“Just Say No”: Drug Abuse Policy in the Reagan Administration

I had served as an assistant director of the Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention (SAODAP) under President Richard Nixon and had been one of the architects of the original federal strategy for dealing with the drug problem in the early 1970s. Later I became, in the Carter administration, director of the White House Office of Drug Abuse Policy (ODAP), an expanded version of SAODAP with authority over all treatment, law enforcement, and foreign policy aspects of drug abuse. Through three administrations, two Republican and one Democratic, a network of expertise had been built up both inside and outside the government. It was comprised of people who regarded themselves as career professionals in the field of addiction sciences. Mostly physicians, medical scientists, epidemiologists, social workers, and psychologists, and others in the helping professions, they created what amounted to the accumulated wisdom in the country with regard to drug addiction. Because of their professional backgrounds they tended to be politically liberal, but as long as they were producing significant results, as they did during the years when heroin was the major problem, political leaders of both parties were happy to defer to them. The fundamental principle in which these experts believed was that addiction was a disease and addicts were sick people who needed to be treated.