Smuggler Nation (44 page)

In 1909 Secretary of State Elihu Root convinced Congress to ban the importation of all forms of smoking opium in order to secure “legislation on this subject in time to save our face in the conference at Shanghai.”
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Other prohibitionists wanted much more. Spearheading the campaign was Dr. Hamilton Wright, who had joined Brent in representing the United States at the international conferences. Wright and others argued that Washington should not only support an international agreement to ban the production, export, and use of cocaine and opium abroad but also pass federal legislation to ban all imports of these drugs. They were quick to join their campaign to the rising domestic tide of racist fears about narcotics and their effects. Dr. Wright pushed tirelessly for restrictive legislation and skillfully recruited the secretary of state and the secretary of the treasury in the effort.
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Avid in his support of prohibitionist and missionary pursuits, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan pressed for the passage of legislation to meet the requirements of the international agreements the State Department supported.
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New York Representative Francis Burton Harrison eventually agreed to sponsor legislation. In the wake of reports that opium use had nearly tripled between 1870 and 1909,
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he expressed a now-familiar logic for control of the drug supply: “This enormous increase in the importation of and consumption of opium in the United States is startling and is directly due to the facility with which opium may be imported, manufactured into its various derivatives and preparations, and placed within the reach of the individual. There has been in this country an almost shameless traffic in these drugs. Criminal classes have been created, and the use of the drugs with much accompanying moral and economic degradation is widespread among the upper classes of society. We are an opium-consuming nation today.”
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There was no mass movement, as in alcohol prohibition, to support Harrison’s bill; but neither was there broad opposition. Public opinion had gradually swung to accept the view that drug use was a problem and that it was legitimate to control drugs. And, unlike alcohol users before and during Prohibition, cocaine and heroin users mounted no organized opposition to control.

The Harrison Narcotics Act, passed in December 1914, grounded federal drug control in the constitutional power to tax—which meant
that enforcement powers fell to the Treasury Department. This first federal drug-control law would prove momentous. But what exactly did the new law mean? Legally, it set three major requirements for those who produced or distributed drugs: they had to register with the federal government, keep a record of all their transactions, and pay a purchase or sales tax. The Harrison Act also required that unregistered persons—drug users—could purchase drugs only with a prescription from a physician who “prescribed [it] in good faith” and did so “in pursuit of his professional practice only.”

On its face, the Harrison Act seemed to be based more on a medical rather than law-enforcement model of drug control. The major regulatory mechanisms were designed to keep drugs under the control of the medical community. The law did not criminalize drug users or brand them as morally wrong. Using drugs was not made a crime: users were simply required to turn to doctors for prescriptions to buy drugs. The antivice crusaders, despite their rhetoric and pressure campaigns, appeared to have lost the fight: the law did not reflect their prohibitionist desires, nor did legislators believe they were passing a prohibition law.
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But the battle to define the terms of national drug policy had only begun. In the end, the prohibitionists would transform a largely medical model for controlling drug use into a law enforcement model for outlawing drug use. Powerful government agents joined them in their quest. They were aided by an increasingly fearful and vengeful social context shaped by such events as the struggle over alcohol prohibition, World War I, and widespread fear of immigrants and foreign influences.

The Treasury Department was charged with administering the Harrison Act, and its agents took the lead role in transforming it into a prohibitionist law. The department (first its Bureau of Revenue and then, after 1920, the Narcotics Division of its Prohibition Unit) began to issue regulations interpreting the law as forbidding the maintenance of addicts on drugs. The department also began to arrest physicians and druggists, in order to stop them from providing prescriptions to help maintain addicts, and to arrest addicts for illegal possession.
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The courts rejected this prohibitionist maneuver. But Treasury persisted and was eventually able to take advantage of a changing social context increasingly shaped by the antivice movement.

In the years immediately following the Harrison Act, antivice crusaders, often supported by urban dailies and popular national magazines, sought more stringent prohibition and punishment of physicians and addicts and continued to warn of “the drug evil.” Mass organizations pushing for alcohol prohibition had created a moral atmosphere that condemned such vices. The Treasury Department also helped turn public opinion against doctors and their addicted patients. Antivice crusaders and many journalists projected an image of “dope doctors” responsible for the nation’s drug problems.

The growing antidrug sentiment rode the tide of other national fears. World War I and the 1919–20 Red Scare fanned the fears of foreign threats. Press stories circulated about drugs being smuggled into U.S. Army training centers by Germans and about Germans “exporting drugs in toothpaste and patent medicines in order to hook innocent citizens of other countries on drugs.”
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Alcohol Prohibition further boosted the antivice crusade, and in the early 1920s a number of antinarcotics groups formed. Richmond P. Hobson, a star orator of the Prohibition movement, was responsible for the creation of some of the more vocal organizations. Hobson not only grossly exaggerated the numbers (“one million heroin addicts”) but also argued that heroin caused crime and that addicts were “beasts” and “monsters” who spread their disease like medieval vampires.
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“Drug addiction is more communicable and less curable than leprosy,” he warned, asserting that, “drug addicts are the principal carriers of vice diseases.” Hobson exclaimed that “upon this issue hangs the perpetuation of civilization, the destiny of the world, and the future of the human race.”
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Meanwhile, very few voices rose in opposition to the prohibitionist tide, and those that did were weak and marginalized.

