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The Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914 is widely viewed in the scholarly literature as the beginning of the U.S. government's war on drugs (Miron and Zwiebel 1995; Benson and Rasmussen 1997; Libby 2006; Francis and Mauser 2011; McNamara 2011). An essay by Peter Boettke, Christopher Coyne, and Abigail Hall (2013) is an exception that dates the war's start to the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. However, the problems that the Harrison Act was intended to address can be directly traced to the unintended consequences of antidrug policies adopted by state governments and the federal government in the nineteenth century. This paper documents these nineteenth-century antidrug policies and uses an economic theory of the dynamics of intervention to explain how these policies led to the adoption of the Harrison Act. These nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century policies represent the beginning of the U.S. government's war on drugs.
With the notable exception of a book by Mark Thornton (1991), the literature on the drug war largely fails to recognize and explain the dynamic nature of the interventions in the war on drugs. The literature on the legislation and outcomes of the period leading up to the Harrison Act, written primarily within the history and medical professions, falls short in explaining how the Harrison Act came about because it does not have a suitable economic framework to interpret the events.1
We utilize the theory of intervention developed by Ludwig von Mises ([1940] 1998) and then built upon by F. A. Hayek (1945, [1944] 2007), Sanford Ikeda (1997), and others to explain the evolution of drug laws leading up to the Harrison Act, and, in doing so, we are able to address and utilize insights from David Musto (1973), Edward Brecher (1972), and David Courtwright ([1982] 2001) in a cohesive, not contradictory, manner. This theory allows us to explain how policy X implemented at time t affected the decision to implement policy Y at time t + 1.
Each government intervention into the market impacts the information and incentives of a wide variety of market participants who often have goals other than and sometimes contrary to those of the policy makers. But, as Mises states, "interventionism is not an economic system ... it is not a method which...