Drug Normalization

Controversy of Drug Normalization: The First Conflict—Lindesmith Versus Anslinger

The first contemporary sociological and criminological application of the term normality to drugs appeared in the work of Alfred R. Lindesmith during the 1930s. What links the early Chicago school with the contemporary British concept of normalization is the desire to locate explanations of recreational drug use within everyday life and compare it with the demonization of drugs and drug users. From the outset, the theory of drug normalization has been used as a means to critique inaccurate and misleading explanations of contemporary drug in society. From the late 1930s, the sociologist Alfred Lindesmith was the object of regular harassment and censorship from Harry Anslinger, Director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN). Lindesmith's critique of the FBN drug policies was that the FBN promoted a dope fiend mythology; indeed, he was a significant voice of dissent against the FBN drug propaganda during the 1950s.

Lindesmith argued that the theories of drug use tend to be moralistic rather than scientific, and he accused drug prohibitionists of defining drug users as defective psychopaths. He claimed that the medical establishment held misinformed views about drug use and constructed the drug user as a fictitious monster of the imagination. His data for the non-criminality of drug use were based on international evidence, which indicated that more than half of the drug users had no criminal records of any kind prior to addiction and two thirds of drug users showed no appreciable changes in their general behavior as a consequence of addiction. Thus, Lindesmith set out the modern case for the normality of the drug user arguing that one of the key factors of drug consumption is the cultural milieu and particularly the culture of drug-using groups in their rationalization of their motivations for drug use.

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