Effective Drug Control: Toward A New Legal Framework

The Drug Abuse Control Amendments of 1965 charted a new course in federal drug
laws. Under this Act, the Bureau of Drug Abuse Control was established within the Food
and Drug Administration (FDA). The FDA assumed responsibility for enforcement of
this new law, which in its limited scope covered stimulants and depressants and which
“imposed a registration, inspection and record-keeping pattern, covering everyone
concerned with the controlled traffic, which closely paralleled the Harrison [Act]
requirements.” 169
Despite being hailed as a new front in America’s campaign against illicit
psychoactive substances, the 1965 Amendments failed to curb the nation’s appetite for
them. In fact, regulations promulgated under the law led to quotas on the number of
pharmaceutical methamphetamine tablets that could be produced, thereby limiting supply
and spawning a black market in “speed,” marketed at first by the Hell’s Angels
motorcycle gang in the 1960s and later by other criminal organizations. 170 The “meth
lab” problem plaguing Washington and other western states today is a haunting
reenactment of the “speed lab” problem in California in the 1960s, each brought about by
the severe restrictions placed on pharmaceutical amphetamines almost 40 years ago.
In 1968 a merger of the FDA’s relatively new Bureau of Drug Abuse Control with
Treasury’s old Bureau of Narcotics created a new agency named the Bureau of Narcotics
and Dangerous Drugs, housed in the Department of Justice. That same year, Congress
made further amendments and modifications to the Harrison Act and, once again,
increased penalties for federal law violations. 171
International efforts to control drugs intensified during the 1960s. The black
market and trafficking of illicit drugs was taking on added importance in the United
States by the end of the decade when “a torrent of Mexican and, to a lesser degree,
Colombian marijuana flooded the country.” 172 Heroin was smuggled from Turkey in
massive quantities and by 1970 the United States saw unprecedented levels of heroin use.
Drugs were becoming one of the nation’s most prominent issues of social concern.
Even with the raft of federal anti-drug laws and agencies to enforce them, such
enforcement efforts did not stem the tide of drug use and drug-related crime; and yet
there was also a certain perverse, bureaucratic imperative that worked to perpetuate the
vigilant fight against drug use and drug trafficking, as Gore Vidal observed in 1970:
The bureaucratic machine has a vested interest in playing cops and robbers…
want[ing] strong laws against the sale and use of drugs because if drugs
are sold at cost there would be no money in it for anyone. If drug were
cheaply available, addicts would not commit crimes to pay for the next fix,
but if there was no money in it, the Bureau of Narcotics would wither away,
something they are not about to do without a struggle. 173