Contents:

Introduction to Rhetorical Genealogy
The Assumptions of Drug Hysteria
1. Opium
2. Cannabis
3. Hallucinogens
4. Cocaine
5. MDMA
Links to Related Web Sites
Drugs and the CIA
Exposing the Drug Warriors

I mean, I don't know if it's good, I don't know if it's right, but it sure is good. And I was born to do it, I've been trying to do it all my life, and I never knew it. Someday you're gonna come into a room, and you're gonna see this funny-looking thing, a piece of flesh clutching into a naked console, and you're gonna stop and stare, because you won't be sure where the flesh stops and the circuits begin. They'll be, like, melted into each other, and some of the console'll be as alive as flesh and some of the flesh'll be dead as console, and that'll be me. All of that'll be me. [1]

It ain't right but it sure is good. Watching junkies shoot themselves up with slow death in an abandoned warehouse on Chicago's west side I think of Pat Cadigan's cyberpunk antihero permanently jacking himself into artificial reality, leaving the meat of his body behind to become pure information in a worldwide cybernetic circuit. The difference between the electronic experience described in Cadigan's novel and the chemical experience of the heroin addict is both discursive and material, but it is the discursive difference that defines the experience of the drug user as illegitimate and a threat to society and the "techno-cowboy" as at worst an antisocial computer geek. The material difference is one of technology: the artificial reality hacker in the novel "shoots up" with bioelectronic technology whereas the junkie prefers a chemical technology.

This comparison points to an extremely difficult problem in any analysis of the War on Drugs -- that is, a question of definition. What exactly is a "drug"? In the Phædrus, Socrates compares the written word to a drug (pharmakon). This comparison is extremely important in the context of my argument, for this paper is not about drugs but about the discourse of drugs. Rather than attempting a delimiting definition of the term, my purpose is to analyze the ways in which the term and the various substances it denotes have been imbued discursively with certain affective contents throughout history. Thus I will purposefully avoid defining the term except to put it in the context of Derrida's use of the term in "Plato's Pharmacy":

This pharmakon, this "medicine," this philtre, which acts as both remedy and poison, already introduces itself into the body of the discourse with all its ambivalence. This charm, this spellbinding virtue, this power of fascination, can be -- alternately or simultaneously -- beneficent or maleficent. The pharmakon would be a substance -- with all that the word can connote in terms of matter with occult virtues, cryptic depths refusing to submit their ambivalence to analysis, already paving the way for alchemy -- if we didn't have eventually to come to recognize it as antisubstance itself: that which resists any philosopheme, indefinitely exceeding its bounds as nonidentity, nonessence, nonsubstance; granting philosophy by that very fact the inexhaustible adversity of what funds it and the infinite absence of what founds it.[2]

The pharmakon as antisubstance is the topic of this paper -- the discourse surrounding drugs is the substance of my research. In this genealogy I will attempt to probe the points at which what has been written about drugs resists previous historical philosophemes about drugs and thus initiates a significant change in the discursive formation. In a sense this project is an antihistory of an antisubstance -- rather than search for historical continuities and commonalities I will be paying attention to "ruptures, thresholds, and changes in direction."[3] In this project I am heavily indebted to the work of Michel Foucault, whose later project was precisely that of genealogy. I will briefly discuss some of the presuppositions of genealogy as a practice of (re)writing histories before turning to the work of writing the history at hand. My goal in writing this history is to theorize the relationship between the intentional use of chemical substances to modify an individual's bodily chemistry and the medical and legal constructions of the social and institutional interests at stake in such individual practice. My approach to this topic will be to analyze the discursive constructions of the drug and its users in the media and the legal and medical communities. I will be looking for institutional interests that inform the discourse in an attempt to theorize the relationship between structural power and the individual body.

Knowledge, taken in excess without hunger, even contrary to need, no longer acts as a transforming motive impelling to action and remains hidden in a certain chaotic inner world which that modern man, with curious pride, calls his unique "inwardness" ... Our modern culture is ... no real culture at all, but only a kind of knowledge about culture... and so the whole of modern culture is essentially internal: on the outside the bookbinder has printed something like "Handbook of Inner Culture for External Barbarians."[6]

Foucault has employed this assumption throughout his genealogies, arguing that "power produces knowledge ... power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations."[7] Knowledge is not some separate sphere outside of everyday power relationships; rather, knowledge is an exercise of power through the codification of power relationships. At one point in time it was common "knowledge" that dark-skinned people were inferior to light-skinned people; this "knowledge" had material effect in perpetuating power relationships. The kidnapping and enslavement of African blacks and the genocide of American natives were the material results of this "knowledge" in this country. The one constant in the progress of knowledge throughout history is the exercise of power as domination; "Humanity," Foucault argues, "does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination."[8]

This conception of history leads the genealogist to a practice of historical writing as discursive intervention; the rules by which domination is maintained are subverted through the seizure of their means of production, i.e., the historical narrative. Because all history is interpretation, "[t]he role of genealogy is to record its history: the history of morals, ideals, and metaphysical concepts, the history of the concept of liberty or of the ascetic life; as they stand for the emergence of different interpretations, they must be made to appear as events on the stage of historical process." (NGH, 152) The genealogist approaches historical knowledge as the general approaches warfare, for s/he realizes that "[t]he successes of history belong to those who are capable of seizing these rules, to replace those who had used them, to disguise themselves so as to pervert them, invert their meaning, and redirect them against those who had initially imposed them; controlling this complex mechanism, they will make it function so as to overcome the rulers through their own rules... [I]nterpretation is the violent or surreptitious appropriation of a system of rules, which in itself has no essential meaning, in order to impose a new direction, to bend it to a new will, to force its participation in a different game." (NGH 151-2) Gilles Deleuze's conception of "nomadic thought" characterizes the role of the genealogist: "[Nietzsche] made thought into a machine of war -- a battering ram -- into a nomadic force."[9]

Of course, genealogy is not simply a matter of writing new histories to reflect the historian's stake in political struggles. One could easily object to such a project that even if truth is power, there is a real world "out there," however inaccessible through language, to which the exercise of the power of truth must relate. Thus the genealogist is dealing with materials present in traditional histories, but s/he is specifically cognizant of her/his work as an interpretation, and attempts to uncover what the discourses of historical knowledge hide from themselves. The genealogist works with what is available, and "re-reads the surface of cultural activity to find a meaning in it different from that which it seems, itself, to offer and approve. Realignment of cultural phenomena available publicly discloses the lines of force in a culture organized towards certain ends and proceeding through certain transformations. And genealogical redistribution of surface fragments, not only demystifies the veiling, legitimating ideologies of a system, but produces a new reading which is a more convincing asymptotic approximation of the truth of the matter."[10]

[I]t is this life of the memory that the pharmakon of writing would come to hypnotize: fascinating it, taking it out of itself by putting itself to sleep in a monument.... Letting itself get stoned {médusée} by its own signs, its own guardians, by the types committed to the keeping and surveillance of knowledge, it will sink down into lethe, overcome by non-knowledge and forgetfulness .... For writing has no essence or value of its own, whether positive or negative. It plays within the simulacrum. It is in its type the mime of memory, of knowledge, of truth, etc.[11]

The purpose of this genealogy is to offer a challenge to the official narrative of the past decade, which has firmly established several assumptions in the public discourse. These assumptions have become invisible as assumptions; they have become truths in Nietzsche's sense of "illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are."[14] I hope in this narrative to spell out the places where some of these assumptions became fixed into the discursive formation; first, however, it is necessary to examine two of the critical assumptions from a theoretical standpoint. The first of these is that drugs are dangerous, addicting, and probably deadly. The second is that drug abuse is a key factor in the increasing crime rate. Drug abusers themselves are criminals, some will kill or steal to get a fix, and drug use thus rips apart the social fabric.

