In The Drug Wars in America, 1940–1973, Kathleen Frydl tries to reframe United States efforts to combat illegal drugs as part of a larger state-building project. In this goal she is largely successful. According to Frydl, the “war on drugs,” as famously declared by President Richard Nixon in 1971, had in fact been going on for decades before his announcement. Illegal drugs had long since ceased to be a regulatory and taxation issue; since the 1940s, a more punitive and restrictive approach had gained ascendance, despite continued evidence of its ineffectiveness against what it was ostensibly trying to combat.

Frydl focusses her story on efforts to consolidate and increase federal control through the restructuring of policies concerning illegal drugs. A major contribution of Frydl's work is the demonstration that, in the case of drugs, state and federal power grew in tandem. Despite the popular mythology that an increase in federal power leads to corresponding impotence at the state level, Frydl successfully argues that both levels of government drew strength from a more punitive regime.

Another important contribution the book makes is tracing how different organizations treated different categories of drugs and how those categories shifted over time. Her distinction of diversion versus subversion is a useful one. The dramatically different perceptions and regulations of diverted licit drugs and subverted illicit drugs – what the effects were, who the users were, and what the appropriate control strategies were – culminated in the 1970 Controlled Substances Act, which reified the distinction in its classification of drugs into schedules. Schedule I drugs have, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), no currently accepted medical use in the United States.

Frydl's concluding recommendations inadvertently strengthen her argument. Her proposal to abolish the DEA, for example, reminds the reader of the previous chapter, in which she details the circumstances of the DEA's birth and the important institutional roles it fills. The durability of the “war on drugs,” in Frydl's account, stems from the concept's usefulness in rationalizing all sorts of other state-building projects, from mandatory sentencing to border security to bilateral trade agreements. Because she makes this argument so meticulously, her policy recommendations thus seem at best unlikely.

Despite the thoroughness of Frydl's account, there are some gaps in the story she tells. One omission is the role of changing mores in determining how the public viewed certain drugs. Contrasting how, for example, tobacco companies came under increasing scrutiny might shed more light on cultural trends that may have influenced perceptions of other drugs. The increasing restrictions on cigarette advertising in the late 1960s and early 1970s, for example, may have helped neutralize perceptions of marijuana compared to narcotics like heroin, despite the designation of both drugs as Schedule I. (Marijuana has subsequently been reclassified.) Frydl's goal is explicitly to tell a story of “government power” (12), but, in a democracy, that power cannot be completely divorced from broader cultural trends.

Another shortfall is a disproportionate focus on eastern urban environments, especially Washington, DC, as proxies for the nation. Frydl moves away from this emphasis in a fascinating sidebar on amphetamine use in the long-haul trucking industry, but her research on more rural or western areas is otherwise thin. More attention to, for example, drug use among low-income workers would have given greater context for the legislative story she tells. To give only one example, the drug consumption patterns in the district of Representative Hale Boggs (D–LA) might have shed light on his chairmanship of the Subcommittee on Narcotics of the House Ways and Means Committee.

Overall, Frydl tells an important story about the origins of United States drug-control policy, a policy that has done little to stop the demand for illegal drugs but has filled various other political purposes. She argues persuasively that the drug wars have been essential for the enhancement of state power in both domestic and foreign policy. The work also contributes to our understanding of how state power is built and reinforced, often through narratives that appear to be about something else. Deeply researched and thoughtfully argued, The Drug Wars in America, 1940–1973 tells an important story about why a failed set of policies continues to endure.