Toiling in the Vineyards: American Security and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 1938-1968

The story of America's war on drugs usually begins with Richard Nixon in 1971. However, the history of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics--the country's first drug control agency--suggests that the drug war's roots lay in the years following WWII, when the U.S. government began to consistently depict drug control as a paramilitary conflict and first stationed agents overseas to disrupt the flow of drugs to American shores. Analysis of the ideology and foreign policy of the early drug wars shows how the U.S. government interpreted addiction and organized crime as profound threats to the American people. Skeptical of public health efforts to reduce demand, the FBN believed that reducing the global supply of drugs was the only way to contain the slavery of addiction. In effect, America applied a foreign policy solution to a domestic social crisis. The FBN's effort to bring the rest of the world into line behind American expectations on drug control demonstrates how consistently U.S. policymakers have assumed that security at home could only be achieved by through some form of hegemony abroad.