The hysterical
image of the vampire-addict that Captain Hobson propagated
in the 1930s was brilliantly refined into a national
political issue in the 1960s by Nelson Rockefeller,
who, in projecting this nationwide "reign of terror,"
had at his disposal an unprecedented family fortune.
The Rockefeller fortune was begun by Nelson's great
grandfather William Avery Rockefeller, a nineteenth-century
dealer in drugs who, like modern narcotics dealers,
dressed in extravagant ilk costumes, used aliases, and
never carried less than a thousand dollars in cash on
his person. "Big Bill," as he was commonly
called, hawked "herbal remedies" and other
bottled medicines which, if they were like other patent
medicines being sold in those days, contained opium
as an active ingredient. Long before opium-the juice
from the poppy-became the base of patent medicine in
America, it was used in Asia as a remedy for dysentery
and as a general pain-killer. Because it was a powerful
analgesic, hucksters on the American frontier made quick
fortunes selling their various "miracle" preparations.
In any case, Big Bill, who
advertised himself as a "Cancer Specialist,"
was sufficiently successful in selling drugs to stake
his son John Davison Rockefeller to the initial capital
he needed to go into the oil business in Cleveland.
Young Rockefeller found that oil was far more profitable
than herbal medicine. He foresaw that concentration
and combination rather than competition were the order
of the future. Moreover, he realized that the leverage
for gaining control over the burgeoning oil industry
lay in the hands of the railroads. Since oil was more
or less a uniform product, costing the same at the wellhead
and fetching the same price at the market, any refiner
who could ship his oil to market for even a few cents
less a barrel than his competitors could eventually
drive them out of business. With this insight Rockefeller
played the railroads in Cleveland against each other
until he was given a surreptitious discount, or "rebate,"
by the railroads, which provided him a decisive advantage
over his competitors. By the turn of the century Rockefeller's
company, Standard Oil Company, refined more than 90
percent of the oil in the United States and two-thirds
of the oil in the world. Rockefeller's personal fortune
was equal to some 2 percent of the GNP of the entire
United States.
Rockefeller's only son, John
Davison Rockefeller, Jr., used the fortune to launch
a number of crusades of his own, including financing
a large part of the movement to prohibit alcohol in
the United States (an effort in which Captain Hobson
was then playing a leading role). Although his crusade
against alcohol ultimately failed, he was not discouraged
from public enterprises. He built Rockefeller Center
at the height of the Depression as a monument to the
family's enterprise, and encouraged his second-eldest
son, Nelson, to enter public life.
Nelson first learned the techniques
of propagating and controlling information when he was
appointed coordinator of inter-American affairs at the
age of thirty-two by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
and given the responsibility of running a $150-million
propaganda agency in Latin America. To gain complete
control over the media of Latin America, Rockefeller
engineered a ruling from the United States Treasury
which exempted from taxation the cost of advertisements
placed by American corporations that were "cooperating"
with Rockefeller in Latin America. This tax-exempt advertising
eventually constituted more than 40 percent of all radio
and television revenues in Latin America. By selectively
directing this advertising toward newspapers and radio
stations that accepted "guidance" from his
office, he was effectively able to control the images
that the newspapers and radio stations of Latin America
projected about America during World War 11. By 1945
more than 75 percent of the news of the world that reached
Latin America originated from Washington, where it was
tightly controlled and shaped by Rockefeller's office.
In developing this mode of psychological warfare, Rockefeller
learned not only the vulnerabilities of the press but
the techniques of manipulating news. By supplying a
daily diet of some 30,000 words of "news"-including
editorials, articles, news photographs, and "exclusive
features"-to the media of Latin America, Rockefeller
came to appreciate the reality that journalists acted
mainly as messengers of dramatic and titillating stories,
rather than as any sort of independent investigators.
As long as Latin Americans were spoon-fed manufactured
anecdotes and dramatic happenings that fell within the
generally accepted definition of "news," they
would not question the interest or politics that lay
behind the disclosure of this information to them. This
education in the management and manipulation of news
was to prove invaluable to Nelson Rockefeller in his
political career after World War II.
