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Controlling “America’s Opium”: Barbiturate Abuse, Pharmaceutical Regulation, and the Politics of Public Health in the Early Postwar United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 September 2017

Nicolas Rasmussen
Nicolas Rasmussen*
Affiliation:
University of New South Wales
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Journal of Policy History , Volume 29 , Issue 4 , October 2017 , pp. 543 - 568
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Copyright © Donald Critchlow and Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

The author gratefully acknowledges funding of this study by the Australian Research Council, and a residential Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in Social and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, where much of it was written. Many thanks also to David Courtwright, David Herzberg, the late and much-missed Harry Marks, anonymous referees, and numerous colleagues who have had helpful discussions with me at UNSW and at AAHM meetings during its several stages.

References

NOTES

1. Daemmrich, Arthur, Pharmacopolitics: Drug Regulation in the United States and Germany (Philadelphia, 2004);Google Scholar Hilts, Philip, Protecting America’s Health: The FDA, Business, and One Hundred Years of Regulation (Chapel Hill, 2004);Google Scholar Quirke, Viviane, “Thalidomide, Drug Safety Regulation, and the British Pharmaceutical Industry: The Case of Imperial Chemical Industries,” in Ways of Regulating Drugs in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Gaudilliere, J.-P. and Hess, V. (New York, 2013), 151–80;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Daniel Carpenter, Reputation and Power: Organizational Image and Pharmaceutical Regulation at the FDA (Princeton, 2010).Google Scholar

2. Temin, Peter, Taking Your Medicine: Drug Regulation in the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 3; Temin, “Origin of Compulsory Drug Prescriptions,” Journal of Law & Economics 22 (1979): 91–105 (99). On 1930s consumerism, see Kallett, Arthur and Schlink, F. J., 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs: Dangers in Everyday Foods, Drugs, and Cosmetics (New York, 1933)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tomes, Nancy, “Merchants of Health: Medicine and Consumer Culture in the United States, 1900–1940,” Journal of American History 88 (2001): 519–47Google Scholar, and Cohen, Lizabeth, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York, 2003)Google Scholar, chap. 1.

3. Madden, Bartley, Free to Choose Medicine (Chicago, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gieringer, Dale H., “The Safety and Efficacy of New Drug Approval,” Cato Journal 5 (1985–86): 177–201Google Scholar; Wardell, William and Lasagna, Louis, Regulation and Drug Development (Washington, D.C., 1974)Google Scholar. On the drug industry’s postwar campaign against regulation, especially against the 1962 Food and Drug Law amendments that followed in the footsteps of the thalidomide fiasco, see Tobell, Dominique, Pills, Power, and Policy: The Struggle for Drug Reform in Cold War America (Berkeley, 2012).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. Marks, Harry, “Revisiting ‘The Origins of Compulsory Drug Prescriptions,’” American Journal of Public Health 85 (1995): 109–15.Google Scholar

5. Carpenter, Reputation and Power, 152.

6. Frydl, Kathleen J., The Drug Wars in America, 1940–1973 (Cambridge, 2013), chap. 3.Google Scholar

7. David Musto, The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control, 3rd ed. (New York, 1999); David Courtwright, Dark Paradise: Opiate Addiction in America before 1940, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: 2001); Keire, Mara L., “Dope Fiends and Degenerates: The Gendering of Addiction in the Early Twentieth Century,” Journal of Social History 31 (1998): 809–22Google Scholar; Acker, Caroline, “From All Purpose Anodyne to Marker of Deviance: Physicians’ Attitudes Towards Opiates in the U.S. from 1890 to 1940,” in Drugs and Narcotics in History, ed. Porter, Roy and Teich, Mikulás (Cambridge, 1995), 114–32Google Scholar; Joseph Spillane, Cocaine: From Medical Marvel to Modern Menace in the United States, 1884–1920 (Baltimore, 2000); Frydl, Drug Wars; Alfred Lindesmith, “The Drug Addict as a Psychopath,” American Sociological Review 5 (1940): 914–20. On other Anglophone countries, see Berridge, Virginia, “Morality and Medical Science: Concepts of Narcotic Addiction in Britain, 1820–1926,” Annals of Science 36 (1979): 67–85Google Scholar; Manderson, Desmond, From Mr Sin to Mr Big: A History of Australian Drug Laws (Melbourne, 1993)Google Scholar; Carstairs, Catherine, “Deporting ‘Ah Sin’ to Save the White Race: Moral Panic, Racialization, and the Extension of Canadian Drug Laws in the 1920s,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 16 (1999): 65–88Google Scholar. On patent medicines, the FDA, and addictive drugs, see James Harvey Young, Pure Food: Securing the Federal Food and Drugs Act of 1906 (Princeton, 1989).

