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The Case for Legalizing Heroin
by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel
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What group of currently illegal drugs did affluent, middle-
aged women in nineteenth century America widely imbibe? What
drugs were also used in teething syrups for babies and as a cure
for alcoholism? What drugs aroused opposition, not because of any
demonstrated health hazard, but because of a congruence of
special interests and anti-Chinese racism? And what drugs were
first banned by the national government, not as a result of
conditions in this country, but in response to obscure
international events occurring halfway around the globe nearly a
century ago?
The answer is the opiates: heroin, morphine, codeine, and opium.
Of all illicit drugs, heroin has the most vicious reputation.
Even many of those favoring the legalization of marijuana and
other "soft" drugs blanch at the prospect of a free market in
heroin. The estimated half-million heroin users in the United
States are viewed, in the words of a 1962 Supreme Court decision,
as a plague of "walking dead"--driven into prostitution, if they
are women, and into crime, if they are men, in order to finance
their $120-a-day habits.
Heroin-related deaths number in the hundreds every year, while
some analysts attribute as much as 70 percent of all property
crimes to heroin. Despite the billions of tax dollars allocated
by governments to deal with this drug problem--either through
strict law enforcement or through various treatment panaceas--the
problem persists at epidemic levels.
Contrast the current state of affairs with the nineteenth century, when there was no narcotic drug problem in this country and virtually no drug laws.
Heroin is a derivative of morphine, which in turn is derived
from opium. A German firm first synthesized heroin in 1898. But
prior to that date, the other opiates were as freely available as
aspirin today. Drug and grocery stores sold products containing
opium and morphine across the counter. Anyone could order these
products through the mail. Opiates were the basic ingredients in
many patent medicines and were used to treat everything from
diarrhea to what was called "women's trouble." Even teething
syrups for babies contained opiates.
An 1880 medical text listed 54 diseases that could be treated
with morphine. One wholesale drug house reportedly offered more
than 600 medicines and other products with opiates. "Godfrey's
Cordial," for instance, mixed opium, molasses for sweetening, and
sassafras for flavoring. "Godfrey's Cordial" was popular in
England as well as in the U.S. Residents of mid-nineteenth
century Coventry bought ten gallons weekly--enough for 12,000
doses--and administered them to 3000 infants under two years of
age.
In the United States, regular users of opiates at the end of
the century numbered somewhere between 200,000 and 1 million, out
of a population of 76 million, leading to a general recognition
that excessive opiate use was peculiarly American. The majority
of these users were white, middle- or upper-class women, with an
average age of forty. For them, opiates served the same function
that alcohol, Valium, and other tranquilizers serve for
housewives today. Although opium use was not socially
respectable, it received less opprobrium than the use of alcohol,
which was especially frowned upon for women. Social reformers put
a much higher priority on the flourishing crusade for alcohol
prohibition, and the increasing number of state and local
prohibition laws helped stimulate the demand for opiates. Indeed,
both opium and morphine were widely recommended cures for
alcoholism.
After heroin (diacetylmorphine) was synthesized, it became as
readily available as opium and morphine. Once in the body, heroin
is converted back into morphine, which is also the primary active
agent in opium. Heroin differs from morphine only in that it is
more potent and acts more rapidly. Interestingly enough, heroin
was initially acclaimed as a non-addicting cure for morphine
addiction. More recently, authorities have employed methadone, a
synthetic narcotic resembling morphine and heroin but not derived
from opium, as a treatment for heroin addiction. Methadone, while
not as pleasurable as heroin, turns out to be equally addictive.
And ironically, the resulting use of alcohol to get off methadone
has, within less than one hundred years, brought the "treatment"
cycle back to where it started.
The first law restricting the sale of morphine appeared in
Pennsylvania as early as 1860. For the remainder of the century,
however, those few state and local ordinances regulating opiates
remained filled with loopholes, enforced laxly, and evaded
easily. The most noteworthy exception to the near-universal reign
of \laissez faire\ in narcotics was San Francisco, where the
smoking of opium in smoking houses or "dens" was prohibited in
1875. The motivation behind this ordinance was not so much a
moralistic disapproval of opium as a racist intolerance of the
Chinese laborers pouring into the city. While white Americans
preferred to ingest their opium orally, the Chinese, reflecting
cultural differences, favored opium smoking.
U.S. labor unions, fearing competition from Chinese workers,
contributed immensely to the spread of this racism. Congress in
response not only barred further Chinese immigration in 1889, but
also, two years earlier, had prohibited the importation of
smoking opium altogether. Congress further tightened the
restriction upon opium importation in 1909. Twenty-seven states
and cities had passed laws against opium smoking by 1914. None of
these laws, as could be expected, were very effective. Their main
impact was to encourage opium users to shift to stronger
substitutes: morphine and heroin.
