Richmond
Pearson Hobson, even as a young man, had the romantic
vision necessary to heroes. On June 3, 1898, as a newly
graduated lieutenant of the naval academy at Annapolis,
he guided the USS Merrimac into the narrow mouth of
Santiago Harbor in Cuba.-Though the Navy described his
ship as an antiquated tub, Hobson saw it as a magnificent
fighting ship and saw himself that night as "Homeric
manhood, erect and masterful on the perilous bridge
of the Merrimac. " The Spanish-American War had
just broken out, and the Navy planned for Hobson to
trap the Spanish fleet in Santiago Harbor by scuttling
his ship in the main channel. To this end, Hobson heroically
had tied a string of homemade torpedoes-to the hull
of the Merrimac, but owing to a failure in the ship's
steering mechanism, he was unable to get the tub into
the blockading position before the charges exploded.
The Merrimac rapidly and ineffectually sank without
interfering with any of the Spanish shipping lanes,
and Hobson himself was rescued by the Spanish and imprisoned
in Morro Castle, outside Havana. After Spain surrendered,
Hobson was repatriated. The United States Navy, faced
with the difficult choice of either court-martialing
Hobson or decorating him for valor, chose the latter
alternative and made Captain Hobson the first celebrated
hero of the short-lived Spanish-American War. Hobson
thus experienced what he later described hyperbolically
as "the ecstasy of martyrdom." President McKinley
personally decorated Hobson, and the Navy arranged a
national speaking tour for its new hero. As crowds,
swarmed about the man reputed to have blocked the entire
Spanish Armada, his popularity grew, and he became known
as "the most-kissed man in America" (Hobson's
Kisses, a caramel candy, was even named after him).
By 1906, the celebrated hero of Santiago Harbor had
been elected to Congress.
Captain Hobson was at the turn
of the century a hero in search of a grand cause. He
first attempted to exploit his reputation as a military
genius by calling for America to build a navy larger
than all the other navies of the world combined, in
order to protect the world against the "yellow
peril" in the immediate form of Japanese military
strength, which he saw increasing in Asia. He argued
at every public gathering he could find that American
naval supremacy was the "will of God." When
his first crusade failed to excite continued interest
in the nation's newspapers, and his speaking engagements
dwindled, he switched his moral drumbeat to a far more
pervasive enemy-alcohol, which he termed "the great
destroyer."
Captain Hobson's crusade against
alcohol, like his crusade against the yellow peril,
attempted to mobilize public opinion into an apocalyptic
battle between the forces of good and evil, the outcome
of which would determine the fate of Western civilization.
Describing this ravaging battle, he gave statistics
in various speeches for all occasions-"Alcohol
is killing our people at the rate of nearly two thousand
men a day, every day of the year"; "one out
of five children of alcohol consumers are hopelessly
insane"; "ninety-five percent of all acts
and crimes of violence are committed by drunkards";
"nearly one half of the deaths that occur are due
to alcohol"; "a hundred and twenty-five million
white men today are wounded by alcohol." In adding
up the economic cost of alcohol, he asserted that the
"total loss" was more than "sixteen billion
dollars," or one quarter of the gross national
product of the United States. He posited a medical theory
whereby alcohol attacked "the top of the brain
... since the upper brain is the physical basis of thought,
feeling, judgment, self control, and it is the physical
organ of the will, of the consciousness of God, of the
sense of right and wrong, of ideas of justice, duty,
love, mercy, self-sacrifice and all that makes character,"
and from that he reasoned that "the evolution of
human life, the destiny of man and the will of God"
were at stake in the struggle against alcohol. (While
alcohol reached the "top of the brain" of
"negroes," according to Hobson's theory, "they
degenerate ... to the level of the cannibal." Similarly,
"peaceable redmen" became "the savage"
when they drank alcohol.)
