 On April 23, 1973, Herbert Giglotto and his wife Evelyn were sleeping in their home in Collinsville, Illinois. Suddenly they were awakened when they heard a loud crash, which happened to be their door being smashed off its hinges. He and his wife were terrified. My god, we're dead, Giglotto said. The hippies have come to kill us. The intruders grabbed Giglotto, knocked him to the floor and pressed a gun against his temple. Another man in the gang yelled at him, where's it at, where's it at? While these men were yelling and holding a gun at Giglotto, another man had a shotgun aimed at his wife. He yelled to Giglotto, who's the whore in the bed? Giglotto tried to answer, but the man holding a gun against his head stopped him. You son of a bitch, you moving, you're dead. The intruders started ransacking the house. They smashed furniture, they pulled out dresser drawers and dumped the contents on the floor. They pulled pictures off the wall. Whatever they were looking for was nowhere to be found. After an hour, they started gathering their things to leave. That's it. Giglotto asked them a mixture of fury and terror. You just kicked in my door, threatened my life, called my wife a whore and a bitch. Can you explain to me why you did this? The man who was apparently in charge of the gang turned to Giglotto and knocked him to the floor again. Shut your mouth, boy. It was the last thing he said before he and his thugs left. As it would turn out, these men left Giglotto's house and kicked down the door of Donald Askew and his wife Virginia. They repeated their terror tactics on the Askews, upsetting Virginia so much that she spent weeks after the event in the psychiatric ward of the local hospital. Again, they found nothing and again, they left without an apology. These men were not hippies, as you can probably guess. These were agents of the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement, which had only just been formed. The no-knock raids they used on the Giglotto's and Askews were only recently made legal as part of Nixon's tough-on-crime policies. They were searching for drugs, and although it wasn't the first time that they kicked down the door of the wrong house, it was the first time that they had done so twice in the same night. I'm Chris Calton, and this is the Mises Institute Podcast, Historical Controversies. In this episode, I want us to look at how the environment that led to the story I just told came about. To do this, we're going to have to look at a handful of different episodes that took place over the first term of the Nixon presidency to see how everything came together into the modern war on drugs. So the year is 1967. The Democrats are in office and a presidential election is coming up. The Republicans need an issue to make their own. Anti-communism would be the logical choice, but with Lyndon Johnson escalating the Cold War conflict in Vietnam, the Democrats had commandeered that one. But with the rise of anti-war demonstrations in hippie culture, as well as the recent civil rights movement, a young conservative member of the House Judiciary Committee named Don Santorelli thought he had an angle. The war on poverty was failing for reasons obvious to anybody familiar with Austrian economics, and the peaceful protests of Martin Luther King, Jr. were being replaced by the righteous fury of people like Stokely Carmichael and his Black Panthers. The FBI released statistics revealing that the number of Black people arrested for homicide had doubled over seven years. And the image of the Black heroin addict was associated with this. So white middle America was uneasy with the decay of law and order. So when Santorelli saw the results of LBJ's crime commission, which advocated an increase in the war on poverty as a way of tracking the root cause of crime, and the war on poverty was unquestionably a disaster economically, Santorelli thought to offer an alternative solution which would essentially replace the democratic bad idea with a Republican bad idea, as is so often the case with politics. Santorelli started drafting a bill. His bill was based on the idea that it wasn't poverty causing crime, but criminals who were causing crime. And the government needed a law with enough teeth to stop the criminals. Drug criminals were kept in mind when this bill was drafted as Santorelli invented the concept of no knock raids to give the police the authority to bust in on a drug dealer before they were able to flush their stash and concerned with violence committed by criminals who are out on bail Santorelli also created the concept of preventative detention that would effectively do away with the bail system. Neither of these provisions actually made it into the the bill when it was finally passed. And Santorelli never expected them to when he when he wrote the bill, they were there to show the American public that the Republicans were the party that was tough on crime. And the Democrats who rejected these two provisions were weak on crime. But a version of the bill did pass and it was signed into law by LBJ in 1968. The