The Nazi War on Cancer and our War on Drugs

THE NAZI WAR ON CANCER by Robert Proctor
(Princeton University Press, 1999)         

I have read many books on the Nazi era, curious to understand how one of the most enlightened nations on the planet could become the most depraved. Germany at that time was the scientific leader of the world, holding half of all Nobel Prizes in science. It was a politically Christian nation: the clergy was integrated into the political power structure.

Robert Proctor, a professor of the history of science, has written a book that looks beyond the known horrors, into a part of the Nazi era that no one knows about, a time when they were world leaders identifying and attempting to eliminate environmental toxins and carcinogens. They passed laws to restrict pesticides and food additives. They were health food enthusiasts, and tried to discourage the excessive consumption of meat and fat, which they recognized had health hazards. They promoted breastfeeding and had laws against "exaggerated advertising of infant formulas which diminished a mother's will to nurse." They were the first to promote breast exams and cancer screening in women. They were animal rights activists, and anti-vivisectionists! And they were mass murderers.

Hitler was obsessed with the health of the German people. He himself did not smoke, drink or eat meat. He was, in a word, pure. And purity is close to holiness. German Seventh Day Adventists enthusiastically supported Hitler who, they claimed "has his office from the hand of God...As an anti-alcoholic, non-smoker, and vegetarian (he) is closer to our own view of health reform than anybody else." The Nazi appeal was not their brutality, but their purity, their holiness! They would return Germany to a national healthiness, by ridding it of infectious, cancerous elements through public health measures, and by ridding Germany of the metaphorically and ideologically impure, like Jews, Gypsies, drug addicts and the mentally ill. Brutality was condoned as a means of achieving this purity.

What attracted me specifically to the book was the Nazi war on drugs. They identified tobacco as an addictive drug and proved a relationship between cigarette smoking and cancer, two decades before American and British physicians accepted it. They promoted genetic research into low nicotine strains. And they showed one could also produce a high nicotine tobacco, as American tobacco cartels were later to capitalize on. They produced sophisticated anti-tobacco and alcohol messages, and targeted youth education.

They had "zero tolerance" for illegal drugs long before American drug warriors coined the term. Their policy was to put addicts and alcoholics in slave labor concentration camps and sterilize them. They used "coerced therapy," like our contemporary drug courts, and set up some token treatment programs. Those who relapsed, however, were referred for euthanasia. This process involved physicians to document their unworthiness to live. Drug enforcement officials in the U.S. in 1938 praised the Nazi approach to drug abuse as the most advanced in the world. They set the standard for "zero tolerance."

Lest anyone think that American law enforcement in the 1930s was merely unaware of Nazi brutality toward drug addicts and alcoholics, one can trace the continuity of sadistic policies toward addicts into our contemporary drug war.

I vividly remember the first time I heard about "no-knock" drug raids, where police smash into someone's home, often in the middle of the night, throw people to the floor, terrorize any children present, and tear the home apart. I experienced a powerful memory of the film, The Diary of Anne Frank, which had a profound effect on me as an adolescent. Drug users are seen to deserve this treatment, an American public condones it, and the Supreme Court stated that the 4th Amendment of the Constitution (the right to be secure in one's home) doesn't apply to drug users.

William Bennett, drug czar under President Bush, called for public beheading of addicts. Former Los Angeles police chief Darryl Gates favored summary execution of drug users. The Bush Administration took a page out of Nazi anti-Semitic verbiage and called casual drug users contagious menaces to society. A 1992 California Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement publication held up China's murderous drug policy as an ideal! Beneath all this hate-filled anti-drug ranting, which has encouraged widespread human rights abuses of addicts in our jails and prisons, is a fervent wish for a "Final Solution" to the American drug problem. This book provides a window on our own kinship with evil.

The Nazis championed the age-old wish for a pure, simple, morally unambiguous time. Such a time never existed, but there is a craven urge in the human soul to find a scapegoat to abuse, drive out and ultimately kill, in an attempt to actually create this fictional reality. While we reject the sick Nazi views of racial purity, we espouse their equally sick views of drug-free purity.

We reveal our kinship with Nazi concepts when we call people "dirty" when they test positive for drugs. Addiction is an illness. It has nothing to do with being clean or dirty, pure and impure, moral or immoral. Abstinence from drugs doesn't confer morality. Should we think less of the morality of the surgeon Halstead, or of the writers Poe and Melville because they were opiate addicts? Churchill and Roosevelt were smokers and drinkers, while Hitler, Franco and Mussolini were all non-smokers. Hitler was so "moral" he wouldn't let anyone drink in his presence.

Professor Proctor says he wrote the book "to challenge the comfortable notion that Nazi Germany was unique and defies comparison," and out of "the need to understand how the routine practice of science can so easily co-exist with the routine practice of cruelty." Nazi public health measures probably did have a positive impact on health and cancer rates, although the war may have destroyed the evidence. However, the Nazi war on drugs was a failure. Traumatizing the population doesn't lead to less drug or alcohol use. Their police-state attempt at creating a drug-free Reich was no more successful than our own.

The Nazi War on Cancer is a remarkable description of the complexities, virtuous goals, fabricated realities, frustration with unsolvable problems, and dreams of purity and holiness that underlay the Nazi phenomenon. Similarly fabricated realities, frustrations and delusions of drug-free purity achieved by a massive prison system underlie our own cruel experiment to socially engineer a drug-free America.

My original question was how could an enlightened people condone monstrous brutality? The disturbing answer: as easily as an enlightened American public has accepted a drug policy that is barbaric, no matter what purity and holiness it pretends to.

jjm_md@pacbell.net