Despite
continuing efforts by Egil Krogh and his young staff
on the Domestic Council and increasing pressures from
their superiors in the White House for "dramatic
results," the embryonic war on drugs soon dissolved
into open bureaucratic strife. There were no fewer than
fifteen different federal agencies, with different programs,
involved in the government offensive against drugs,
and each tended to view the problem from the perspective
of its own particular programs and interests. By early
1971 Krogh found that the administration's entire effort
was leaking like a sieve, with the various agencies
releasing to congressional subcommittees and the press,
information which advanced their own programmatic interests
and undermined those of competing agencies. In this
morass of conflicting claims and statistics it became
impossible for the White House to sustain its initiative
for long.
For example, after the Bureau
of Customs succeeded in obtaining tens of millions of
dollars' worth of new airplanes and patrol equipment
on the assumption that much of the narcotics in America
came from Mexico, and could therefore be intercepted
by intensified border surveillance, the Bureau of Narcotics
and Dangerous Drugs released information to Congress
and the press which suggested that Turkey, not Mexico,
was the crucial source of supply. When the White House
then succeeded in pressing the State Department into
action against the Turkish poppy fields, the CIA released
its "survey, which showed that Turkey produced
only a small fraction of the world's illicit opium,
and that if this supply were curtailed, it would rapidly
be replaced through other countries in Asia and the
Middle East. In another case John Ingersoll had hired
systems analysts to demonstrate to the public that there
were nine primary systems of narcotics distribution
in the United States. When the BNDD was focusing almost
all its efforts on these nine systems rather than on
the small trafficker, Eugene Rossides and the Bureau
of Customs found a tenth system, unlisted by the BNDD
in its charts. More embarrassingly, it was the largest
single supplier of heroin to United States markets.
Nixon called Ingersoll and
Krogh to his office to clarify the situation, and after
Ingersoll presented a number of bar graphs depicting
the increased value of seizures of narcotics through
this systems approach, Krogh recalled that the president
responded, "Now this is very impressive, but does
it have anything to do with solving the problem of narcotics
... are there less narcotics on the street? Are there
fewer addicts? Is there less crime related to the use
of narcotics? Can you show me that the problem itself
is being corrected by these operational indices of success?"
Since Ingersoll could not specify the number of addicts
in the United States, or the total amount of heroin
that was consumed, Nixon realized that there was no
way of knowing what proportion of the heroin traffic
passed through the nine systems that Lngersoll was concentrating
his forces on. Even Rossides readily admitted to anyone
who asked that less than one fifth of all narcotics
shipped into the United States was intercepted before
it reached its ultimate customers. At one point, when
Ehrlichman brought him a report on bureaucratic charges
and countercharges, the president shook his head in
dismay and asked, "Why are they fighting each other
... instead of drug traffickers?" Yet the continuing
conflicts between the law-enforcement agencies involved
in the war on drugs were relatively minor compared to
the "bureaucratic in-fighting," as Krogh put
it, among the nine agencies involved with the problem
of treating narcotics addicts-and thereby reducing demand.
The federal government had
first become involved in the treatment of addicts in
1929, when Congress established facilities at Lexington,
Kentucky, and Fort Worth, Texas, to treat the large
number of imprisoned addicts in federal penitentiaries,
and to provide an alternative to the private clinics
that had recently been outlawed by the federal government.
These "narcotic farms," as they were called,
detoxified addicts by gradually reducing their daily
dosages of heroin until they were completely withdrawn
from the drug under the supervision of government-employed
psychiatrists. Detoxification proved unsuccessful in
permanently changing the behavior of those who underwent
the treatment-more than 70 percent of those who were
committed to the government's narcotic farms eventually
resumed the use of heroin. It was debatable whether
this resumption was due to the environment to which
they returned or to the chemical lure of the drug itself.
In any case, detoxification became the central focus
for government research and data collection on narcotics
addiction. By the time the Nixon administration assumed
office, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH),
which administered the "farms" and employed
the psychiatrists engaged in the detoxification programs,
had developed a "bureaucratic interest in maintaining
the status quo," as Egil Krogh explained the situation.
Despite White House pressures, NIMH resisted the Idea
of using treatment as part of the law-and-order campaign
which focused on the ghetto population. It claimed that
this was because the methods of treatment were untried
and possibly unsafe. Krogh, however, saw this as a bureaucratic
problem. He explained in a memorandum to John Ehrlichman
that the "primary orientation of NIMH is towards
professionals and psychiatrists not other approaches
the Institute's target populations have historically
been non-poor; ... philosophically, NIMH orientation
could not accommodate non-Mental health approaches......
In September, 1970, the president himself became concerned
over the independence" of NIMH, when its director,
Bertram Brown, was quoted by the Washington Post as
recommending that marijuana violations be treated no
more seriously than traffic violations and that offenders
simply be given a ticket. Since this conflicted directly
with the administration's bete-noire strategy, to appear
merciless and unrelenting in prosecuting crimes, Krogh
recalled, "The president hit the ceiling."
He even wrote Krogh a personal note suggesting "that
clown Brown" be fired immediately, and then angrily
reiterated this demand in a meeting a few days later
with Ehrlichman, Krogh, and Krogh's assistant, Jeffrey
Donfeld. According to Donfeld, Krogh then asked him
to prepare a memorandum for the president which would
provide "evidence of incompetency." Donfeld
investigated and found that Brown was a close friend
of' Elliot Richardson's, and that Richardson would not
be easily persuaded to fire Brown to please the White
House. Realizing that Richardson was not a man to be
trifled with, the president ordered the matter dropped.