The term "drugs" has been imbued with strong affective content in American culture, and it is difficult to establish a precise definition that encompasses only those substances referred to in popular media concerning drug abuse. It is clear that when one mentions "drug abuse" s/he is not talking about the forcible injection of mental patients with neuroleptics such as chlorpromazine or haloperidol. Despite the known harmful effects of these substances,[15] these are considered "antipsychotic agents" by the medical community and "medicine" by the lay population. Additionally, "drug abuse" does not refer to a patient's physical addiction to chemicals such as morphine, dilaudid, or valium, if prescribed in a hospital. These, again, are "medicines" designed to help, not harm, the patient. And while a person addicted to heroin is clearly abusing drugs, a person addicted to methadone is just as clearly seeking treatment to stop abusing drugs.

The statement that "drugs are dangerous" is ridiculous from a purely literal standpoint. A pound of arsenic is no more dangerous than a pound of lettuce -- both are merely inert substances. The issue of physical or mental injury is only relevant when the substance is ingested into a living body , and all substances are toxic to the human body at some dose level. "Heroin, cocaine, and marijuana pose no problems for those who do not take them, and unlike the currently fashionable psychiatric drugs, no one is forced to take them."[16] Of course, drugs are meant to be ingested, not to sit on the shelf. But their dangers must be balanced by their benefits; after all, there is an entire medico-pharmaceutical establishment dedicated to the proposition that drugs are helpful and beneficial. One should be leery of any foreign substance introduced into the body, rather than developing a morbid fear of some substances and a blind tolerance of others. I do not contest the fact that drugs can injure or kill those using them. I do, however, take issue with the hypocrisy that allows hysterical fear of some chemicals such as THC while avoiding even a mild skepticism concerning much more dangerous chemicals such as alcohol, valium, or Demerol. Derrida points out that "Plato is suspicious of the pharmakon in general, even in the case of drugs used exclusively for therapeutic ends, even when they are wielded with good intentions, and even when they are as such effective. There is no such thing as a harmless remedy. The pharmakon can never be simply beneficial." (99) Our society should share Plato's suspicions concerning all drugs rather than being terrified of some while accepting of others.

But the power of this assumption, drilled into Americans daily in increasingly apocalyptic television commercials and news stories, lies in its ability to personify the inert substance and imbue it with agency. When "drugs" become this omnipotent demon with the power to drag the unsuspecting victim into addiction, crime, and death, it becomes rational to "wage war" on the demon. The metaphor of a "war on drugs" in itself comes to justify the massive use of actual military force to combat the worldwide metaphysical threat, as in the case of the invasion of Panama or the National Guard deployment to marijuana fields. Thus the metaphor gathers material reality -- there is a very real war on drugs going on today.

The notion that "drugs are addicting" requires some elaboration. Physical addiction, in medical terms, applies to very few drugs, notably alcohol and the opiates. One who develops a physical addiction to heroin quite simply needs the drug to survive. When the drug is withdrawn from the body, the individual becomes violently ill. Thus methadone centers attempt to wean heroin addicts off their drug of choice by providing the system a different opiate to become addicted to. Psychological addiction, on the other hand, is a more complex phenomenon, applying to drugs such as marijuana and cocaine. William S. Burroughs dramatizes the distinction in comparative notes on heroin and cocaine in Naked Lunch: "Only excuse for this tired death route is THE KICK when the junk circuit is cut off for the non-payment and the junk-skin dies of junk-lack and overdose of time ... It is clear that junk is a Round-The-World-Push-an-Opium-Pellet-with-Your-Nose-Route..."[17] He continues: "We are getting some C on RX at this time. Shoot it in the mainline, son. You can smell it going in, clean and cold in your nose and throat then a rush of pure pleasure right through the brain lighting up those C connections. Your head shatters in white explosions. Ten minutes later you want another shot ... you will walk across town for another shot. But if you can't score for C you eat, sleep and forget about it. This is a yen of the brain alone, a need without feeling and without body, earthbound ghost need, rancid ectoplasm swept out by an old junky coughing and spitting in the sick morning." (19) While psychological addiction is still addiction, it is not nearly as debilitating as physical addiction. Additionally, our society hosts a number of psychological addictions that are seemingly far removed from the drug crisis; television and sports being only two examples.[18]

The last issue of crime and the threat to the social fabric is undoubtedly "true" in the sense that one can identify material conditions that correspond to this discursive deployment. Addicts do steal to support their habits, and the prevalence of "drug-related" crime and violence is more than simply a textual concoction. Yet it also has rather obvious origins in the discursive formation -- drug use itself is a crime; therefore, ipso facto, drug users are criminals. There is more than semantics to my argument here -- by defining drug use as a criminal activity, the state ensures the creation of an underground of criminal activity that is best maintained through connections with other criminal activity. Hence it is no surprise that organized crime "controls" the trade in heroin. For addicts, the social stigma of being institutionally defined as a criminal outside the bounds of ordinary society by a physical condition of the body further ensures that they are unlikely to function well in that ordinary society. Thus, addicts steal. Or sell drugs.

The problems with this assumption are more insidious than an increase in the crime rate. The rhetorical function of labeling drug users "criminals" shifts the locus of concern over drugs from behavior to personality. Until approximately the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the use of drugs was portrayed in the public discourse as an activity some people engaged in rather than something that defined the personality of the user. The intentional ingestion of foreign chemicals generally fell into two categories: religious ceremony and medical practice. While warnings of the harms of these substances date back at least to 1030 AD, the social definition of the drug user as a different kind of person does not come to influence these discourses until the end of the nineteenth century.

