Coolidge Administration, Calvin

Calvin Coolidge was born in July 1872 and died in January 1933. Coolidge became president following the sudden death of Warren G. Harding in August 1923. Coolidge ran and was elected the 30th president of the United States in 1924. Regarded as a progressive Republican who voted in favor of giving women the right to vote, Coolidge's presidency took place during the failed experiment of Prohibition, which lasted from 1920 until 1933, shortly after Coolidge's presidency ended.

During Coolidge's administration it was illegal to manufacture, consume, or transport alcohol. At the federal level the Prohibition Unit was part of the fight against the epidemic of bootlegging and increase in organized crime that were the result of the 1919 Volstead Act. When it was first established in 1920, the Prohibition Unit was part of the Bureau of Internal Revenue. In 1927 under Coolidge it became an independent agency within the Department of the Treasury and changed its name from the Prohibition Unit to the Bureau of Prohibition. Today the unit is the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). In addition to alcohol temperance, a number of pieces of federal legislation were passed during Coolidge's presidency that would gradually come to form the basis of today's drug laws.

As the murder rate increased with the expansion of the underground alcohol market, there was growing national concern about the connection of drug use and crime by the mid-1920s. Addiction was viewed as both a moral and physical affliction and linked to increasing crime rates. Heroin was banned in 1924 under the Heroin Act, which made it illegal to manufacture heroin. Supporting the ban was the medical community; doctors testified before Congress that not only did heroin have no medicinal use, but it was also the most dangerous and addictive drug and could cause psychological damage that encouraged criminality. Soon after came the beginning of a call for states to have standardized laws to regulate and punish drug crimes.

First drafted in 1925, the Uniform State Narcotic Act was finally passed in 1932 and granted states the power to seize and punish those involved in the illegal opium and cocaine drug trades. Internationality there was also agreement that countries needed to work together to control the manufacturing, importing, selling, distributing, and exporting of morphine and cocaine. First signed by countries including Germany, China, France, Italy, Japan, Russia, and Egypt in 1925, legislation that created a [Page 172]Permanent Central Opium Board charged with collecting statistical information about the opiate trade and how it was regulated went into effect in 1928.

In 1925 the Supreme Court of the United States heard the case of Linder v. United States, which reversed Webb, et al. v. United States (1919) where the court found it was legal for doctors to prescribe small amounts of narcotics to wean a person from addiction, but not for addiction maintenance. In Webb, the Court found that the 1914 Harrison Tax Act, which empowered Congress to levy a tax on a variety of drugs including heroin, morphine, and cocaine in what was actually an effort to exert control over drug use and distribution, made prescribing narcotics to those with an addiction an unprofessional practice. In Linder the Court found that the federal government was not empowered to regulate how doctors practiced medicine and dispensed drugs. Due to the antinarcotic fervor of the time, however, the case did little to make addiction maintenance more available. The media portrayed drug users as evil people who became totally corrupted by the drug and were going to be the ruin of American culture and values.

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