Ford Administration, Gerald

The resignation of Richard Nixon sent shock waves throughout the Washington, D.C., political establishment. That many consider the presidency of Gerald Ford a continuing casualty of the Nixon calamity is not without reason. As the transition portended to drug policy, Ford found himself neither the absolutist that his predecessor was nor the more tolerant liberal the public seemed to want.

Ford's closest advisors were strongly adverse to the extremes of Nixon-era drug policy. Coupled with this, many felt federal drug policy needed to be reconsidered whole cloth. With both scientific and social opinions leaning away from harm principle-derived, punishment-driven policy, a more nuanced approach gained administration favor.

As Ford took office, a number of harsh realities came into focus. Chief among these was the fact that heroin use had continued to rise. Collaterally, the newly formed Drug Enforcement Administration was flagging as a result of poor leadership. Interagency turf battles persistent since the Kennedy era were still evident. All of this took place against a backdrop of changing public attitudes about the casual use of certain drugs, marijuana in particular.

Many aspects of the Ford administration can be properly regarded as the administration's struggle to find its own voice, while making certain it was sufficiently, but not radically different than that of [Page 305]Nixon. Early Ford administration changes included: suspension of drug testing in the armed forces; halting of Internal Revenue Service involvement in fraud investigations of suspected drug traffickers; and a general loss of confidence in foreign supply reduction efforts such as those undertaken in Turkey.

Perhaps the first major hurdle confronting the Ford administration was the stagnant and increasingly ineffectual state of the federal law enforcement bureaucracy. Essentially leaderless for a year and a half, DEA agents operated in an ostensibly atomized environment predicated on old and outmoded expectations. Much of the blame for this may be placed at the feet of DEA administrator John R. Bartels. Moreover, old animosities between the Justice Department and the Treasury Department continued to impede progress. Some of this was resolved by Bartels's May 1974 resignation and replacement by Deputy Assistant Attorney General Henry S. Dogin.

Dogin's first charge was to address what former Nixon staffers thought had been resolved under the Reorganization Plan 2 of 1973, which is to say, the enmity between Justice and Treasury narcotic enforcement bureaucracies. By December 1974 the two agencies had crafted a memorandum of understanding that spelled out the respective spheres of responsibility for the agencies.

A secondary, but no less daunting challenge for the administration came in the form of drug treatment and rehabilitation program difficulties. While nowhere near the scope of the law enforcement quagmire, the treatment bureaucracy faced its own transitional pains. The primary frontier for these problems was the transition of the Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention (SAODAP) into the National Institute on Drug Abuse through a merger with the Division of Narcotic Addiction and Drug Abuse of the National Institute of Mental Health. While some administration officials favored extension of the SAODAP mandate as a standalone functionary, most inside the White House did not. The debate revolved around matters of public perception in the face of research depicting the government's understanding of the national heroin problem as inherently flawed.

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