Uniform State Narcotics Act

Context

The Harrison Narcotic Act, effective in March 1915, essentially regulated the relationship between psychoactive drug distributors and consumers by creating authorized sellers and buyers and then prescribing a documented and audited set of transactions. Although Harrison clearly was intended to regulate psychoactive drug consumption throughout the country, constitutional considerations caused it to be framed as a revenue act with a limited scope for federal police authority (an interpretation upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1916). Harrison's broader aim could be achieved only through corresponding state laws and their enforcement. The Uniform Act translated Harrison and international treaty considerations into enforceable state law.

The seven-year gestation period of the Uniform Act's first complete draft reflected the political complexity of the task. Influenced by medical societies, organizations of pharmacists, drug manufacturers, and even agricultural producers and processors, state drug laws varied considerably in terms of which substances, in what concentrations, were regulated, and who could legally administer them. They differed as to acceptable handling and documentation provisions. They were ambiguous about the legality [Page 796]of furnishing drugs to addicts as a method of treatment. The National Commission on Uniform State Laws, with two members appointed by each governor, struggled for years to find language and substance that was broadly acceptable.

Equally important, the states had vastly different administrative capacities for oversight and different constitutional provisions for it. Some states (like New York, on whose 1921 law the original draft of the Uniform Act was largely modeled) had highly developed, state-administered systems for the regulation of medicine, dentistry, veterinary practice, and pharmacy—the professions most directly affected by drug regulation—but others did not. Some states had detailed antinarcotic laws but few enforcement personnel, a problem most apparent when it came to investigating drug dealing. In most states, addicts were treated as a species of vagrant and arrested by local police.

As late as 1931, only California and Pennsylvania had much state enforcement capability and most states had no coordinated administrative approach that might, for example, take charge of revising legislation in view of new science or experience or immediately alert a medical licensing board to the conviction of a doctor as an addict and/or drug peddler. Thus, an important political goal of the Uniform Act was to create a set of laws whose enforcement would oblige lagging states to develop greater administrative capacity. This approach was strongly supported by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.

...