White Market Drugs by David Herzberg

Author:David Herzberg [Herzberg, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: MED000000 Medical / General
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2020-11-12T00:00:00+00:00

Mood-control substances are legally available and their use is increasing with society’s approval. Mood-control substances are illegally available and their use is increasing, but condemned by society. These two statements are contradictory, but both are true. As a matter of fact, in many instances the same drugs are involved. . . . [No wonder] we are rightfully charged with hypocrisy.”112

This kind of reasoning had surprisingly wide support during the congressional debates, probably because all factions could see it as a potential vehicle for their agenda. For medicalizers it held the promise of easing punitive controls over less harmful drugs like marijuana; for consumer advocates, increased controls over drugs like Valium; for moral crusaders, crackdowns on new informal markets for drugs like “speed” (amphetamine); and for the pharmaceutical industry, easing controls over unfairly maligned products.

While most of the congressional debate centered on the attorney general’s role in making a final scheduling decision, there was unnoticed but remarkable unanimity on a much more radical issue: allowing the legal status of individual drugs to be changed administratively, without Congress having to pass a new law. As the head of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs put it, the schedule was designed to be “flexible,” with substances able to change categories as “public interest dictates.”113 A version of the bill that required congressional approval before moving a drug from Schedule II to a less strict category was dropped, and the final bill allowed the attorney general to transfer or even remove “any drug or other substance” after making formal findings justifying the move.114

The Controlled Substances Act was thus at least potentially far more significant than initially intended.115 Obscured by Nixon’s public crime-fighting rhetoric, it contained the seeds of a dramatic rethinking of American drug policy. On the one hand, it accepted widespread use of addictive drugs while robustly regulating sales to protect and fully inform consumers. On the other hand, it reduced punishments for consumers while investing significant resources in providing treatment for those who developed addiction despite the protections.116 The radical possibility of seeing these reforms as two sides of the same coin—as a new template and rationale for drug policy—was captured most fully by the Schedule of Controlled Substances itself, which offered the potential for evening out or even rationalizing the arbitrary and sometimes absurd binary categorization of addictive substances into medicines and “narcotics.”

It is important not to go too far with this interpretation of the Controlled Substances Act. Medicalizers and consumer advocates still shared moral crusaders’ complete opposition to nonmedical drug use, and this consensus also marked the law. Consumer protection rhetoric and compassion for nonmedical drug users was explicitly linked to the supposedly new prevalence of drug use among America’s white middle classes. Senator Dodd’s outrage came, in part, because he saw drug companies bringing addiction to places it did not belong. “Hardened drug addicts” using “narcotics” in “the slums and ghettos of our large cities” was one thing, but “college students” and “young affluent professional people and other white collar workers” hooked on pills was something else altogether.

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