzying spending, we don’t need a drug czar to tell us—even though one of them has—the war on drugs, by its own measures, has been a century-long failure.


A hundred years ago this month, the U.S. government signed 700 percent increase in incarceration $450 million worth of military equipment

It's worth taking a look at how it all went wrong from the very beginning.

Francis Burton Harrison, the New York Congressman whose name the act bears, intended none of this. His bill, which became the Harrison Act, imposed “a special tax on all persons who produce, import, manufacture, compound, deal in, dispense, sell, distribute, or give away opium or coca leaves, their salts, derivatives, or preparations.” Interestingly, it did not even include a section on enforcement, other than for tax collection, and while the act regulated the production and sale of “narcotics” (the bill included cocaine, which is not a narcotic), the legislation said nothing about drug users.

At the beginning of the 20th century, everyone’s medicine cabinet contained opium in some form. Patent medicines mixed alcohol and opium, and women used them for menstrual cramps, coughs and other minor symptoms, as well as for infants’ teething pains. Aging Civil War veterans self-injected morphine to soothe old wounds, and physicians dosed patients liberally with opium pills and morphine. Opium smokers, usually Chinese, but also habitués of the urban underworld and the occasional slumming college student, were the most common recreational users.

Yet all of this was changing. The passage of the Federal Food and Drugs Act in 1906 revealed the ingredients in patent medicines to increasingly wary consumers and the development of aspirin by the Bayer Company in 1899 offered a less dangerous alternative for everyday pain relief. Civil War veterans were dying off, Congress had passed a bill banning the importation of smoking (non-medicinal) opium in 1909 and reports in medical journals indicated that heroin, commercialized by Bayer in 1898 as a treatment for coughs and morphine addiction, was actually more addictive than morphine. Per capita opiate use in the United States was indeed declining at the time the bill passed in 1914.

During the Progressive Era, a culture war was raging over sexuality, alcohol and modern life—as seen in efforts to censure pornography and eliminate “red light” districts—and prohibition offered the best hope of legislating moral certainty. While alcohol prohibition had the largest domestic constituency, drug prohibition fit with foreign policy interests. Years of lobbying by religious groups in both the United States and Britain, who were appalled at opium smoking in China and places to which the Chinese emigrated, culminated in the 1912 Hague Convention, where a dozen countries agreed to regulate the international narcotics traffic and signatories promised to limit opiate use in their own countries.

The 1914 Harrison Act left room for interpretation, and the Bureau of Internal Revenue—the precursor to the IRS—promoted a broad construction of its meaning. Physicians, dentists and veterinary surgeons continued to dispense these drugs, and pharmaceutical companies lobbied successfully to exclude over-the-counter medicines containing small amounts of narcotics from regulation. But questions remained , particularly over one line in the law that stipulated that the tax did not apply to a physician’s “professional practice.” Could a physician prescribe an opiate to maintain a patient-addict? The law also left a broader question unanswered: Was possession of heroin itself a crime?

The Supreme Court decided against the government on both questions in 1915 in Jin Fuey Moy, but reversed course four years later—laying the groundwork for the aggressive enforcement that would come to define the drug war. In U.S. v. Doremus and in U.S. v. Webb , both announced on the same day , a divided Court upheld the constitutionality of the Harrison Act and ruled that providing narcotics addicts with drugs was not part of professional practice. The well-publicized prosecution of medical personnel and the potential loss of a medical license and jail time, combined with the increasing stigma associated with working-class narcotics addicts, kept physicians from challenging the law.

The legal distribution of narcotics continued for a time even beyond the Supreme Court rulings. Municipal, state and federal governments were exempt from the Harrison Act, and over 30 cities established narcotics dispensaries to furnish users with a legal supply of drugs until treatment facilities could be provided. Registered users were required to taper off their doses, and those who did not comply were cut off. By the early 1920s, the clinics had all closed, and only elderly patients who risked death from withdrawal could be supplied with morphine.