The notion of "social decay" is much more complex; the phrase itself is meaningless in any materialist sense -- has anyone ever actually seen a society "fall apart"? The metaphor of a "social fabric" or "structure" is useful when discussing particular aspects of particular social institutions, but the reified metaphor as used in the rhetoric of the war on drugs is quite useless. Society is not a building with material existence and shape; rather, it is a discursive formation or set of articulations existing only in language, thought and action. It has political utility as an ideograph; that is, an empty phrase which gets imbued with meaning in the minds of audiences when politicians use it in particular political conflicts.[19] Thus it, like the word "drugs," has strong affective component and is quite useful in mobilizing public audiences to fear a metaphysical threat to a metaphysical social order. Ernesto Laclau explains this metaphysical conception of "society": "Society as a sutured space, as the underlying mechanism that gives reasons for or explains its own partial processes, does not exist, because if it did, meaning would be fixed in a variety of ways. Society is an ultimate impossibility, an impossible object; and it exists only as the attempt to constitute that impossible object of order. That is to say, the order of society is the unstable order of a system of differences which is always threatened from the outside. Neither the difference nor the space can be ultimately sutured."[20] When I make the argument that society is a metaphysical concept I am not arguing that there are no material consequences of its metaphysical rupture; a stroll through South Bronx or East St. Louis is all anyone needs to realize that while the social order may be metaphysical, it impacts the material world in decidedly visible ways. But my point is that the social order does not "fall apart"; rather, it is always already in a constant state of flux. Threats to this order are relative rather than absolute. But the rhetorical tactic of labeling drugs a "threat to the social order" allows politicians to justify a huge expenditure of social resources to stave off the threat. If society is threatened with destruction, then the $3.3 million Air Force interdiction operations, which resulted in 8 drug seizures in 1986, were well worth every penny.[21]

These assumptions, however misguided, have been embedded into the public discourse to such an extent that in this century our society has produced an incredible quantity of irresponsible statements and arguments, ranging from mere exaggeration to blatant mendacity, on the subject of drugs. These arguments have had a large amount of influence on public policy, and have led to today's full-fledged hysteria over the use of illegal drugs. Throughout each of the case studies I examine below, the discourse surrounding the substance has followed a trend from enthusiastic acceptance of the substance to equally enthusiastic condemnation of it. To a large extent these discourses have also followed a parallel trend from control by the medico-pharmaceutical establishments and institutions to control by the juridico-legal institutions and the repressive state apparatus.[22] The media, in turn, have exacerbated these trends to such an extent that a drug can now be discovered by the media, panegyrized by practicing psychotherapists as a panacea for many social problems, placed on Schedule I by the DEA [23] and reviled by public officials as a dangerous threat to society, and then completely forgotten by the general public within the space of four years. The material result of such discursive developments has become disturbingly familiar and predictable throughout this century: the drug becomes "chic" in certain social formations for medicinal, recreational, or therapeutic purposes, the legal system prohibits its use, it becomes the object of heightened media attention, the amount of actual drug use rises dramatically, with a corresponding increase in crime, violence, and adverse reactions associated with the use of the substance.

c. 700 BC - 140 AD:

Sumerians pass on knowledge of the cultivation of Hul Gil ("the plant of joy"; i.e. opium) to the Assyrians, who name it "lion fat." They later pass on cultivation secrets to the Babylonians, who pass them on to the Egyptians.

Cypriots draw opium poppies on vases unearthed 2500 years later. Greek heroes Heracles, Theseus, and Jason use opium to sedate their victims. Helen of Troy pours Telemachus a hearty glass of opium in the Oddysey (iv.220). Greeks celebrate the return of Persephone to Demeter in February by gathering at Agrai and getting high on opium; a celebration that eventually became Groundhog Day. Hippocrates prescribes opium to patients as a sleeping pill. Galen (another physician) records the first opium O.D. in 140 AD.

c. 400-600 AD: Opium used for medicinal and aphrodisiac properties in China.

1030 AD: Arab literature portrays opium as addictive agent, but Arab society continues to use opium for its medicinal qualities.

1500: Portuguese traders introduces opium smoking to China.

1729: China declares opium smoking illegal with penalties including flogging and death. The prohibition has no effect on trade since trading routes are already established by this time.

1730: Philip Johan von Strahlenberg publishes earliest known reference to the use of the hallucinogenic mushroom Amanita muscaria in Siberian shamanic rituals.

1753: Linnaeus christens Indian hemp cannabis sativa.

c. 1750: British East India Company establishes monopoly on the opium trade to China.

1805: F. W. Sertürner isolates the active ingredient in opium (much more powerful than opium proper) and names it morphine, after the Greek god of dreams, Morpheus.[24]

1818: American Dispensatory notes that habitual use of opium could lead to "tremors, paralysis, stupidity and general emaciation" but extolled its value for medicinal purposes. (Compare the other treatments then in vogue for various ailments: blistering, bleeding, and vomiting).

1830s: British East India Co. floods the opium market in China in an attempt to undercut competitors. Chinese authorities confiscated much of the opium on foreign vessels in order to stem the tide of cheap opium into the country.

1840: British Navy begins the First Chinese Opium War by attacking Chinese ships. The second war is fought in 1856. The British win both wars and China is forced to pay reparations and increase the importation of opium despite its illegality. Another victory for British imperialism.

The Opium Wars tell the story of Western domination and capitalist exploitation. The Chinese government saw opium as a primary symbol of the corrupting influence of Western imperialism on Eastern culture. Despite the declaration of the drug's illegality, the Chinese were forced by British military power to accept its massive importation and the consequent increase in addiction. Years later, the US would attempt to avoid this stigmatic association of opium with Western imperialism by declaring opium smoking illegal for Chinese immigrants in the Phillipines.

1847: American Medical Association established. The American Pharmaceutical Association is established four years later.

1853: Alexander Wood develops the hypodermic needle. Drugs injected into the veins enter the bloodstream directly and are thus more potent and immediate.

1852-1870: Over 70,000 Chinese immigrate to US to work on the railroads and in the gold mines as indentured servants. Many brought opium habits with them, while others acquired the habit here. The virulent anti-Chinese racism in this country did not focus on their opium habits until 1873, when an economic depression hit the country. Press stories after 1873 told of horrifying opium dens where "yellow fiends" forced unsuspecting white women to become enslaved to the mischievous drug.

At this time, opium use and addiction were not unknown in the United States. While it is recognized as a "problem," there is little mobilized effort to mitigate the drug's use among white people. The association of the drug with an undesirable population, in this case Chinese immigrants, is the first source of the discursive deployment of an opium "scare" and subsequent criminalization.

1874: British chemist C. R. Alder Wright boils morphine with acetic anhydride, producing diacetyl-morphine, better known to us lay folks as heroin, junk, or smack.

1875-1877: First opium laws passed in San Francisco, Virginia City, Nevada, and Portland.

1878-1885 : Surveys indicate that 56%-71% of opium, morphine, and heroin addicts in the US were middle- to upper-class women who purchased the drugs by prescription. The rate of opiate addiction in the US at that time was 4.59 per 1000 population (compared with today's rate of roughly 2.04 per 1000). Chinese accounted for 60% of arrests for narcotics violations in Portland in the same period.

1887: Congress passes a bill (23 Feb) prohibiting the importation of opium by US citizens and subjects of China. The result was a black market of importation. The law and its enforcement generally ignored women addicted to medicinal opium derivatives.

1898: German pharmacologist Heinrich Dreser, an employee of Bayer & Co., endorses heroin as a medicine for coughs, chest pain, pneumonia, and tuberculosis. Heroin becomes widely available and advertising is unrestrained in America.

