James Q. Wilson, in Commentary (Feb. 1990), 165 E. 65th St., New York, N.Y. The War on Drugs 10022.
Most Americans probably don't remember the nation's last war on drugs. We won it.
Wilson remembers it well. In 1972, he was appointed chairman of President Richard M. Nixon's National Advisory Council for Drug Abuse Prevention, charged with drawing up a strategy to combat what was at that time the nation's leading drug scourge: heroin. (Today, he is a political scientist at UCLA.) Then, as now,...