I’ve never had any desire to do drugs, took a couple of puffs (toke, hit?) of weed a couple of times in my teens (didn’t do a thing for me). But my memory of the 60’s and 70’s was that drugs were communally shared and when sold, weren’t for huge profit. Okay, maybe the first couple of times were to draw you in, but AFAIK, people didn’t fight and die over drug sales. That suddenly changed in the 80’s and beyond. What happened?
Cocaine.
Ah, I remember hearing that. Also crack and crystal meth in the 90’s and beyond.
There’s more to it than that. What really changed was the decline of the mafia. Prior to the 70s, the Mafia dominated the drug trade, primarily the Luccheses and Bonannos. They imported heroin from Turkey and the greater Middle East via France over a trade route called “The French Connection.” What this meant is that the drug trade was being run by prosperous business people from prosperous countries. Yes, they were violent and certainly not nice people, but they had centuries of dealing with conflicts and maximizing profits under their belts. They tended to target users on the margins in order to keep pressure off of them and could usually fairly peacefully divide up territories and come to consensus on decisions regarding the trade.
In the 70s, the governments of Turkey, France and the US decided to shut down these crime families and smuggling routes and largely succeeded. This combined with a large number of wealthy addicts coming back frim Vietnam. It left a large power vacuum that was filled by Colombian and Panamanian gangs. These gangs were largely run by amateur criminals who saw an opportunity rather than career criminals like the Mafioso of old. They didn’t have methods of dealing with conflict, nor connections within law enforcement that smoothed smuggling operatiions so things were much more likely to devolve into violence, particularly in Miami. They also lacked distribution networks, so they turned to street gangs who had even fewer methods of conflict resolution and histories of violence which made things even worse. This brought things to mainstream attention which started the war on drugs. This drove up the price of drug labor, so they needed higher prices and new markets. By the 1980s, what was once a “poor or black problem” had gone mainstream and the additional revenues had firmly established a quite capitalistic culture.
Late 60’s- early 70’s also saw the rise of the meth trade and turf wars between the biker gangs that produced and distributed it.
I never read any Hunter S. Thompson, but I hear he covers some of this in his book “Hell’s Angles”.
Dude! Hie thee to your nearest library and check out some of his books! With your sense of humor that I have seen here on the Dope, I think you would really love them.
The War on Drugs itself, launched by Nixon in part to punish the left and minorities, played a huge role in make ng the drug trade dangerous.
I didn’t think anybody noticed. :o
Of course, I’d have to learn to read. 
Gato, youre so funny. Maybe you could get books on cd.
I agree. The greater the attack by government, the stronger the cartels got. Just like the rise of the bootleggers during Prohibition.
You’ll have to go ask Alice.
I think this is another case of faster information making us more aware of the problem now.
Many people forget that African American community leaders lobbied Nixon intensely for stricter drug enforcement. Drug abuse was already seen as a serious problem by then in poor neighborhoods, but it got much less attention because it was more confined.
Transitions can happen very fast. During 1967-1968, Haight-Ashbury in SF went from minor drugs like LSD and marijuana being the “standard” drugs to hard drugs like cocaine and heroin coming in and causing all sorts of problems. The free clinic services got overwhelmed.
Incidentally, what was the attitude of the Johnson Administration toward drugs? Was it as tough as Nixon’s or more lenient?
I was 10-15 during the LBJ years so it was a little before my exposure to the (mostly) marijuana scene but out in the sticks where I lived it simply wasn’t popular enough to garner significant attention from the authorities. The turning point came between 1968 and 1972 in my hood and things started to get a little hostile.
During the late 1970s there was a glut of cocaine. In response, dealers started pushing crack, which was easier to sell in smaller quantities and at higher profits. Crack also has a more immediate, intense, and shorter-lasting effect, thus making it more addictive than powder cocaine. Thus during the early and mid 80s, the crack epidemic spread across the US and UK. This was correlated with a rise in serious crime in some major US cities -
Cite.
Crack is different from pot. As drug abuse patterns changed, attitudes towards it changed.
Regards,
Shodan
My own personal theory is that the counterculture became the norm in the 1960’s. Yes, previous decades had their little pockets of unusual people, but nothing like the 1960’s. Those little pockets that did drugs eventually became main stream, and doing drugs became much more accepted by society.
Along with acceptance of people who were not the straight, white, Christian male norm.