From the 80s and into the aughts, “drugsandcrime” was one word for politicians. Drugs followed crime, or vice versa, and drug use was rarely discussed as anything other than a menace: "Public Enemy No. 1." Thanks to an unprecedented uptick in overdose deaths initially affecting white people, that get-tough rhetoric has begun to soften. President Trump has declared the overdose crisis a national public health emergency.
But he isn’t the first president to see it that way. Before Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush turned drugs into a signifier of urban decay, and before Nixon launched his “War on Drugs,” President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 assigned James Vorenberg, future assistant to Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox, to lead more than a dozen legal experts and scholars to examine "every facet of crime and law enforcement in America." Far from a cohesive system, little was known about how the fragmented patchwork of "law and order" actually worked. Among other accomplishments, the task force helped establish 9-1-1 dispatch services across the United States and a procedure governing the treatment of suspects after arrest.
But there was also a short and obscure chapter in the Commission on Law Enforcement’s 1967 report, titled "Narcotics and Drug Abuse," that addressed both the causes and ramifications of illicit substance use. The commission was "decades ahead of its time" on the topic of drugs, Bryce Pardo and Peter Reuter write in "Narcotics and Drug Abuse: Foreshadowing 50 Years of Change," their new paper in the journal Criminology & Public Policy.
The authors, drug policy researchers at the University of Maryland, analyzed the commission’s chapter on drugs—now over 50 years old—with fresh eyes and new knowledge. The Appeal caught up with Pardo to discuss contemporary drug policy, including the use of harsh criminal penalties, the new difficulties posed by illicit fentanyl, and alternatives to prohibition gaining political momentum.