BackStory; All Hopped Up: Drugs in America

- This is Backstory, I'm Peter Onuf. When Americans first encountered cocaine in the late 19th century, it was seen as a pick-me-up for the well-off. Cocaine-infused drinks like Coca-Cola marketed themselves as virtuous alternatives to alcohol. - The idea would be that while everybody else was kind of getting sozzled in taverns, then the smart, urbane Coca-Cola drinker was staying sharp and taking care of business. - Cocaine's image took a turn for the worse in the early 20th century, but there were other wonder drugs waiting in the wings: psychedelics, amphetamines, and especially for women there were tranquilizers. - They would say, you know, these things, they'll cure you if you're feeling sad, they'll bring you down if you're feeling too up. They'll cure juvenile delinquency. They'll help you want to have sex with your husband again. It'll help you feel happy at work. It'll make the dishes look great. - Today on the show, Americans' changing attitudes about drugs. But first, some history in the making. Major support for BackStory is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia,

and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation. From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory with the American History Guys. Welcome to the show. I'm Brian Balogh here with fellow History Guys, Peter Onuf... - [Onuf] Hey. - ... and Ed Ayers. - [Ayers] Hey. - And we have a letter here written by a Colorado newspaper editor dated September 4, 1936. Ed, why don't you read it for us? - [Ayers] Gentlemen, two weeks ago, a sex-mad degenerate named Lee Fernandez brutally attacked a young Alamosa girl. He was convicted of assault with intent to rape and sentenced to 10 to 14 years in the state penitentiary. Police officers here know definitely that Fernandez was under the influence of marijuana. - This letter was addressed to the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics. A few months later, the Bureau submitted it as evidence to Congress, which was considering a new measure that would

essentially outlaw marijuana. Now, a lot of congressmen at this time had never heard of marijuana, but with stories like this on the table, they didn't need much convincing. In August 1937, that law was soundly approved. - Today, a lot of people blame the head of the Narcotics Bureau, a guy named Harry Anslinger, for whipping up the marijuana panic of the 1930s, and for forcing this legislation through. But while Anslinger may have trafficked in reefer madness, he didn't invent it, nor did those newspaper editors who fed him their stories. Nope, this panic had gotten its start decades earlier, and it began of all places in Mexico. - [Campos] Let me give you an example. - This is Isaac Campos, an historian who's written about early Mexican attitudes towards drugs. - There's a newspaper article that I'd have to look it up here to see. Look at the footnote here. Can't remember them all. - Short-term memory loss there, Isaac? - Yeah, well, that's what happens when you study too much marijuana.

Okay, so this article comes from a Mexico City newspaper called El Pais, and was published in 1909. This was absolutely typical for how marijuana was described in the late 19th or early 20th century in Mexico. "Yesterday, on Chapultepec Avenue, around six in the afternoon, there occurred a major scandal. The cause of the disorder was a cocky tough guy, who was stoned thanks to the influence of marijuana and who insulted all the passers-by. Two gendarmes attempted to reduce him to order and he attacked them with his knife, causing them significant injuries. The scandal then took on colossal proportions, for it became very difficult to disarm the marijuano. When they finally reduced him to order, they confined him to a cell, it being necessary to hold him down with a straitjacket. - These kind of stories had been appearing for decades in the Mexican press, but around the turn of the 20th century, they start trickling north. - You could think of it as like an ideological acid rain [chuckles] that starts arriving in the United States very gradually in the 1890s and begins to build the foundation of these ideas that we would eventually call reefer madness here in the States and create this idea that marijuana was the most dangerous of all drugs, a drug that caused madness and violence,

and therefore had to be prohibited. - In 1920, the new revolutionary government in Mexico did just that. It passed a law prohibiting the use of marijuana, beating the Americans to the punch by 17 years. - This past November, voters in Colorado and Washington approved measures legalizing the recreational use of marijuana. In his first remarks on the news, Colorado's governor made a joke about the munchies. And if all this seems like a radical shift from those early days of reefer madness, well, it's hardly the first time the image of a drug has undergone such a major overhaul. - So today on the show, we're going to trace some of these overhauls here in America. We've got stories about the changing face of opium, cocaine, heroin, even Valium. But first, let's return to marijuana. Because one of the most surprising things about what happened after its prohibition in Mexico was that people just didn't seem to care.

- [Campos] There isn't as far as I know a single newspaper article that references it. - Really? - There's not one newspaper article. Even in the proceedings, so if you read the minutes of the meetings leading up to this ban, there's almost no debate about it. And this shows you one critical part of the story, which is that marijuana was not particularly widely used in Mexico. - Right. - It was only used in prisons and soldiers' barracks for the most part. And furthermore, it was used in these environments that were extremely violent in themselves. So it seemed quite reasonable that people in a prison would smoke this drug that was thought to be extremely powerful and cause madness and then go on violent rampages. Nobody really questioned that because it just seemed logical. - Today, at least based on my viewing of Cheech and Chong movies, the associations with marijuana are kind of mellowness, the munchies, perhaps a little bit of laziness. It's, in fact, often contrasted with the sometimes violent aggressive behavior that something like alcohol leads to.