The courts also caved in. From 1915 to 1919 narcotics agents faced limits in their campaigns to intimidate doctors because the courts refused to accept the Treasury Department’s prohibitionist interpretation of the Harrison Act, and Congress was unwilling to amend the law.
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But in 1919, in
Webb v. United States
, the Supreme Court concluded that it was illegitimate for a doctor to maintain addicts on morphine with no intention of curing them. Treasury pounced on the decision, quickly putting its personnel on notice that the Supreme Court now supported the prosecution of physicians who were distributing drugs “to a person
popularly known as a ‘dope fiend,’ for the purpose of gratifying his appetite for the drug.” Such acts, the Treasury memorandum said, put physicians in violation of the Harrison Act.
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In 1922 the Court again delivered a verdict supporting Treasury’s position. In
United States v. Behrman
, the Court established that a narcotics prescription for an addict was illegal unless the addict had some other ailment requiring treatment with narcotics.

These court rulings transformed the Harrison Act into a prohibition law that conformed to the Treasury Department’s interpretation. The social and political tide toward the prohibition of drugs had turned so decisively by the mid-1920s that even a reversal of position on the
Behrman
case by the Supreme Court in 1925 had little effect on policy or practice. As legal sources of drugs dried up, dope peddlers and smugglers were defined as the key problem and became the targets of government policy. The dominant interpretation of addiction, meanwhile, pointed toward harsh, punitive measures. Furthermore, a consensus arose that any nonmedical narcotics use—even nonaddictive use—was a vice and that users should be punished. Laws began to sanction not just suppliers but also users themselves. By the late 1920s, one-third of inmates in federal prisons were serving sentences for violating the Harrison Act.
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Driving the Drug Trade Underground

As physicians and pharmacists backed away from prescribing cocaine and opiates and as clinics closed their doors by the 1920s, those drug users who were unable to break their habits had little choice but to enter the underworld—supporting the black-market smugglers and dope peddlers who had replaced doctors and pharmacists, and sometimes stealing to meet the high prices created by prohibition.

In this growing illicit drug market, New York City emerged as the central import, distribution, and user hub. The city not only possessed the country’s largest port and was well connected by transportation links to major markets across the continent but also had the largest concentration of heroin users.
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In the second decade of the twentieth century New York was also the center of a loosely organized and decentralized underground cocaine trade. Through New York, criminologists
Alan Block and William Chambliss tell us, “Cocaine was imported, wholesaled, franchised, and retailed.… It was traded in movies, theaters, restaurants, cafes, cabarets, pool parlors, saloons, parks, and on innumerable street corners. It was an important part of the coin of an underground that was deeply embedded in the urban culture of New York.”
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Initially, supplies of cocaine, morphine, and heroin could still be found through diversion and theft from American pharmaceutical companies, many of them located in the New York–Philadelphia corridor.
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Like their foreign counterparts, these companies produced far more than the legitimate medical market could possibly absorb. A favorite diversion and smuggling scheme early on was to set up front companies in Mexico and Canada to import heroin and other drugs from the United States and then smuggle them back into the country.
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As Treasury told a congressional committee in 1920, “drugs are exported from this country for the purposes of reentry through illicit channels.”
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Congress targeted these trade tricks by passing the Narcotics Drugs Import and Export Act of 1922, otherwise known as the Jones-Miller Act. The new law empowered the federal government to closely track legal narcotics shipments and crack down on diversion. Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon warned that the law would be difficult to enforce, require many more customs agents, and further fuel smuggling. Customs, he stressed, was already overwhelmed, its reports documenting “conclusively that smuggling of narcotics into the United States is on the increase to such an extent that customs officers seem unable to suppress traffic to any appreciable extent.”
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To eliminate the possibility of diversion from legal channels, in 1924 Congress banned all domestic production and medical use of heroin.

With domestically produced drug supplies drying up by the mid-1920s, dealers increasingly turned to foreign sources. Bulk quantities of heroin, morphine, and cocaine could still be secured through German, Dutch, and French firms. Taking advantage of this new international business opportunity, Arnold Rothstein became America’s most famous drug trade entrepreneur of the 1920s. Already a well-established and successful New York bootlegger, racketeer, financier, and gambler who gained fame and notoriety for allegedly fixing the 1919 World
Series, Rothstein used his underworld business connections to branch out into the profitable new world of international drug trafficking. Rothstein set up and oversaw a transatlantic operation illicitly importing drugs—mostly heroin but also morphine and cocaine—legally manufactured in Europe. France was an especially important source, with French pharmaceutical firms processing far more opium than any other country in the world and far beyond legitimate medicinal needs. Excess production slipped into the black market.
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As European countries began to impose stricter controls on their pharmaceutical companies (as agreed to in international treaties signed in 1925 and 1931 to more closely monitor and restrict legal production), underground factories sprung up in France, the Balkans, and Turkey. Drugs were also increasingly imported from East Asia, especially Shanghai, where a freewheeling regulatory environment and chaotic political situation provided favorable conditions for heroin processing and export in the 1930s.
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These prohibition-induced shifts in the illicit drug trade favored heroin over morphine and opium smoking. Heroin was much more potent than morphine, and its higher value per weight made it ideal for smuggling. Moreover, heroin could more easily be diluted for higher profits at the retail distribution level. And unlike morphine, heroin users could snort the stuff (as long as it was not overly diluted) if they had an aversion to the needle.

Meanwhile, opium smoking, which was less dangerous than heroin, virtually disappeared: opium was a bulky product with a pungent smell, making it less profitable to smuggle per weight and more detectable by law enforcement.
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A similar shift happened with coca products, with high-potency cocaine pushing out the much more benign coca tonics.
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This essentially repeated the market dynamic we saw with alcohol prohibition, with hard liquor replacing beer as the favored drink in the 1920s.