After serving briefly in the
Truman and Eisenhower administrations, Nelson Rockefeller
decided in 1958 to run for elective office as governor
of New York State. As the former coordinator of information
in Latin America he had little difficulty in mobilizing
support for himself in the media, and he succeeded in
projecting an image of himself as a liberal, or, at
least, as an enlightened Republican. Appealing to both
the liberal constituency in New York City and the Republican
constituency in the upstate areas, Rockefeller was easily
elected governor. His more expansive ambition of being
elected president, however, presented a much more difficult
problem in image management. The highly sophisticated
polls of public opinion that Rockefeller commissioned
in the early 1960s (and George Gallup, of the Gallup
Poll, had worked for him in Latin America) indicated
that a Republican candidate could not win in a national
election without attracting large numbers of the more
liberal-leaning independent voters-and this would require
maintaining a liberal-Republican image. Yet, Rockefeller
was also aware that to win the Republican nomination
and the support of the more conservative stalwarts of
the Republican party required a hard-line and even anti-liberal
image. As a result, the more Rockefeller tried to amass
support in the media, and among independent voters..
by projecting a liberal image, the more he lost support
among more conservative Republicans. Unable to resolve
this dilemma of conflicting images, Rockefeller was
decisively rejected by delegates at the 1964 Republican
convention, who instead enthusiastically endorsed Senator
Barry Goldwater, who went on to lose the general election
by a disastrous proportion of the vote.
After his 1964 defeat, Rockefeller
ingeniously developed an issue which seemed to resolve
the political dilemma by appealing to both the hard-line
element in the Republican party and the liberal-to-moderate
element among the independent voters-the drug issue.
By proposing measures for oppressing drug users that
were more draconian than anything ever proposed by Senator
Goldwater or by his most hard-line followers, Rockefeller
hoped to placate the law-and-order Republicans by toughening
his image. At the same time, analysis of public opinion
showed that the more liberal independents and modern
Republican voters would not object to measures that
enhanced their personal safety. As Rockefeller subsequently
pointed out, in 1973, in a speech to the New York State
legislature, "Every poll of public concern documents
that the number one growing concern of the American
people is crime and drugs-coupled with an all-pervasive
fear for the safety of their person and property."
To exploit this well-researched "all-pervasive
fear" and turn it into a national political issue,
Rockefeller worked to establish in the popular imagination
a connection between violent crimes and drugs. He argued
that even if drugs did not in themselves induce violent
behavior, the user, physiologically dependent on the
drug, felt compelled to steal in order to pay for his
habit. Rockefeller correctly foresaw that this more
sophisticated "dependency theory" could be
used to inspire another wave of fear in the public (as
well as among intellectuals) that heroin addicts were
jeopardizing the lives and property of citizens, and
therefore drastic action was necessary.
* Of course, one could apply
a similar "dependency theory" to other disabled
groups-alcoholics, cripples, blind people, or even divorced
women with two children-arguing that since their disability
prevents them from easily obtaining employment. they
need money to compensate for their disability, and they
will be compelled to steal.
Masterfully employing the tactics
of psychological warfare that he and his staff developed
in Latin America during World War II, Rockefeller first
began expanding the drug issue during his gubernatorial
reelection campaign in 1966. Depicting heroin as an
infectious disease that, like the common flu, could
be spread to unwilling victims in both the ghetto and
the suburbs, Rockefeller boldly declared that the epidemic
of addiction in New York State had reached the proportions
of a plague and was threatening the lives of innocent
middle-class children. Demanding "an all-out war
on drugs and addiction," he rushed a law through
the legislature providing for the involuntary confinement
of drug addicts for up to live years for "treatment,"
even if they were not convicted of any crime. Although
the courts had consistently ruled that addiction itself
is not a crime, this new procedure, known euphemistically
as "civil commitment," permitted officials
to lock up addicts in "rehabilitation centers,"
even if they were not convicted of a crime.
While
the phrases "treatment" and "rehabilitation
center" were shrewdly designed to imply a medical
model dealing with drug addiction, and thus appealed
to Rockefeller's liberal constituency, there was in
1966 no program of medical treatment for addiction in
New York State. There was not even a concept or an operational
definition of what addiction was or how it could be
treated. If, for example, addiction were defined as
being the physical dependence on a drug, then coffee
and tobacco would fall in the same category as heroin
under the "civil commitment" law. On the other
hand, if addiction were defined as being a permanent
metabolic change in the nervous system-one that was
irreversible-then the various programs of detoxification,
or gradual withdrawal from heroin, being used in "rehabilitation
centers" would not treat the disease any more than
withdrawing patients from insulin would treat diabetes.