- Yeah. - Are we talking about the same drug here, Isaac? - Yes. We're absolutely talking about the same drug. And this is a critical question that was at the center of my research, how could it be that marijuana was so overwhelmingly associated with these effects a hundred years ago that today are now just laughed at? A critical part of this story and something that, not enough people, I think, recognize is that the effects that drugs have on us are dictated not simply by the pharmacology of the drug but also by something else that we'd generally refer to as set and setting. So that is by the psychology of the user and the setting of the drug use. The simple way to think about this is what you think is going to happen when you take a drug is critical to what happens when you take a drug. And so it's not that marijuana makes you violent but in an environment where the stereotyped behavior related to the drug is to lash out against people nearby violently, it seems quite likely to me that, in fact, there were violent incidents that were related to marijuana. Again, not because it necessarily makes you violent but when you take set and setting

and connect that to the drug itself, you wind up with these kinds of outcomes. There's actually no laboratory evidence that suggests today, for example, that marijuana makes you lazy either, right? But everybody has that stereotype and I feel very, you know, it's quite likely that people smoke marijuana because they see this kind of, you know, a romantic thing to become this sort of burned-out stoner but there's nothing about marijuana that should make you a burned-out stoner except for our culture which suggests that that's what should happen. - How does your story change our understanding of the war against drugs today? - Well, I think one thing that people have to recognize is that Mexico has long been an extremely anti-drug country. There's a kind of stereotype out there that suggests that it's the United States that's the kind of puritanical anti-drug country and that it forces its views on the rest of the world. But in fact, it was Mexicans who showed people in the United States really how to despise marijuana. So, Mexico consistently comes out against drug reform in the United States.

Just recently with these two new laws in Colorado and Washington, representatives of the new president of Mexico came out right afterward and said that Mexico opposed these policies. When California was looking to legalize marijuana three or four years ago, whenever that was, 2008 or 2009, Mexico came out and complained that this was the United States shirking its drug war duties. In the 1970s, when many states were decriminalizing marijuana, Mexico came out and complained and said that Mexico would no longer fight the war on heroin if the United States didn't uphold its responsibilities fighting marijuana. This is not simply an elite diplomatic game. This is something that fits right into a much longer history in Mexico of drug prohibitionism and ideas about drugs. So that has contributed critically to the development of these prohibitionist policies and contributed to the anchoring of these prohibitionist policies that have now produced anywhere between 60 and 100,000 deaths in Mexico over the last six years. - Isaac, thank you so much for joining us on BackStory. - Well, thank you. It was my pleasure.

- Isaac Campos is an associate professor of history at the University of Cincinnati. He's the author of Homegrown, Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico's War on Drugs. - Towards the end of that interview, Isaac Campos mentioned that by the 1970s, states had begun loosening marijuana laws. Well, this regulatory shift reflected a larger cultural one. Reefer Madness was out. Cheech and Chong were in. - It was around this time, 1976 to be precise, that a woman in Atlanta named Marcia Schuhard made a little discovery. - [Dufton] So she discovered her 13-year-old daughter was smoking marijuana and was incredibly upset by it, very frightened by it, and was the first person to gather a group of parents together and to kind of take a stand. - This is Emily Dufton, an historian at George Washington University. We called her up to hear about her work on the stand that Schuhard took. - So one of the things that they did was set up a community group of rules

for those children. They were not allowed to access magazines like High Times. They couldn't go see the Cheech and Chong movie. They had, you know, curfews and all of this other stuff. They weren't allowed to access drugs or drug culture. - Dufton says that over the next few years, these parents helped organize groups in other towns and cities. By 1983, there were 4,000 of these groups. They networked, built national organizations, and they were all devoted to protecting the nation's youth. It became known as the parent movement, and it didn't take long for their message to catch on. - [McGruff the Crime Dog] Now, what are you going to say if someone asks you to try drugs? - [girl] My mom and dad told me not to, and I wouldn't lie to them. - [MucGruff] Sensational. [singing] "Don't use drugs, don't use drugs!" - [Dufton] The biggest contribution to really America's drug war that the parent movement was able to accomplish was that they transformed a conversation about marijuana. They used to be about an adult's right to access a drug that was seen as benign and innocuous

into a conversation that was almost exclusively about children. So this is the first time that you had really seen a campaign against any drug that had children at the center of it. - In the '80s, Nancy Reagan got behind the parent movement. At the same time, her "just say no" message was getting off the ground. The anti-drug message had gone mainstream. - What ends up happening is that a lot of corporations, like McDonald's and Procter and Gamble and things like that, they jump onto the bandwagon as well and see this as a really great way to start marketing things like McDonald's Happy Meals or Procter and Gamble products to families with small children. So Procter and Gamble actually say, "Hey, we'd love to use this message and send out mailers to all the families in America and have kids sign just say no pledges. And by the way, you get all these coupons for Proctor and Gamble products. Isn't this a wonderful, mutually beneficial organization here?" - Kind of like pushers. - Yeah, exactly. They're pushers, but of, like, Duncan Hines' cake mix as opposed to marijuana.

- The parent movement had its day in the sun, but by the '90s, it was starting to die out. Marijuana use among young people had fallen off, either because of the movement's success or maybe because of the availability of harder drugs, it's hard to know for sure. But Dufton says the story may not be quite over just yet. - We're always sort of moving back and forth between prohibition and acceptance and each cycle birthed the next. So we went from being really opposed to marijuana, being really against drugs in the 1980s, and then by the 1990s, by 1996, you had California's approval of medical marijuana. Now we have 18 states and the District of Columbia approve medical marijuana, and now we actually see the resurgence of outright legalization. Now will this birth a brand new cycle of prohibition, will a new anti-drug grassroots movement arise? Maybe. So that's why I'm kind of suggesting that the parent movement offers us something to, like a historical understanding of how we have reacted to legalized or decriminalized marijuana in the past

and maybe how we might react again. - That was Emily Duffton. We'll link to the story she wrote about the parent movement on our website, backstoryradio.org. - We're going to take a short break, but don't go away. When we get back, the surprising origins of America's first narcotics ban. - You're listening to BackStory. We'll be back in a minute. - We're back. With BackStory, I'm Peter Onuf. - I'm Ed Ayers. - And I'm Brian Balogh. We're talking today about how Americans' ideas about illicit drugs have evolved through time. - A little over a century ago in the 1890s, you could buy cocaine for $1.50 in a Sears and Roebuck catalog. Opium was available from most corner pharmacies. There were no federal restrictions at all on the sale of either. But by 1914, both drugs were illegal. How did things change so fast? - To answer that question, we have to take a detour, oddly enough, to the Philippines. In 1898, the United States emerged victorious

from the Spanish-American War and took control of the Philippines. For the first time, the US had an overseas empire, an empire in which opium use had been legal. - Spain hadn't been the only imperial power that permitted opium use by its subjects. Other colonial governments in Southeast Asia, like the British and the Dutch, also allowed it. In fact, most of them made a tidy profit of the drug trade. - [Foster] In the European colonies, most of them between 15 and 50% of their tax revenues came from opium. - This is Anne Foster, an historian at Indiana State University. - So they were deeply embedded in this legal consumption of opium on which tax revenue rested. So they could not just easily give that up and say, "Oh, well, this is increasingly seen as an addictive and problematic product." This is the basis of their governments. - The US government stepped into this world and figured, why change the status quo? Opium use didn't seemed like that big a deal.

Under Spanish law, it had been limited to ethnic Chinese. So relatively few Filipinos used the drug anyway. So the US figured that if legal opium worked for everybody else in the region, it should work for them too. - The new administration did make a couple of changes. The Spanish had maintained a monopoly on the import of opium and restricted its sale to specific sellers. The US decided to get rid of that system and impose a steep import tax instead. They also rolled back the restrictions banning opium used by indigenous Filipinos. This way, the government could keep the revenues rolling in, but the tax would prevent opium used from getting out of hand within the Filipino population. At least that was the idea. - It did not have that effect actually. Not usually with addictive substances. It doesn't always work that way. So what happened was actually because they removed all the restrictions on who could purchase opium, and I have to say, statistics, of course, are very shaky at this time period.

And especially the Spanish government did not keep a lot of really strong statistics on this and the US government did not keep a lot of strong statistics either. But it appears anecdotally that the usage of opium spread to the entire population. And definitely the quantity of opium being legally imported was going up. And there was a concern even under the high tax system that the quantity of opium being smuggled into the country was also high. - This rise in opium consumption was a major problem from one group in the Philippines: American missionaries. A lot of them were deeply opposed to intoxicants in general. And opium was one of the most visible ones out there. - They said this is spreading to the indigenous population. They really use that argument of the duty of the United States to care for and sort of that paternalistic, benevolent assimilation policy of the United States to take care of the Filipinos, that it was our sort of duty. And so they began to agitate against this law as a fair approach to the opium imports that the United States had.

They wanted to move away from this notion of just having an import tax, saying that that's not a sufficient amount of control and that the United States should indeed ban opium in the Philippines altogether. - So the missionaries got to work. They wrote articles. They lobbied. They networked with colleagues back home. They swamped the White House with telegrams. Each one demanding that the US government ban opium in the Philippines. - In the archives, I saw just literally three boxes just full of these telegrams that had been sent to Teddy Roosevelt. They're sort of the precursors to the form letters, though they're really always saying exactly the same thing. So I didn't read all of them, but there's just hundreds if not thousands of these. One historian estimated about 2000 of them were sent. And so that really made an impact on Roosevelt. He did not want to be defending the use of opium under sort of an official US government seal by indigenous Filipinos. And soon after that, indeed, the government changed from the high tax policy to, in 1905,

passed the law and then by 1908, prohibition was complete in the Philippines. - This was a huge victory for the anti-opium crusaders, but it also opened up a new problem. How do you enforce prohibition in a region that is awash with the drug? The Americans realized that unless they wanted every outlaw in Southeast Asia to start smuggling drugs into the Philippines, they needed to also tamp down the supply of opium in nearby countries. - So the US organized a series of international conferences with its neighbors in the region. And little by little, Americans worked the moral argument. Sure, opium was bringing in critical revenue. Revenue these countries needed to run their governments. But it was also addictive, corrupting, a menace to society. How could these governments claim to be decent and forward-looking if they refused to protect their colonial subjects from the drug scourge? - There was just one small problem. As the US began moralizing against opium, there was not a single federal law against the drug

on the books back home. And that put American negotiators in an awkward position. So just before the final conference opened in 1914, Congress pushed through a face-saving measure, sponsored by a congressman named Francis Burton Harrison. It was effectively the first federal narcotics ban in American history. - The Harrison Act, which is the act which does in the end, put a prohibition on all forms of narcotics, except under doctor's prescription for specific medical purpose, that act is passed directly so that the United States will not go to the 1914 opium conference, having no law against opium. It's explicitly done for that purpose, saying we will be embarrassed if we come to this conference. So when Harrison and the others who introduced this legislation talk about it, they are actually saying we have been a moral leader in this regard. We have been out front and creating these conferences. We have the most restrictive law in the Philippines, and yet here at home, we have no restrictions effectively at all.

We can't go to this conference with that circumstance. Pass this legislation. - And Congress did it on December 14, 1914. For the U.S., it was the end of several embarrassing years of preaching one thing and practicing another. And it was also the moment when much of the drug trade was forced underground. The beginning of a new era of criminal addicts, increasing smuggling, and the black market. - Helping us tell that story was Anne Foster. She's an associate professor of history at Indiana State University. - If you're just joining us, this is BackStory, and we're talking today about Americans changing attitudes about drugs and drug users. - We're going to turn now to 1979 when high-profile Senate hearings on drug abuse captured national headlines.

But this time, the threat wasn't heroin or cocaine or marijuana. It was Valium. - [news report] This is Valium, a so-called mood altering drug, which according to a government study is the most popular and one of the most abused prescription drugs in America today. Most of the abusers are women. - The NBC report from 1978 outlined what had come to be seen as a national crisis. Affluent suburban wives turning into drug addicts. The report featured a young mother, Cindy McGinnis, who described her addiction as she ate dinner with her husband and children. - [McGinnis] I was not coping with my family. I was sleeping a lot during the day. I was up at night. My body was completely out of whack by the time I tried to stop taking them. - Was there no warning? Why did you wait so long before you got hooked? - I thought I was taking medicine. - In the mid-1970s,

Valium was the most commonly prescribed drug in America with over 100 million prescriptions a year. Women used it at twice the rate of men, and this was nothing new. Anti-anxiety drugs had been disproportionately prescribed to women for well over a decade. Advertisements in medical journals told doctors in no uncertain terms who these drugs were intended for. - [Herzberg] It might show a woman that looks like she's behind the bars of a jail cell, but in fact they're the handles of rooms and mops. And it says, "You can't set her free, but at least you can help her feel better." - This is David Herzberg, an historian at the University of Buffalo. He says that drug companies also targeted women more directly. They got favorable articles placed in mainstream magazines like Newsweek, Time, and Vogue. - Now, how it would work is that the pharmaceutical industry, as part of its very large public relations arms during the 50s, had a stable of science writers who were technically freelancers, but who generally tended to write about pharmaceutical issues

and they were in the pay of the pharmaceutical industry, and they would place articles about, say, tranquilizers in Good Housekeeping or in Redbook or Vogue. And so they would say, you know, "These things, they'll cure you if you're feeling sad, they'll bring you down if you're feeling too up. They'll help you want to have sex with your husband again. It'll help you feel happy at work. It'll make the dishes look great." [laughter] They would just literally just grab from the culture, whatever was in the headlines right then that you were worried about: juvenile delinquency? All right, these pills will cure juvenile delinquency. And these articles, because they were written technically by some science journalist, didn't have to deal with the regulations and limitations of an advertisement, which, you know, had to tell the truth and had to tell both sides. - And that's great, advertising was more objective than journalism. - Oh, yeah, today's direct-to-consumer ads as, you know, as awful as so many people find them, are way better guides to whether you should use a drug than, you know, a Good Housekeeping article from 1957. - Wow.