8. Acker, Caroline, Creating the American Junkie: Addiction Research in the Classic Era of Narcotic Control (Baltimore, 2002)Google Scholar; Nancy Campbell, Discovering Addiction: The Science and Politics of Substance Abuse Research (Ann Arbor, 2007); Nicolas Rasmussen, “Maurice Seevers, the Stimulants, and the Political Economy of Addiction in American Biomedicine,” Biosocieties 5 (2010): 105–23. See also Sedgwick, Eve K., “Epidemics of the Will,” in Tendencies, ed. Sedgwick (Durham, 1993), 130–42Google Scholar; Goffman, Erving, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York, 1963)Google Scholar; Spillane, Joseph, “Building a Drug Control Regime, 1919–1930,” in Federal Drug Control: The Evolution of Policy and Practice, ed. Erlen, Jonathan and Spillane, Joseph F. (New York, 2004), 25–59Google Scholar.

9. Becker, Howard S., Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Social Deviance (New York, 1963), Chap. 8;Google Scholar Courtwright, David, “Introduction: The Classic Era of Narcotic Control,” in Addicts Who Survived: An Oral History of Narcotics Use in America, 1923–1965, ed. Courtwright, D. T., Joseph, H., and Des Jarlais, D. (Knoxville, 1989), 1–44;Google Scholar Frydl, Drug Wars. See also Rufus King’s classic beltway history, The Drug Hang Up: America’s Fifty Year Folly (New York, 1972).

10. Spillane, “Building a Drug Control Regime”; Rebecca Carroll, “Under the Influence: Harry Anslinger’s Role in Shaping America’s Drug Policy,” in Federal Drug Control, ed. Erlen and Spillane, 61–99; David Herzberg, “Big Pharma’s Real Nemesis? The Federal Bureau of Narcotics as Pharmaceutical Regulator,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine, Chicago, May 2014; Herzberg, “The Medicalized Drug War: Physicians and Pharmacists in the Punitive Era of Drug Control,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the History of Science Society, San Francisco, November 2015; Herzberg, “Entitled to Addiction? Race and Pharmaceuticals in America’s First Drug War,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, in press.

11. “Lullaby Pill Peril,” Newsweek, 13 March 1939, 36–37; Hambourger, W. E. and the Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry, “A Study of the Promiscuous Use of Barbiturates. I. Their Use in Suicides,” JAMA 112 (1939): 1340–43Google Scholar; Hambourger and the Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry, “A Study of the Promiscuous Use of Barbiturates. II. Analysis of Hospital Data,” JAMA 114 (1940): 2015–19; Bureau of Legal Medicine and Legislation, “Regulation of the Sale of Barbiturates by Statute,” JAMA 114 (1940): 2029–36; Editorial, “Barbital and Its Derivatives,” JAMA 114 (1940): 2020–21 (quotes on 2020). Jackson, Charles O., “Before the Drug Culture: Barbiturate/Amphetamine Use in American Society,” Clio Medica 11 (1976): 47–58Google Scholar; Pieters, Toine and Snelders, Stephen, “From King Kong Pills to Mother’s Little Helpers: Career Cycles of Two Families of Psychotropic Drugs: The Barbiturates and Benzodiazepines,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 24 (2007): 93–112Google Scholar. On amphetamines, see Rasmussen “Maurice Seevers,” and On Speed: The Many Lives of Amphetamine (New York, 2008).

12. Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938, 75th Cong. Ch. 675 (52 U.S. Statutes 1040), 25 June 1938. On the 1938 amendments, see Young, James Harvey, The Medical Messiahs: A Social History of Health Quackery in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, 1992)Google Scholar, chap 8.

13. Marks, “Revisiting ‘The Origins’”; see also Carpenter, Reputation and Power, chap. 2. Temin, “The Origin,” cites the “potent but dangerous” phrase (from the FDA’s 1939 Annual Report), 99. Swann, John, “FDA and the Practice of Pharmacy: Prescription Drug Regulation before the Durham-Humphrey Amendment of 1951,” Pharmacy in History 36 (1994): 55–70Google Scholar. For FDA compulsion in amphetamine’s classification, see Rasmussen, On Speed, chap. 4.

14. Kleeman, Rita H., “Sleeping Pills Aren’t Candy,” Saturday Evening Post, 24 February 1944Google Scholar, 17, 85. On moral panic, see Cohen, Stanley, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (Oxford, 1972)Google Scholar; Garland, David, “On the Concept of Moral Panic,” Crime Media Culture 4 (2008): 9–30;Google Scholar Rasmussen, Nicolas, “Goofball Panic: Barbiturates, ‘Dangerous’ and Addictive Drugs, and the Regulation of Medicine in Postwar America,” in Prescribed: Writing, Filling, Using, and Abusing the Prescription in Modern America, ed. Greene, Jeremy and Watkins, Elizabeth (Baltimore, 2012), 23–45.Google Scholar

15. “Sister Aimee’s Death Laid to Sleeping Pills,” Chicago Tribune, 14 October 1944, 1; “Aimee’s Death Blamed on Overdose of Capsules,” Los Angeles Times, 14 October 1944, 1, 1 and 4; “Lupe Velez Suicide Over Love Tragedy,” Los Angeles Times, 15 December 1944, 1–3; “Lupe’s Estate Worth $200,000; Burial Monday,” Los Angeles Times, 16 December 1944, 9; “Raymond Lays Lupe’s Death to ‘Fake Marriage’ Error,” Los Angeles Times, 17 December 1944, A1; H.W., “Doctor’s Pen is More Potent than Most Prescriptions,” Washington Post, 29 December 1946, S6.

16. Blum, John Morton, V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture During World War II (San Diego, 1976)Google Scholar; Hegarty, Marilyn, Victory Girls, Khaki-Whackies, and Patriotutes: The Regulation of Female Sexuality during World War II (New York, 2008)Google Scholar; Parascandola, John, “Quarantining Women: Venereal Disease Rapid Treatment Centers in World War II America,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 83, no. 3 (2009): 431–59Google Scholar; Gilbert, James, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (Oxford, 1988)Google Scholar, chap. 2; Daniels, Douglas Henry, “Los Angeles Zoot: Race ‘Riot,’ the Pachuco, and Black Music Culture,” Journal of African American History 87 (2002): 98–118Google Scholar; Rasmussen, On Speed, chap. 4.

17. Gordon Alles to A. J. Affleck, 29 December 1944, with attached “Memorandum to Secretary and Members of the California State Board of Pharmacy” (1944) by “Baes and Dowdy, Inspectors;” Anon., 15 December 1944, “Hypnotic Drug Law”; Anon. [Alles?], undated, “Brief Presented to Mr Kraft” (handwritten); Alles to O. J. May, 7 January 1945; “Senate Passes Two Assembly Measures,” Pasadena Star News, 18 January 1945, unpaginated clipping, all in Box 12, folder “California Board of Pharmacy Benzedrine Legislation A.B. 285–1945,” Gordon Alles Papers, California Institute of Technology Archives.