Proposing in Congress that
alcohol be totally prohibited, he forged a dramatic
nexus between alcohol and crime. Innocent men were converted
to violent criminals in almost all cases, he argued,
because alcohol had degenerated the "gray matter"
in their brains. Not only did alcohol destroy self-control
in 95 percent of criminal cases, but it created an economic
need for those afflicted with the disease of alcoholism
to steal in order to pay for their chronic habit. In
multiplying the number of alcoholics by the daily cost
of the habit, Hobson arrived at his $16 billion estimate
of the cost of crime engendered by alcohol.
By 1915 Captain Hobson had
become the highest-paid speaker on the lecture circuit
in America. He helped organize (with financial support
from John D. Rockefeller, Jr.) the Women's Christian
Temperance Union (WCTU), which helped galvanize national
support for Prohibition. Congress ordered his speech
to the House of Representatives in 1912, entitled "The
Great Destroyer," to be republished in 50 million
copies by the Government Printing Office. (The order
was never carried out by the GPO.) Defeated in his attempt
to win the Senate seat for Alabama, Hobson organized
the American Alcohol Education Association, which attempted
to marshal American youth behind his crusading banner.
The dramatic mythology that
Hobson had popularized, if not created, which put alcohol
at the root of all of society's evils, was undermined
ironically by the passage of National Prohibition legislation
in 1921. Neither crime rate nor death rate was diminished
by the banning of alcohol; indeed, each rose during
Prohibition. Human nature did not markedly change for
the better. Hobson no longer had a demon on which to
unleash his virtually unlimited moral indignation. In
the 1920s, thus, Captain Hobson was again in quest of
a great cause.
For almost a year Captain Hobson
retired from public life-or at least from public speaking
engagements-and sought an issue around which another
moral campaign could be organized. He soon found a new
"greatest evil," which not only could be held
accountable for all crime and vice but had the added
advantage over alcohol of being a foreign import, thus
coinciding with the xenophobia of the times. This new
devil was a drug called heroin.
Heroin (from
the German heroisch-"large, powerful") was
first developed by the A. G. Bayer Company, of Germany,
in 1898 as a "nonaddictive" pain-killer. This
white powdery substance (known scientifically as diacetylmorphine)
was refined from morphine, a natural alkaloid of opium,
which for thousands of years had been derived from the
dried juice of the unripe capsule of the opium poppy.
When morphine was first isolated from opium in 1803,
it was thought to be a universal panacea, called by
physicians "God's own medicine," and was recommended
for fifty-four diseases, which included everything from
insanity to nymphomania. As late as 1889, morphine was
recommended in medical journals as a drug for treating
those addicted to alcohol on the grounds that it "calms
in place of exciting the base of passions, and hence
is less productive of acts of violence and crime."
However, by 1898, morphine addiction was considered
a serious national problem. And heroin (even though
three times as powerful a pain-killer as morphine) was
now recommended in medical journals as a new means of
treating morphine addiction. The attempt to cure drug
addiction by
substituting one drug for another again proved to
be a failure, and in the early 1900s, confronted by
a growing number of heroin addicts, the American Medical
Association defined heroin as a dangerous and highly
addictive drug not suitable for medical treatment. At
the same time, the United States State Department, under
increasing pressure from American missionaries working
in Asia who were concerned with the morality of opium
trade, supported the idea of international laws to regulate
narcotics. In December, 1914, Congress passed the Harrison
Narcotics Act, which attempted to control narcotics
in the United States through licensing and taxation.
Federal laws did not, however,
diminish public concern over heroin. A spate of newspaper
stories during the final days of World War I suggested
that Germany was attempting to addict the entire American
population through heroin by mixing the powder with
cosmetics. And in New York City, public officials increasingly
attributed bank robberies and anarchist bombings to
heroin-crazed fiends. Though the postwar scare stories
in the press tended to be inconsistent and fragmented,
they provided Captain Hobson with fertile grounds for
a new crusade. Unlike alcohol, heroin was a foreign
and mysterious drug; its powers were not known to the
general public. Hobson quickly foresaw the potential
of reorganizing the available bits of information and
assertions about this new drug into the specter of the
vampire. In a frenzy of public appearances, lectures,
and writings, he termed narcotics addicts "the
living dead." In explaining the operations of this
"demonic" drug, he used the same convenient
pseudomedical jargon that, he had previously used in
denouncing alcohol. For example, explaining in the September
20, 1924, issue of The Saturday Evening Post that addiction
is essentially a "brain disease" responsible
for most crime, he gave the following quasimedical explanation:
The entire brain is immediately
affected when narcotics are taken into the system.
