Harshest in the Nation: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Widening Embrace of Punitive Politics

Abstract

This article analyzes local debates around the enactment of New York's 1973 Rockefeller Drug Laws, which marked a watershed moment in the turn towards punitive drug policy. This history contributes to a growing body of literature that has challenged and complicated the traditional backlash narrative of "law and order." Governor Nelson Rockefeller did not root his campaign for harsh new drug laws in the politics of white racial backlash. Instead, he championed the laws by publicizing their endorsement by several African American community leaders from Harlem. This article argues that historians must take seriously Americans' perceived threats to security and safety in order to better understand the public's embrace of punitive politics in the later twentieth century. More attention to the ways local community leaders debated and promoted crime policy better informs our understanding of the punitive turn and the formation of a bipartisan legislative effort responsible for the War on Drugs.

Entitled to Addiction?: Pharmaceuticals, Race, and America's First Drug War

“…Already in 1973, for example, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller's “harshest in the nation” drug laws encouraged law-and-order politicians to adopt a new and even intensified drug war as part of the nation's resurgent political conservativism. 115 This process culminated in the mid-1980s scare over “crack” cocaine, whose punitive legislation helped to produce an era of mass incarceration so racially unequal that some have taken to calling it the “New Jim Crow.” 116 Meanwhile, deregulation of the pharmaceutical industry in the 1980s allowed the introduction of a new generation of blockbuster sedatives, stimulants, and narcotics, all hailed as technological triumphs over addiction. Barbiturates and early tranquilizers gave way to Xanax (for panic) or Ambien (for sleep); Benzedrine and Dexamyl gave way to Ritalin, Adderall, and other stimulants for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and depression; even narcotics got a new lease on life as morphine and Demerol gave way to Talwin and eventually OxyContin, and pain management emerged as a new medical specialty.…”