7. Nixon’s actions against drug abuse
In 1970 Congress passed, at the urging of President Nixon, the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act. The act classified drugs in five different categories called Schedules. Placing a given drug in a schedule was based on considerations of international treaties, medical use, and the drug’s potential for abuse, which was at the time of passage an undefined term based primarily on the attitudes of society rather than medical definition. The law was drafted by a team under the supervision of the Attorney General, John Mitchell. The effect of the act was to consolidate federal drug policy under one umbrella and expand the activity of federal law enforcement to control drug use. At the same time Nixon’s Justice Department, headed by Mitchell, prepared the Uniform Controlled Substances Act for submission to the states for passage by their individual legislatures.
Under the provisions of the act passed by the Nixon administration, which remains in force though it has been amended several times, virtually any entity can petition to have the schedule for any drug changed, or created anew in the case of new drugs and medications being developed. To study the effect of a drug and its potential for abuse, a major factor regarding the schedule to which it could be assigned, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and the Treasury Department’s Customs Agents responsible for monitoring drugs coming across the border were combined into a new federal law enforcement agency, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the term DEA entered the alphabet soup of the federal government’s bureaucracy in 1973.