same year that the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs was formed in a Reader's Digest article published in October of 1967. Former Vice President Richard Nixon endorsed the bill. It was time to stop blaming society for crime. Nixon said in the article and time to start empowering the police to deal with the criminals directly. This is the message that would carry him into the White House in the next year's election. Nixon picked up the banner first raised by Harry Anzlinger who had retired in 1962. But Nixon picked up where Anzlinger left off with crafting an incredibly demagogic and false narrative about drugs. And his goal was to make it clear to the American public that drugs were the reason people, especially black people, the hippies and anti-war protesters, drugs were the reason they were committing crimes. And as my opening anecdote indicates, the narrative was successful enough that when Herbert Gigalato's house was raided by the government, he was certain he was being raided by violently criminal hippies. Nixon's war was waged on two drugs, primarily heroin and marijuana. But it was heroin that was really the concern for most people in the country. And Nixon capitalized on their fears while simultaneously combining the narratives of heroin and marijuana into a single specter, which was just drugs. So the media, whether intentionally or not, the media helped Nixon cultivate his message by spreading intriguing but misleading stories about the drug epidemic in the country. A Newsweek story ran in 1969 about addicts in New York City claiming that, quote, the age of U.S. drug users is dropping rapidly, sometimes reaching down into elementary schools. No sources were cited, of course, and the claim was patently false. But nonetheless, a similar story in Life Magazine told the horrifying story of drug abuse and marijuana emerging from the shadowy underworld of junkie row. So they were now very much in the open, quoting from the article there directly. To the degree that drug abuse was common, it was almost entirely college-aged students smoking marijuana. But the stories, by combining marijuana and heroin into a single narrative about drug abuse, paraded on the fears of Americans about heroin use, which they believed was far more prominent than it actually was. In 1969, for instance, only 1,601 Americans died from both legal and illegal drugs. And to put this in perspective, 2,641 Americans choked to death on their food in the same year. In 1970, Time Magazine wrote an article entitled, Kids and Heroin, the adolescent epidemic. And this article estimated that the number of teenage addicts in New York City was expected to rise to 100,000 over the next few months. That's teenage addicts in New York City alone. Their estimation of this figure was based on the word of an anonymous expert who argued that, quote, if a young person smokes marijuana on more than 10 occasions, the chances are one in five that he will go on to do more dangerous drugs. So the gateway drug narrative was now part of the mainstream conversation. When seizing drugs, the government was running into a marketing problem, though. Marijuana and heroin were being tied together by the media and the government. But the average citizen was still not very concerned about marijuana. And this would really be the case until after Nixon was out of office. But when illegal drugs were seized, the drugs were advertised in weight. This meant that people were reading stories about gigantic quantities of marijuana being confiscated, but very small amounts of heroin. The primary reason for this, of course, was the fact that heroin was simply far less common. But that answer wasn't acceptable to the government officials who had propaganda to pedal. The director of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, John Ingersoll, he said that the reason only 15 percent of drug seizures were for hard drugs was because it took far less heroin to get somebody high. So comparing the two drugs was like comparing apples and oranges. So what the government needed to start doing, he said, was to start reporting the drug seizures in terms of street value, a dollar value of the drug. And using the street value of a drug bust was perfect for the government narrative, because the elements that went into the price of a drug once they hit the streets were so variegated that it was very easy for officials to heavily inflate the number by things like counting the weight of a heavily diluted drug as if it had the street value of a pure uncut version of the same substance. So this is the way that drug busts are still reported today. And this is how it originated that we report in dollar terms of drug busts, which is just an incredibly unreliable figure. Nixon was even more disingenuous than this. Instead of fudging numbers, he and several other politicians throughout the country just made them up. And his goal was to associate heroin to crime. In 1971, for example, he told Congress that heroin addicts stole $2 billion worth of property the previous year to feed their