This
Week
in
History
3/18/05
March 18, 1839: Lin Tse-Hsu, the imperial Chinese commissioner in charge of suppressing the opium traffic, orders all foreign traders to surrender their opium. In response, the British send expeditionary warships to the coast of China, beginning the First Opium War. March 19, 1983: First Lady Nancy Reagan of "Just Say No to Drugs" fame appears on the NBC sitcom Different Strokes to say, "Let me tell you a true story about a boy we'll call Charlie. He was only 14 and he was burned out on marijuana... One day, when his little sister wouldn't steal some money for him to go and buy some more drugs, he brutally beat her. The real truth is there's no such thing as soft drugs and hard drugs. All drugs are dumb... Don't end up another Charlie." March 21, 2003: President Bush announces his intention to nominate Karen P. Tandy to be the Drug Enforcement Administration's new administrator. Tandy served in the Department of Justice (DOJ) as Associate Deputy Attorney General and Director of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. She also previously served in DOJ as Chief of Litigation in the Asset Forfeiture Office and as Deputy Chief for Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. Earlier in her career, she prosecuted drug, money laundering, and forfeiture cases as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia and in the Western District of Washington. March 22, 1972: The Richard Nixon-appointed, 13-member National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse (the "Shafer Commission") recommends the decriminalization of marijuana, concluding: "Marihuana's relative potential for harm to the vast majority of individual users and its actual impact on society does not justify a social policy designed to seek out and firmly punish those who use it. This judgment is based on prevalent use patterns, on behavior exhibited by the vast majority of users and on our interpretations of existing medical and scientific data. This position also is consistent with the estimate by law enforcement personnel that the elimination of use is unattainable." March 23, 1983: Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush is placed in charge of the National Narcotics Border Interdiction System, supposed to staunch the drug flow over all US borders. March 24, 1998: House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) establishes the Speaker's Task Force for a Drug-Free America to design a World War II-style victory plan to save America's children from illegal drugs. Chaired by Congressman J. Dennis Hastert (R-IL) and co-chaired by Congressmen Rob Portman (R-OH) and Bill McCollum (R-FL), the 36-member Task Force is charged with helping to raise public awareness about America's drug crisis and advancing a comprehensive legislative strategy to achieve a Drug-Free America by 2002. March 24, 2002: Another day goes by with America no closer to being drug free than six years before.
|
