Drugs-as-a-Disease: Heroin, Metaphors, and Identity in Nixon’s Drug War

This essay examines President Nixon’s drug policy during the early 1970s, specifically the government’s reaction to heroin use by American soldiers in Vietnam. The official response, discursively (through the employment of the drugs-as-a-disease metaphor) and on the policy level, illustrated how issues of nationaland self-identity, othering, and modernity intersected in the formulation and implementation of what is now termed the Drug War. Heroin using soldiers and domestic addicts, labeled as carriers of a contagious, foreign, and dangerous, antimodern disease, threatened to undermine a contingent national identity, an identity weighted by capitalist modernity. Unearthing how addiction’s ostensibly antimodern condition contributed to the othering of addicts as a foreign danger reveals how the United States’ antidrug character and policies help maintain a national identity bound to the tenets of capitalist modernity. Methodologically, this essay combines historical analysis with literary and critical theory.