addiction. Other demagogues were even worse than Nixon. The conservative Hudson Institute said that the addicts in New York City alone were responsible for $1.7 billion in property crime. George McGovern gave a speech on the floor of the Senate, saying that heroin junkies were responsible for $4.4 billion in crime. And the best one, Senator Charles Percy. He upped the ante by claiming that the number was between 10 and 15 billion dollars. Another guy, Miles Ambrose, who was Nixon's appointee to the head of the Office of Drug Abuse and Law Enforcement that I mentioned in the opening anecdote, he said that junkies were responsible for $6.3 billion. But the value of all property thefts in the country committed by anybody was only $1.28 billion. So that's all property thefts, heroin or not heroin related. And it was the whole country and it's less than any of the figures given. But nobody questioned the new narrative. In fact, a study published in the 1980s called Taking Care of Business demonstrated that while heroin addicts do sometimes steal to support their habit is really isn't very common. The crime most junkies commit to financially support their habit is just to sell heroin as well. The ones who did steal almost always had a record of property crimes prior to picking up heroin in the first place. But none of this matters when politicians have an agenda. Nixon also enlisted the help of Hollywood by inviting the producers of America's most popular TV shows at the time to Washington, D.C. So for the first time ever, the White House asked television executives to produce scripts helpful to the president's narrative. Now, Obama would do the same thing during his first term, though he did so at least for the much less problematic issue of volunteering. I don't know, people still remember this, but you watch shows like I remember there's a scene in the office where Dwight mentions volunteering and it's it's part of Obama's push to to propagandize volunteering in television shows. And even though this is obviously much more innocuous, I do think the precedent of it is just creepy, regardless of the issue. But for Nixon, Hollywood acquiesced and why wouldn't they when drug stories made for such good fiction? So by the summer of 1970, many of the most watched shows were telling stories of dastardly drug dealers and drug adult teens, which really just weren't very common at the time. But they sure seem to be in these television shows. At the time, all of this was taking place. Even marijuana use among high schoolers was nearly non-existent. But people trusted their fiction. In 1971, the book Go Ask Alice was published and sold as nonfiction, posthumously published, supposedly a diary of a drug addict by a psychologist. And this book is still popular today. I actually read it long before I was interested in the history of the war on drugs and its popularity persists, despite the fact that it has long been accepted as a fabrication. In fact, the psychologists who claimed to have been Alice's doctor attempted to publish other supposed patients journals, but none of them had the commercial success of Go Ask Alice. And if you read this book, I mean, it's just absurd. It's supposed to be this teenage diary. I mean, it's stuff that she's documenting all these drug orgies. She was a part of and this isn't the kind of stuff that teenage girls write about the grammar is far too good. And then the ending of it, she gets clean. But then there's a note saying that she went back on the wagon and died. It's just a really weird ending. It is absurd that people actually thought this book was nonfiction, but they did. Some people still do, though. It's really largely accepted as a fabrication by the psychologist. The idea of the newborn drug addict also came out of this era. The New York Times reported in 1972 that 550 babies had been born in New York City addicted to heroin the previous year. Now, while this is a horrifying thing, and as far as I know, heroin babies are a real phenomenon unlike crack babies, which is pretty much a myth. It was actually quite statistically insignificant compared with the 11,000 babies born underweight in the 1600 who died in their first 28 days. And many of these underweight babies, of course, suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome. So as horrifying as heroin babies are, the actual number of them is representative of a much smaller problems than ones that people weren't blinking an eye at. But the Times focused only on heroin and the image of a heroin baby epidemic was now spreading throughout the country. And it was in 1974 that the study came out falsely linking marijuana to the killing of brain cells. Now, out of all the studies that either support or refute a claim about some harmful effects about marijuana, this may be the most telling, especially when you're talking about government funded scientific research, because government funded scientific research tends to be a way of controlling the narrative. And with marijuana research, you do have to appeal to the government to approve you getting marijuana