And by December, 1970, as Krogh and Donfeld watched
in complete frustration, Bertram Brown managed to gain
effective control over an interagency study group which
was supposed to promulgate national goals for the war
on drugs. Brown steered the group into recommending
that his agency, NIMH, take the lead in government efforts
to reduce addiction. To counter these recommendations,
Krogh immediately set up another study group of experts
not in the government.
The administration was also
having problems with the Department of Health, Education,
and Welfare, which through a number of its other agencies
was funding treatment programs throughout the United
States. Secretary Richardson took the position that
the criterion for allocating funds to programs should
be the "size of the local drug problem." Although
this may have seemed like a rational way of allocating
federal money to the neediest areas, it would mean that
New York City, which then had approximately half of
the drug addicts in the nation, and Chicago, which also
had a large addiction problem, would receive most of
the federal money. In political terms, H. R. Haldeman
pointed out, reaching two cities that were "Democratic
strongholds" was "unacceptable." Donfeld
reminded Krogh of this consideration in a May 17, 1971,
memorandum criticizing the submission of drug-abuse
"initiatives" from the Health, Education,
and Welfare Department. In the section on "Selection
of Recipient Cities," Donfeld noted, "If 'size
of the local drug problem' is a key criteria for funding,
then most of the money will be poured down the insatiable
holes of New York and Chicago with no likely visible
reduction in crime. Let's dream up a non-formula where
some political mileage can result from visibly achieving
a reduction in crime." On the other hand, two agencies
created by Lyndon B. Johnson in his war on poverty,
the Model Cities Administration in the Department of
Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Office of
Economic Opportunity (OEO), wanted a large part of the
"drug money" invested in counselors and other
jobs in the ghettos which would be administered by their
agencies. The White House staff feared that such money
would not go for treating addiction or reducing the
crime problem in the inner city but for hiring more
organizers in the poverty agencies who would ultimately
work against the interests of the Nixon adminstration.
Adding to the confusion, NIMH proposed that "community
mental health centers be the focal point for drug rehabilitation
projects." The White House stall' viewed this as
simply an attempt by NIMH to expand its empire, and
commented in a memorandum,-"Community Mental Health
Centers are brick buildings in primarily middle class
neighborhoods ... how many young blacks now go to psychiatrists
or would want to go to mental health centers for their
addiction?" The staff warned that such a program
would strengthen the NIMH dynasty to the detriment of
the administration's law-and-order programs. (NIMH was
also muddying the waters by releasing multibillion-dollar
estimates of the amount of crime being committed by
drug addicts; and the Domestic Council, according to
a staff report authored by Krogh and Donfeld, attributed
these exaggerated figures to NIMH's "desire to
evidence (a] need for treatment programs, thereby aggrandizing
their territory.")
There was also "a growing
White House concern with coordinating treatment programs
for soldiers returning from Vietnam." according
to Krogh. In the summer of 1970, both Egil Krogh and
John Ehrlichman visited Vietnam and discovered that
it was an open secret that a large number of American
servicemen in Saigon were using heroin. The Department
of Defense, however, refused to accept Krogh and Ehrlichman's
findings and claimed that there were "only a few
dozen" confirmed cases of heroin addiction in the
Army. Meanwhile, Krogh found Out that congressional
investigators in South Vietnam were being told by unit
commanders that between 10 and 15 percent of all U.S.
troops in South Vietnarn were addicted. The specter
of several hundred thousand addicts returning from Vietnam
convinced the president that the federal government
would have vastly to expand its treatment facilities.
At one point Krogh suggested that funds could be provided
to the Veterans Administration to allow it to expand
its treatment facilities for returning soldiers. The
president, demonstrating some insight into the escalating
nature of bureaucracies, decided against building new
"Veterans Administration capacity to handle heroin
addicts because once they are built, one can never get
rid of that capacity," according to a memorandum
of the conversation. (Such memoranda were assigned to
what was known as the President's File.) Since there
seemed no other way out of the bureaucratic tan-le,
the president agreed with Krogh and his staff that the
only answer was to "reorganize into a central agency
the separate efforts of the nine federal agencies dealing
in these areas. . . ." Krogh later explained, "We
felt we couldn't get control of policy unless we put
it all together."
The idea of placing all the
federal treatment and rehabilitation programs for narcotics
addicts under the umbrella of a single agency was first
proposed in 1970 by the President's Advisory Council
on Executive Organization, which was headed by Roy L.
Ash. The Ash Council, as it was known in the government,
suggested that this new umbrella agency be created within
the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. It
became clear, however, in early 1971 that this new agency
would, if located in HEW, fall under the influence of
Bertram Brown's NIMH rather than that of the White House.
Since hundreds of millions of dollars were to be channeled
into selective cities and programs by this new agency,
and it was hoped that such treatment might bring about
dramatic results before the 1972 election, Ehrlichman
decided that the new umbrella agency should be under
the direct control of the White House. "There was
a strong feeling that it should span everything, be
accountable to the president and be in the president's
office," Krogh later stated. Thus, in the spring
of 1971, President Nixon approved plans to create a
special-action office which would allow the White House
staff radically to revamp all the government's narcotics
treatment programs and use them for novel purposes.
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