Indeed, at the time of the passage of the 1966 law,
doctors could not even agree whether addiction was produced
by the chemical agent heroin or by the environmental
depravity in which the addict lived. Rockefeller shrewdly
perceived, however, that he did not have to concern
himself with these medical problems and confusions.
Demanding the imprisonment of some 25,000 addicts in
New York (the number he was giving in those days) without
time-consuming trials, Rockefeller realized that he
could bait his liberal opponents in the election-Frank
D. O'Connor, the Democratic candidate and a former prosecutor,
and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jr., the Liberal party
candidate-into opposing this new and hastily conceived
law. When in the heat of the campaign O'Connor did in
fact criticize Rockefeller's rehabilitation program
as "an election-year stunt" and "medically
unsound," Rockefeller was finally in a position
fully to exploit the drug issue. In speech after speech
he asserted, as he did in a rally in Brooklyn on November
1, 1966:
Frank O'Connor's election
would mean narcotic addicts would continue to be
free to roam the street- to mug, snatch purses,
to steal, even to murder, or to spread the deadly
infection that afflicts them possibly to your own
son or daughter. Half the crime in New York City
is committed by narcotic addicts. My program-the
program that Frank O'Connor pledges to scrap-will
get addicts off the street for Lip to three years
of treatment, aftercare, and rehabilitation....
(Rockefeller never gave a source
for his assertion that half the crime in New York was
caused by drug addicts; nor did he give sources for
most of the other statistics he used.)
Fully resurrecting the vampire
imagery of an earlier time, Rockefeller brilliantly
exploited the fear that New York citizens would lose
their lives and children to murderous addicts. Since
Rockefeller lost few votes among the addicts he was
threatening to quarantine in prison, he easily won reelection.
As a Democratic leader explained on CBS television,
O'Connor underestimated the fear of people about rampant
crime: "Parents are scared that their kids might
get hooked and turn into addicts themselves; people
want the addicts off the streets, they don't care how
you get them off."
Through the instrument of this
generalized fear, Rockefeller was able not only to harden
his law-and-order image to meet the political requisites
of his own party (and to win elections) but also to
project a new nationwide menace which he alone among
the nation's politicians had the "experience"
to solve. His newly created Narcotics Addiction Control
Commission (NACC), which supposedly supervised the involuntary
rehabilitation of addicts under the 1966 law, had on
its staff many more public-relations specialists than
medical specialists. Turning to the modus operandi that
Rockefeller developed in Latin America, the commission
published its own nationally circulated newspaper, Attack,
as well as newsletters, pamphlets, and background briefings
for journalists interested in writing on the new reign
of terror." This new agency was thus able systematically
to coordinate and cultivate a highly dramatic image
of the heroin addict as a drug slave who ineluctably
is compelled to steal and ravage by his heroin habit-a
disease which can be "treated" only by quarantining
the addict. If Rockefeller had not succeeded in establishing
a quasimedical vocabulary for heroin addiction, this
proposal might have been recognized as a repressive
form of pretrial detention for suspected criminals.
The size of the addict population
in New York proved to be conveniently flexible over
the years 1966-1973. When it was necessary to demonstrate
the need for greater police measures or more judges,*
Rockefeller and his staff expanded the number of putative
addicts from 25,000 in 1966 to 150,000 in 1972 to 200,000
in 1973. For other audiences, and especially when Rockefeller
wanted to show the efficacy of his program, the army
of addicts was conveniently contracted in public speeches
to under 100,000. (if the addict population had really
increased from 25,000 to 200,000 between 1966 and 1973,
as can be inferred from Rockefeller's various claims,
this 800-percent increase would hardly demonstrate success
in his extraordinary war against addicts.) Rockefeller
suggested in one of his tracts against heroin that "addiction
appears to spread exponentially." The image of
an uncontrollable epidemic of heroin addiction being
responsible for most crime in America appealed not only
to police officials around the country, who could use
this fear to justify the need for more men and money,
but also to doctors and hospital administrators who
were eager to expand their treatment facilities and
rehabilitation staffs. Thus, little resistance was offered
to the dubious medical claims put forth by Rockefeller's
public-relations men. By December, 1971, the alleged
army of addicts in New York had been hyped to such proportions
that Rockefeller could seriously write in the New York
Law Journal:
How can we defeat drug
abuse before it destroys America? I believe the
answer lies in summoning the total commitment America
has always demonstrated in times of national crisis....