While opium smoking and importation had become illegal, there was at this point little attempt to regulate the use of heroin and opium-based cough syrups. Again, enforcement is directed primarily at Chinese immigrants. Opium smoking in the country peaks around the turn of the century, when the number of addicts is around 250,000.[25]

1900: Dr. John Witherspoon, who would become President of the AMA in 1913, delivers a speech to the AMA warning of the medical community's duty to "save our people from the clutches of this hydra-headed monster which stalks abroad through the civilized world, wrecking lives and happy homes, filling our jails and lunatic asylums, and taking from these unfortunates, the precious promises of eternal life."[26]

1903: US Opium Commission (USOC) established in August to study ways to regulate opium; Harrison Wright is appointed Federal Opium Commissioner.

1907: Wright estimates that 160,000 pounds of opium were imported for smoking and eating, and 2,600,000 pounds of coca leaves were imported. These estimates led to the Harrison Narcotics Act.

1909: Congressional Act of 9 Feb 1909 (Smoking Opium Exclusion Act) prohibits importation of opium for other than medicinal purposes.[27]

1910-11: The Foster Anti-Narcotics Bill, which eventually became the Harrison Narcotics Act, is debated and killed in Congress. Dr. Harrison Wright, a visible force in the debate over the drug, appealed to racist fears of Chinese immigration rather strongly, arguing that "one of the most unfortunate phases of the habit of smoking opium in this country [was] the large number of women who have become involved and were living as common-law wives or cohabiting with Chinese in the Chinatowns of our various cities."[28]

1914: Pres. Wilson signs 26 USC 4701 on 17 Dec; the Federal Narcotics-Internal Revenue Regulations, commonly known as the Harrison Narcotics Act, effective 1 Mar 1915. The act divided drugs into 4 categories: Class A (highly addictive); B (little addiction liability); X & M (exempt & especially exempt). The bill licensed and taxed everyone who imported, manufactured, sold or distributed opium or cocaine. In 1919 the bill was amended to define addicts and doctors treating addicts as criminals.

1981: Janet Cooke wins the Pulitzer Prize for her story "8-Year Old Heroin Addict Lives for a Fix." The story turns out to be a complete fabrication, and her editor at the Washington Post attributes her fabrication of the story to a mental illness.[29]

1984: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., pleads guilty to possession of heroin.[30] New York Mayor Edward Koch advocates the death penalty for drug pushers.[31]

2737 BC: First recorded mention of the use of marijuana by Chinese emperor Shen Neng in his pharmacopoeia.

In ancient Greece, Herodotus reports that the Scythians enjoyed a vapor-bath of marijuana smoke (kannabis); see Histories iv.73-75.

1090 AD: Hassan-i-Sabbah creates a third split in the Moslem world, the sect known as the Hashishim or Assassins. The term "assassination" is later coined to describe Hassan's technique of secret murder which he developed to purge the Islamic world of false prophets. Marco Polo writes that this technique could only have been carried out by men well stoked with hashish. Genghis Khan put an end to the purging when he killed off 12,000 Hashishim near the end of the thirteenth century.

1753: Linnaeus christens Indian hemp cannabis sativa.

1776: Letters from George Washington indicate that he most likely enjoyed a fat joint now and then. He discusses separating the male and female hemp plants, a practice that is irrelevant when the hemp is used to make rope but is essential when one wished to smoke the buds of the female plant.

1894: Report of the Indian Hemp Drug Commission published at Simna; over 3,000 pages of testimony from various sources, concluding, "There is no evidence of any weight regarding mental and moral injuries from the moderate use of these drugs" and recommending taxation.

1930: 14 June Congress establishes Bureau of Narcotics with Harry J. Anslinger as head (apptd by Hoover on 23 Sept).

1934: Dr. Walter Bromberg informs the American Psychiatric Association that cannabis is "a primary stimulus to the impulsive life with direct expression in the motor field. [It] releases inhibitions and restraints imposed by society and allows individuals to act out their drives openly [and] acts as a sexual stimulant [particularly to] overt homosexuals."[32]

Until the 1930s, there was no evidence of widespread use of marijuana in the US, and no agitation for a crackdown. Anslinger's Bureau suffered 4 years of budget cuts during the depression. According to Donald Dickson, as narcotics waned as a major issue, Anslinger needed a new demon to justify the Bureau's existence. He began to circulate horror stories about the "evil weed," including the cult classic film Reefer Madness. The stories Anslinger circulated were anonymous, sensationalistic, and highly improbable, but they were periodically fed to the press and reported uncritically. E.g.:

"The sprawled body of a young girl lay crushed on the sidewalk the other day after a plunge from a fifth story of a Chicago apartment house. Everyone called it suicide, but actually it was murder. The killer was a narcotic known to America as marijuana." (SH)

Another story included a Florida youth who had murdered his entire family under the influence. An article in Amer J Nursing in 1936 reported that a smoker will "suddenly turn with murderous violence upon whoever is nearest to him. He will run amuck with knife, axe, gun, or anything else that is close at hand, and will kill or maim without any reason." Anslinger tapped racial fears and prejudices as well, saying that the killer weed made Mexicans especially violent and that it made black males more likely to rape white women.

1937: Marijuana Tax Act (2 Aug) calls for $20,000 fine and 20 yrs. imprisonment for possession without a legal fiscal transfer stamp. Enforcement (by the Treasury) was directed primarily against Mexican immigrants.

Ancient Hindu text Rig Veda discusses the ecstatic visions available from the plant soma, later identified by Robert Wasson as the hallucinogenic mushroom amanita muscaria.

1730: Philip Johan von Strahlenberg publishes earliest known reference to the use of the hallucinogenic mushroom Amanita muscaria in Siberian shamanic rituals.

1855: Von Bibra publishes the first scientific treatment of psychopharmacology, Die Narkotischen Genusmitteel unde der Mensch, which identified seventeen different mind-altering plants.

1886: Louis Lewin, toxicologist and artist in Berlin, publishes the first pharmacological study of kava, a South Seas hallucinogenic plant. He later isolated four different peyote alkaloids but wouldn't ingest them himself to determine which was the psychoactive substance. His colleague Arthur Heffter did the dirty work and christened the psychoactive alkaloid "mezcal."

1897: Havelock Ellis swallows three peyote buttons in his room and trips out. He later gave a few to William Butler Yeats, who found the hallucinogens "whimsical." Ellis published his experiments in Contemporary Review, Jan 1898, in the essay, "Mezcal: A New Artificial Paradise."

1900: Carl Lumholtz publishes first Western description of a Huichol hikuri (peyote) pilgrimage.

1901: Canadian psychologist Richard Bucke coins the phrase "cosmic consciousness" to describe the evolutionary stage beyond self-consciousness.

early 1920s: Karl Beringer publishes a massive mescaline study, Der Meskalinrausch, lit. "the mescaline intoxication." He comments on the similarity with psychosis.

1924: Louis Lewin published Phantastica, cataloguing most of the world's known mind-altering plants. He created 5 categories: euphorica, phantastica, inebrianta, hypnotica, and excitiantia.

1931: Aldous Huxley reads Phantastica and wrote a scathing condemnation of "all existing drugs" in the Chicago Herald Examiner. But he concludes that the solution is not prohibition but the search for better drugs.

1938: Sandoz Pharmaceuticals employee Dr. Albert Hofmann synthesizes d-lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD-25) and then forgot about it.

1940: E. Guttmann and G. T. Stockings write that mescaline intoxication induces schizophrenia.