The upper cerebral regions, whose more delicate
tissues, apparently the most recently developed
and containing the shrine of the spirit, all those
attributes of the man which raise him above the
level of the beast, are at first tremendously stimulated
and then-quite soon-destroyed....
At the same time the tissues
of the lower brain, where reside all the selfish
instincts and impulses, receive the same powerful
stimulation. With the restraining forces of the
higher nature gone, the addict feels no compunction
whatever in committing any act that will contribute
to a perverted supposition of his own comfort or
welfare.
According to the "scientific"
explanation that Hobson popularized, the degeneracy
of the "upper cerebral regions" turned the
addict into a "beast" or "monster,"
spreading his disease like a medieval vampire. Hobson
explained thus: "The addict has an insane desire
to make addicts of others." As evidence of this
vampire phenomenon of the "living dead," Hobson
gave examples of how a mother-addict had injected her
eight-year-old son with heroin; how teenage addicts
infected other teenagers by secreting heroin in ice-cream
cones; and how lovers seduced their partners with heroin.
He suggested the calculus (which President Nixon adopted
a half-century later) that "one addict will recruit
seven others in his lifetime." He also fully played
up the xenophobic appeal of heroin's coming from foreign
lands, stating, "Like the invasions and plagues
of history, the scourge of narcotic drug addiction came
out of Asia...... Also, like the irreversible bite of
the mythical vampire, Hobson asserted, "So hopeless
is the victim, and so pitiless the master," that
the heroin addicts are termed "the living dead."
After having established the
dreaded imagery of the vampire-addict, Hobson went on
to organize his crusade. In a short time he had mobilized
such groups as the Women's Christian Temperance Union,
the Moose, the Kiwanis, the Knights of Columbus, the
Masonic orders, and various other lodges in his battle
against heroin. (The cause of temperance having been
mitigated by the Prohibition law, the heroin crusade
provided a new sense of purpose for many of these organizations.)
He created the World Narcotic Association and the Narcotic
Defense Foundation, whose goal was to raise $10 million
in ten years for "the defense of society from the
peril and menace of narcotic addiction." He also
published his own journal of "narcotic education."
By 1927 Hobson claimed to have
recruited "21,000 major clubs and organizations"
into his various "narcotic education programs."
The development of the radio networks after the First
World War gave him a new national pulpit, and time was
provided for his uninterrupted lectures on four hundred
stations for "Narcotics Education Week," which
he inspired the government to promulgate. He thus spoke
to an audience of unprecedented size, and warned in
1928 that virtually all crime in America was a symptom
of the new wave of heroin addiction. On the NBC network,
for example, he told a nationwide audience:
Most of the daylight robberies,
daring holdups, cruel murders, and similar crimes
of violence are now known to be committed chiefly
by drug addicts who constitute the primary cause
of our alarming crime wave....
Drug addiction is more
communicable and less curable than leprosy. Drug
addicts are the principal carriers of vice disease,
and with their lowered resistance are incubators
and carriers of the strepti coccus, pneumo coccus,
the germ of flu, of tuberculosis and other diseases.
New forces of narcotic
drug exploitation devised from the progress of modem
chemical science, added to the old form of the opium
traffic, now endanger the very future of the human
race.... The whole human race, though largely ignorant
on this subject, is now in the midst of a life and
death struggle with the deadliest foe that has ever
menaced its future. Upon the issue hangs the perpetuation
of civilization, the destiny of the world and the
future of the human race.
