In November 1969, Arthur’s attention was abruptly brought back to Valium and Roche. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, in Richmond, Virginia, ruled against drugmaker Carter-Wallace in its two-year-old lawsuit to overturn the FDA’s decision that Miltown had the “potential for abuse.”1 The Fourth Circuit noted, “The evidence on this issue is in sharp conflict. It ranges from testimony of Carter-Wallace’s experts that the potential for abuse of candy or aspirin is greater than for meprobamate to testimony from a government witness that he became so uneasy about alcoholics’ affinity for the drug he stopped prescribing it for them.”2 Although the court acknowledged that the FDA’s administrative judgment was “not supported by direct evidence,” it was satistied there was sufficient “circumstantial evidence, or indirect proof” of “future or potential abuse.”3 The unanimous verdict was bad news for Carter. Its broad language also did not bode well for Roche, whose appeal of the FDA’s similar ruling against Librium and Valium was working its way through the courts.
Could the Nixon administration regulate the benzos while Roche’s judicial appeal was pending? Roche and Sackler were not certain. They were not aware that a thirty-year-old Justice Department attorney, Michael Sonnenreich, was working on doing just that. He was drafting a law that would turn out to be Roche’s feared worst-case scenario. Sonnenreich and Sackler did not know each other. In a few years, however, the young lawyer would play as important a role in Sackler’s life as anyone, even becoming a closer confidant to Arthur than his own brothers.
Sonnenreich, born in 1938, was the second son in a middle-class Jewish family in the mostly Italian neighborhood of Marble Hill, in the northernmost tip of Manhattan. His mother, Fay, who had graduated college with honors at only seventeen, was a former teacher. She was the first female administrator and executive secretary for Manhattan’s Temple Israel.4 Emmanuel (Manny), Sonnenreich’s father, had a doctorate in ancient languages and had studied to be a rabbi before working at several New York social agencies. He became the membership director of B’nai B’rith, the world’s oldest Jewish service organization. While the family was steeped in Judaism, Sonnenreich went to a public school.
A self-described “great test taker,” he graduated near the top of his Bronx High School of Science class. Although he got a New York Regents “scholarship for academic excellence” to Cornell, he chose the University of Wisconsin (“I didn’t want to stay in New York, and I liked Bob La Follette a lot).”5 I
Without a scholarship Sonnenreich worked a series of odd jobs. Later his talent at duplicate bridge and billiards provided “just enough to pay” his bills. With majors in Applied Engineering, Mathematics, and History, he was the first American to spend a year abroad at the University of Spain.6 There, he became a habitué of the Prado Museum’s archives, indulging interests in art history and Thomistic philosophy. When he returned to Wisconsin for his senior year, he married a childhood friend four years his junior.7
Sonnenreich wanted a history doctorate but when he graduated from Wisconsin, he agreed to take the law boards to satisfy his father. “I bought a textbook about the law tests and that was all I needed,” he recounted.8 His aced the exams and was accepted at three schools to which he applied, Harvard, Yale, and Columbia. He selected Harvard. After graduating near the top of his law school class in 1963, he was drafted. His Harvard law degree meant the Army dispatched him to the Judge Advocate General’s School in Charlottesville.9 Two years later he was a civilian again and applied to some large New York firms.
“There was a long list of white-shoe law firms then that didn’t hire Jews,” he recalls, “so my choices were limited.”10 A traditionally WASPish breed, Abbott and Morgan made him an offer but he was not very interested in the bankruptcy, mergers, and business litigation that had become the mainstay for many large law firms in the 1960s. Sonnenreich accepted an offer in the Criminal Division of the Justice Department. As he had been in school, he proved a fast study. It was not long before his colleagues took notice of the young attorney with the eidetic memory capable of synthesizing complex issues into simple-to-understand talking points. Fred Vinson Jr., the Criminal Division’s assistant attorney general, made him part of a team handling civil rights cases.