18. Business Bulletin, Wall Street Journal, 22 March 1945, 1; “Sharp Rise in Deaths by Sleeping Pills Brings Warning by Dr. Gonzales on Sales,” New York Times, 22 July 1945, 25; “Sleeping Pill Curb Drawn for Albany,” New York Times, 10 September 1945, 21; “New City Drive to Clamp Down on the Sale of Misbranded or Harmful Drugs Here,” New York Times, 10 September 1946, 9; “Weinstein Warns of New Controls to Check Sales of Sleeping Pills,” New York Times, 15 October 1946, 35. See also Swann, “FDA and the Practice of Pharmacy.”

19. United States v. Sullivan, Trading as Sullivan’s Pharmacy, No. 121, Supreme Court of the United States, 332 U.S. 689; 68 S. Ct. 331; 92 L. Ed. 297, 1948; see also Davis, Opinion, in United States v. Sullivan, no. 3688, United States District Court for the middle district of Georgia, Columbus division, 67 F. Supp. 192, 19 June 1946. “Food and Drug Unit Acts to Stop ‘Self-Doctoring’: Court Authorizes Prosecution for Sale of Drugs Without Prescription,” Toledo Blade, 4 February 1948, 3. See also Werble, Wallace, “Waco Was a Barbiturate HOT SPOT,” Hygeia 23 (1945): 432–33Google Scholar.

20. “Drug Labeling Revision Opposed,” Oil Paint & Drug Reporter 145 (15 May 1944): 3, 64. Temin, “The Origin”; see also Carpenter, Reputation and Power, chap 2.

21. Kleeman, “Sleeping Pills Aren’t Candy.”

22. Marks, “Revisiting the Origins”; Young, James Harvey, “Sulfanilamide and Diethylene Glycol,” in Chemistry and Modern Society, ed. Parascandola, John and Whorton, James C. (Washington, D.C., 1983), 105–26;Google Scholar Calvery, Herbert O. and Klumpp, Theodore G., “The Toxicity for Human Beings of Diethylene Glycol with Sulfanilamide,” Southern Medical Journal 32 (1939): 1106–7.Google Scholar

23. Adams, Samuel Hopkins, “Slaves of the Devil’s Capsules,” American Weekly, 18 November 1945, 10–11Google Scholar. See also Adams, “Slaves of the Devil’s Capsules, Part II,” American Weekly, 25 November 1945, 16–17; Anon., “Slaves of the Devils Capsules—Emergency,” American Weekly, 19 May 1946, 18. See also Robinson, Stewart, “America’s New Dope Peril,” New York Journal-American, Saturday Home Magazine section, 20 October 1945Google Scholar, 14; Connolly, Vera, “Lethal Lullaby,” Colliers, 19 October 1946, 86, 95–97Google Scholar. On the Hearst role in marijuana control, see Ferraiolo, Kathleen, “From Killer Weed to Popular Medicine: The Evolution of American Drug Control Policy, 1937–2000,” Journal of Policy History 19 (2007): 147–79Google Scholar.

24. Editorial, Saint Petersburg Evening Independent, 8 March 1945, 14; “Unprescribed Use of Sleeping Pills Brings Warning,” Washington Post, 5 September 1945, 2; Bess M. Wilson, “Addiction Peril,” Los Angeles Times, 24 April 1949, C1; “Clubwomen Score Drug Act Failure,” Los Angeles Times, 29 November 1949, B1 (“habit forming”); “Students’ Use of Drug Told by P.T.A. Official,” 25 July 1946 (“America’s Opium”); Editorial, “Education Badly Needed to Fight the Sleeping Pill Problem,” Schenectady Gazette, 28 January 1947, 10 (“vitality”).