In 1929, Hobson journeyed to
Los Angeles and, again using radio, warned his West
Coast audience that "drug addicts are the cause
of our crime wave with its daring holdups, cruel and
unnatural murders, and the chief factor in the disappearance
of girls who fall to the underworld in ever increasing
numbers, now estimated at seventy-five thousand per
year." He argued that the "suffering of slaves"
was "easy and light" compared to the "living
death of drug addicts." He now asserted that addicts
were responsible for crime's placing "a burden
exceeding ten billions of dollars yearly on the American
people." At one point he placed the number of heroin
addicts as high as four million, and stressed that this
"army of addicts" would contaminate all other
Americans in a few short years. Up until his death,
in 1937, Captain Hobson continued to broadcast to millions
of Americans on the perils of narcotics, and distribute
through his many organizations tens of millions of pages
of educational material to schools and media. Since
there were few (if any) systematic studies of heroin
during this period, Captain Hobson's energetic crusade
created for a large segment of the American public the
stereotype of an addict as a vampire-like creature with
an insatiable appetite for crime and destruction and
a need to infect with his disease all who came in contact
with him.
Hobson's legend of the living
dead lived after him. The apocalyptic battle he depicted
between the forces of good and the army of addicts provided
countless politicians, police officials, and medical
bureaucrats with a conceptual framework from which they
could advance their particular interests. The Hobsonian
notion that heroin transformed innocents into uncontrollable
"desperadoes" became a persistent part of
police rhetoric. For example, in explaining a "crime
wave" to the newspapers in the late 1930s, New
York City police commissioner Richard E. Enright said
that addicts, "when inflamed with drugs ... are
capable of committing any crime"; and his successor,
Commissioner John O'Ryan, went further in attributing
"wanton brutality and reversion to the life of
the beast" to narcotics, which, he explained (apparently
on Hobson's authority), "penetrate the upper brain
and inflict swift and deep injury upon the gray matter
so a transformation of the individual follows quickly......
Although such "scientific"
explanations of crime provided a convenient rationale
for an expanded police department, they were based on
little more than the rhetoric that Hobson himself borrowed
verbatim from his earlier crusade against alcohol. In
fact, in more than fifty years of analysis, scientific
studies have not substantiated the image of the crazed
heroin fiend or "the living dead." On the
contrary, virtually all of the medical and pharmacological
investigations have found that heroin is a powerful
analgesic that depresses the central nervous system
and produces behavior characterized by apathy, lessened
physical activity, and diminished visual acuity. Instead
of inducing "wanton brutality," this medical
evidence suggests that heroin-and other opiates-decreases
violent response to provocations (as well as hunger
and sex drives in individuals). For example, in studying
the relation between drugs and violence, the National
Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse concluded, in
1973, "Assaultive offenses are significantly less
likely to be committed by ... opiate users." To
be sure, doctors have consistently found that heroin
is a habit-forming and dangerous drug, but it does not
necesarrily produce violent behavior. Nor, of course,
has any evidence been found suggesting that it suppresses
moral instincts, as Hobson claimed, or reverses the
evolutionary process. Hobson's theory that heroin was
the root cause of most crime in America also appealed
to a number of liberal doctors and medical bureaucrats.
After the Harrison Narcotics Act was passed, some doctors
established clinics in which they legally dispensed
narcotics to addicts to prevent them from suffering
from what was known as withdrawal symptoms. In a number
of notorious cases these clinics simply became wholesale
narcotics distributors, selling heroin and morphine
to all comers. The federal government held that such
clinics were in violation of the Harrison Narcotics
Act, which originally attempted to regulate the nonmedical
sale of drugs. Medical authorities argued that the applicability
of the act depended on the medical purpose for which
the drug was being used. However, in 1922, in U.S. v.
Behrman, the Supreme Court held that regardless of medical
intent. such treatment could be construed as illegal
tinder the act, and agents moved to close down the narcotics
clinics and arrest thousands of doctors dispensing heroin
and morphine.