Sonnenreich’s colleagues were by now accustomed to how he tackled assignments. Few could keep up when it came to working through a roomful of documents. He could read more than a thousand words a minute and retain them. By then he had gotten the attention of William Bittman, best known for his successful 1965 prosecution of Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa.11
Sonnenreich would quickly be front and center in the debate over reforming the nation’s drug laws. It was about a month later that John Dean, then an associate deputy under Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, walked into Sonnenreich’s office. The two had met the previous year when Dean was the associate staff director to LBJ’s National Commission on Reform of Federal Criminal Laws.
“I hear you rewrote the drug laws,” Dean said to him.
“Yes.”
It was not an empty boast. Later that year, the Government Printing Office would publish Sonnenreich’s Handbook of Federal Narcotic and Dangerous Drug Laws.12
“Would you be willing to meet with the attorney general?”
“Yes.”13
When Sonnenreich and Mitchell met, he told the attorney general that the “drug laws are archaic” and the enforcement and regulatory framework was a confusing and sometimes contradictory hodgepodge of laws and amendments that had been cobbled together over the decades. In 1951 Congress instituted the first mandatory minimum sentences for drug convictions and barred probation for first offenses.14 Five years later a different Congress increased the minimum jail terms.15 In 1965, faced with a wave of unknown psychedelic drugs, it criminalized manufacturing or possessing those hallucinogens and gave HEW enforcement responsibility.16
None of the laws addressed treatment, Sonnenreich told Mitchell. He believed it was not enough for reforms to curb supply. They should also cut the demand for drugs.17 Mitchell asked Sonnenreich if he would meet with Nixon.
“Of course, I’d be willing to talk to the president.”
A few days later in the Oval Office, Sonnenreich told Nixon about his idea for a commission to examine existing laws before making any final recommendations. Nixon liked that. Sonnenreich was transferred to the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. There, as deputy chief counsel, he began drafting what would become the heart of the Controlled Substances Act. He established “schedules” by which drugs were listed, balancing their medical usefulness, if any, against their potential for abuse.
Sonnenreich was thirty-one years old and liked his work. He expected to to spend his career in government service. “My wife and I were happy; we had no problem in wanting more. We did everything we wanted to do.… One day this guy comes in with some Roche people and he says to me that ‘If you schedule Librium or Valium, we’re gonna challenge this, we’re gonna challenge that.’ ”
It was Arthur Sackler. Sonnenreich had never heard of him.
“I welcome your challenge, it makes my day,” Sonnenreich replied.
Sackler again warned that Roche would battle any effort to restrict the sale of its drugs.
“I’m going to do something better,” said Sonnenreich. “I’m going to file an administrative action to put your drugs under control and put them on the three times prescription rule [a controlled substance limited to a maximum of three refills].”18
When Sonnenreich later held that administrative hearing to determine whether Roche’s benzodiazepines should be covered in one of the Controlled Substances Act schedules, he recalls “they had all the big law firms there, the biggest D.C. powerhouses. They were wrong if they thought that might scare me. They didn’t understand I was having a good time. They had just irritated me so much. I was still getting paid the same $7,900 a year, it didn’t make any difference to me.”
Sonnenreich and the Justice Department won the administrative action. “Arthur was obviously very, very upset,” he recalls.19
Sonnenreich’s draft of the Controlled Substances Act was at the heart of sweeping reorganization legislation—the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act—that the Nixon administration submitted to Congress in early 1970.20
In creating four schedules of “controlled substances,” Sonnenreich had in part relied on extensive research and guidelines set out earlier that year by the World Health Organization.21 The public initially misinterpreted those schedules to think the drugs were listed in order of danger. Sonnenreich had instead balanced the potential for abuse with whether a drug had “any currently accepted medical use.” Although Cicely Saunders was then praising heroin as an effective pain reliever at her London hospice, it was judged to have no medical benefit. There was grim evidence of its abuse between hospital admissions and deaths from overdoses. It, along with LSD and ecstasy, were on Schedule I. So was marijuana, although that was a political compromise. The assistant secretary of health had suggested it be placed there temporarily until Nixon appointed a commission to recommend a final status.
Cocaine, methamphetamine, oxycodone, and fentanyl at least had demonstrated medical uses—cocaine in dental surgery as a topical anesthetic—and were listed on Schedule II, although they had a risk of “severe psychological or physical dependence.” