Matthew D. Lassiter On What We Miss About White America and the War on Drugs

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When I first picked up Matthew D. Lassiter’s groundbreaking new text, The Suburban Crisis: White America and the War on Drugs, I knew I had to interview him and bring the book’s essential reframing of an oft-misunderstood history to our readers. Lassiter makes a profound and necessary case against both criminalization and coercive rehabilitation, and time and time again, highlights the gap between white fears and white behavior. I was able to send Lassiter some questions over email, what follows is a lengthy and fascinating discussion that sheds light on many previously (may I say, deliberately?) ignored facets of the decades-long war on drugs. Also, we talk about how bad Traffic is. That movie is just ridiculously terrible. 

Why has so little attention been paid to the history of drug policy in suburbia?

The American war on drugs has always been thoroughly pervaded by racial (and class) discrimination, and incarceration rates for drug-related crimes have long been much higher for nonwhite communities and especially Black residents of poor urban areas. This history of racial control through saturation policing, selective enforcement, and harsh sentencing has rightly received lots of attention from scholars, advocacy groups, and journalists.

My book builds on this essential work by showing that the war on drugs has long operated in white middle-class suburban areas as well and that these stories have to be told together in order to fully understand the deeper causes and racial consequences of drug control policy. Starting in the 1950s, law enforcement began arresting significant numbers of white teenagers and young adults for drug crimes, especially marijuana. But the discretionary and discriminatory processes of the criminal and juvenile justice systems almost always diverted these white youth into rehabilitation without leaving any trace of a criminal record, if they faced consequences at all. Because millions of white youth were arrested, but very few ever ended up in prison, the familiar graphs about extreme racial disproportionality in mass incarceration actually obscure the extensive impact of drug control policy and discretionary law enforcement in white suburbia.

The Suburban Crisis shows how white middle-class suburban “victims” have been as central to American drug politics and policy formation as the Black and Mexican American “villains” inevitably stigmatized as evil urban “pushers,” dangerous border traffickers, inner-city gangsters, and predatory ghetto addicts. White youth who chose to consume illegal drugs, once recast as the innocent victims of foreign and urban predators, became the primary justification for harsh and racially selective crackdowns on the supply side of the market. The drug-war prioritization of marijuana between the 1950s and the early 1980s can only be explained as a futile mission to keep this mild recreational drug away from white middle-class youth because of what it symbolized. White suburban communities have also been the primary beneficiaries of public health prevention and rehabilitation programs, with treatment in urban centers badly underfunded while there’s always plenty of money for policing and prisons.

You talk about three eras of drug policies since the 1950s. What are these? What was the cause behind the drug war interregnum?

The modern war on drugs really emerged in the early-to-mid 1950s when the U.S. Congress and key states including California and New York passed the first mandatory-minimum laws targeting sale and possession of both heroin and marijuana. These laws responded to grassroots pressure to protect white youth from urban and foreign “pushers,” accompanied by racist imagery from politicians and the mass media that young white females were becoming narcotics addicts and prostitutes in urban slums. This era also depicted marijuana and heroin as equally dangerous drugs based on the hype and mythology of the gateway progression syndrome, that youth who experimented with marijuana would almost inevitably become addicted to heroin.

The second era, what I call the drug war interregnum, responded to a massive increase in marijuana use (a felony crime) by millions of white teenagers and young adults starting in the mid-1960s. Law enforcement prioritized suburban and college recreational marijuana markets during this era and arrested white youth at roughly their population share for the first and likely last time in American drug-war history. Arrests of white juveniles peaked at 89 percent of the juvenile total in 1973, compared to barely half after the launch of the war on crack cocaine in the 1980s. The criminal legal system devised an array of discretionary procedures to divert most of these white youth into rehab programs without leaving any trace on their official records. This was a massive government intervention against a relatively harmless recreational drug that had no real impact on demand and made the supply side more profitable. Congress nationalized these procedures in a major 1970 law that reduced first-offense possession of all illegal drugs to a misdemeanor, as leverage to divert even more users into rehabilitation, while increasing the mandatory penalties passed in the 1950s for “professional” traffickers.

Mass arrests of white pot smokers led to a vibrant campaign for legalization in the 1970s, when several states led by Oregon and California decriminalized possession of marijuana. It seemed likely at the time that marijuana would soon be decriminalized nationwide, but then “parent-power” groups in affluent white suburbs began mobilizing against the threat of adolescent pot smoking as usage trickled down into the middle schools. In this third stage, suburban activists came together in the National Federation of Parents for Drug-Free Youth and pressured both the Carter and Reagan administrations to re-escalate the war on marijuana as well as cocaine, labeled the new gateway risk. Their zero-tolerance agenda profoundly shaped drug control policies in the 1980s, a bifurcated approach of public health “just say no” campaigns in white suburbia and punitive crackdowns in urban centers and foreign nations. This movement ultimately helped lead to the injustices of the racially targeted war on crack.

How did marijuana use in the suburbs become the driving narrative of the war on drugs?

Marijuana was the most important enforcement priority of the American war on drugs from the 1950s through the early 1980s because it was the illegal drug most likely to be sold and consumed by white middle-class youth. The vast majority of drug arrests nationwide were for marijuana possession, until the focus shifted to crack cocaine and Black urban centers in the mid-1980s, and a large majority of these marijuana arrests were of white teenagers and young adults. The obvious question is why would the United States spend so many resources in the failed effort to interdict a mild and non-addictive drug, and why would policymakers and law enforcement seek to arrest and then rehabilitate so many white middle-class youth—almost always defined as “otherwise law-abiding Americans”—to deter their recreational use of marijuana?

“Marijuana smoking by white youth represented a symbolic threat to normative suburban values and capitalist ideologies.”

There are plenty of specific reasons for each time period, but the overriding answer is that marijuana smoking by white youth represented a symbolic threat to normative suburban values and capitalist ideologies. The constant racial fear was that “ghetto” pathologies and behaviors were infiltrating the middle-class suburbs. In the 1950s, politics and culture portrayed marijuana experimentation by white youth as an invasion by Mexican and urban Black pushers that would lead suburban children to heroin addiction and even death in urban slums. In the 1960s, marijuana use accelerated in the context of campus protests and the counterculture, leading to fears that the drug was causing white youth to become political radicals, suburban runaways, and “hippies” in urban enclaves—that smoking grass was fueling the so-called “generation gap.”

In the 1970s, politicians justified drug-war expansion by conflating marijuana and heroin to make the crisis seem universal, because only a few cities had major heroin markets but parents everywhere were worried about teens smoking pot and moving on to harder drugs. This decade also brought the unscientific diagnosis that lots of young white stoners were falling victim to the “amotivational syndrome,” causing laziness, apathy, and no desire to study hard or work productive jobs—an anxiety that again reflected racialized fears of ghetto contagion. The National Federation of Parents for Drug-Free Youth also blamed marijuana for suburban family breakdown in the 1970s and 1980s—arguing that latchkey children with both parents working or divorced were smoking pot because of peer pressure and becoming insubordinate druggies and dropouts.

You talk about how the seemingly opposed policies of criminalization and coercive rehabilitation were both sides of the same coin. Can you explain how those policies complemented each other and were racialized?

Between the 1950s and the 1980s, liberal policymakers in Congress and in key states such as California were the main architects of the war on drugs and champions of its coercive public health framework. They argued that so-called “pushers” should be incarcerated for a long time while their alleged victims were “sick people” who should be forced into rehabilitation, if necessary through involuntary institutionalization in treatment centers and psychiatric facilities. Liberals tended to be more sympathetic than conservatives to some nonwhite drug users whom they also classified as addict-victims, but almost everyone across the political spectrum defined white Americans who broke the drug laws as the definitive victims who always deserved rehabilitation.