from the marijuana farm at the University of Mississippi. And if you apply for a study that might look at, say, the medicinal benefits of marijuana, you get denied. But if you apply for a study that says, I'm going to look for the harmful effects of marijuana on the liver or the brain or something like that, then you'll get approved. So this is a really good example of how that bias plays out into, in this case, scientific fraud. Dr. Robert Heath, who has previously been employed by the CIA as part of MK Ultra, which I talked about in the last episode, he took a bunch of rhesus monkeys and he strapped gas masks on them. And then he forced them to inhale high potency marijuana smoke, the equivalent to 63 high THC joints for five minutes straight. This meant that he was essentially cutting off their supply of oxygen and giving them carbon monoxide poisoning. No surprise, the monkeys suffered from brain damage. Of course, you suffocate a rhesus monkey with carbon monoxide, you're going to give them brain damage. Not only were these results never reproduced in any other study, but several similar studies expose Dr. Heath's experiment as an example of scientific fraud. They disproved his claim that marijuana caused brain damage. And several peer reviewed scientific studies published in later years would actually demonstrate that cannabis actually has some stimulating properties for the growth of brain cells and mammals. So not only does marijuana apparently not kill brain cells, it might actually help grow new ones. Now that that research is not far enough to advance to say that in an absolute sense, but but there's at least some indication that that might be the case. But as with everything else, the myth was created and the idea that marijuana kills brain cells is still perpetuated today. I hear people bring this up when when I'm talking to me about it quite frequently. In fact, a few years later, John Ehrlichman, who was part of Nixon's council, would admit that, quote, we understood that drugs were not the health problem we were making them out to be, but it was such a perfect issue for the Nixon White House that we couldn't resist it. After Timothy Leary successfully got the Marijuana Tax Act struck down in 1969, Congress quickly ratified the Controlled Substance Act of 1970, and this acted several significant things for the war on drugs. The first thing is it finally wrote into law Santorelli's ideas for no-knock raids that were removed from his 1968 bill. It also moved the BNDD out of the Department of Treasury and into the Department of Justice, so drugs were no longer regulated through taxes. Now they were just strictly prohibited and the law was enforced by the federal government's Justice Department. This law also established drug scheduling, which ranks drugs according to both their dangers and their medical uses, with Schedule 1 drugs like marijuana, heroin and LSD being drugs who are deadly, addictive and medically useless. And because this was all part of the justice system, it would be lawyers in the Attorney General's office rather than doctors who got to decide on how drugs should be scheduled, and this is still the case today. One other thing that the Controlled Substance Act did was to form a national commission on marijuana and drug abuse to study the dangers of cannabis for long-term policy recommendations. The person appointed to head this commission was the former governor of Pennsylvania and a known drug hawk named Raymond Schaefer. The commission was meant to be one-sided and to highlight the dangers of marijuana abuse. Nixon even hinted to Schaefer that he would be offered a federal judgeship if he got the president and I'm quoting Nixon directly here, a goddamn strong statement about marijuana, one that just tears the ass out of them. Nixon, Nixon told him that's what he wanted. So the Schaefer Commission, as this is usually referred, it finally released its 1,184 paid report entitled Marijuana, a signal of misunderstanding, which was released in March of 1972. The commission was incredibly comprehensive and gave the exact opposite conclusion from what Nixon was looking for. The most notable statement that can be made about the vast majority of marijuana users, the study said, and I'm quoting here, is that they are essentially indistinguishable from their non-marijuana using peers by any fundamental criterion other than marijuana use. The commission also revealed that many of the foreign politicians who were openly repeating the standard lines about the marijuana problem had secretly confided over drinks that quote, they thought marijuana was harmless, but the Nixon administration wanted a hard line and they feared economic reprisals if they didn't go along. So in a previous episode, I mentioned similar studies, such as the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission and the LaGuardia Commission and other studies that I haven't mentioned, such as the Panama Canal Zone report and the Wooten report that took place in Panama and the United Kingdom, respectively, also concluded that marijuana