1943: (16 Apr) Dr. Hofmann synthesized a new batch of LSD-25, felt a little woozy and took the day off. He had just climbed into bed when the hallucinations began.

(19 Apr) Hofmann experimented by ingesting 250 millionths of a gram of LSD in a glass of water. He thought he had gone permanently insane as he embarked on his infamous bicycle ride home.

In the late forties and fifties, only two communities knew and used LSD: the psychiatric research community and the CIA.

The CIA used LSD as part of Operation MK-ULTRA in an attempt to develop a truth serum to aid interrogation. While the agency's use of the drug throughout the next ten years led to no firm conclusions about the best uses for LSD, they were undoubtedly fascinated with tests of the drug. Their experiments ranged from the insipid to the irresponsible.

1947: The US Navy initiates Project CHATTER to develop a truth drug. Dr. Charles Savage conducted experiments with mescaline, and had no success. CHATTER had begun when Navy investigators learned of experiments with mescaline by Nazi doctors at the Dachau concentration camp; the CIA imported more than 600 top Nazi scientists years earlier under Project Paperclip. CHATTER died in 1953.

1951: CIA begins experimenting with cocaine as a potential truth serum in Operation ARTICHOKE. A 21 Oct CIA memo indicated that LSD-25 was tested as well, along with ether, morphine, and mescaline.

1953: 19 Nov: CIA begins administering LSD to incoming trainees in order to test their stamina. On 13 April CIA Director Allen Dulles authorized Operation MK-ULTRA, the CIA's major drug & mind control program during the Cold War. In November Dr. Frank Olsen was surreptitiously dosed with acid at a cocktail party in a CIA experiment. Olsen was not amused. After several weeks of intense anxiety he plunged through a closed ten-story window to his death.

1955: 5 May CIA document places high priority on the development of a drug that will produce "pure euphoria with no subsequent letdown." George Hunter White, a former narcotics officer employed by the CIA for MK-ULTRA, hires prostitutes in San Francisco to bring men back to an apartment with a two-way mirror ("Operation Midnight Climax"). The prostitutes slipped the men LSD and White sat behind the mirror and watched the fun.

1959: CIA experimented by giving prison inmates increasing doses of LSD for 75 consecutive days.

In the medical community, the purpose of LSD research was to discover psychotherapeutic potentials of the drug. By the early 60s there are 3 perspectives on the drug. The psycholytic researchers saw LSD as an adjunct to traditional therapy. This school is represented by the Freudians Chandler and Hartman, and their method was to supplement traditional therapy with tiny doses of LSD. Psychedelic researchers, on the other hand, saw the drug as completely transforming the nature of therapy, and tended to use larger doses in an attempt to elicit integrative, mystical experiences. Hubbard and Osmond represent this school of research. Psychotomimeticists shied away from the drug completely, arguing its only function was to mimic a psychotic or schizophrenic state.

1947: Werner Stoll publishes research findings of experiments with LSD as a psychotherapeutic tool, concluding that it allows repressed material to pass easily into ordinary consciousness. Sandoz offers to supply LSD to select researchers (under the trade name Delysid) and advocated use by both psychotherapists and patients.

1949: LSD first arrives in America.

1951: Psychiatrist Max Rinkel notes a similarity between LSD and schizophrenia. The drug soon earned the reputation as a psychotomimetic among researchers.

1952: British psychiatrists Humphrey Osmond and John Smythies publish "A New Approach to Schizophrenia," theorizing that when the body is confronted with extreme anxiety it produces the hallucinogen adrenochrome, inducing schizophrenic or psychotic reactions. The next year they flew out to bring Aldous Huxley a vial of mescaline. Huxley later cabled his editor that mescaline was "the most extraordinary and significant experience available to human beings this side of the Beatific Vision." He then dashed off The Doors of Perception in a month.

1960: Narcotics Manufacturing Act (22 April) - requires licenses for synthesized narcotics. Sidney Cohen published research findings on adverse reactions to LSD based on a survey of 5000 people who had taken the drug 25,000 times. He found, per 1000 ingestions, 1.8 psychotic episodes, 1.2 attempted suicides, and .4 completed suicides; his conclusion: "LSD is an astonishingly safe drug." These findings led to a boom in LSD psychotherapy in the next 2 years.

1962: Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO, 18 USC 1962, 1963) enacted; on 19 Oct 1970 Congress modified the law to insert criminal forfeiture provisions. This is the first instance of this penalty being included in US law since they were prohibited by the first US Congress in 1790. Also, Congress gave the FDA control over all new investigational drugs. While this law was aimed principally at amphetamine use, it effectively prevented LSD- and psilocybin-using psychotherapists and researchers from obtaining the drugs without FDA approval. The FDA sent agents to confiscate the drug supplies of Oscar Janiger and other LSD researchers. 30 Apr: Timothy Leary relieved of teaching duties at Harvard (he had already publicly severed his ties with the school, but now would no longer be collecting his paycheck). 27 May: Richard Alpert fired from Harvard.

LSD therapy begins to be seen skeptically by the media and the larger medical community. By this time LSD therapists had firmly divided along psycholytic and psychedelic lines. The psychedelic therapists seemed a bit too mystical for their more conservative colleagues and were viewed with increasing suspicion, some skeptics charging that the stoned researchers were hallucinating their data. Roy Grinker boldly stated: "Latent psychotics are boldly disintegrating under the influence of even single doses; long-continued LSD experiences are subtly creating a psychopathology. Psychic addiction is being developed." (SH) Grinker had no evidence to support this claim simply because there was none available -- the 1960 study was still unchallenged in the field. But the climate surrounding medical use of LSD had turned around completely. Janiger stated: "The whole goddam climate changed. Suddenly you were now conspirators out to destroy people ... I closed my practice and went to Europe. I felt violated." Leary and Alpert were dismissed in the popular media as "the world's worst bores," "parlor-game mystics," and "armchair pilgrims."

1963: 15 Jan- Kennedy establishes Advisory Commission on Narcotic and Drug Abuse w/ Judge E. Barrett Prettyman as chair. On 15 July '64 recommended full federal government power be applied to combat drug abuse, and recommended the transfer of all enforcement to the DOJ (this happened in 1968). Life magazine publishes 9-pg article on mind-altering drugs which warns of LSD's dangers but emphasizes its value in laboratory situations. Articles in JAMA and Archives of General Psychiatry warn of adverse LSD reactions and argue for "responsible" control over the drug by the medical community.

22 Nov: Aldous Huxley dies in bed shortly after receiving his last request, a shot of LSD.

1964: Navajo Indians of the Southwest win the legal right to use peyote in religious ceremonies; People v. Woody 61 Cal 2d 716. July: Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters begin their infamous journey, reaching Leary's Millbrook retreat in late July. The Pranksters found the stoned Ivy League eggheads a total bore and headed back west.

By this point, the perspectives on LSD use and controls over such use can be divided into 5 categories:

Liddy: Complete criminalization. LSD is dangerous and the government alone must control it.

Huxley: Government control of LSD can build a utopian society.

AMA: The medical community should control the drug for responsible therapeutic use only.

