was about to engulf the nation. The numbers were astounding. From a total of 68,088 heroin addicts in 1969, the official count jumped to over 550,000 in two years—an eight-fold increase.  “The problem has assumed the dimensions of a national emergency,” said the President. “I intend to take every step necessary.”^[3]  To fight the drug pushers on their own terms, he would need emergency powers—preventive detention, unorthodox strike forces, more freedom to search, wiretap, and arrest. The Democrats in Congress, impressed with the whip-crack political power of Nixon’s law-and-order message, backed him to the hilt.

But it turns out the numbers that launched this spectacular crusade, in the grand tradition of drug wars past, were totally fabricated.   The 1971 addict count—559,000—was not arrived at by discovering new junkies, but by taking the 1969 total—68,088—and multiplying it by a factor of eight.^[4] The first number, suspiciously precise in itself, was simply a list of all the addicts who had run afoul of the law. Harry Anslinger always maintained every junkie would come to the attention of the cops sooner or later, but by 1970 the record-keepers at the Bureau of Narcotics began to suspect this was wishful thinking. After a study of the actual street scene, they concluded that the official count was probably off by about 800 percent. So instead of a dramatic increase in addiction, the new numbers simply reflected a second look at the original data. But nobody at the Bureau bothered to call the White House spokesmen on this flagrant misconstruction of the facts, and the press never bothered to ask.

By 1972, however, the appearance of a growing addict population was becoming an embarrassment. This huge jump had occurred, after all, on Nixon’s watch, and this was an election year.  So the White House called the head man at the Bureau of Narcotics and told him to cool it. The drug agency, responding instantly to this shift in the wind, arbitrarily cut the number of junkies to 150,000 in the next report, and the Administration was able to take credit for the overnight cure of some 400,000 addicts.^[5]