was seemingly harmless and non-addictive. So the Schaefer Commission was the most recent and a long list of government commission studies that came to the exact opposite conclusions from what the government was looking for and recommended legalization. And like other studies, the Schaefer Commission was ignored. Before the report was given, Nixon told a reporter, quote, I am against legalizing marijuana. Even if the commission does recommend that it be legalized, I will not follow that recommendation. And this was a promise that Nixon actually kept after the report was published. He said, I read it and reading it did not change my mind. And he gave no further explanation for his reasoning. In addition to the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, there was also the passage of the Racketeering Influence and Corrupt Organizations Act. This is one that gets a little bit less attention in the histories. And it was known by the acronym RICO. And in fact, the name of the bill was chosen specifically to fit this acronym because the primary author of the bill, Bob Blakely, was a fan of the 1930s movie Little Caesar, in which the gangster Rico Bandello was killed by the police. But the legitimate business he used to launder money was left alone. And it was specifically this kind of loophole that Blakely wanted to attack. In fact, for the rest of his career, Blakely had a movie poster of the guy who played Rico Bandello in character, hanging behind his office desk. So he's a big, big fan of that guy, apparently. And prior to Rico, property confiscation laws would only allow people to confiscate illegal property, such as the drugs seized in raids. But if a criminal was making money through his legitimate enterprises, even laundered money, the government could not touch either the business or the profits from the business. And this upset Blakely. So Blakely invented the concept of criminal forfeiture. Technically, the term forfeiture was used anytime the government seized property from anybody. And if the seized property isn't connected to the criminal prosecution, then this would be a civil forfeiture. And traditionally, this was only used to confiscate so-called dangerous property such as whiskey during prohibition era. But it would not allow the government to confiscate a legal enterprise owned by the person who produced the whiskey. So civil forfeiture was not very common and it was really limited in scope. But Blakely's new concept of criminal forfeiture sought to remedy this. If somebody is engaged in a legal activity, the government should be able to seize their legal assets as well. Now, this wasn't civil forfeiture. Blakely assured anybody who was concerned about the expansion of government's authority to seize property said it's not civil forfeiture because his law would require the government to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the person whose property was seized was guilty of a crime. But Blakely's law significantly expanded the scope of legal government enforcement. It defined organized crime as anybody who had any financial connection to crime syndicates, which could mean banks and other businesses that may not even be aware of how their customer makes money. And this law also allowed the government to charge people with a conspiracy according to a definition so broad that somebody could be found guilty for conspiracy to commit a crime that they literally had no participation in just based on the very loose connections to the culprits. And of course, over the next two decades, Blakely's law would evolve as part of the war on drugs into our modern civil asset forfeiture laws that allow the government to seize the house of a family whose son is found with marijuana, for example, and just hold it without charging anybody with a crime. And of course, I'm going to talk a lot more about civil asset forfeiture when we get into the 1980s, when that really gets gets expanded. Most marijuana at this time was coming in from Mexico and Nixon wanted to put a stop to this. So Nixon tried to convince the Mexican government to do something about it, but they responded that as long as the people in the United States were buying marijuana, there was nothing they could do to fix the problem. So a young official by the name of G Gordon Liddy, who would later go on to spend some jail time for his participation in the Watergate scandal. And he would also then after prison make a career selling gold as a spokesman for Roslyn Capital. I remember seeing his commercials on Fox News back when I still watched Fox News. And he suggested that the Nixon administration simply cut off the supply at the border. So they called this plan Operation Intercept and it began on September 21st in 1969. Customs inspectors traditionally just waved nearly everybody past the border. So moving between Mexico and the United States was pretty easy. With Operation Intercept, they were instructed to stop everybody to conduct lengthy searches of the car in search of marijuana. So they're going through trunks and the glove compartments and under