The modern war on drugs, though, with its bulked-up law enforcement and harsh sentencing, wouldn’t come until decades later, in response to a series of drug surges that began in the 1940s. After the end of World War II, Italian and Jewish gangsters, who had switched product lines from booze at the end of Prohibition , reconnected to supplies from the Middle East that had been disrupted by the war. Heroin use surged in American cities among veterans addicted to morphine during the war and young men, disproportionately African American and Latino. Mexican Americans smuggled heroin across a porous border, while Italian organized crime families in New York imported heroin stolen from pharmaceutical companies in Italy and redistributed it across the country.

Municipal, state and federal authorities held public hearings to examine the upsurge in heroin addiction. The faces featured in hearings and in public media were those of white teenagers—the ones most likely to promote alarm about heroin—rather than those of more typical users—young African Americans, whose addiction raised awkward questions about poverty, discrimination, and apartheid-like segregation in American cities. And thus the first drug-induced moral panic swept the public and the government: Congress indulged in a frenzy of legislating, with 26 bills introduced in 1951, fourteen in 1955 and sixteen in 1956. Two—the Boggs Act of 1951 and the Narcotics Control Act of 1956—established the contours for the modern war on drugs: mandatory minimum sentences for drug sellers in the Boggs Act, which the Narcotics Control Act extended to drug users.

The postwar heroin surge gave Harry J. Anslinger, the commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 until 1962, the opportunity to finally expand the power of his agency. Anslinger envied the public recognition given J. Edgar Hoover’s much larger Federal Bureau of Investigation, and seeing an opportunity , Anslingerg's agents staffed public hearings, prepared witnesses and exhibits, and promoted a narrative of international intrigue that served the FBN’s interests. In Anslinger’s telling—which misrepresented the actual source of heroin—Mafia dons distributed narcotics produced by Communist China, and the FBN served as the nation’s bulwark against a generation of drug-addled Red youth. In fact, the heroin packets with Chinese characters that Anslinger loved to wave before the press came from America’s Nationalist Chinese allies and funded their covert war against “Red China.” After public hearings, Congress in the 1956 Narcotics Control Act granted FBN agents the power to carry guns, serve search warrants and wiretap phones, just like the FBI.

The heroin wave of the late 1940s essentially ended before any of this legislation was introduced, but a cluster of addicts remained, around which a new wave of users would appear a generation later. In the mid-1960s, heroin use emerged mostly among young whites who moved to counter-culture communities in New York, San Francisco and other cities where they met more experienced users. Young African Americans and Latinos, especially those living near drug marketplaces, also began experimenting with the drug. This Baby Boomer cohort was larger than any previous one, and young, unskilled, undereducated users turned to street crime to support their habits.

Then the drug fight got political. Rapidly rising crime rates during the 1960s provided a perfect opportunity for conservatives looking to fight back after Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1964 landslide victory. Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” mobilized white voters after the gains of the Civil Rights Movement and merged with panic over skyrocketing crime, civil unrest and drug use in America’s cities. In June 1971, Nixon declared a “War on Drugs.” Drug abuse, he said, was “public enemy number one.” The drug enforcement budget ballooned from $3 million in 1968 to $224 million in 1974; in 1973, Nixon placed the funds into a new Drug Enforcement Administration within the Department of Justice.

The Vietnam veteran became the face of this drug scare. The specter of returning veterans addicted to the purest heroin in the world and adding to the crime problem of urban America sent a chill down Republican spines. Nixon’s legislative initiatives authorized federally-coordinated “no knock” raids on drug dens, but he also expanded the methadone program and other treatment slots for addicts to the tune of $350 million. While veterans certainly deserved treatment, the scare about them was overblown. Over 90 percent of those who failed the urine tests in Vietnam stopped their heroin use upon returning to the U.S. Once again, legislation and funding benefited drug warriors more than drug users and bore little relation to the actual drug problem.