Drug addiction represents a threat akin to war in
its capacity to kill, enslave and imperil the nation's
future: akin to cancer in spreading a deadly disease
among us and equal to any other challenge we face
in deserving all the brain power, man power, and
resources necessary to overcome it.
Continuing, he rhetorically
asked, "Are the sons and daughters of a generation
that survived a great depression and rebuilt a prosperous
nation, that defeated Nazism and Fascism and preserved
the free world, to be vanquished by a powder, needles,
and pills?"
* One by-product of this putative
"reign of terror" was that Rockefeller was
able to gain authority in 1973 to appoint one hundred
"narcotic judges" in New York State, and since
judgeships are one of the most prized rewards of New
York State politics, Rockefeller also gained a measure
of influence for himself.
In the next few years Rockefeller
used statistical legerdemain with unprecedented skill
to convert heroin into a multibillion-dollar issue.
Since the police generally
assumed that many addicts were criminals who had shoplifted,
burglarized abandoned buildings, "boosted"
merchandise from parked trucks, forged welfare checks,
and committed other forms of petty larceny, Rockefeller
and his staff decided that by simply multiplying the
total number of estimated addicts by what they assumed
each addict's habit cost him to maintain, they could
ascertain, as one of his advisors put it, an impressive
"billion-dollar figure." For example, if they
assumed, as they did in 1970, that there were 100,000
addicts in New York and that each addict had a habit
of $30 a day, they could calculate that the "army
of addicts" was compelled to steal $1,095,000,000
worth of goods to pay for their combined habit. The
estimated numbers were quite elastic, if not totally
arbitrary, for political purposes. By playing with the
estimate they could arrive at any figure they believed
was necessary to impress the populace with the danger
of addicts.
There was, however, a stumbling
block to the billion-dollar estimates. The total amount
of reported theft that was not recovered in New York
City in the Rockefeller years was never more than $100
million a year, and only a fraction of this could be
considered stolen by addicts (since the largest segment,
automobiles, was stolen by teenage joy-riders, and eventually
recovered). Governor Rockefeller thus commissioned the
Hudson Institute, a "think tank" with close
connections to the Rockefeller family and institutions,
to reanalyze the amount of theft which possibly could
be attributed to addicts. After studying the problem,
Hudson Institute reported back to Rockefeller in 1970:
"No matter how we generate estimates of total value
of property stolen in New York City, we cannot find
any way of getting these estimates above five hundred
million dollars a year-and only a part of this could
be conceivably attributed to addicts." The governor,
schooled in the art of controlling information, found
it unnecessary to accept such a statistical defeat.
He simply persisted in multiplying the maximum possible
amount of theft in New York City by ten and arrived
at a figure of $5 billion, which he attributed entirely
to heroin addicts. Rockefeller's long experience in
psychological warfare had taught him that large, authoritative-sounding
numbers-like $5 billion a year-could be effectively
employed in political rhetoric. Thus, in testifying
before the United States Senate in 1975 that addict
crime was costing the citizens of New York State "up
to five billion dollars," Rockefeller could be
fully confident that no senator would bother to chip
away at his hyperbole.
In May, 1970, Rockefeller's
staff, apparently excited by the wave of national publicity
their heroin imagery was gaining for the governor, presented
plans to declare a "drug emergency" and asked
President Nixon and Mayor John Lindsay to set up "emergency
camps" to quarantine all of New York City's addicts.
In commenting on the plan, Rayburne Hesse, a member
of Rockefeller's NACC, wrote in a private memorandum,
"The press would love the action, the editorialists
would denounce the vigilante tactics ... civil libertarians
would be aghast. . ." and for these reasons went
on to recommend the plan. The point, -however, was not
to round up addicts but simply to fuel the national
concern. Thus, although the plan was disseminated to
the press and aroused much publicity, it was never put
into effect.