“The genuine alternative to drug criminalization is some combination of legalization, decriminalization, regulation, and non-coercive harm reduction…”

Mandatory rehabilitation depends on criminalization—the use of arrest and then diversion to channel certain illegal drug users into treatment programs and other alternatives to jail or prison. Our drug policy debate often portrays rehabilitation as the opposite of incarceration, but the genuine alternative to drug criminalization is some combination of legalization, decriminalization, regulation, and non-coercive harm reduction. Arresting people for using and selling certain drugs that government policy has arbitrarily criminalized, and then diverting a subset of those deemed “victims” and “deserving” of rehabilitation, is still a form of punishment and state coercion. The war on drugs has long operated, and still largely operates, through a consensus politics shaped by these intertwined policies of punitive law enforcement and coercive public health.

Coercive rehabilitation is a discretionary policy that inevitably operates in discriminatory ways and gives law enforcement actors without medical expertise, especially police and prosecutors, the power to define drug “addiction” and “abuse” as they assess potential for rehabilitation. In the 1950s and 1960s, the criminal and juvenile justice systems designed a discretionary diversion process that explicitly used assessment factors including racial status (white youth without prior records always defined as not “real criminals”), grades and college plans, church attendance, parental income, social class standing, and geographic residence. Many recreational drug users, including plenty arrested for marijuana possession, faced coercive rehabilitation even as serious public health problems remained badly underfunded. In California during 1973-1974 alone, law enforcement arrested and diverted around 40,000 white marijuana offenders into formal rehab programs, taking up spots originally allocated for heroin addicts and others with serious drug abuse issues. Privileged white youth definitely resented being forced into any sort of drug rehab program, but they rarely faced incarceration or juvenile institutionalization, the outcomes far more likely for poor and nonwhite youth.

You refuse to use the words “moral panic” to discuss white suburban opinions around drug use— why?

I made a deliberate decision not to use “moral panic” as an analytical framework for a couple of reasons. First, I think there has been a lot of imprecision and oversimplification around the popularization of the moral panic concept, especially when it jumps from the careful work by sociologists into a catch-all explanation by journalists and some scholars seeking to provide popular audiences with an explanation for “irrational” and “hysterical” crusades, usually those undertaken by conservatives. Arguably the Los Angeles story in chapter one does represent a form of moral panic—the mass suburban campaign in the 1950s demanding life-without-parole sentences for the alleged invading “pushers” of heroin and marijuana, portrayed as Mexican villains. In fact, white youth drove to Mexico themselves to acquire illegal drugs and then supplied their friends and acquaintances. But even in this case, I decided to focus more on how a broad range of actors including law enforcement, politicians, media corporations, and suburban anti-drug groups strategically sought to produce a moral panic in order to justify harsh and discriminatory mandatory-minimum laws in the emerging war on drugs.

The analytical framework in The Suburban Crisis relies not on the psychological frame of moral panic but on a more layered political history and state formation model of how policy formation unfolds. The book spends a lot of time critically examining how various actors with anti-drug agendas tried to generate public panic for specific policy goals, usually by deploying the “suburban crisis” framework of endangered white youth and lost white innocence. Politicians and the media exploited stories of white female victims and nonwhite villains to escalate the drug war and distract attention from its constant failure to suppress either supply or demand. The Nixon administration hyped the marijuana-to-heroin gateway to generate public support for its drug-war crackdown in the early 1970s. Drug warriors in both parties and their allies in media and law enforcement misrepresented the dangers of marijuana for decades, promoting many absurd arguments, to justify massive budget expenditures in a war on drugs that they just kept losing. The National Federation of Parents for Drug-Free Youth, a relatively small coalition of anti-marijuana activists from affluent suburbs, lamented the permissiveness toward teenage pot smoking of most of their neighbors while successfully pressuring the Carter and Reagan administrations to make marijuana the top priority of drug-war prevention, rehabilitation, and enforcement campaigns.

Just because suburban social movements and their allies in the political-media-law enforcement nexus often emerged victorious, it does not mean that the general public was therefore caught up in a mass moral panic around youth drug use.

How did housing policy intersect with drug policy in the story of American segregation?

The American housing market was comprehensively segregated by race in the post-World War II decades, a product of deliberate government policy and also defensive resistance to integration by white neighborhoods in the cities and suburbs alike. The racial inequalities in the war on drugs (and the related wars on crime and delinquency) accelerated as part of this broader landscape of metropolitan segregation. White parents viewed racially segregated housing and schools in middle-class suburbia as key to protecting their children from the crime, gangs, and drug problems that they (wrongly) believed were contained in the Black and Mexican American sections of the cities. In 1956, the state of California officially instructed parents that living in a “homogeneous” neighborhood with others of “similar racial, cultural, and economic backgrounds” was the best way to ensure that “normal” youth would not be tempted by the delinquency and drugs associated with the urban centers. Commissioner Harry J. Anslinger, the longtime head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, often claimed that marijuana and heroin only appealed to “hoodlums,” whereas “normal” white youth were not at risk as long as they stayed out of urban slums and interracial settings.

This strategy to protect white youth through segregated middle-class sanctuaries inevitably failed, again and again—not because the ghetto invaded the suburbs, but because suburban teenagers with cars had the freedom and autonomy to seek out illegal drugs and bring them back to their hometowns. Instead of dealing with this reality, activist parents’ groups, policymakers, and the mass media repeatedly blamed urban and foreign sources for contaminating the allegedly utopian suburbs, leading to enforcement crackdowns that as designed had racially discriminatory consequences. These outcomes—much higher incarceration rates in nonwhite areas, white drug crimes hidden from view through the arrest-and-diversion process—then reproduced the false logic that suburbs were safe havens and cities were dangerous and crime-ridden.

You talk about the inherently political categories of childhood and youth—can you unpack that for us, in terms of the selective application of innocence?

The politics and culture of the war on drugs has consistently portrayed white youth as innocent victims, even though these youths almost always insisted that they participated in drug markets willingly and had the right to break unjust and irrational prohibition laws. White middle-class youth have instead been depicted as victims in need of protecting from illegal drug “pushers,” victims seduced into crime and delinquency by popular culture and outside invaders, victims in need of diversion to rehabilitation whenever they break the drug laws, victims who must be shielded from the consequences of their criminalized activities, victims of overzealous law enforcement on the rare occasions they ended up in jail or prison for felony crimes. In the book I label these white youth “impossible criminals”—the phrase that appeared over and over in the historical record was “otherwise law-abiding youth,” meaning they broke laws but were not real criminals.

The victimization framework removes political autonomy and responsibility from white middle-class youth and at the same time justifies extremely harsh treatment of Black and other nonwhite and poor youth…

The victimization framework removes political autonomy and responsibility from white middle-class youth and at the same time justifies extremely harsh treatment of Black and other nonwhite and poor youth who are generally portrayed as villains and not victims, as possessing “real” criminality and therefore not capable of innocence. The discretionary and discriminatory processes of the criminal and juvenile justice systems then reproduce these assumptions about white innocence and nonwhite guilt, as do the political and cultural discourses of policymakers, the mainstream news media, and suburban activist groups. White youth have always been the innocent victims that matter most in every constructed crisis of the drug war—from the marijuana-to-heroin gateway of the 1950s and 1960s, to crack cocaine in the 1980s, to fentanyl today.

Can you take a moment to discuss the history of racialized depictions of drug addicted white women as being sexually exploited by people of color? I’m glad you mentioned Traffic, I absolutely HATED that movie…