25. Herndon, Booton, “More Victims of the DEVIL’S CAPSULES,” American Weekly, 28 December 1947, 14Google Scholar.

26. Edith Nourse Rogers, statement, in 80th Cong., 1st sess., House Committee on Ways and Means, Hearings, “Miscellaneous Bills,” 14–16 May 1947 (Washington, D.C.), 69–70; Rogers, testimony, in 82nd Cong., 1st sess., Subcommittee of the House Committee on Ways and Means, Hearings, “Control of Narcotics, Marihuana, and Barbiturates,” 7, 14, and 17 April 1951 (Washington, D.C.), 3–8. See also King, The Drug Hang Up, chap 25; Norman and Madelyn Carlisle, “Thrill Pills Can Ruin You,” Colliers, 23 April 1949, 20, 60–61; cf. Connolly, “Lethal Lullaby.”

27. “Legislature to Remain in Session Three More Weeks,” Nashua (New Hampshire) Telegraph, 3 June 1947, 4.

28. Green, Paul, “The Barbiturate Time Bomb,” American Druggist, September 1945, 76ffGoogle Scholar.

29. “Sleep Pill Curbs,” Business Week, 20 October 1945, 36; “New York’s Drive on Sleeping Pills Pays Off,” Los Angeles Times, 22 August 1948, C15; Robert Geiger, “U.S. Wolfs Sleeping Pills by the Hundred Tons,” Washington Post, 26 January 1947, B6.

30. Geiger, “U.S. Wolfs Sleeping Pills.”

31. Werble, “Waco Was a Barbiturate HOT SPOT”; “Barbiturate Curb Backed by Doctors,” New York Times, 3 April 1947, 26; “Academy Endorses Sleeping Pill Curb,” New York Times, 1 November 1947, 8; Theodore Klumpp, “Sleep and Sleeping Pills,” American Mercury, October 1945, 457–62 (“normal self-control”); Geiger, “U.S. Wolfs Sleeping Pills” (“continuation of a trend”). On the waning of the therapeutic reform movement within the AMA, see Harry Marks, The Progress of Experiment (Cambridge, 1997); Nicolas Rasmussen, “The Drug Industry and Clinical Research in Interwar America: Three Types of Physician Collaborator,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 79 (2005): 50–80; and Dominique Tobell, “Allied Against Reform: Pharmaceutical Industry–Academic Physician Relations in the United States, 1945–1970,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 82 (2008): 878–912. Public health leader Louis Dublin dated the shift in attitude of the AMA leadership to about 1930, when “local medical practitioners” began to replace eminent “scientists and medical educators” in elected positions (Dublin, Memoirs, chap. 16, folder “Memoirs Chapters 11–20,” Box 21, Louis I. Dublin Papers, U.S. National Library of Medicine manuscript collection MS C 316; quotes p. 166). While the elite influence lasted longer on expert councils such as the Council on Pharmacy, it was finished by the 1950s, when that council discontinued its voluntary “Seal of Acceptance” drug marketing regulatory program.

32. Becker, Outsiders; Frydl, Drug Wars, 180.

33. Anslinger memo to Assistant Secretary of Treasury Herbert Gaston, 16 April 1941, Folder “Barbituric 1940–44”; Ray Tucker, National Whirligig newswire, 9 October 1945, Folder “Barbituric 1945 (June–Dec)”; both in Box 38, Entry 9, General Subject Files 1916–70, Records of the Drug Enforcement Administration, RG 170, National Archives, College Park, Md. Anslinger in 82nd Cong., 1st sess., Subcommittee of the House Committee on Ways and Means, Hearings, “Control of Narcotics, Marihuana, and Barbiturates,” 7, 14, and 17 April 1951 (Washington, D.C.), 205. See also Anslinger statement in “Capehart Says Price Rule May Spur Monopoly,” New York Herald Tribune, 15 October 1948, 34.

34. Anslinger to Rogers, 15 February 1946, Folder “Barbituric 1946,” and Anslinger to Pearl Kendall Hess (Director, National WCTU), 20 February 1947, Folder “Barbituric 1947–,” Box 38, Entry 9, General Subject Files 1916–70, Records of the Drug Enforcement Administration, RG 170, National Archives, College Park, Md. On the Tax Act, see Ferraiolo, “From Killer Weed to Popular Medicine,” and Carroll, “Under the Influence.”

35. Rep. Boggs, 3 March 1952, in 82nd Cong., 2nd sess., Subcommittee on Narcotics Control, House Ways and Means Committee, Hearings, “Barbiturate Control,” 3, 5, and 13 March 1952 (Washington, D.C., 1952), 10.

36. 82nd Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record (23 July–13 August 1951), vol. 97, pt. 7, 9327 (Rep. O’Hara—“chaos”) and 9331 (Rep. Hale). The ongoing uproar among pharmacists from Dunbar’s remarks can be traced in the trade press; e.g., “F&DA Position on Rx Renewals Hit by APHA’s Fischelis as ‘Interfering with Exercise of Professional Judgment,’” FDC Reports, 1 April 1950, W9–W10.

37. Young, Medical Messiahs, chap. 25; Marks, “Revisiting ‘The Origins,’” 111; John Swann, “Drug Abuse Control Under FDA, 1938–1968,” Public Health Reports 112 (1997): 83–86; Sam D. Fine, interview with Robert Porter, 5 November 1978, FDA Oral Histories, undated interview at https://www.fda.gov/downloads/AboutFDA/WhatWeDo/History/OralHistories/SelectedOralHistoryTranscripts/UCM264155.pdf, 20 (accessed 29 June 2017). See “Six Cincinnati Druggists Plead ‘Not Guilty,’” FDC Reports, 10 September 1949, 2; “Nab 6 Druggists in U.S. Drive on Sedative Sales,” Chicago Tribune, 19 January 1950, A6; “20 Convictions Under Food and Drug Act Listed,” Chicago Tribune, 22 July 1950, B8; Associated Press, “Risky Drugs, Poison Foods Bother FDA,” Washington Post, 7 February 1951, 6.

38. Inspector Joseph Milunas to Chief Inspector, Baltimore District, Progress Report 2, 20 March 1950; Philadelphia District, Memo to FDA Field Operations re Investigations of Indiscriminate Refilling of Prescription for dangerous Drugs, DFO letter 1–13–50, 14 March 1950. Both in box 1257, RG 88, Records of FDA, Division of General Services, General Subject Files 1938–74, 1950, U.S. National Archives, College Park, Md.

39. Swann, “Drug Abuse Control under FDA, 1938–1968.” For trade-press perception, see “Regulatory Activity Against Retail Druggists,” FDC Reports, 4 February 1950, 3 (“bearing down”), and “F&DA Retail Drug Store Enforcement Activities,” 11 February 1950, 2 cover section (“up in arms”). On the AMA’s campaign, see Poen, Monte, Harry S. Truman Versus the Medical Lobby: The Genesis of Medicare (Columbia, Mo., 1979);Google Scholar Derickson, Alan, Health Security for All: Dreams of Universal Health Care in America (Baltimore, 2005), chap 4;Google Scholar Boychuk, Gerard, National Health Insurance in the United States and Canada: Race, Territory, and the Roots of Difference (Washington, D.C., 2008), chap 3.Google Scholar

40. Isbell, Harris, “Addiction to Barbiturates and the Barbiturate Abstinence Syndrome,” Annals of Internal Medicine 33 (1950): 108–21Google Scholar; Isbell et al., “Chronic Barbiturate Intoxication: An Experimental Study,” Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry 64 (1950): 1–28; “Sleeping Pills Declared Worse Than Morphine,” Los Angeles Times, 21 April 1950, 1.