the seeds and everything looking for marijuana, which very time consuming process when you're doing this to everybody at the border. So the result was lines miles long backed up at the Mexican border. Operation Intercept had two effects. The first is that it drove marijuana dealers to start smuggling drugs into the country by airplane, which would only become more common, especially as cocaine became popular in the 1980s. The second thing it did was temporarily impede the supply of marijuana into the country. And the consequence of this was that the people who wanted to get high on marijuana were now starting to turn for the first time to heroin. One of the doctors in the San Francisco hate Ashbury free clinic saw a spike in the number of kids being treated for hard drugs. And in an interview with News Week entitled The Year of the Famine, one drug dealer named David Smith out of Massachusetts was quoted saying, I know of four kids and they're really kids like under 16 who tried smack because they couldn't get grass. This government line is that the use of marijuana leads to more dangerous drugs. The fact is that the lack of marijuana leads to more dangerous drugs. That's the full quote there. The drought didn't last long, though, because with the market for marijuana going unfulfilled, a bunch of people who had gone on drug tours through the Middle East on what was called the hippie trail or the hashish trail brought back a ton of marijuana seeds with them. And cannabis grown in Mexico was cannabis sativa, which fares poorly in colder climates. So this limits the ability to grow it domestically to pretty much just the southern areas of the country. But what the hippies brought back from the Middle East was essentially the same thing as the old school Indian hemp from the 19th century and this was cannabis indica. And indica was more resistant to frost. So it would grow better in areas farther north in the United States. And plus now that it was being cultivated by the hippies themselves, new methods of cultivation started to crop up in the seventies to increase THC levels. One of the members of the Grateful Dead, I think it was Jerry Garcia, his wife actually wrote a book on how to cultivate marijuana for higher THC levels, which circulated pretty much in the hippie community, very, very heavily, very widely circulated at the time. The legacy of Operation Intercept was primarily just to drive people to heroin and to jumpstart the domestic supply of marijuana, all complete with its higher levels potency. And despite this legacy, the government would end up increasing its effort to eradicate Mexican marijuana by strong arming the Mexican government to poison farms with the herbicide periquette. But this wouldn't happen until the Carter administration, though it wasn't Nixon-aid who first proposed the idea. It was another important position created during the Nixon years. And the story of it, I think, is revealing about the world of politics. So in 1970, Dr. Jerome Jaff was running one of the country's few methadone clinics out of Illinois. Now, Jaff wasn't a fan of Nixon. He was a Democrat. For one, his work with heroin addicts convinced him that Nixon's rhetoric about drugs was just entirely wrong-headed. Jaff did not find marijuana to be really a threat at all, just like most people around the country at the time who weren't in government or the media. And more significantly, he thought that the best approach to heroin was not law enforcement, but medical treatment. The method that Jaff believed in was methadone, which is a synthetic opiate that prevents the symptoms of heroin withdrawals without giving users the high. Now, it's worth mentioning that methadone treatments are still problematic in themselves, largely because they are chemically addictive, just like heroin is. So you're not weaning yourself off the addiction as much as replacing one addiction with another. But the idea was that like the nicotine patches, it would help addicts wean themselves off the drug because they wouldn't be seeking the high once they got away from the withdrawal symptoms. I've never looked into how effective methadone treatments are. But I know I have a friend who's an EMT in Huntington, West Virginia, which is where I went to school for my bachelor and master's degree. I went to Marshall University and Huntington West Virginia is the heroin capital of the country right now. I mean, it's just incredibly, incredibly bad there. It's the highest rate of heroin use per capita anywhere in the country. And I lived there for the past seven years. And in the methadone clinics there, he says, you know, when he's picking people up, what people are doing is they're just using methadone to treat the withdrawals between heroin use. But what Jaff was doing is a little bit different than what the methadone clinics today are using because he was combining it with therapy. So there was more than just methadone by itself, which in my understanding is that that's largely what the methadone clinics are today. You just get a dose of methadone and you're on your