- And so on the one hand, these popular magazine articles really helped build the boom for the drugs. While at the same time, in an unintended way, they helped spread the idea that women in particular were experiencing a lot of unhappiness and problems in their supposedly perfect world of suburbia. - And that idea was one that resonated with a very different group of people, feminists. They argued that, yes, many suburban women had come to depend on tranquilizers to get them through the day, but the problem wasn't that they were sick. The problem was that these smart, capable women had abandoned their education and career goals in order to raise families. Their unhappiness was a natural response to their constrained circumstances. - And throwing tranquilizers at them didn't solve the problem and because it didn't solve the problem, they kept, you know, being prescribed the tranquilizers and now it's produced widespread Valium addiction, which is a concrete sign that, to put it bluntly, that sexism is bad for women.

We're not talking about hurt feelings. We're not talking about stubbed toes. We're talking about women becoming junkies. - These arguments first popped up in magazines that popularized feminism, magazines like Ms. But soon enough, they were finding spots in even more mainstream publications. The very ones that just a few years before had been publishing those glowing articles about Valium. - One of the quotes is, "Just like the Puerto Rican junkie mainlining heroin in a rat- infested tenement in Harlem," just to try to put every racially charged stereotype you can possibly pack into one sentence, and by conjuring up that kind of language, they're able to remind people that addiction is a really exciting and titillating story and then when you connect it to housewives, this is something that can move magazines. - Yet I'm willing to bet that the housewives who did rally around this and the feminists were eager to distinguish themselves from those... another group that was the media

was really shining a lot of light on: people addicted to heroin, hardcore drug addicts. My guess is that they really went to pains to distinguish themselves from that group. - Absolutely. And that's one of the interesting things about this is that those kind of non-white or urban junkies were used as sensationalist decoration in the articles. They were there to make it exciting, but it was also very clear that in the language of some of these articles and in some of the people who ended up testifying in Congress, that these are very quote, "different people" from us who need very different kinds of treatment. And so in a way, an opportunity to broaden the critique of the politics of addiction, to say that basically feminists were saying Valium addiction is a political issue where women are being oppressed and the result is Valium addiction. And so to treat Valium addiction,

we don't need to talk about the pathology of the women or what's the matter with them and why they became addicts because they're essentially innocent. It is the forces that oppress them that create the addiction. They weren't ready to make this argument about those Puerto Rican, tenement dwellers, mainlining heroin. And as a result, one of the ways that they were able to make this argument palatable in a country that's had all these racially charged drug wars for a century is that they did explicitly say this is a unique situation because it's these sweet, innocent white women who are the victims and that makes it unique. - So what's the outcome? What's the upshot of all of this, David? What happens after the hearings? What happens to Valium use, for instance? - Valium use plummets. Now, it's a little bit of a complicated story. The high point of Valium use seems to be 1973 and the addiction panic comes in the late '70s. This is actually strangely typical of drug addiction. - Yes. - Panics seem to happen after the problem. It started to recede.

And so one thing that you can read from this is that the Valium addiction panic, you might say, was a successful public health response to overuse and potentially dangerous use of a tranquilizer, that it educated a large number of women who then took steps to try to reduce their use of the drug, it educated physicians, who took steps to try to use it less and the result was much less use of Valium. And so on the one hand, it can almost look like a success story although there are a few caveats. A lot of medical experts, first off, they saw the Valium addiction panic as an overblown affair. While Valium became a symbol of, a shorthand for medical sexism against suburban housewives, with the suburban housewives' plight, in many medical circles it became a shorthand for the medical system having lost a good drug by failing to navigate popular culture properly. "This is a good drug.

It can produce dependence, but it's actually pretty hard to produce dependence with." - So when something like Prozac comes along, does the Valium story affect the way Prozac is presented and marketed? - I think it does very much so. I'm not going to say it's some conspiracy where they kind of study the Valium panic and figure out what language to use, but I would suggest that one of the reasons why Prozac is able to succeed is because the kinds of stories told about it respond to a lot of the critiques raised by the Valium panic so that, for example, instead of being a sedative that makes women compliant and content with their current situation, it's an energizing drug that's often described as making them more assertive in the business world and more assertive in their personal life. - Empowering drug. - An empowering drug. Peter Kramer, who wrote the famous bestseller Listening to Prozac, even at some point calls it a feminist drug. Because of this quality it has of enabling women to seize control of their lives

and do things that they haven't been able to do before. [Rolling Stones, "Mother's Little Helper"] "What a drag it is getting old..." David Herzberg is a professor of history at the University of Buffalo. His book is Happy Pills in America, from Miltown to Prozac. [music] "It's all different today. I hear every mother say Mother needs something today to calm her down And though she's not really ill There's a little yellow pill She goes running for the shelter Of her mother's little helper And it helps her on her way Gets her through her busy day..." - If you'd like to listen to more from my interview with David Hertzberg, head on over to backstoryradio.org where we've posted a longer version. And while you're there, take a moment to help us out with next week's show. To mark Barack Obama's second inauguration, we'll be looking back on some notable scenes from past inaugurations.

Do you think these rituals really matter much in the big scheme of things or are they all just pomp and circumstance? Leave us a comment on our website or if you really want to get old fashioned, give us a call. Our number is 888-257-8851. [music] - "And if you take more of those, you will get an overdose..." - It's time for another short break. When we come back, how Sherlock Holmes kicked his coke habit with a little help from his American fans. - You're listening to BackStory. We'll be back in a minute. - We're back with BackStory. I'm Brian Balogh, here with Ed Ayers. - Hey! - And Peter Onuf. - Hey. - Today on the show, we're taking a look at drugs. How have Americans draw in the line between use and abuse? - Before the break, we heard about the Valium addiction scare of the 1970s and what feminists made of it.

And one of the most interesting points there was this growing feeling that doctors might not be all that reliable. - Which is especially interesting because a hundred years earlier, doctors established their authority by prescribing drugs. Drugs that would raise eyebrows today, drugs like morphine and heroin. So guys, let's take a couple of minutes and talk this through. Where did doctors weigh in on this, Ed? - Yeah, doctors were ambivalent about this, Brian. They prescribe opiates themselves. And what's interesting to me, of course, from my parochial 19th century perspective, is that doctors are being pulled in two directions by these opiates. On one hand, they make you look great if you're a doctor. Somebody comes in, they're feeling terrible, and really whatever ails them can be improved by giving them an opium distillate. And so their claims of making you feel better. Well, they were probably true! On the other hand, they kind of undermine doctors' authority. Who needs a doctor when you can open up any newspaper or magazine

and order a patent medicine through the mail? It creates an environment in which doctors are saying, "What kind of leverage do we have to get this under control?" - Right, and that impulse to regulate is an impulse to establish a professional monopoly: that is, the expertise that doctors claim to have about the effects and proper doses, dosages of various medicines. Now that has to be something that regulates the entire industry. So in other words, it's monopoly against free enterprise. - That's right, Peter. And it undermines the real basis for what will become doctors' authority in the 20th century. And that is the diagnosis. Right? - Good point. If you have these opiates that are cure-alls, then what do you need a diagnosis for? What do you need a doctor for? - Yeah, it's like the internet, isn't it? - Well, it's not an accident that these patent medicines are pretty much killed by the medical profession, right, Brian? - Well, in the first decade of the 20th century,

you have the American Medical Association and as part of this campaign, they decide to take on patent medicines because, of course, as Ed pointed out, they're completely unregulated. - Well, in addition to opiates and alcohol, many patent medicines contain powerful stimulants, like cocaine. The drug was first isolated from the coca leaf in the mid-1800s, and in America, quickly moved from popularity to infamy. And one of the witnesses of this transition was a certain British detective. Chioke I'Anson has the story. - [I'Anson] In 1890, readers of the American magazine Lippincott Monthly, were introduced to Sherlock Holmes and its faithful companion, Watson. The first story the magazine ran was called, A Sign of Four. Here's how it began. [narrator] "Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece and his hyperdermic syringe from its neat Morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers, he adjusted the delicate needle

and rolled back his left shirt cuff. Finally, he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston and sank back into the velvet-lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction." - Cocaine use may not be the first thing people today associate with the world's greatest detective. But would readers, at the time, have also found it strange? To find out, I called Mike Jay. - [Jay] I'm an author and historian and I've written a lot about the history of drug use. - Jay says that while Americans might have raised an eyebrow at the needle, they would not have been surprised by the drug itself. To understand why, we have to look at the public perception of cocaine around the turn of the century. The drug became available in American drugstores six years before Sherlock Holmes' debut. It was touted as a cure-all and even added to soft drinks, especially as localities started cracking down on alcohol. The most famous of these drinks, of course, was Coca-Cola,

which sold itself as, quote, "the temperance drink." - The idea would be that while everybody else was kind of getting sozzled in taverns, the smart, urbane Coca-Cola drinker was staying sharp and taking care of business. - As Coca-Cola was coming into its own in America, Sherlock Holmes was on his way out. In 1893, readers were shocked to find the detective killed in a fight with his nemesis, Moriarty. At the height of Holmes' popularity, his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, had lost interest. Meanwhile, over the next few years, Americans' perception of cocaine would continue to shift. By the mid-1890s, doctors were warning that the use of cocaine was habit-forming. By the turn of the century, there was a new image, the image of the coke fiend, which was often associated with veterans