The imagery of the white female, lured from suburban safety by the urban underworld of drug addiction and prostitution across the color line, is the most potent subset of white youth victimization and innocence in the history of the war on drugs. Law enforcement, politicians, and the news media repeatedly circulated stories of addicted white females in Black and Mexican American slums to justify harsh and selective crackdowns, from the war on heroin in the 1950s to the war on crack cocaine that the film Traffic recounts. The scene of Caroline as a “crack whore,” rescued by her father from a Black dealer’s shooting gallery, is designed to tap into the worst nightmares of white suburban parents. In the 1950s and 1960s, Commissioner Harry Anslinger of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics often justified tough mandatory-minimum laws by telling a similar story of a lost white daughter from the Midwest who ended up addicted to heroin, a prostitute in Harlem with a Black pimp, and ultimately dead. In a similar way, the mass media quickly transformed the narrative of white suburban youth who traveled to countercultural enclaves during the 1967 “Summer of Love” into a familiar tragedy narrative of runaway daughters who became heroin addict-prostitutes in San Francisco and New York City. When political and media actors seek to generate fear and anxiety about any new “epidemic” drug crisis requiring government action, this trope always resonates.

You call California the bellwether state for drug policy. How does America’s most populous state compare to the nation overall in the history of drug laws and selective decriminalization?

California passed its first mandatory-minimum drug law targeting marijuana and heroin in 1951, before the federal government did the same, and repeatedly escalated sentencing penalties during the next decade. The suburban grassroots movement for tougher drug laws in Los Angeles County also helped push the issue into national politics during this era, because most parts of the country outside of a few large metropolitan regions had relatively small illegal drug markets. Southern California was different than other drug centers, including New York City, because the proximity of the Mexican border created a very decentralized market where almost anyone could became a small-scale dealer or consumer of marijuana, heroin, and also illicit pharmaceuticals. The state of California, led by Los Angeles County, also arrested by far the most people for drug offenses during the 1950s and 1960s—more than half of all drug apprehensions nationwide. California had dedicated narcotics squads in operation before most other states and also a robust juvenile delinquency system that was a national model for the liberal rehabilitative philosophy of arrest and frequent diversion.

California also became the cutting edge of the marijuana legalization movement in the 1970s, a grassroots mobilization against the mass arrests of white teenagers and young adults. This youth-led activism eventually resulted in the state legislature passing a decriminalization compromise in 1975, making simple possession subject to a small fine. The law maintained the tough felony penalty for selling marijuana, however, and the legislature also increased the mandatory sentences for heroin in order to target the “real criminals.” In the general pattern, the laws and policies established in California soon became models for federal legislation and then became nationalized—both the state’s get-tough measures and the loopholes designed for the white marijuana market.

What was the parent power coalition? How did the feedback loop between advocacy groups and policy makers work?

In the late 1970s, “parent power” groups began forming in affluent white suburbs out of alarm that increasingly younger teenagers and even preteens were experimenting with marijuana. They blamed the permissiveness of decriminalization and almost immediately succeeded in pressuring the Carter administration to reverse its initial support for that policy and to re-escalate the federal war on marijuana. They called themselves a nonpartisan “parents’ movement” and argued that marijuana use was causing “amotivational syndrome” on a mass scale, leading to a full-blown suburban family crisis. Of course they did not want their own children to go to jail or prison for breaking the drug laws, so they supported zero-tolerance educational programs and rehabilitation for suburban youth caught with illegal drugs, combined with militarized interdiction of the supply side of the market for not only marijuana but also cocaine.

The Carter administration played a key behind-the-scenes role in helping these scattered parent power groups join together in 1980 as the National Federation of Parents for Drug-Free Youth. Then the Reagan administration embraced the coalition as part of Nancy Reagan’s “just say no” campaign and worked with its leaders and media outlets to publicize the message that strict parenting and anti-peer pressure messaging could overcome the marijuana crisis in the middle and high schools. This was the feedback loop in action, as federal and media support for the anti-marijuana movement ended up spawning thousands more chapters around the country, which turned mobilized white suburban parents into a formidable political force. The National Federation of Parents for Drug-Free Youth denounced “responsible use” and “harm reduction” approaches to teenage drug and alcohol use—evidence-based public health programs that actually worked—and it helped shift massive amounts of federal and state funding from urban treatment programs to zero-tolerance moral crusades.

You contrast the history of pharmaceutical abuse with narcotics use in fascinating ways. What is the history of the drug wars when it comes to the pill industry?