Ironically it was a victory in the drug war that set up the last phase of its development. The Nixon administration addressed heroin supply by negotiating a treaty with Turkey in 1971 to fund crop substitution for Anatolia’s potent poppies. Simultaneously, French police raids on heroin processing labs in the Marseilles area shut down the so-called “French Connection” that had supplied Turkish heroin to New York since the 1950s. This disrupted the heroin trade more effectively than any treaty and caused a heroin drought in the United States that threatened New York’s grip on the nation’s drug economy. It also opened the door to cocaine.

As had happened in the past, new heroin supply lines quickly emerged. Smugglers brought heroin from Mexico to Chicago, where it was redistributed nationally. Enterprising servicemen tapped Southeast Asia’s “Golden Triangle” and shipped heroin to North Carolina in the coffins of American soldiers. Cubans and Columbians moved shipments from Latin America into Miami. Not only did heroin enter the market from a variety of sources, but also cocaine—a rich man’s drug since the 1920s—followed the smuggling routes from Latin America into American cities, especially San Diego, Los Angeles and Miami. As cocaine supplies increased, prices began to drop, by as much as 80 percent.

Andean coca production increased 300 percent between 1982 and 1992 and produced a cocaine glut in the 1980s. In a new marketing strategy, crack cocaine, sold cheaply in small units, expanded the market and made up for its low price with sales volume. Reports of nearly instant addiction, and of “crack whores” trading sex for hits on the pipe, fueled a public panic, represented by the African-American crack mother and her addicted offspring. Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer expressed the fear of many that these mothers were producing a “bio underclass,” whose “biological inferiority is stamped at birth.” In response, the Reagan administration promoted its new war on drugs (with Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No”) and Congressional representatives competed to be tough on crack, implementing even harsher sentencing guidelines than the president had recommended. Congress gave bipartisan support, including from members of the Congressional Black Caucus, to the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 that appropriated $1.7 billion to fight the drug war, allowed asset seizures from drug offenders and established the 100-to-1 sentencing disparity for crack versus powder cocaine. Communities of color have disproportionately borne the cost of aggressive policing and excessive imprisonment. In the mid-1980s, drug-related prison admissions for African-American men nearly quadrupled in three years, and by 2000, that figure had increased by a factor of 26 from its 1983 level. Today in major American cities as many as 80 percent of young black men have criminal records.

It seems, though, that the federal government is finally coming to terms with the catastrophic loss—in resources as well as Americans’ lives—incurred by the drug war. The Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, for one, redressed disproportionate sentencing by eliminating the five-year mandatory minimum sentence for possession of crack cocaine and reducing the sentencing disparity to 18 to 1. Some states, such as New York, which led the drive for tougher penalties for drug sellers under Governor Nelson Rockefeller, have also opted to reduce penalties for drug offenses. Increasingly, states and municipalities are decriminalizing small amounts of marijuana. While sentencing reform is welcome, the drug war is far from over.

The drug war has had a host of casualties, but felons released from prison are the most obvious. They are virtually unemployable, since discriminating against someone with a criminal record is allowable, and so frequently return to the drug economy as the only occupation available to them. Felons lose public benefits such as food stamps, public housing and educational assistance, and in some jurisdictions, they are stripped of their right to vote and to serve on juries. The creation of a permanent class of non-citizens who cycle in and out of prison remains the most destructive legacy of the war on drugs.

After a century of aggressive policing, mandatory minimums and enforcement that disproportionately targeted the most marginalized of American citizens, the failure of the war on drugs is ultimately a cautionary tale about pursuing an agenda at any cost—financial or human. From the founding of a vast bureaucratic infrastructure to support the new war, to the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on military police equipment, to the $50 billion spent annually on incarceration, the story of fighting addiction in America has brought out its mirror image: An irrational dependence, despite all logic to the contrary, on a steady flow of government cash and brute enforcement.

We should have just said no.