Alfred R. Lindesmith, The Addict and the Law (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965)

Primary published sources utilized:

MTA House Hearings

MTA Senate Hearings

Archival sources utilized:

none

A sociologist who studied various aspects of drug addiction and drug policy beginning in the mid-1930s, Lindesmith had long advocated for treating addicts as medical patients rather than criminals. He highlighted the pharmacological incongruency of strict controls over opiate use while imposing relatively little regulation on alcohol, since the latter drug caused all manner of negative societal outcomes. Because marijuana did not meet the standard criteria for addiction applied to opiates (e.g., no scientific evidence indicated that use produced tolerance or withdrawal symptoms similar to "narcotics"), Lindesmith especially discounted claims that cannabis should be included in the roster of dangerous drugs. Anslinger harassed and attempted to discredit Lindesmith because of his early and frequent critiques of the FBN’s criminalization approach. Daniel Patrick Keys and John F. Galliher, Confronting the Drug Control Establishment: Alfred Lindesmith as a Public Intellectual, (Albany: State University Press of New York, 2000) describe Lindesmith’s critical assessment of the MTA and the Commissioner in The Addict and the Law as an effort at “settling an old score” with his longtime nemesis. (pp. 188-189).[1]

Lindesmith’s treatment of the MTA in The Addict and the Law (pp. 228-234) is rather unusual in that he focused roughly half of his brief analysis on Earle Albert Rowell, an author and lecturer who publicized the alleged dangers of marijuana. Lindesmith stated that the kind of hyperbolic statements about the effects of marijuana made by Rowell typified the era. Yet Lindesmith also noted (without clear attribution) that Rowell fell out of favor with the FBN in 1938, precisely the time that many authors claim anti-cannabis rhetorical campaign orchestrated by Anslinger reached its peak. Lindesmith speculated that Rowell became too prohibitionist--he criticized alcohol and tobacco use as well as “drugs.” More importantly, Rowell thought drug addicts should be treated as medical patients, which contravened Anslinger’s policy to suppress maintenance programs. Despite Rowell’s excessive characterizations about the effects of marijuana use, Lindesmith nevertheless treated him as a sort of prophet, more insightful than either Anslinger or his congressional interlocutors at the 1937 hearings: Rowell predicted increasing use of marijuana because cigarette smoking normalized the method of administration and the ubiquity of cannabis plants rendered it extremely difficult to eliminate cultivation.

- Lindesmith’s account subsequently jumped forward in time to Anslinger’s 1955 testimony before a Senate subcommittee in which the Commissioner downplayed any link between marijuana consumption and heroin usage or particularly sensational crimes. Lindesmith then returned to the 1937 MTA hearings at which Anslinger took the opposite position. Lindesmith did not question what factors specific to each moment in time might have caused the Commissioner to adopt such differing stances.

-Ultimately, Lindesmith’s brief, cursory treatment of the MTA represented a single element of a much larger critique of U.S. drug policy in which he determined the trajectory of his argument from the beginning. Like almost all authors, Lindesmith did not consider that international national security factors, secret at the time but subsequently made public, might account for the timing and configuration of the law, as well as Anslinger’s diametrically opposed statements 18 years apart.

[1] See Also John F. Galliher, David P. Keys, Michael Elsner, "Lindesmith v. Anslinger: An Early Government Victory in the Failed War on Drugs" Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Vol. 88, No. 2 (Winter, 1998), pp. 661–682.