Agency of Fear: Opiates and Political Power in America

by Edward Jay Epstein

President Bush has made the war against drugs the number one issue on the contemporary American political agenda. In this revised edition of his classic book, available for the first time in paperback, Edward Jay Epstein argues that the president has adopted the strategy of his forebear, Richard Nixon, in using the drugs war to blame foreigners for the crisis in America’s cities, and to provide a smokescreen for unrelated political activity designed to bolster executive power.

The drugs crackdown has seen an almost hundredfold increase in the federal budget for narco-politics in the fifteen years since Agency of Fear  was first published, while statistics on drug-running have been massaged. Epstein points out that, despite the massive budgets and public relations brouhaha, drug importation, as measured against wholesale price, has in fact grown.

Genres: History, Politics, Drugs

Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Edward Jay Epstein (born 1935) was an American investigative journalist and a former political science professor at Harvard, UCLA, and MIT. While a graduate student at Cornell University in 1966, he published the book Inquest, an influential critique of the Warren Commission probe into the John F. Kennedy assassination. Epstein wrote two other books about the Kennedy assassination, eventually collected in The Assassination Chronicles: Inquest, Counterplot, and Legend (1992). His books Legend (1978) and Deception (1989) drew on interviews with retired CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Jesus Angleton, and his 1982 book The Rise and Fall of Diamonds was an expose of the diamond industry and its economic impact in southern Africa.

Reviews

[Ben Westhoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd call this a "lost classic" that's still relevant today, about how the Nixon administration drummed up a phony heroin epidemic to gain control of various government bureaucracies -- their attempt to "drain the swamp." This led to the creation of the DEA, and kicked off the Wars on Drugs (made most famous by Reagan). Nixon's efforts did nothing to slow drug abuse, of course, and most likely exacerbated the problem, as well as birthing the methadone industrial complex. Interestingly, the opiate problem looked much different at the time; heroin came mainly from the Golden Triangle or Turkey, through France. This book is not just for drug policy wonks; think of it as a companion piece to the "Slow Burn" podcast. The sourcing is incredible, giving you a unique, rarely-seen look inside the Nixon administration's sleazy machinations.

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 2 out of 5]

Edward Jay Epstein's Agency of Fear is an odd tome by a conspiracy theorist, seeking to explore the "real" scandal of Richard Nixon's presidency. Epstein (famous for his writings on the Kennedy Assassination) argues that the key to the Watergate scandal was Nixon's War on Drugs, which he views as Nixon's tool for consolidating power in the United States. After a brief history of American scaremongering over drugs (particularly heroin), Epstein shows that Nixon exploited paranoia about narcotics both as a key aspect of his "law and order" message and a method of social control. He expanded the loosely organized agencies into a full-scale narcotics task force, a variety of overlapping agencies that (Epstein argues) usurped the traditional functions of the FBI, DEA and other law enforcement agencies. It's an interesting premise that Epstein does his best to document: he notes that many of those directly involved in Nixon's drug enforcement efforts, like Bud Krogh and Gordon Liddy, became major players in Watergate; that Nixon's demands for drug enforcement caused strained relations, or worse with allies like Turkey and Mexico; that Federal agencies were given almost unlimited powers of surveillance and arrest which dovetailed nicely with Nixon's own paranoia. So far as that goes, the book is persuasive. Epstein is less convincing, however, drawing a straight line from Liddy's crackpot notions of drug control to the White House Horrors; his book often falls back on supposition, hearsay and thin chains of evidence that never quite say what he wants them to say, a failing of many conspiracist volumes. Nor did this reader find his argument that the DEA, ATF and other organizations are a nascent "Deep State" waiting for the right dictator to execute a coup, however tempting that thesis is to some modern readers. Nixon's abuse and expansion of state power, whether for personal or political ends, ought to have been enough to condemn him; for Epstein, like many others, launching the disastrous drug war somehow did not suffice.