Rockefeller's
crusade against addicts reached its zenith in 1973,
when the governor declared that a reign of terror existed
with "whole neighborhoods ... as effectively destroyed
by addicts as by an invading army." The elements
of fear in his heroin story had already been articulated
and established by the various publications and briefings
of his narcotics commission. Again in the century, addicts
had taken the place of medieval vampires-infecting innocent
children with their disease, murdering citizens at large,
causing all crime and disorder. Rockefeller thus had
little difficulty in 1973 in pressing through the legislature
laws which totally bypassed the discretion of both the
court and the prosecutors, and made it mandatory that
anyone convicted of selling or possessing more than
a fraction of an ounce of heroin (or even amphetamines
or LSD) would be imprisoned for life. This new "Attila
the Hun Law," as It was called in the state legislature,
extended the mandatory life sentence to sixteen year-old
children, who heretofore had been protected by the youthful
offender law. For information leading to the arrest
of drug possessors or sellers, thousand-dollar bounties
would be paid. And in another legal innovation the bill
provided a mandatory-life-imprisonment sentence for
the novel crime of ingesting a "hard" drug
before committing any number of prescribed crimes including
criminal mischief, sodomy, burglary, assault, and arson.
Under this new law a person would be presumed to be
guilty of ingestion if he took any of these drugs within
twenty-four hours of committing any of these crimes.
Since addicts by definition continually took these drugs,
they could be rounded up and mandatorily sentenced to
concentration camps for life for committing any of a
number of petty crimes, for which judges previously
would have hesitated before putting them in prison at
all. As Rockefeller shrewdly anticipated, the passage
of such extraordinary laws (which were only slightly
modified by the state legislature) created an instant
furor in the nation's press. Rockefeller thus strengthened
his reputation among the hard-line element of the Republican
party without losing much support elsewhere, since few
people in America were concerned with the fate of drug
addicts. Rockefeller later justified the law by explaining
in his Senate testimony that "about 135,000 addicts
were robbing, mugging, murdering, day in and day out
for their money to fix their habit....." Though
this depiction of a huge army of addicts carrying out
daily mayhem against the citizens of New York no doubt
further excited popular fears, it hardly fit the police
statistics at Rockefeller's disposal. If 135,000 addicts
maintained their "day-in, day-out" schedule,
they would have had to commit something on the order
of 49,275,000 robberies, muggings, and murders a year,
which would mean that the average resident of New York
would be robbed, mugged, and murdered approximately
seven times a year. In fact, there were only about 110,000
such crimes reported in New York City in 1973, or only
1/445th the number of crimes that Rockefeller claimed
were being committed solely by addicts. Even here, as
Rockefeller was well aware, virtually all analyses showed
that the addicts were responsible for only a minute
fraction of the violent crimes he attributed to them
in his constant rhetoric. Most murders and manslaughters
were the result of intrafamily disputes, not addiction.
Most muggings were the work of juveniles, not hardened
addicts. Indeed, the Hudson Institute concluded, in
the aforementioned study commissioned by Rockefeller,
that less than 2 percent of addicts in New York financed
their habit by either robbery or muggings (and they
also concluded that there was only a fraction of the
number of hardened addicts that Rockefeller claimed
there were). Moreover, in 1972, another analysis by
the New York City police department concluded, "Both
the volume and seriousness of addict crime are exaggerated."
Only 4.4 percent of those arrested in the city for felonies
against person-which include murders, muggings, and
robberies-were confirmed drug users (and only a small
percentage of these could possibly be classified as
addicts). Addicts generally refrain from such crimes
against persons, according to most views of addict behavior,
because it involves too high a risk of being caught,
imprisoned, and withdrawn from their drug. Petty crimes
against property, however, such as burglarizing abandoned
houses, involve much fewer risks and potentially much
higher profits. The proposals for putting addicts in
concentration camps for life, thus, if actually carried
would have an infinitesimal effect on decreasing violent
crimes against persons. The "Attila the Hun Law"
was never enforced with any great enthusiasm against
addicts-or even against pushers. The purpose was to
provide Rockefeller with a law-and-order image that
would satisfy even the most retrograde member of the
Republican party. And Rockefeller played the politics
of fear so adroitly in the national media that President
Nixon borrowed from him many rhetorical images and the
statistical hyperbole linking heroin and crime in the
public's mind. In his brilliant coordination of information
and misinformation about addicts, Rockefeller succeeded
in making the heroin vampire a national issue and himself
vice-president, even if in the next two years the laws
themselves proved unworkable.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For
drug addicts in treatment, recovery
from addiction should be their
top priority, and they should pay no mind to any issues
that may distract
them from their goal.
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