The History Of Drug Use In The — страница 2

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thing the Pure Food and Drug Act did was, it said that certain drugs could only be sold on prescription. The last thing it did was require that any drug that can be potentially habit-forming say so on its label. The labeling requirements, the prescription requirements, and the refusal to approve the patent medicines basically put the patent medicine business out of business and reduced the source of accidental addiction. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, not a criminal law, did more to reduce the level of addiction than any other single statute we have passed in all of the times from then to now. The very first criminal law at the Federal level in this country to criminalize the non-medical use of drugs came in 1914. It was called the Harrison Act. There were three very

interesting things about this act. The entire experiment of using the criminal sanction to deal with the non-medical use of drugs really began in this country in 1914 with the Harrison Act. The second interesting thing about the Harrison Act was the drugs to which it applied, because it applied to almost none of the drugs we would be concerned about today. There was no mention anywhere of amphetamines, barbiturates, marijuana, hashish, or hallucinogenic drugs of any kind. The Harrison Act only applied to opium, morphine and its various derivatives and derivatives of the coca leaf like cocaine. The third thing was called the Harrison Tax Act. The drafters of the Harrison Act had two goals. They wanted to regulate the medical use of these drugs and to criminalize the non-medical

use of these drugs. They had one problem. 1914 was the high water mark of the constitutional doctrine we today call “states’ rights” and, therefore, it was widely thought Congress did not have the power to regulate a particular profession or the power to pass what was, and is still known, as a general criminal law. That’s why there were so few Federal Crimes until very recently. In the face of possible Constitutional opposition to what they wanted to do, the people in Congress who supported the Harrison Act came up with a novel idea. They would disguise this whole thing as a tax. There were two taxes. The first tax was paid by doctors. It was so much per year. The doctors, in exchange for paying that tax, got a stamp from the Government that allowed them to prescribe

these drugs for their patients so long as they followed the regulations in the statute. The second was a tax of so much of every single non-medical exchange of every one of these drugs. Since nobody was going to pay a tax to exchange something which, in 1914, even in large quantities was worth about five dollars. The second tax wasn’t a tax either. It was a criminal prohibition. If in 1915, somebody was found in possession of an ounce of cocaine on the street, what would be the Federal crime? Not possession of cocaine, or possession of a controlled substance. The crime was tax evasion. The alcohol prohibition in the 1920’s was supported by many people who weren’t opposed to drinking. The reason they supported it was because of political affiliation. It was also in part a

response to the drinking practices of European immigrants, who became the new lower class. The reason it failed after just thirteen years was because it came back on the people who favored it, so they got rid of it. Marijuana was widely used at this time because people couldn’t get alcohol. Between 1915 and 1937, 27 states passed criminal laws against the use of marijuana. These states were divided into three groups. The first group of states to have marijuana laws in that part of the century were the Rocky Mountain and southwestern states; Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Montana. In the period just after 1914, into all of those areas was a large migration of Mexicans. They had come across the border in search of better economic conditions. They worked heavily as rural laborers,

beet field workers, and cotton pickers, and with them, they brought marijuana. Many of the white people in these states knew little about marijuana, and thought it made you crazy. So, the main reason for the early state marijuana laws in the Rocky Mountain and southwestern areas of this country wasn’t hostility to the drug. It was hostility to the newly arrived Mexican community that used it. A second group of states that had criminal laws against the use of marijuana was in the Northeast; Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York (had one and then repealed it and then had one again), and New Jersey. No theory about Mexican immigration will explain the origin of those laws because, the Northeast has never had any substantial Mexican-American population. They outlawed it before it got