At the same time that Chinese immigrants in the U.S.
experienced increasing bigotry and brutality, American merchants
were attempting to penetrate Far Eastern markets. They faced
stiff competition from the British, who sold opium grown in India
to the Chinese. The British government in fact had waged two
opium wars in the mid-nineteenth century to protect and expand
this traffic, and opium accounted for 14 percent of China's total
imports by 1894. Chinese merchants, moreover, organized a
voluntary embargo of American goods in 1905 to protest the
oppressive treatment of Chinese immigrants and travelers within
the United States.
During the Progressive Era, the belief that a healthy domestic
economy depended on expanding foreign markets guided American
foreign policy. The U.S. government was embarked upon its first
adventure with overseas imperialism, as epitomized by its seizure
of the Philippines from Spain in 1898. To open the British-
dominated Chinese markets, the State Department began promoting
international controls over the opium trade.
The U.S. further hoped that its advocacy of international
controls would mollify both Chinese merchants and the Chinese
government, which was engaged in a ruthless nationalistic effort
to stamp out opium use among its own subjects. International
controls would also please American missionaries in China, who
felt that British opium was ruining the people. Finally,
international controls would help the U.S. replace the Spanish
government's narcotic monopoly in the Philippines with total
narcotic prohibition.
Two international opium conferences resulted: one in Shanghai
in 1909 and another at the Hague in 1911. Out of the latter came
the first international opium agreement, the Hague Convention of
1912, which called upon all participating nations to establish
internal controls over narcotics. Much to its embarrassment, the
United States government, after sponsoring the opium agreement,
had no such controls. In order to fulfill the U.S. obligation and
provide a model for other nations, Congress passed, virtually
unnoticed, the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914.
Federal control over narcotics also received endorsement from
the American Medical Association and the American Pharmaceutical
Association, both of which desired government regulation as an
instrument for dominating and cartelizing their respective
professions. A diverse and weak system of state drug-prescription
laws already existed as a result of their efforts.
The Harrison Act was originally written only to regulate, and
not prohibit, opiates. Because of worries about the act's
constitutionality, Congress explicitly framed it as a revenue
measure and charged its enforcement to the Treasury Department.
It licensed and taxed all importers, manufacturers, and
distributors of narcotics, and required a doctor's prescription
in order to get narcotics except in small doses. The act,
however, contained ambiguous language stating that a physician
could prescribe drugs "in the course of his professional practice
only." The Treasury Department interpreted this phrase as totally
forbidding the prescription of narcotics to "addicts." The
courts, after dissenting for five years, sustained the Treasury
Department's interpretation.
The Treasury's hard-line position and the courts' reversal
reflected the profound changes in public attitudes during the
hysteria of World War I, the "Red Scare" of 1919, and the triumph
of alcohol prohibitionism, all of which rapidly transpired after
the Harrison Act's passage. Americans viewed narcotic addiction
as undermining the war effort and took seriously the frequent
wild rumors of secret German plots to turn U.S. soldiers and
citizens into dope fiends.
Drugs were suddenly a major vice among young people. Fantastic
and unsubstantiated accounts of pushers giving candy loaded with
narcotics to schoolchildren circulated widely. Once the war was
over, narcotics became associated with Bolshevism and anarchism.
New York City, for example, established a Committee on Public
Safety in May 1919 to investigate two supposedly related evils:
bombings by revolutionaries and heroin use by youngsters.
The government campaign against narcotics encountered no
restraints in this atmosphere of suspicion and intolerance. The
same agency, the Treasury Department, was initially responsible
for administering both alcohol prohibition and the Harrison Act.
Enthusiasm for the prohibition experiment inevitably spilled over
into the control of narcotics, with the same excessive
enforcement techniques in both areas.
The Treasury Department had shut down 44 heroin-maintenance
clinics around the country by 1925. One-third of all persons in
federal penitentiaries in mid-1928 were Harrison Act violators,
more than the combined total for the next two categories of
prisoners: violators of alcohol prohibition and car thieves. By
1938, 25,000 doctors had been arraigned for supplying narcotics
to users, and 3000 of them were serving prison sentences. A
series of amendments that totaled 55 by 1970 steadily
strengthened the Harrison Act, and myriad state laws of
increasing severity supplemented the federal statutes.
As the government's war against narcotics escalated, the
notorious conditions associated with the modern drug problem made
their first appearance. A black market in narcotics emerged, with
its linkage to crime. The health and status of identified opiate
users began to decline. And heroin all but supplanted the other,
milder opiates on the black market, because it packaged greater
potency with the same risk of arrest and punishment.
