During these early years of drug policy formation, there seemed to be few critics of the emerging control efforts. A conspicuous exception in this regard was Alfred R. Lindesmith, who during the 1930s was a graduate student at the University of Chicago and in subsequent years a member of the sociology faculty at Indiana University. Lindesmith's first exposure to the drug field was through criminal addicts, but the majority of his thinking was influenced by his research with patients at the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital at Lexington, Kentucky. There the addict population was comprised of individuals addicted to either morphine or paragoric, and their drugs had been obtained from physicians through either legal or quasi-legal means. They were members of neither the criminal underworld nor the street subcultures. As "patients" under treatment for some illness, Lindesmith argued that criminal penalties were inappropriate for those suffering from the chronic and relapsing disease of addiction. Although a direct call for the legalization of drugs was not apparent in Lindesmith's early work, it was clearly implied. His arguments for policy changes were criticized at the federal level --and then essentially ignored.

Arguments for the legalization of drugs came to the forefront during the 1960s. The sixties were a time when drug use seemed to leap from the marginal zones of society to the very center of middle-class community life. As the use of heroin, marijuana, and a variety of hallucinogenic drugs increased, so, too, did the number of arrests on drug charges of apparently otherwise law-abiding citizens. Spirited by the liberalism of the era, discussions about drugs in the social science community often encouraged some form of legalization. By legalizing the possession and sale of the whole spectrum of illicit drugs, it was argued, lives would no longer be disrupted by arrests, the drug black market would shrink, and drugrelated crime would eventually disappear. Once again, the calls for legalization were for the most part ignored.

By 1988 it had long since been decided by numerous observers that the seventyfour years of federal prohibition since the passage of the Harrison Act of 1914 were not only a costly and abject failure, but a totally doomed effort as well. It was argued that drug laws and drug enforcement had served mainly to create enormous profits for drug dealers and traffickers, overcrowded jails, corruption among police and other government employees, a distorted foreign policy, predatory street crime carried on by users in search of the funds necessary to purchase black-market drugs, and urban areas harassed by street-level drug dealers and terrorized by violent drug gangs.

Much of what these observers were remarking about indeed had been the case. To begin with, expenditures for the war on drugs had been considerable. Federal disbursements for supply- and demand-reduction from 1981 through 1988, for example, had totaled some $16.5 billion. These figures, furthermore, did not include the many more billions of dollars spent by state and local governments on law enforcement and other criminal justice system costs and on prevention, education, treatment, and research.

On the more positive side of the equation, interdiction initiatives had resulted in a somewhat impressive set of figures. From 1981 through 1987 some 5.3 million kilograms of marijuana had been seized. And even more importantly, cocaine seizures had increased dramatically, from 2,000 kilograms in 1981 to almost 60,000 in 1988. . .