Sixty years ago, the Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking and Health marked a huge moment in public health, significantly impacting smoking rates in the United States. It was a groundbreaking report. Adult smoking rates then were 40 percent of the population — it’s about 12 percent today. 

What’s lesser known is that a year prior, Consumer’s Union (CU) had published a report titled Smoking and the Public Interest, which laid the groundwork for the Surgeon General’s findings.

In 1972, at the dawn of the War on Drugs, CU decided a similar report was needed for drugs and published Licit and Illicit Drugs — using the same lead author and researcher from their smoking report.

Unfortunately, it never influenced the federal government the way their smoking report did. That might be because the government wasn’t ready (and still isn’t) for the conclusions they shared. 

Here are the main recommendations in the report:

• Stop emphasizing measures to keep drugs away from people.
• Stop publicizing the horrors of the “drug menace.” 
• Stop increasing the damage done by drugs.
• Stop misclassifying drugs.
• Stop viewing the drug problem as primarily a national problem, to be solved on a national scale.
• Stop pursuing the goal of stamping out illicit drug use.

In short, they knew back then that a punitive approach to drugs was not going to be effective, and would cause more harm in the long run. 

Today, we have even more evidence that shows this to be true.

As we continue our mission to reshape the conversation and policy around drugs and addiction, it’s helpful to understand the historical context that has gotten us to where we are today.

Many thanks to my friend Robert Legge for bringing this part of drug prohibition history to my attention. He writes a weekly drug policy roundup newsletter, and if you’d like to receive it, you can email him at rob9leg@gmail.com.

Robert writes his newsletter as a volunteer because he has a passion for ending the harm happening to so many people from faulty drug policies. Everyone has influence. Where might yours be?

Sharing a social media post of ours, sharing Curious, sharing a conversation with a friend about better ways to approach addiction — all of it helps to reshape our culture, and ultimately, our policies.