41. Caute, David, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower (New York, 1978)Google Scholar; Poen, Harry S. Truman Versus the Medical Lobby, chaps. 6–7. Negotiations had completely stalled by the end of 1950, with manufacturers adamant to block provisions empowering the FDA to decide what drugs were prescription only, and the largest retail druggists trade association (NARD) together with FDA insistent on their necessity but allowing pharmacists refill discretion over drugs not requiring prescriptions according to the FDA, while the AMA was insistent that pharmacists have no such discretion as it belonged to physicians alone. See “‘Way Out’ of Rx Refill Controversy,” FDC Reports, 2 December 1950, W1; “NARD’S Frates Uses ‘U.N. Veto’ to Block Nat’l Drug Trade Conf. Resolution vs. Refill Bill,” FDC Reports, 2 December 1950, W2–4.

42. Chalmers Roberts, “Bill to End Leniency to Dope ‘Repeaters’ Gets Green Light; D.C. Judges Criticized,” Washington Post, 8 April 1951, M1; “War on Narcotics Urged,” New York Times, 16 May 1951, 42; Harold Hinton, “3 Minors Recount Narcotic Scourge,” New York Times, 27 June 1951, 19 (“leprosy”); King, The Drug Hang-Up, chap. 25. Anslinger testimony in 82nd Cong., 1st sess., Subcommittee of the House Committee on Ways and Means, Hearings, “Control of Narcotics, Marihuana, and Barbiturates,” 7, 14, and 17 April 1951 (Washington, D.C.), 205; George Lull submission on behalf of the American Medical Association, 12 April 1951 (Washington, D.C.), 211–12. On organized medicine’s role in the November 1950 federal elections, especially as perceived by the Democratic Party leadership, see Poen, Harry S. Truman Versus the Medical Lobby, chap. 7; Mike Gorman to Donald S. Dawson, undated [stamped received 20 March 1951] and Dawson to Gorman, 3 April 1951, in Official Files 103, Box 577, Folder “Health Needs of the Nation,” Harry Truman Presidential Library, Independence, Mo.

43. Anon., “House Subcmte. Orders FDA and Narcotics Bureau to ‘Get Together’ on New Barbiturate Controls,” FDC Reports, 21 April 1951, W6–9; Anon., “Licensing Control for Barbiturates,” FDC Reports, 4 August 1951, W6; Anon., “AMA & Drug Field Oppose New Controls over Barbiturates via Legitimate Channels, But May Consider Plugging Loopholes,” FDC Reports, 12 December 1951, W5–10.

44. Anon., “Key Role On Durham-Humphrey Rx Refill Bill,” FDC Reports, 9 August 1950, P3; Anon., “Mftrs. Push Compromise for ‘Rx legend listing,’” FDC Reports, 5 May 1951, W3–10; Anon., “House Passes Durham-Humphrey Bill Minus Rx Legend Listing,” FDC Reports, 4 August 1951, W2–5; Anon., “Strong Senate Committee Report on Durham-Humphrey Bill Virtually Assures Final Enactment This Session,” FDC Reports, 13 October 1951, W10–11; “FDA Invites Industry Cooperation in Preparing Regs for Major Drug Relabeling Operation under D-H Law,” FDC Reports, 27 October 1951, W8–11. Public Law 215, An Act to Amend Sections 303(c) and 503(b) of the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, 82nd Cong., 1st sess. (65 U.S. Statutes 648, 1951); Young, Medical Messiahs, chap 12; Temin, “The Origins”; Marks, “Revisiting ‘The Origins.’”

45. Anon., “AMA & Drug Field Oppose New Controls Over Barbiturates” (quote on W7).

46. Anon, “AMA & Drug Field Oppose New Controls Over Barbiturates,” W9. A likely example of this industry-driven PR is Richard Williams, “To Sleep: Perchance . . . ,” Life Magazine, 13 October 1952, 105–18.

47. Division of Field Operations memo to Chiefs of Districts re Barbiturate Control, 27 December 1951, box 1393, RG 88, Records of FDA, Division of General Services, General Subject Files 1938–74, 1951, U.S. National Archives, College Park, Md.

48. Correspondence cross-reference sheet, “Lasker, Mrs Albert D.,” 26 October 1951, with summary and President’s reply; Official Files 103, Box 576, Folder 1949–53 [3/3], Truman Presidential Library, Independence, Mo. “House Unit Urges U.S. to Control Barbiturates,” Toledo Blade, 5 August 1951, 10; Editorial, “Control of Barbiturates,” Journal the American Medical Association 148 (1952): 1126–27; King, The Drug Hang Up, chap. 25; cf. Marks, “Revisiting ‘The Origins.’” On the politics of ‘free enterprise’ in the 1950s, Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–1960 (Champaign-Urbana, 1994). On the drug industry and medical profession, see Tobell, “Allied Against Reform,” and Tobell, Pills, Power, Policy; Poen, Harry S. Truman Versus the Medical Lobby.

49. Anon., “FDA’S $648,000 Budget Cut,” FDC Reports, 30 May 1953, W1–2; Anon., “FDA’S Budget,” FDC Reports, 6 November 1954, P3; Anon., “More FDA Inspections,” FDC Reports, 24 January 1955, 1; Carpenter, Reputation and Power, 167–69. Swann, “Drug Abuse Control under FDA, 1938–1968,” and on relaxed enforcement efforts after 1951, see Swann, “FDA and the Practice of Pharmacy,” 63.

50. Eve Edstrom, “4 Witnesses Relate Use of Narcotics by Children,” Washington Post, 25 November 1953, 1. Testimony of George Larrick, in 83rd Cong., 1st sess., Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Hearings, “Juvenile Delinquency (National, Federal and Youth-Serving Agencies),” 19, 20, 23, and 24 November 1953, pt. 1, 284.

51. “Pills Used for Thrill,” Berks County Reading Eagle, 22 March 1953, 40; Rufus King, The Drug Hang-Up, chaps. 15–16, 25; “Barbiturate and Amphetamine Misuse,” FDC Reports, 3 October 1955, 5–9; Estes Kefauver “Let’s Stop Sleeping-Pill Suicides!,” Los Angeles Times, 20 March 1949, G4–5, 22.

52. King, The Drug Hang-Up, chap. 25; Swann, “Drug Abuse Control Under FDA;” Statement of Randel Shake, in 89th Cong., 1st sess., House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Hearings, “Drug Abuse Control Amendments of 1965,” 27 January–10 February 1965, 375–77.

53. King, The Drug Hang-Up, chap. 28; David Courtwright, “The Controlled Substances Act: How a “Big Tent” Reform Became A Punitive Drug Law,” Drug and Alcohol Dependence 76 (2004): 9–15.

54. Poen, Harry S. Truman Versus the Medical Lobby; Derickson, Health Security for All; Boychuk, National Health Insurance in the United States and Canada; Fox, Daniel M., Power and Illness: The Failure and Future of American Health Policy (Berkeley, 1993).Google Scholar

55. Barbiturate consumption estimates, originating in FDA manufacturing surveys, from New York Academy of Sciences Committee on Public Health, “Misuse of Valuable Therapeutic Agents: Barbiturates, Tranquilizers, and Amphetamines,” reproduced in 89th Cong., 1st sess., House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Hearings, “Drug Abuse Amendments of 1965,” 27 January–10 February 1965, 57–62. Contemporary amphetamine consumption figures, also based on FDA manufacturer surveys, from B. Stewart and J. Lyndall, “The Deadly Highway Menace,” Fleet Owner, May 1964, reproduced in 88th Cong., 2nd sess., Senate Subcommittee on Health, Hearings, “Control of Psychotoxic Drugs,” 3 August 1964, 21–37. For more information on the trajectory of pharmaceutical amphetamine consumption, see Rasmussen, Nicolas, “America’s First Amphetamine Epidemic, 1929–1971: A Quantitative and Qualitative Retrospective,” American Journal of Public Health 98 (2008): 974–85Google Scholar.