One would expect that Congress and the state legislatures, as
they stiffened the penalties for using and selling drugs,
possessed overwhelming evidence about the harmful effects of
opiates. Yet, on the contrary, they had no such evidence. Even
today there is absolutely no scientific basis for the claim that
the regular use of opium, morphine, or heroin has deleterious
health effects.
Dr. George Stevenson and a group of British Columbia
researchers exhaustively reviewed the medical literature on
narcotic addiction in 1956 and reported: "To our surprise we have
not been able to locate even one scientific study on the proved
harmful effects of addiction." Their findings are confirmed in
such reputable pharmacology texts as Goodman and Gillman's \The
Pharmacological Basis for Therapeutics\ (6th edition, 1980), as
well as in such exhaustive surveys as Edward Brecher's Consumers
Union Report, \Licit and Illicit Drugs\ (1972). Medical experts
agree that the opiates are among the safest of all drugs, and
undoubtedly far less dangerous than either alcohol or nicotine.
All of heroin's alleged health consequences are actually the
effects of the laws themselves. The prohibition of heroin causes
artificially exorbitant prices. Malnutrition, skin discoloration,
rotted teeth, and the other "symptoms of addiction" result, in
reality, from users having to spend most of their money on drugs
and little on food, sanitary conditions, and medical and dental
care. Unsterile syringes cause hepatitis and spread other
diseases, such as AIDS. Without the laws, users could--with
little difficulty--acquire sterile syringes and heroin pure
enough to sniff, smoke, or ingest orally.
None of the ill effects have been noted whenever users have
been able to get opiates easily and cheaply. American soldiers in
Vietnam had ready access to high-quality heroin, and it was
impossible to tell by their appearance or behavior who was using
it. Only a urine test could make the distinction. Some very
prominent and successful persons throughout history have been
regular opiate users. Dr. William Halsted, the father of American
surgery and founder of Johns Hopkins Medical Center, took
morphine all his adult life, yet none but his closest friends
knew. He died at the age of seventy, having performed his most
brilliant operations while an addict.
Estimates of the number of doctors who regularly take opiates
today run as high as 1 percent. Charles Wilnick, a New York
public health official, discovered that exposed physician users
were more successful than other physicians. Studies in Newark and
Brooklyn indicate that heroin users, even in the ghetto, may be
better off economically and better educated than the average
resident.
The popular impression of heroin's addictiveness also requires
qualification. Regular users of heroin and other opiates can
develop a physical dependency that leads to severe withdrawal
symptoms if the drug is no longer administered. But the notion
that after only one experience an individual becomes hopelessly
addicted, forever craving the drug, with only a slim chance of
"kicking" the habit, is highly exaggerated. Even the Drug
Enforcement Administration (DEA) admits that 80 percent of the
nation's half million heroin users are not hardcore addicts, but
infrequent or light users who go on and off the drug with
relative ease. It usually requires a couple of weeks of daily
shooting to acquire any noticeable addiction. Heroin users
furthermore can be remarkably flexible about frequency and
dosage, and significant variations exist between individuals.
Of course, heroin, like any other drug, including caffeine,
can cause death if taken in a large enough dose. Most of the
reported heroin overdoses, however, are not genuine overdoses,
but are another unintended ill effect of the drug laws. Street-
quality heroin is so diluted that a user would have to inject
nearly fifty "bags" at once in order to get a lethal quantity.
This could hardly occur by accident. Even if it did, death from a
true overdose takes from one to twelve hours, during which time
the victim can be easily brought around in a few minutes with
nalorphine (Nalline), an antidote stocked in all pharmacies and
hospitals.
Reported "overdoses" actually result from lethal combinations
of heroin and other substances. Sometimes these combinations
occur when taking heroin with another drug, such as alcohol (as
did Janis Joplin) or cocaine (as did John Belushi). More often,
the heroin itself is cut with other substances, including
quinine, strychnine, talc, battery acid, and sugar. Street-
quality heroin contains these impurities only because it is
illegal.
Finally, let us consider the relationship between heroin and
crime. The alleged proportion of property crimes committed by
heroin users range from as high as 70 percent to as low as 10
percent. None of these estimates is very reliable, but the higher
ones are particularly suspect. The Drug Abuse Council, in its
report on \The Facts About "Drug Abuse"\, reveals that the
connection between heroin and crime "has been repeatedly
overstated and even misrepresented to support tough enforcement
policies." For instance, the DEA claims that heroin users
committed over 100,000 robberies, burglaries, larcenies, or auto
thefts \per day\ in 1974. That comes to 36.5 million crimes for
the entire year, which according to the FBI Uniform Crime Report
is almost four times the 9.7 million crimes reported in these
categories \for all persons\. Even allowing for the Bureau of
Justice Statistics' estimate that the number of unreported crimes
approximately equals the number of reported crimes, the DEA is
charging heroin users with 17 million crimes that never occurred.