Leary: Enlightened experts and gurus should administer the drug in the proper set & setting.

Kesey: Anyone should use the drug anywhere for any reason they want.

1965: Drug Abuse Control Amendments establish the Bureau of Drug Abuse Control (BDAC) within the FDA, which gave the FDA control over enforcement of the law (limited to stimulants and depressants); FDA agents could in some cases make arrests without warrants.

August: Ken Kesey's second "Acid Test" in San Jose featured such respected guests as Richard Alpert, Allen Ginsberg, the rock band the Warlocks (later the Grateful Dead) and the Hell's Angels. While the gathering was quite peaceful, media reports sensationalized the "drug orgy." In May Augustus Owsley Stanley III begins the largest underground LSD production laboratory to date.

The rise in street use and the increasing adoption by "kids" of the Kesey perspective leads to full-blown LSD hysteria. The outrageous claims of the acid gurus combined with media sensationalism combined to create a nasty climate by 1967. Allen Ginsberg suggested "that everybody who hears my voice, directly or indirectly, try the chemical LSD at least once; every man, woman and child American in good health over the age of fourteen ... that everybody including the President and his and our vast herds of generals, executives, judges and legislators of these States go to nature, find a kindly teacher or Indian peyote chief or guru guide, and assay their consciousness with LSD." (SH xvi)

William S. Burroughs, who was not into drugs for kicks, had warned of the dangers of such acid-drenched optimism in the beginning to Nova Express: "Listen: their Garden of Delights is a terminal sewer... Their Immortality Cosmic Consciousness and Love is second-run grade-B shit -- Their drugs are poison designed to beam in Orgasm Death and Nova Ovens -- Stay out of the Garden of Delights .... Throw back their ersatz Immortality .... Flush their drug kicks down the drain -- They are poisoning and monopolizing the hallucinogenic drugs -- Learn to make it without any chemical corn."³³

1966: Sept. Timothy Leary founds the League for Spiritual Discovery, whose purpose was "to change and elevate the consciousness of every American within the next few years. Slowly, carefully, and beautifully, you can learn to drop out of American society as it is now set up." The league's slogan was "tune in, turn on, drop out." 25 Mar Life magazine article sensationalizes the horrors of LSD: "What the LSD user may be buying is a one-way ticket to an asylum, a prison, or a grave." (30b) Time magazine in March announced that America was in the grip of an LSD epidemic. Newspapers begin to capitalize on the hysteria with stories of LSD-inspired rape, mutilation and murder. LAPD files for the first 4 months of the year show only 4 out of 543 narcotics arrests involving LSD. 16 April: Timothy Leary busted at Millbrook by none other than G. Gordon Liddy. (A few years ago Leary and Liddy toured college campuses debating each other). By October possession of LSD is illegal in every US state. 2 Dec New Eng J of Med calls for an end to all LSD research.

Jay Stevens argues: "The real reason LSD needed to be eliminated wasn't because it was making a tiny percentage of its users crazy, but because of what it was doing to the vast majority .... LSD wasn't attracting nonconformists so much as it was creating them." (278) In Congressional hearings Sidney Cohen, who had called LSD "astonishingly safe" in 1960, testified: "We have seen something which in a way is most alarming, more alarming than death in a way. And that is the loss of all cultural values, the loss of feeling of right and wrong, of good and bad. These people lead a valueless life, without motivation, without any ambition ... they are deculturated, lost to society, lost to themselves."

1967: "A Gathering of Tribes for the First Human Be-In" held in Golden Gate Park on 14 Jan, attended by 25,000. "Summer of Love" brings 100,000 "heads" to Haight-Ashbury. "Bad trips" become more and more common in an overcrowded area filled with illicit drugs of all types, including PCP, DMT, STP, speed, heroin, and barbituates. By the end of the Summer of Love the Haight "was full of burn-outs with those peculiarly dead eyes that were one of the most unsettling legacies of the private revolution." (Stevens, 353). In the Himalayas, Richard Alpert gives a guru three hits of Owsley's best and nothing happens. Meanwhile, Owsley is arrested with almost a million hits of LSD. A group of smugglers known as "The Brotherhood of Eternal Love" fills the vacuum in underground acid supply. The well-publicized conviction of Leary on marijuana charges; Leary v. US, 383 F.2d 851, 395 US 6.

1968: Pres. order (8 Apr) merged BDAC (under HEW) w/ the Bur. of Narcotics (treas.) to form the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. All enforcement became the responsibility of the DOJ. On 24 Oct the Harrison Act penalties increased again. In his State of the Union Address Pres. Johnson had warned, "These powders and pills threaten our nation's health, vitality and self-respect." Neo-American Church denied exemption from marijuana and LSD laws on religious grounds; US v. Kuch, 288 F Supp 439.

1974: Amer J Psychiatry article advocates treating alcoholism in American Indians with peyote.[34]

1975: The family of Frank Olsen settles its claim against the US government in return for $1.25 million and the release of all CIA files on the case.[35]

1985: LSD use is higher than ever before, and bad trips are less common than even before the Summer of Love. Lee and Shlain theorize that this is because "the psychosocial matrix surrounding LSD have evolved. When the social and political movement symbolically entangled with LSD collapsed in the early 1970s, the climate informing expectations about the drug lost much of its emotional charge. The new generation of acid trippers has not been waned on the psychedelic controversies of yesteryear, when taking LSD was tantamount to an act of social defiance. Without the shrill warnings about psychosis or chromosome damage, or all the hubbub about the glories of expanded consciousness, there are fewer freakouts and untoward incidents." (291)

Hence, when the proliferation of discourse about LSD's earth-shattering effects, both beneficial and apocalyptic, began to die down, the crisis itself began to defuse. Today there is little discussion of LSD in the popular media, except in relation to MDMA use and acid house parties in Europe. This is strong evidence for the influence of "set and setting"; that is, environmental factors, as the key determinants of positive or adverse reactions in relation to a powerful mind-altering drug such as LSD.

1884: Sigmund Freud extolls the virtues of injecting cocaine with a hypodermic needle to cure alcoholism and morphine addiction.[36]

1900: Association of cocaine with Southern blacks begins to increase in public discourse. A JAMA editorial stated that "the Negroes in are reported as being addicted to a new form of vice -- that of 'cocaine sniffing' or the 'coke habit.'"[37]

1903: Pure Food and Drug Act passed; requires correct labeling of pharmaceutical drugs containing cocaine, opiates, or cannabis.

1910-11: The Foster Anti-Narcotic Bill is debated in Congress. This is the bill that would eventually become the Harrison Narcotics Act. Hamilton Wright concludes of cocaine that "it has been authoritatively stated that cocaine is often the direct incentive to the crime of rape by the Negroes of the South and other sections of the country," Wright, 48-9.

