At the threshold of the 1990s, control of illicit drugs is the preeminent problem of criminal justice in the United States. Because a high level of public concern produces governmental action in a political democracy, the drug problem has already produced within five years two major federal legislative initiatives, the creation of a new special office headed by a federal “drug czar,” and numerous antidrug campaigns at every level of American government. Although many of these governmental responses themselves increase public awareness of drugs as an issue, public anxiety and alarm about drugs seem to have been an authentic grass-roots phenomenon of the mid-1980s that has taken hold in the American landscape. Drug control seems poised for a long run as a high priority for political action.

This book is about the process of making drug control policy. How are policy choices identified, debated, and made in an atmosphere of intense concern? How are the consequences of governmental policy measured and evaluated? How, if at all, do we learn from our mistakes? We undertook this project convinced that just as much as we need new drug policies, we need a new drug policy process to create an environment in which alternatives can be rationally debated.

What is conspicuously missing from this volume is a neat solution to the complex of phenomena that Americans call the drug problem. The appetite for mood-affecting substances is universal, and it is a chronic condition of American life rather than an acute emergency that is likely to be quickly resolved.