way. But I'm not an expert on the methadone treatments. I haven't looked into them very much. I just remember we're talking to my friend who's an EMT about it. And I think it's something worth mentioning. But regardless of the merits or demerits of methadone, Jaff's view on heroin addiction actually preceded many of the later studies that would come out of Vancouver, Canada about addiction from Gabor Maté and Bruce Alexander. And what what Jaff believed was that heroin addiction was largely the product of social alienation and emotional trauma, which drove people to seek a chemical means of coping. So by combining methadone with therapy, Jaff observed that addicts fared better than people who were treated with therapy alone. And crime in areas with such treatment went down. So Jaff was brought to the attention of the Nixon administration by an official named Jeff Donfield. And Donfield approached to Jaff to ask him for ideas on how the government might combat drug related crime. And Jaff was really skeptical of Nixon obviously, with good reason. But he offered Donfield suggestions anyway and unbeknownst to Jaff. Donfield was really on his side. He was essentially acting as the liaison between Jaff, who Donfield thought had good ideas and the Nixon administration, who were hostile to ideas that sought drug crime solutions that weren't based around more law enforcement. So when Jaff gave his proposals for the expansion of methadone clinics, Donfield was asking him all these critical questions. And what he was doing was he was trying to get Jaff to strengthen the proposal as much as possible before bringing it to his superiors. But Jaff thought Donfield was attacking his ideas and forcing him to bend to the new Nixon narrative. So he gave Donfield a final report and expected just to wash his hands of any business with federal government's drug policies. But unexpectedly, sometime later, Richard Nixon sent him a note thanking him for his recommendation. So it was pretty well received. And a little while later, Jaff Donfield's boss, Ejal Crow, Jr. who was the deputy assistant to the president for domestic affairs, he called Jaff up. Now the problem was heroin addiction in Vietnam. And he asked Jaff to propose a way the government could deal with this. And time was a factor. So there would be no committee. It was just write down your ideas and send them over to me right away. So Jaff suggested the idea of drug testing soldiers and if they were positive for heroin, keeping them in Vietnam to undergo detox. And Jaff's logic was that since soldiers wanted to go home, keeping them in Vietnam for treatment would create an incentive to avoid the drug completely. And this was the first time anybody suggested the idea of random government drug testing. So Jaff wasn't sure how his plan would be received. Well, as it turns out, Washington liked his plan and they asked him to fly up to DC to brief the pentagon about his ideas. And when he was speaking to the generals, these were three star generals, they really didn't seem to be interested in making Jaff's plan a priority. The problem was being investigated, they said. And in a few months, they might adopt a plan kind of like what Jaff's proposing. So Jaff's response to them was, and I'm quoting, gentlemen, I believe the White House wants something done about the problem a little sooner than that. Now, Jaff was a nobody. He certainly didn't have the authority to issue orders to three star generals. He also didn't think he was issuing orders at all. He was just making his professional argument about the issue he was brought in to talk about. The generals weren't aware of Jaff's loose relationship with the White House. And they actually thought he was giving them a direct order on behalf of their commander-in-chief. So after another 10 minutes of deliberation, they asked Jaff if he could help set up the first testing machines so they could start implementing his plan in only two weeks. And it was only in retrospect that Jaff realized that his ignorance on how they viewed him and the way that he worded his statement made him think that he was delivering a presidential order. So he didn't really know why they were so responsive until sometime later. So thus the government policy of random drug testing was born. And this would become, of course, much more common in the 80s. But Jaff's story doesn't end there. After Time Magazine reported that heroin addiction in Vietnam was trickling out to American children, Crow called Jaff once more to ask him to fly out to Washington D.C. And this time, Jaff was going to speak at the White House in a cabinet meeting. And after Jaff spoke, President Nixon told the room that the next day he would be announcing the formation of a special action office for drug abuse prevention. It's a title with a terrible acronym that's basically SODAP. And this would operate directly under the president and it would have authority over the Bureau of Neucardics and Dangerous Drugs, the FDA and the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. So Nixon was going to ask Congress