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DuPont, Robert

Robert L. DuPont (1936-) was born in Toledo, Ohio. He is widely considered to be a pioneer in drug policy, having served as a principal drug policy advisor for Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter. His career was shaped in large part by experiences working with heroin addicts in the criminal justice system, and that led him to champion drug testing as a way to identify and treat substance abuse disorders.

Inspired by Karl Menninger's The Human Mind at age 14, DuPont set his sights on becoming a psychiatrist. He graduated from Emory University in 1958 and Harvard University Medical School in 1963. For his residency training, DuPont went to the Cleveland Metropolitan General Hospital and Massachusetts Mental Health Center at Harvard Medical School (and worked for a short time with Martin Luther King, Jr., at the Southern Christian Leadership Council), before coming to the National Institutes of Health in Washington in 1968 to complete those requirements.

Washington, D.C., Positions

In 1968 DuPont became a research associate and deputy at the Washington, D.C., Department of Corrections. In less than a year, he became head of community corrections and parole. In August 1969, with a handful of college students on summer vacation, he and his team tested the urine of every man entering jail in the District. They found that 44 percent were positive for heroin, and DuPont's life course would be forever changed.

Surprised by the finding that heroin was fueling crime, DuPont set out to learn about addiction treatment from veterans of the field, including Vincent Dole, Marie Nyswander, and Jerry Jaffe. On September 15, 1969, DuPont started the first methadone treatment program in Washington with 25 prisoners on parole. On February 18, 1970, D.C. Mayor Walter E. Washington appointed him the head of a new citywide heroin addiction treatment program, the Narcotics Treatment Administration (NTA), housed within the District government's new Human Resources Department. Within two months, the NTA had 2,000 addicts in treatment in 12 treatment centers, and the center had attracted significant political support.

In the three years DuPont would be the director, the NTA served 15,000 heroin addicts; the crime rate in the District of Columbia was cut in half in that three-year period. The NTA pioneered the idea of drug testing criminals, and drug testing would be a major policy initiative of DuPont throughout his career.

Federal Positions

DuPont moved from the NTA to the Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention (SAODAP), the White House's drug policy office, in 1973. SAODAP had been established in 1970 (Jerry Jaffe was its first director), and was set to expire in 1974. The job of demand-reduction activities in the federal government was to fall under a newly minted agency, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).

The Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), Casper Weinberger, appointed DuPont as NIDA director in September 1973. DuPont was also temporarily assigned in 1975 to serve as the acting head of the Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration (ADAMHA—later the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration), the agency to which NIDA then reported to. This is the only time someone has simultaneously held the position of principal White House drug policy advisor, principal drug abuse research advisor, and principal prevention and treatment program administrator.

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