who were coming back from the Spanish-American war. - And specifically, in the southern states, the idea that this is something that's spreading like wildfire through the Negro population. - A New York Times headline read, "Negro cocaine fiends are a new Southern menace," and said that cocaine made black gun-wielding criminals better marksmen. There's no evidence that African Americans use cocaine disproportionately more than whites. What's clear is that this Jim Crow narrative had lasting effects on the perception of cocaine throughout America. But let's get back to Sherlock Holmes. Years after his literary demise, Americans were still clamoring for more. A popular American magazine, Collier's Weekly, offered Doyle a hefty financial incentive for the detective's resurrection. Doyle accepted, and by 1903, Sherlock Holmes was back. But there was one crucial difference. As Watson explains, in a story called,

The Missing Three-Quarter, - "For years, I had gradually weaned him from that drug mania, which had threatened once to check his remarkable career." - Doyle had given the world a Sherlock Holmes who was clean. Again, Mike Jay. - I mean, I think the reason that Doyle started easing back on it was once he'd started selling into Collier's, he realized that it just wasn't going to fit with... for an American audience. - An audience that, in less than 20 years, had gone from ambivalence or even enthusiasm for cocaine to deep anxiety about it. An anxiety articulated by Watson. - "Now, I knew that under ordinary conditions, he no longer craved for this artificial stimulus, but I was well aware that the fiend was not dead. But sleeping." - Doyle hadn't simply made cocaine go away. The drug was for Sherlock Holmes, the same thing that it had become for America, a threat that needed to be watched. It's appropriate that Americans learned of

Holmes's sobriety in the pages of Collier's Weekly. The magazine was partnered with the American Medical Association, and it would go on to campaign against the unregulated use of patent medicines. - A campaign that eventually led to the establishment of the first Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906. The act resulted in Coca-Cola removing the drug from its soda. Sales of cocaine would finally be criminalized in 1914 with the Harrison Act. Of course, cocaine didn't go away, and neither did Sherlock Holmes. Today, Holmes is as popular as ever. While different movies and TV shows depict the detective differently... - ...They all have the same problem, which is what do we do with the drugs thing? So there have been various, I mean, you've got Elementary running in the States. They all have this problem, and they all basically come up with the same solution, which is one way and another, to turn this into a recovery narrative.

So in Elementary, Sherlock Holmes is in rehab. And that way, that kind of allows you to have it both ways, because you can have the sort of arch, slightly sniggery drug culture references. But also, your hero isn't actually tainted. In fact, this becomes a kind of tragic bit of his backstory. Something has to struggle against something that gives him depth. For BackStory, I'm Chioke I'Anson. - If you're just joining us, this is BackStory. Today, we're devoting the hour to exploring Americans' changing attitudes toward drugs. - We're going to focus now on one group associated with drug abuse throughout American history, military veterans. That goes all the way back to the Civil War, which spawned a generation of young men hooked on alcohol and morphine. But it was during a more recent war, when a lot of people started demanding that something be done about the problem of drug-addicted veterans.

And that war, of course, was Vietnam. - [Kuzmarov] There were some claims that upwards of 60-70% of soldiers were using drugs in Vietnam. - This is Jeremy Kuzmarov, an historian at the University of Tulsa. - Some news articles were claiming that drugs were hindering the effectiveness of the armed forces, causing indiscipline in the Army, even linking it to atrocities within the Army. - Our army in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, where near-mutinies and soldiers are dispirited and drug-ridden. - If you're going to get killed, you might as well be high while you're getting killed. That's how I felt. - One piece reported that a group of Americans became so stoned on super-strength Vietnamese marijuana that they fired on their own helicopters, which supposedly struck back killing these men. - The fears began with marijuana in the late 60s, but by the '70s, heroin was the bigger concern. With all these young men getting hooked on drugs overseas, there was a real fear about what would happen when they returned home.

- The inner cities were really starting to deteriorate in this period, and there was real concern that addicted soldiers would come home and really exacerbate urban problems gripping the country, including escalating crime rates and violence within the country. - In 1971, two congressmen came out with a report that said 15% of all U.S. troops in Vietnam were addicted to heroin, so on June 17th... - Would you join me here, would you be seated, please, ladies and gentlemen? - ...1971, President Richard Nixon decided enough is enough. - America's public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse. - Nixon called for a new offensive on drugs, necessitated by the situation in Vietnam. - ...which has brought to our attention the fact that a number of young Americans have become addicts as they serve abroad. - The problem, Nixon said, would not end with the war. - So... - With regard to this offensive... - he started a new organization. - The new organization will be within the White House.