Many doctors interested in
treating narcotics addicts assumed that these actions
by the federal government impinged on the legitimate
domain of medical expertise. Their protest that addicts
should be treated by doctors, not police, had little
popular appeal, since there was little concerti for
the individual addict on the part of the public. However,
when Captain Hobson connected in the public imagination
the addict and the crime problem, he also provided the
doctors and liberal reformers with a publicly acceptable
rationale for medical treatment. Accepting Hobson's
assertion that addicts committed billions of dollars'
worth of crimes (which was based on no evidence whatsoever),
these reformers argued that the addict was driven to
crime because he was "enslaved" by his insatiable
need for heroin. They argued that because the drug was
illegal and expensive, addicts were forced to steal
to obtain the money for it. On the other hand, doctors
were allowed freely to dispense, at low cost, heroin
and other narcotics to addicts, they would have no need
to commit thefts, and the American public would be spared
billions of dollars' worth of crime and violence. In
other words, these doctors proposed that the crime problem
was essentially a medical problem, and given the freedom
and resources to open narcotics-maintenance clinics,
they could solve the problem.
This "enslavement theory"
gained added currency in the 1960s with politicians
and reformers who sought a palatable explanation for
the increase in crimes in the city. Since heroin was
imported from abroad, local police commissioners and
mayors could claim that their urban crime rate could
be controlled only if the federal government and foreign
governments curtailed opium production at its source.
For example, 'in 1972, New York City police commissioner
Patrick V. Murphy testified:
Local police agencies cannot
... effectively stem the flow of narcotics into
our cities, much less into the needle-ridden veins
of hundreds of thousands of young people. Only the
Federal government is capable of making effective
strides, through the massive infusion of funds to
damming or diverting the ever-rising, devastating
flood-tide from the poppy fields of the Middle East,
South America, and Indo-China into the bodies of
pathetic victims in the United States.
In suggesting most crime was
not the work of hardened criminals but of innocent individuals
afflicted with an unquenchable addiction, the enslavement
theory had great appeal to those objecting to stricter
police measures as a solution to the crime problem.
Despite its advantages, however, the empirical evidence
gathered about drug addiction in the twentieth century
runs counter to the main tenet of the theory. Reviews
of criminal records of addicts have shown, without exception,
that most addicts had long histories of criminal behavior
that predated their addiction, or even their use of
drugs.* In other words, according to all existing studies,
heroin does not necessarily convert innocent persons
into criminals: generally, criminal-addicts are first
criminals, then addicts. Though heroin undoubtedly is
used by a large number of individuals engaged in crime
and other risk-taking behavior, there is little persuasive
evidence suggesting that it is the cause rather than
an effect in most cases.
* See, for example, J. Tinkleberg,
"Drugs and Crimes," appendix, National Commission
on Marijuana and Drug Abuse, 1973, C. J. Friedman and
A. S. Friedman, "Drug Abuse and Delinquency,"
National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse, 1973.
J. C. Jacobi, N. A. Weiner, and M. E. Wolfgang, "Drug
Use and Criminality in a Natural Cohort," National
Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse, 1973.
Hobson's formulation of heroin
as a chemical that would, after ingestion, render one
a slave for life also provided medical practitioners
with a rationale for maintenance treatment. In ruling
on the Harrison Narcotics Act the courts had in effect
subscribed to the theory that addiction was a dangerous
condition defined by the continuous use of heroin. Thus,
if the agent-heroin-were completely withdrawn from an
addicted person, the "disease" would no longer
exist. On the other hand, Hobson's notion that heroin
induced an irreversible change in the victim whereby
he was "normal" only when taking heroin, and
abnormal without it, justified the dispensing of heroin
by doctors as a form of medical treatment. (Methadone
maintenance is merely a modern-day extension of this
logic.) However, the contention that heroin irreversibly
enslaves the user has not been confirmed by any large-scale
study of drug use. In Vietnam, for, example, the U.S.
