VICE, CRIME, AND AMERICAN LAW

Several laws were made mention of in the previous section that deserve further explanation. I will omit the details of local and state laws, which began to change before the federal laws, and focus only on the major federal laws.

1906 Food and Drug Act

This is the first law that impacts drugs on a federal level. This law was in response to the "snake oil" sales of "cure-alls" which promised to cure most everything but did not provide a list of ingredients. Some of these cure-alls consisted of large amounts of morphine or alcohol. As a result, Congress passed the Food and Drug Act in 1906, which required the labeling of all ingredients in these patent medicines and cure-alls. Predictably, the result was a huge drop in the use of these substances once people knew what it is they were consuming. For example, one cure-all intended to cure tooth aches in children consisted almost entirely of cocaine.

1914 Harrison Tax Act

By 1914, various groups wanted to ban various drugs. Congress and most Americans at the time thought that a ban of any drug was unconstitutional as our constitutional guarantee of liberty gave us the right to consume any product we wished (which is why the prohibition against alcohol required a constitutional amendment rather than merely a law). The plan was to ban drugs by making them nearly impossible to obtain. The law required that you must pay a tax on drugs. To ensure that the tax was collected, you had to get the drugs from a doctor via prescription (all prescriptions were therefore registered with the tax office which enabled the government to track which doctors were prescribing which drugs). It is interesting to note that there was no agreement as to which drugs would be included in the tax act. Various regions pushed for different drugs. One of the candidates was caffeine. In the end the Harrison Act included opium, heroin, and cocaine (but not marijuana). The law required that (for tax purposes) doctors must keep records and only prescribe these drugs for "medical necessity." In 1919 the Supreme Court ruled in Webb, et. al. v. United States that addiction was not a disease; as a result doctors were told there was no "medical necessity" for these drugs. Since all doctors prescribing these drugs had provided records of these prescriptions, thousands of doctors were then arrested for prescribing these drugs to addicts to maintain their habits. Constitutionally, this was questionable as regulating the medical practice is thought to be a state issue.

1970 Controlled Substances Act: (Nixon's Drug War)

By 1970 the prevailing view that the constitution guaranteed us the liberty to use drugs had changed. As a result, Congress, with President Nixon's support (FBI Chief Hoover informed Nixon that the way to attack the "new left" was to arrest them on drug charges since the protests and anti-war speech were legal), passed the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. This act was more than just a banning of particular drugs, but also took the power to determine the legal status of future drugs out of the hands of the president, Congress, and courts. Instead, the power to determine the legal status of drugs was given to the DEA. New drugs never go to Congress for a vote; they are simply classified via " Scheduling " without debate by the DEA.

Scheduling

WEBLINK: Details about scheduling can be found at:

http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/pubs/scheduling.html

Each drug is scheduled by the DEA as it is "perceived."

Schedule I

Any drugs that have a "high potential for abuse" and that have "no currently accepted medical use in treatment in US" and whose "safety is not proven for medical use" are schedule I drugs. They include:

• Heroin
• Methamphetamine
• Marijuana
• LSD

In addition, no research can be done on Schedule I drugs without government approval. 

As you can see it is very easy for a new drug to be classified as Schedule I. Any new drug that is "perceived" by the DEA as likely be abused and that is so new that there is no currently accepted medical use for it and that you can't prove to be safe gets a Schedule I rating. Once a drug becomes a Schedule I drug, how could you prove it is safe, develop a medical use for it, and show that the perception of abuse is false since you cannot do any research without government approval? When we combine this with the historical facts that many of the motivations for making these drugs illegal stem from racial factors (Chinese and opium smoking, Mexican migrants and marijuana, African-Americans and cocaine), it becomes difficult to justify our current drug laws. However, philosophers can employ moral arguments that may justify the legal prohibition of these drugs. We will begin with the case against drug use.

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