Dr. Jaffe, who will be one of the briefers here today, will be the man directly responsible, he will report directly to me. - You know, I was not asked to run the program. I was told I would run the program by the President. I was recruited by ambush. - Jerome Jaffe was a psychiatrist at the University of Chicago in the '70s. He was a pioneer in the drug treatment world and was asked to consult with the White House on how to fix this problem of soldiers returning as addicts. The day before Nixon made the announcement, Jaffe thought he was consulting for a one or two-day gig. But the president had other plans. - He was talking about his new program, the Special Action Office, and then I was sitting in a chair on the periphery of the cabinet room and he pointed to me and he said, that man, Dr. Jaffe, is going to run the program. - Jaffe, Nixon and others, went to meet the press. That's the announcement you just heard a minute ago. And from the pictures, you can kind of tell, just how much Jaffe was caught off guard. - I hadn't brought any clothes with me.

And somebody went out to buy me a new shirt, which was too big. And so the pictures show me wearing an oversized shirt talking to the White House press. - But the hope was that you would grow into the job, Dr. Jaffe. - That or maybe everybody got fat working in Washington, I don't know. - Despite the media accounts and the report from the two congressmen, Jaffe had his doubts about the extent of the problem. No serious testing had been done. So Jaffe developed a plan of attack. - You're in a testing program. We test people at the time they're about to leave, and those who are still using opiates, still positive for opiates, particularly heroin I assume, would be invited to stay longer in Vietnam while we detoxify them and then transfer them to the United States for treatment. It was called Operation Golden Flow. - Operation Golden Flow. Get it?

At any rate, the program was big and it was complicated. There were thousands of soldiers leaving Vietnam every day. And remember, the thought was that 15% of them were addicted to heroin. After a couple of weeks of testing and retesting, they were satisfied that they had a good sample. And what they found was very surprising. Again, historian Jeremy Kuzmarov. - The numbers were much lower than a lot of the media reports. They found that approximately 5% tested positive with heroin in their urine system. - [Jaffe] So the 5% was a lot lower than the 15%. - How do you explain that? Well, some people who had been using, but not dependent, stopped using. There were some people, even who were dependent, who would probably stop using for three or four days, which is often sufficient to come up with a negative.

And so once the word got out and it got out very, very quickly, that you don't get on the plane to leave Vietnam if you have heroin in your urine. - If they knew the test was coming, they would quit, you know, clean out their system. It showed that heroin was perhaps less of an addictive drug than many had thought because soldiers could stop on a whim. I mean, this was a major conclusion that if you have a consequence that is immediate and absolutely predictable, it can be far more likely to affect behavior than one which is far more severe, but remote and less certain. - So the soldiers could kick the drugs for the test, but could they stay clean? To answer this, a psychiatrist named Lee Robbins to follow up study of veterans a year after they returned home. Of the vets who had originally tested positive for heroin, back in Vietnam... - Only 1.3% of those sampled were drug dependent and less than 1% addicted to opiates.

- Nobody believed it. I mean, it was so contrary to all of our beliefs. People thought Lee was twisting the data, making up the data, distorting it. In the first year back, only 5% of veterans even used drugs again, compared to a relapse rate of 65% for non-military addicts. They found that soldiers who were psychologically addicted to heroin under the stress of combat and where heroin was so cheap and plentiful didn't necessarily stay addicted when that stress disappeared. Coming home seemed to be a game changer. So the major legacy was, you know, we can't just continue to treat this as a group of people who are predatory miscreants and law breakers and we'll just lock them all up. People get better. There is recovery.

- A lot of people were afraid that bringing drug addicted veterans back home would make things worse for the veterans, for the cities, for everyone. But what studies found was just the opposite. Coming back home was actually part of the cure. - Thanks to Jerome Jaffe, who currently works with the University of Maryland and the Friends Research Institute in Baltimore. And to Jeremy Kuzmaroff at the University of Tulsa, his book is called The Myth of the Addicted Army. - And that, my friends, is all the time we have for today. Now it's your turn to tell us what you think. You can find us at backstoryradio.org. - We'll be back again next week, in the meantime, don't be a stranger.

Today's episode of BackStory was produced by Jess Engebretson, Chioke I'Anson, Eric Menell, and Allison Quantz. Jamal Millner is our technical director. Our senior producer is Tony Field, and our executive producer is Andrew Wyndham. Special thanks today to Dessa Bergen-Seiko, David Courtwright, Curtis Marez, Adam Rathke, and the Points blog of the Alcohol and Drug History Society. Major support for BackStory is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the University of Virginia, Weinstein Properties, the W.L. Lyons Brown Junior Charitable Foundation, an anonymous donor, and the History Channel: history made every day. Peter Onuf and Brian Balogh are professors in the University of Virginia's Corcoran Department of History. Ed Ayers is President and professor of history at the University of Richmond. Backstory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. [music, the Ink Spots, "That Cat Is High"] "I want the home cooking mama with the frying pan.

I know that cat's high, yeah."