to appropriate $371 million to fund this new position for the purpose of setting up heroin treatment programs in Vietnam and methadone clinics across the country. Now Jaff may not have been a big Nixon fan, but he approved of this announcement. He actually thought it was a really good idea. Jaff was perplexed at by this point was mostly that Nixon's rhetoric about drugs was very wrong being that drugs were linked to violence and marijuana was dangerous. Jaff didn't agree to that, but he actually liked what Nixon wanted to implement here. But then with no warning to Jaff, Nixon introduced him as the first director of the new department. So right in a room full of cabinet officials, Jaff is told that he's appointed to this Washington D.C. high ranking position that he's going to have to move him and his wife from Illinois. And of course, he accepted the job before he even told his wife about it when she was she was appalled that he accepted. And he's like, you just you can't say no to the president was his logic. So so he said yes. So Jaff had only packed enough for a one day trip to D.C. But when Nixon asked him to stick around for the announcement, he obviously couldn't say no. So he had to ask an aid to go find him a shirt. And the shirt that he'd brought back had a 17 inch collar, which was just far too big for him. So when he's at the press conference the next morning, Jaff was entirely unprepared. And he was standing in front of the press in a shirt that didn't fit next to a president he didn't vote for for a job he was essentially just told he was going to take the day before. And the president was asked whether marijuana was still seen as a threat. Nixon said that is our position and we continue to take it. Now, Jaff, of course, did not agree with this. He thought marijuana was a non issue. And heroin was what people should be concerned with. And he hated the fact that Nixon and the media had been combining the two issues into a singular drug problem. But the cameras turned to him and he was asked the same question. Now, at first, he tried to just kind of pass off the question. He said, I think the president has made his position clear on that. The reporters asked for more. What was Jaff's position? Well, he responded, I've discussed this with the president. Now, this was a lie. Jaff knew it, but he went on. I think that the issues are not always what the dangers are, but are the dangers such that we can safely legalize the substance at this time. And on this particular issue, I have no disagreement with the president. This was also a lie. Jaff had significant disagreements with the president when it came to marijuana. But he didn't want to say that while standing right next to him as his new employee. So then the press asked if Jaff believed that marijuana was a gateway to drugs like heroin. Now, Jaff firmly rejected the gateway theory, but he didn't want to appear to take a hard line stance against the Nixon narrative on this issue either. So he floundered. He said, it is a very complicated question. I think that in one sense, and in a limited sense, you have to say that anytime somebody steps over the bounds of using a drug, which is not currently totally approved by society, he is broken a boundary. He has in fact put himself outside the conventional limits and to the extent that one begins to experiment beyond the conventional limits, one is more susceptible to experiment with other non-conventional and non-socially approved illegal substances. To that extent, I think one has to accept the idea that moving across the boundary does in fact increase the use of other drugs. Now to Jaff, this answer was just saying no, marijuana is not a gateway drug. If anything leads to this shift towards harder substances, it's the criminality of marijuana use. But he couldn't come right out and say this and everybody present saw Jaff as just agreeing with the Nixon rhetoric even though he actually severely disagreed with it. And Jaff would resign, I think, in 1973. He didn't stay there long. He was just not happy with these disagreements. So even though the name would not be applied until the 1980s, this is the story of how the United States got its first drugs are. So I think this has been the longest episode yet. It was longer than I wanted to be, but there's just too much good stuff going on in the Nixon administration. So I will end it there. But definitely if you have not already subscribed to the podcast because we've got a few more good episodes coming up on the history war on drugs before moving on to another topic. And in the next one, I am going to be talking about drug use and heroin use in particular in Vietnam. And this has some interesting anecdotes, the CIA smuggling heroin, as well as the heroin addiction in Vietnam, just similar to what we saw with morphine addiction in the Civil War. So very, very important stuff, the narrative relating to the MyLine massacre. You're going to want to listen to all this. So do subscribe to the podcast. And until then, thanks for listening. For more content like this, visit mezes.org.