Army found by testing urine specimens that more than
250,000 American soldiers had used heroin, and that
of these, some 80,000 could be classified as addicts
(in that they used it every day for long periods and
suffered withdrawal symptoms). Yet, more than 90 percent
of these users and addicts were able voluntarily to
withdraw from the use of heroin without any medical
assistance or without any permanent aftereffects. Follow-up
studies showed that less than 1 percent of the total
number-and less than 6 percent of the addicts-used heroin
again in a two-year period after they were discharged
from the Army. Doctors and scientists studying this
massive data were compelled to conclude that heroin
use did not necessarily lead to addiction, and that
addiction was not necessarily irreversible. Indeed,
the Vietnam data suggested that in large part addiction
resulted from problems in adjusting to an unfriendly
environment (i.e., the war in Vietnam) rather than from
the chemical effects of the drug itself. Though Vietnam
may be a special case in many respects, it has also
been found in studies of prisoners that after they have
been withdrawn from heroin, they perform normally for
the balance of their terms in prison.
Hobson's definition of narcotics
addiction as a threat to the very existence of civilization
subsequently became the official justification for the
federal government's mounting a massive law-enforcement
program against drug smugglers, dealers, and even addicts.
Hobson argued in his book Drug Addiction-A Malignant
Racial Cancer that, as suggested by the cancer metaphor,
addiction knew no racial boundaries, and it would spread
from the yellow and black to the white race by "contaminating"
the vulnerable youth. The suggestions he gave in his
educational material-that white girls were seduced by
narcotics into a life of prostitution by men of other
races-were subsumed by public officials, one of whom
was Harry J. Anslinger, the director of the federal
Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962. In explaining
the purpose of his law-enforcement bureau, Anslinger
gave the public lurid descriptions of how Orientals
used drugs to entice "women from good families"
into brothels. (The persistence of this cancer theory
can be found not only in contemporary stories about
heroin spreading out of the ghetto but also in the newspaper
reports that Patricia Hearst was "drugged"
into joining an interracial group of urban guerrillas.)
Anslinger soon found that the Hobsonian rhetoric could
be applied to marijuana as well as to heroin, and in
the mid-1930s, in asking for funds to expand his bureau,
he sounded the alarm of an epidemic of marijuana addiction,
asserting that this "dope addiction" had brought
about "an epidemic of crimes committed by young
people." After publishing an article on this subject
in 1937, entitled "Marijuana: Assassin of Youth,"
he succeeded in having Congress -pass the Marijuana
Tax Act in 1937. Anslinger's campaign to depict marijuana
as a crime-breeding drug was debunked to such an extent
by later critics that the prewar film Reefer Madness,
which supposedly depicted how marijuana converts innocents
into criminals, is today enjoyed on college campuses
as a parody.
During World War II, Anslinger
waged a press campaign to convince the American public
that Japan was systematically attempting to addict its
enemies, including the American people, to opium, in
order to destroy their civilization. Although there
was no other evidence of the putative "Japanese
Opium Offensive," Coast Guardships and Internal
Revenue Service investigative units were directed to
work with Anslinger's bureau. In 1950, during the Korean
War, Anslinger again used the Hobsonian theme, leaking
a report to the press that "subversion through
drug addiction is an established aim of Communist China,"
and that the Chinese were smuggling massive amounts
of heroin into the United States to "weaken American
resistance." The New York Times, after reporting
the assertion as fact, explained in an editorial, "Communists
... are eager to get as many addicts as possible in
the territory of those to whom they are opposed."
Again, despite the yellow-peril hysteria of the time,
no evidence was ever found that China was sending heroin
the United States.
For a host of reasons, then,
Hobson's vampire like visions of addiction were kept
alive by politicians, police officials, doctors, and
enterprising bureaucrats. The drama of the "living
dead" subverting our civilization was reported
with great enthusiasm by the press rather than questioned.
The themes were not woven together into any coherent
pattern until the early 1960s, when the governor of
New York, Nelson Rockefeller, ingeniously transformed
Hobson's vampire-addict notion into a political design.
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