1914: Dr. Christopher Koch of the State Pharmacy Board of Pennsylvania testifies before Congress that "Most of the attacks upon the white women of the South are the direct result of a cocaine-crazed Negro brain."[38]

The association of cocaine use with Southern blacks in the early part of the twentieth century, combined with the virulent racism of the period, made it relatively easy to pass laws outlawing cocaine in the states throughout this period. David Musto writes: "The fear of the cocainized black coincided with the peak of lynchings, legal segregation, and voting laws all designed to remove political and social power from him. Fear of cocaine might have contributed to the dread that the black would rise above 'his place,' as well as reflecting the extent to which cocaine may have released defiance and retribution. So far, evidence does not suggest that cocaine caused a crime wave but rather that anticipation of black rebellion inspired white alarm. Anecdotes often told of superhuman strength, cunning, and efficiency resulting from cocaine. One of the most terrifying beliefs about cocaine was that it actually improved pistol marksmanship. Another myth, that cocaine made blacks almost unaffected by mere .32 caliber bullets, is said to have caused southern police departments to switch to .38 caliber revolvers. These fantasies characterized white fear, not the reality of cocaine's effects, and gave one more reason for the repression of blacks."[39]

1983: Nancy Reagan begins the "Just say NO" campaign.

1984: Earliest mass media reference to rock cocaine, LA Times 25 Nov. Only 1 article in Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature under the heading "Drugs and Employment."

1985: Natl Inst on Drug Abuse (NIDA) reports that over 22 million Americans reported having tried cocaine. First reference to "crack"; NYT 17 Nov. By Jan. 1986 crack was known only to a few impoverished urban neighborhoods. In 1985 the NYT Index indexed 91 articles about "Drug Addiction and Abuse." 7 articles in Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature under the heading "Drugs and Employment."

1986: $1.7 billion anti-drug bill passed (17 Oct 1986). (the "Drug-Free America Act") Largest govt financial commitment to combat drug abuse. Rhetoric of the "war on drugs" begins a massive escalation. Pres. Reagan & his advisers submit urine specimens to be tested for illegal drugs. NYT Index indexes 301 articles about "Drug Addiction and Abuse." 32 articles in Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature under the heading "Drugs and Employment."[40]

In Spring two celebrity athletes died in "crack-related deaths"; news coverage immediately skyrocketed and hyperbole became commonplace. By mid-1986 words like "plague," "epidemic," and "crisis" became routine in news reports. The Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) coded 1092 hospital deaths as "cocaine-related." This term itself is open to contestation; but even accepting the term one should note that for each "cocaine-related" death there were approximately 300 "tobacco-related" deaths and 100 "alcohol-related" deaths.

1987: DEA notes that while "Crack is currently the subject of considerable media attention ... [t]he result has been a distortion of the public perception of the extent of crack use as compared to the use of other drugs."

In Jan. an American Mgmt Assoc survey finds 21.7% companies using drug urine testing. Another 12% were developing programs for drug testing. 2/3 of the companies that had testing policies had written them during 1986. Drug testing becomes a $300 million per year growth industry.

1988: Political rhetoric directed at the crack epidemic escalates dramatically with the presidential primaries. NIDA high school survey reports "significant drop" in use of cocaine and a "slight decline" in crack use.

The crack epidemic is an excellent case study in the rhetorical construction of a social problem for political goals. Cocaine is seen as threatening only when it becomes available to black and inner city poor; the widespread use of cocaine by the urban upper class was not heretofore considered an "epidemic." The hysteria over crack is more than incidentally connected to the American invasion of Panama and the growing American military presence in Peru. There is no doubt that crack use has escalated since the hysteria, and the harms to inner city populations transcend the number of "cocaine-related" deaths (the escalating violence over who controls the trade, for example, has a larger body count than the admittedly moving phenomenon of "crack babies"). But the scare concocted by the media and issue-hungry politicians during election years have allowed individual behavior and morality to become the scapegoat for endemic social and economic problems that underlie the crack epidemic -- poverty, racism, unemployment. Craig Reinarman and Harry Levine note: "the 'Just Say NO' administration has just said NO to virtually every social program aimed at creating alternatives for inner-city young people. Unfortunately, these kids cannot 'Just Say NO' to poverty and unemployment. Drug abuse ... has been used as a scapegoat for crime, rebellious youth, failing productivity, broken families, urban poverty, black and Hispanic unemployment, and other social problems that have little to do with drugs and much to do with US economic and social policy."[41]

1897: German psychologist Theodore Lipps first uses the word "Einfuhlung" (empathy) to designate the tendency of the subject to fuse with the object when viewing a work of art.

1910: 3,4-methylenedioxyphenylisopropylamine (MDA) first synthesized by German chemists G. Mannish and W. Jacobson.

1914: 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) is first synthesized and patented by Merck Pharmaceutical Company in Germany.

1927: Gordon Alles discovers amphetamine.

1939: First lab experiments of MDA on animals by Gunn, Gurd and Sachs.

1953: Army Chemical Center gives MDMA to laboratory animals and finds it less toxic than its cousin MDA. These tests are declassified in 1969 and published in 1973.[42] In these studies MDMA is found to have a LD-50 (lethal dose 50% of the time) of 97 mg/Kg in mice. Recent studies confirm almost the same result.[43] (The average dose taken by humans is about 2 mg/Kg).

1959: Gordon Alles' experiments with MDA published in a Josiah Macy conference (1957) entitled Neuropharmacology ed. Harold Abramson.

1970: August: first known illicit recreational use of MDMA, published in J Crim Law (1972).

Between 1970 and 1985, little is known about the amount of street or psychotherapeutic use of MDMA, but there is undoubtedly a dramatic increase in street use throughout the period. A California laboratory reportedly distributed 10,000 doses a month in 1976, 30,000 per month in 1984, and 500,000 per month in mid-1985.[44] Interestingly, the largest increase, between 1984 and 1985, occurs right after the DEA's announcement of proposed scheduling and the ensuing media coverage. Jerome Beck argues: "If the DEA's action was an attempt at limiting the spread of MDMA use, they had clearly accomplished the opposite ... [the ensuing] publicity generated what appeared to be an exponential increase in street demand." (59)

DAWN reported that only eight people in the entire country sought treatment in hospital emergency rooms after using MDMA between 1977 and 1981. Between 1981 and 1985 DAWN reported not a single admission.

1982: DEA solicits information regarding the abuse potential of MDMA and MDE.

1984: Comprehensive Crime Control Act (PL 98-473) allows "emergency scheduling" for "designer drugs." Also expands forfeiture provision to include possessions associated with the com-mission of criminal acts as well as profits from drug sales.

WHO begins considering international restrictions on MDMA. On 27 July DEA proposes placing MDMA on Schedule I. Association of Humanistic Psychology Conference features a panel on the psychotherapeutic use of MDMA. Thomas Roberts, George Greer, Lester Grinspoon, and James Bakalar, retained DC attorney Richard Cotton to request a hearing concerning the scheduling of MDMA.

Bill Mandel writes one of the earliest mass media articles on MDMA, "The Yuppie Psychedelic," San Francisco Chronicle (10 June 1984). Even though the article itself distinguished MDMA from psychedelic drugs, the title and much of its content associated the two strongly; e.g. "Shades of Timothy Leary! ... Could this be the last hurrah of the 60s?" etc.