Although we do not know the actual strength of the correlation
between heroin and crime, one conclusion is certain. To the
extent that heroin use does generate crime, it has nothing to do
with the physical characteristics of the drug, but rather results
solely from the fact that heroin is illegal. A Detroit study by
the Public Research Institute of the Center for Naval Analyses
found that whenever stricter law enforcement reduced the supply
of illegal heroin, driving up its price, the rate of property
crime rose. Only because heroin is illegal does a user need
approximately $120 a day to maintain a regular habit. Judging
from the pharmacy price of morphine, the same amount of heroin--
50 milligrams--would cost no more than $1.50 on the free market.
In short, all of the supposed evils of heroin are either (1)
total fabrications or (2) consequences of the anti-opiate laws
themselves. These laws did not originate from any sincere or
legitimate health concern, but were the product of blatant racism
and special interest. Heroin on the free market would be cheap,
as well as legal, leaving users with no unique reason to commit
crime. It would be available in unadulterated form, in precisely
measured quantities, alleviating the "overdose" problem. And
governments at all levels would no longer waste billions of tax
dollars each year on a futile quest to suppress the trade in a
substance that has no proven health hazards.
The solution to the heroin problem is nothing less than
complete legalization. Heroin should be openly exchanged with no
restrictions whatever on use, sale, or manufacture. Drug laws
have not prevented heroin use, but instead have left a legacy of
overcrowded prisons, clogged courts, increasing crime, wasted tax
money, mounting "overdose" fatalities, and misallocated police
resources that otherwise could have protected life and property.
Drug use in any society is a complicated function of many
cultural factors. Trying to eliminate drug use through government
action imposes intolerable costs and is ultimately ineffective.
Even restrictions upon the sale of heroin to minors are
unnecessary and unjust. The current draconian laws have not
curtailed heroin's popularity with the young. The power of the
State can never substitute for parental guidance, and those young
people effectively beyond parental guidance because they are out
in the market supporting themselves deserve the same freedom to
run their own lives as adults.
If heroin were as dangerous as widely believed--or deadly--
that still would not justify its prohibition or regulation. The
best way to foster drug safety is through open competition.
Government laws, as we have have repeatedly seen, artificially
encourage the substitution of one drug for another. The
substitute is either more powerful or more readily obtainable,
but often more harmful. The free market, in contrast, would
permit individuals to seek out and indulge in the safest drug
providing the desired sensation. Drug manufacturers would have a
strong incentive to discover or synthesize such safe
alternatives.
In the final analysis, the manufacture, sale, and use of an
illegal drug are victimless crimes. The use of an illegal drug
harms no one but \possibly\ the drug user. The manufacture and
sale of illegal drugs are capitalist acts, furnishing a service
that customers value. Drug laws make criminals out of people for
merely engaging in peaceful actions of which others disapprove.
Individuals should be free to produce, exchange, and put into
their own bodies any chemicals or substances they choose,
regardless of the health consequences. Heroin laws are not merely
counterproductive and costly; they are a fundamental violation of
basic individual rights.
Select Bibliography
Richard Ashely, \Heroin: The Myths and the Facts\ (New York,
1972).
Edward M. Brecher, \Licit and Illicit Drugs: The Consumers Union
Report on Narcotics, Stimulants, Depressants, Inhalants,
Hallucinogens and Marijuana--Including Caffeine, Nicotine, and
Alcohol\ (Boston, 1972).
Roy A. Childs, Jr., "Liberty and the Drug Problem," \Libertarian
Forum\, 10 (May 1977), 1-5
Roy A. Childs, Jr., "Crime in the Cities--The Drug Connection,"
\Libertarian Review\, 10 (Aug 1981), 28-37.
Drug Abuse Council, \The Facts About "Drug Abuse"\ (New York,
1980).
Ronald Hamowy, ed., \Dealing with Drugs: Consequences of
Government Control\ (Lexington, MA, 1987).
Rufus King, \The Drug Hang-Up: America's Fifty-Year Folly\ (New
York, 1972).
Alfred R. Lindesmith, \The Addict and the Law\ (Bloomington,
1967).
David F. Musto, \The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic
Control\ (New Haven, 1973).
William Orzechowski, "Some Economic Perspectives on Government
Drug Policy," \Policy Report\, 3 (Mar 1981), 6-11.
Oakley Ray, \Drugs, Society, and Human Behavior\, 2nd ed., (St.
Louis, 1978).
Thomas Szasz, \Ceremonial Chemistry: The Ritual Persecution of
Drugs, Addicts, and Pushers\ (Garden City, NY, 1974).
Arnold H. Taylor, \American Diplomacy and Narcotics Traffic,
1900-39\ (Durham, NC, 1969).
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