This is only a secondary focus of my book, but it is definitely a major theme in the history and policy of the war on drugs. At every stage of the drug-war escalation, the combined licit and illicit market in pharmaceuticals was more deadly and dangerous in a public health sense that all illegal drugs combined. (Of course, the legal drugs of alcohol and nicotine are also major public health challenges). Every landmark federal law that intensified the war on illegal drugs was also designed by policymakers and corporate lobbies to protect and expand the market for pharmaceutical drugs, especially amphetamines and barbiturates. Criminalizing and cracking down on certain drugs, largely because of their association with stigmatized minority groups or (in the case of marijuana) with radical white youth, was always also an effort to monopolize the drug market for pharmaceutical companies in their quest for profits, in the U.S. and abroad.

In the 1950s, Harry Anslinger of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics denied that prescription amphetamines and barbiturates had any addictive potential, which he knew to be false, and only promoted self-regulation for his allies in the pharmaceutical industry. Anslinger considered pharmaceutical drugs to be a “medical market” populated by white middle-class Americans, and he had no desire to criminalize even illicit use because of the race of the consumers and corporate profitability. These pills circulated illicitly in massive quantities, and American companies shipped huge amounts to Mexican border towns, aware that they would be immediately smuggled back into the U.S. Many white youth who smoked marijuana also took non-prescription “uppers” and “downers” as recreational drugs, but this never generated the same law enforcement response because of their pharmaceutical origin.

 

When the comprehensive 1970 drug law created a new regulatory system that placed marijuana into the Schedule 1 category, alongside heroin and cocaine as very dangerous with no medical value, policymakers in alliance with the pharmaceutical industry kept even the illicit circulation of many hazardous pills in other schedules with much lower criminal penalties. Legally prescribed and illicitly circulating pills, especially barbiturates disproportionately taken by white women, caused far more overdose deaths than heroin did during the second half of the twentieth century, even before the recent exponential spike in overdoses due to the over-prescription of OxyContin.

Here’s one of my favorite quotes in the book: “America’s long and never-ending war on drugs is unjust, counterproductive, and unwinnable for many reasons—but a central and underappreciated factor is that most of the white middle-class youth subjected to systems of criminalization and social control for their own safety and protection do not actually want to be saved.” Can you talk a bit about how actual suburban drug users reacted to these infantilizing efforts?

I really tried throughout the book to bring suburban and white middle-class youth into the story as full political actors and historical subjects, to counter their constant portrayal as innocent and helpless victims. Teenagers and young adults often adamantly defended their right to smoke marijuana, and even to take LSD and cocaine and other criminalized drugs. When actually given a platform, they almost never blamed the “pushers” for tricking them into taking illegal drugs, but instead said that they willingly sought out the market as both users and dealers. High school students almost uniformly ridiculed the marijuana-to-heroin gateway mythology and the absurd classroom instructional films that smoking pot would ruin their lives. White youth were the driving force behind the marijuana legalization and decriminalization campaigns as well, although they had a definite blind spot when it came to recognizing the racial disparities of the war on drugs. They often argued that the government should go after the “real criminals” in urban heroin markets and leave them alone, when the logical and ethical civil liberties stance is that criminalization of drug use is wrong across the board.

From the 1950s until the war on crack in the mid-1980s, the vast majority of drug-war arrests were for marijuana possession. This was a massive squandering of public resources, and a massive violation of civil liberties, in a futile mission to stop white middle-class youth from consuming a recreational drug because of its racial and symbolic associations, rather than any actual harm. I started this project with the understanding that the war on drugs has systematically criminalized and punished nonwhite communities, and I assumed that it had by design insulated white youth who broke the same laws from any consequences. Then I started digging into the arrest records and realized that the story was much bigger. There’s no question that racial discrimination is at the heart of the war on drugs, but I also came to view the entire system as a state project designed for the social control of all youth, with divergent outcomes but driven by the same overarching and unjustified policy of criminalization.

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