Turner, Carlton

Carlton Turner (1940-) is best known for his role as director of the Drug Abuse Policy Office during President Ronald Reagan's administration. During his tenure, Turner was referred to as the “drug czar” and was primarily responsible for directing drug-control policies in America.

Born in Alabama, Turner attended the University of Southern Mississippi from 1964 to 1970, earning a master's degree in chemistry and a Ph.D. in organic chemistry. He then served as assistant director of the University of Mississippi's marijuana research facility. At the time, the university's marijuana project was the only legal source of marijuana research in the country, and Turner was considered one of the world's leading experts on the drug. He also served in the university's Research Institute for Pharmaceutical Studies, becoming director of the institute in 1980, and as a consultant for government agencies and private firms in the United States, Mexico, and Canada, and for the United Nations.

Turner first served in the Drug Abuse Policy Office, an adjunct of the Office of Policy Development, from 1981 to 1983. He subsequently served as special assistant to the president for Drug Abuse Policy from 1983 to 1985, and as deputy assistant to the president and director of the Drug Abuse Policy Office from 1985 to 1986. He also assisted Nancy Reagan with her drug abuse education projects, namely her “Just Say No” campaign. During his employment he implicated marijuana as the leading drug in the “gateway drug” theory, which proposes that marijuana almost invariably leads to the use of harder drugs. This theory became the staple of his anti-drug movement, which included well recognized slogans such as “zero tolerance” and “user accountability.”

Turner's anti-drug initiatives focused primarily on marijuana, and he justified his position by stating that the harm caused by marijuana exceeded that of all other drugs due to its “staying power and broad cellular actions on the body.” During the Carter administration marijuana initiatives included spraying Mexican marijuana with the herbicide Paraquat. In 1983 Turner made several public appearances to justify the use of the same herbicide in Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. He defended the program, stating that marijuana users deserved to die as punishment for smoking the poisoned plants in order to teach them a lesson.

With the Drug Enforcement Administration's particular focus on marijuana, Turner enlisted [Page 785]the help of the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to patrol the nation's forests and destroy any marijuana plants found. With Turner's encouragement, President Reagan gave his full support to the Drug Abuse Resistance Program (D.A.R.E.) to enlist law enforcement officers to teach fifth and sixth graders the consequences of marijuana use.

For Carlton Turner, efforts to control marijuana use may have been as much about culture as they were about health, and he summarized his position by stating that marijuana was not only a perverse, pervasive plague in itself, but also the cause for anti-military, anti-nuclear power, anti-big business, and anti-authority demonstrations among young adults. As a result, the previously adopted public-health approach to drug abuse was replaced by an emphasis on law enforcement, and the notion that substance abuse was an illness was replaced with the belief that drug abuse was immoral, and punishment took precedence over treatment and rehabilitation. The treatment budget was accordingly cut by 43 percent of what it was under President Carter's administration.

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