1985: Judge F. L. Young denies that MDMA can be classified under Schedule I because it hasn't been shown to have a high abuse potential (1 June). The day before the opinion, the DEA invoked the emergency powers act to put MDMA on Schedule I, effectively nullifying the hearing before Judge Young. The major reason for the ban cited by the DEA was a study done at the University of Chicago that determined that MDA (already on Schedule I) may cause brain damage in rats.[45] Chemist David Nichols pointed out in the later hearing that there is no cross-tolerance between MDA and MDMA. Additionally, pharmacist June Riedlinger testified that the two drugs in fact have opposite isomer activity in the brain. Writes Riedlinger: "The DEA seems to believe that since MDMA's molecular structure is similar to that of MDA, it is guilty by association. That would be a fair assumption if it were not for the fact that MDMA and MDA show opposite isomer activity in the central nervous system."[46] Three hearings were held through 1985 on the matter of MDMA scheduling.

Articles in Time, New York, Business Week, Newsweek, and Life warn of a growing counterculture of mellow yuppies getting turned on to the hug drug. Rick Doblin , a major pro-MDMA figure in the mass media, was quoted in New York: "Compassion has political implications. Empathy has political implications." Ronald Siegel, just as prominent an anti-MDMA figure, tells a few unsubstantiated horror stories in the same article: "We're getting people who claimed to have taken this drug who are disoriented for days on end. We've had people locked in fetal positions for as long as 72 hours. We had a psychotherapist that took it, disappeared, and turned up a week later directing traffic." A July article in the Dallas Sun-Sentinel cites the Chicago study mentioned above, but cites the statistics of MPTP (China White, a synthetic heroin) rather than MDMA: "the drug works by destroying large numbers of vital brain cells and may speed up the aging process ... The DEA also reported 31 deaths from the drug, mostly in the San Francisco Bay area, with 26 of those deaths occurring after Aug. 1, 1984."

Rosenbaum and Doblin describe the media's fascination with MDMA during this period: "The popular media loved MDMA. They loved the name 'Ecstasy,' they loved its users -- a white, affluent contrast to the popular stereotype; they loved the bar scene in which it was distributed in Texas. And they wrote glowing reports about it in the Washington Post. This was not the first time the media helped to advertise a 'new' drug." (Beck, 60) As with LSD 2 decades previous, the media's uncritical sensationalism of both the advocates and the opponents of the drug helped to pique curiousity and escalate street demand.

Also in 1985, Psychick TV releases the first "Acid House" album, Jack the Tab, and the songs "Meet Every Situation Head-on" and "Tune in, Turn on (the Acid House)" become popular throughout Europe, and, to a limited extent, in the US. An underground "scene" developed in European danceclubs where crowds bought LSD and MDMA from dealers (identified by the tell-tale yellow smiley faces plastered all over their clothing) and danced until sunrise, night after night. Kaplan et al. discuss this phenomenon in relation to the media portrayal of MDMA use and its increasing spread: "The consideration of the emergence of new drugs such as MDMA ... involves the development of more general models of drug use epidemiology. The most widely used model in current use is the contagion model, which explains the spread of drugs in a community through personal contact of established peer group networks. While this model is indeed valid, it still remains to be seen how the first initiator comes into contact with a drug as well as how existing, established networks may be jumped and mixed in a mass media environment (e.g. concerts, performance, etc.) to produce new patterns of use. The role of the press seems critical in the initiation and diffusion of drug trends... It can be suggested that drugs are primarily spread not through peer groups, but rather by certain cultural city centers which then, in turn, 'invite' those individuals and subgroups which would first have awareness of the new drug." (b30) They continue: "the acid house parties provide a clear example of how a particular cultural setting is preceding the actual use of the drug and providing both a system of ritualized control as well as a potential for selective spread of the drug." (114)

1986: Judge Young delivers the opinion in the three 1985 hearings, deciding that MDMA should be placed on Schedule III. The attorneys for the DEA rejected the opinion of Judge Young: "the Administrator of the DEA would be failing to consider the public interest, and neglecting his responsibility as an impartial decision-maker, if he chooses to accept the biased conclusions of the Administrative Law Judge." (b66) The emergency powers are enacted to keep MDMA on Schedule I for another 6 months. On 14 October MDMA is permanently placed on Schedule I. US v. Pees, 645 F Supp 697, affirms the legitimacy of the DEA's emergency scheduling of MDMA.

A 2-day conference on the benefits and dangers of MDMA held in Oakland (transcribed in J Psychoactive Drugs (Oct-Dec 1986) intensifies media coverage of MDMA. A Doonesbury cartoon parodies the conference. At the conference, Gregory Hayner and Howard McKinney present the first evidence of toxic reactions to MDMA by human beings.[47] One of the two cases involved a healthy woman taking an average dose of MDMA.

As media coverage increases, exaggeration becomes more commonplace; even medical periodicals such as the APA Monitor: "Repeated use of designer drugs such as Ecstasy produces potentially irreversible brain damage," Charles Turkington, "Brain Damage Found with Designer Drugs," APA Monitor (March 1986). And Dr. Charles Schuster was quoted in an Associated Press interview: "It can poison the nervous system probably irreversibly. It may well be that a young, healthy adult who is exposed to these drugs is not going to show frank symptoms that are going to be picked up by a clinician. But what we don't know is that whether 20 or 30 years from now, at the age of 45, they may begin to be showing central nervous system degenerative signs that ordinarily would not be seen until they get to be 70 or 80."[48]

1987: 18 Sept: Greenspoon v. DEA, 828 F2d 881: the federal court issues an order to vacate MDMA from Schedule I because of accepted medical usage. In US v. Spain, 825 F2d 1426, the MDMA conviction is overturned and the court ruled that only the Attorney General, not the DEA, has emergency scheduling powers. MDMA is taken off Schedule I on 22 Dec.

First report of human death due to MDMA use published.[49] Only one of the five deaths reported in the article specifically involved MDMA.

1988: US v. Emerson, 846 F2d 541, overturns an MDMA conviction on the grounds that the DEA did not have the authority to invoke emergency scheduling powers.

Effective 23 March, MDMA is placed again on Schedule I without challenge.

In the summer a 37-year old woman is found dead in Palo Alto after ingesting an unknown quantity of MDMA. (P60)

MDMA is not, by any means, "harmless." While it is remarkably safe when compared to legal drugs such as Dilaudid, nicotine, alcohol, and Valium, later studies have confirmed potential neurotoxicity. However, the therapeutic potentials of the drug, perhaps over-enthusiastically hailed by researchers in the early stages of DEA scheduling, are lost as the medical establishment loses ground in the battle over discursive terrain with the legal establishment. What is interesting is that the arguments that carried the most weight in the legal sphere were medical arguments, however unsubstantiated they were. Jerome Beck points to the underlying ideological frame through which these medical arguments are articulated: "Despite medicalized explanations for justifying the social control of various forms of deviance, the continued (but more hidden) influence of assignations of immorality must also be considered. This is particularly apparant when looking at various kinds of drugs or sex which are regarded as sinful pleasures deserving of condemnation or seen as threatening the moral fabric of society. Given this, it is important to examine to what extent the criminalization of 'Ecstasy' is based on moralistic conceptions cloaked in scientific justification." (24)