History of Illegal Drugs in America - Essay Example

Drugs and Crime Touring through the United s Department of Justice Drug Enforcement Administration’s online museum exhibit entitled “Illegal Drugs in America: A Modern History,” one notices several instances in history where drug use has taken its toll on society at large. Without going into specific detail, the article makes these instances known primarily through the reaction of the government in creating new enforcement laws and practices to address the concerns. Specifically, the article brings the opium dens of the 1890s, drug trafficking by Americans in the 1960s and 1970s and the drug mafias of Colombia and Mexico into sharper focus as being a threat to American society. With its highly addictive nature, the introduction of opium into America in the 1800s was the country’s first introduction to the dangers of recreational drug use. Originally seen as more of a disreputable practice involving the integration of races as mentioned in Martin Booth’s Opium: A History, “The dens were a sign of decadence and contact with the Chinamen, as with other colored races, was seen as socially polluting” (104), the use of opium quickly spiraled out of control. Tracing through the laws governing opium importation, one can see the government slowly becoming aware of the potential social ills brought in with the practice. According to Holden, opium importation was at first merely charged import duties in San Francisco, which were gradually increased as the government became more aware of the volumes of the drug being imported. However, raising the duties merely served to increase the smuggling trade. By 1898, legal restrictions on the use and distribution of the drug were proving to have little effect other than to drive the trade underground as was reported in that year in the Scientific American. “The great demand for the extract has induced smuggling, and illicit stills were started everywhere. Opium was and is still smuggled in at the Canada and Mexican lines. It is landed at the islands off shore and brought in by Chinese fishermen, smuggled in on steamers, dropped into the bay and the law evaded in numerous ways familiar to the ‘heathen Chinee’” (Holder 147). Despite the growing power of the opium trade in the late 1800s, “Illegal Drugs” states “[international] controls, domestic law enforcement, and a societal shunning of these much-feared substances combined to largely eliminate” the use of drugs by the outbreak of World War II. Evidence of the social opinion of the use of opium and other poppy-produced recreational substances can even be seen in children’s stories of the day, such as the use of poppies to slow Dorothy’s progress toward the Emerald City in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, first published in 1900. With the illicit drug threat generally considered solved following the second world war, America awoke to a new threat as the group called the “new Bohemians” described as “Beat literary types” (Illegal Drugs) began bringing drug use to the forefront of society once again in the 1960s. Again, the slow growth of the new drug trade was treated with a somewhat laissez-faire attitude in the early days. A story told by an ex-narcotics officer about dealing with LSD users in the 1970s illustrates how officers of that time approached the problem of drug users. I was undercover in L.A. one time, and I was dealing with this hippie who was dealing in acid. Obviously hed ingested a lot of acid. And we were getting ready for him to deliver some acid that I was going to purchase undercover and he says, "I got really good vibes, man." I go, "Thats great." Well, he says, "Wait a minute. The last time I had good vibes I sold to The Man." I said, "Hey, Im out of here. Forget it. Youre nuts. Im leaving." And I left. … It was almost like "no harm, no foul," with LSD organizations, and sort of the hippie culture. (Interview). Of course, Alden is careful during his interview to quickly add that his unit was successful in following up on this drug lead, but it is obvious that the severity of the threat was not yet recognized by the law enforcement community or society at large. That the drug trade was growing quickly was noticed with the addition of cocaine to the market and the increase in violence associated with its importation. “All of a sudden, the East Coast, the southeast coast, and Miami became the place, particularly in terms of cocaine: smuggling, trafficking, distribution, transportation,” Alden said. “It was a major, major shift in trends. At the same time, we were beginning to see violence, and the violence was something that we hadnt dealt with previously in the cities of America” (Interview). The seizure of a large amount of cocaine that had absolutely no impact on the market was the wake-up call, in Alden’s opinion, to law enforcement agencies of the magnitude of the problem at hand. By that time, of course, the drug cartels of Colombia had begun to hold sway, producing those large amounts of cocaine from plantations carved out of the South American jungles. According to Alden, the Tranquilandia seizure in Bogota woke up drug enforcement agencies, but had little impact on the American public (Interview). According to the DEA’s museum exhibit, it was the overdose death of college basketball star Len Bias in 1986 that finally alerted the public to the highly addictive and dangerous nature of cocaine (Illegal). “By then, drug mafias based in Colombia were powerful, well-organized, and entrenched. When their middle class customers began to shun powder cocaine, these criminals refocused on traditional inner-city drug markets” (Illegal). To make their product more accessible to the lower-income societal bracket they were now marketing to, the cartels introduced crack, a derivative of cocaine. Currently, it is estimated “the average heavy heroin or cocaine user consumes about $10,000 to $15,000 worth of drugs per year, a sum that most of them cannot generate legally” (Boyum). This addiction has been linked to an increase in crime not just from the cartels working together to increase smuggling and fighting against each other to protect their markets, but also from the users who work themselves into positions where they cannot obtain adequate employment to support their habit and turn to crime to meet their needs. With the introduction of drugs at this volume, both national and state governments began adopting new laws that made drug trafficking less desirable (Montaldo). It was thought that by doing things such as making jail terms mandatory for those in possession of illegal drugs, less Americans would be tempted into the trade, but such does not appear to be the case. “The high cost of incarceration and the small results that it has shown in fighting the war on drugs, show that such money would be better spent on shorter sentencing and drug rehabilitation programs” (Montaldo). With the introduction of opium in the 1800s and of marijuana and the psychedelic drugs in the 1960s and 1970s, the greatest danger to society seemed to be more a question of controlling the volume of the substances available in the marketplace, but with the introduction of cocaine and the drug cartels in the 1980s, the threat to society changed a great deal. Instead of a social nuisance, the drug trade turned serious on a number of fronts. As drug users became more and more addicted to their substance of choice, they become more and more unable to obtain sufficient employment to fund their habits and had to turn to criminal activities to obtain the large amounts of money necessary to sustain them. However, drug cartels are working not just in their own country, but in several countries to bring illegal materials to the American markets, creating a great deal more violence worldwide and presenting the greatest social threat to the most people. To support these plantations, the drug cartels have created entire towns completely focused on producing drugs to be sold illegally in the United States. People living in these areas have no choice but to work on these plantations, while others have no options other than to serve in the armies assembled to protect the plantations from rival gangs and government agencies. At the same time, the cartels war against each other to maintain their own control over various aspects of the marketplace and have worked to educate gangs in other parts of the world in how to smuggle materials across the U.S. border, resulting in yet more violence. Works Cited Baum, L. Frank. The Wizard of Oz. New York: George M. Hill, 1900. Ch. 8. Booth, Martin. Opium: A History. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Boyum, David and Mark A.R. Kleiman. “Breaking the Drug-Crime Link.” Public Interest. Summer, 2003. Nov. 24, 2005. < http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0377/is_2003_Summer/ai_104136474#continue> Holder, C.F. “The Opium Industry in America.” Scientific American. 1898. Schaffer Library of Drug Policy. Nov. 24, 2005. “Illegal Drugs in America: A Modern History.” United States Department of Justice Drug Enforcement Agency. Nov. 23, 2005. “Interview Bill Alden.” 1995. Frontline. WGBH Educational Foundation. Nov. 23, 2005. Montaldo, Charles. “Mandatory Drug Sentencing Laws.” 2005. About Guide to Crime and Punishment. Nov. 23, 2005. Read More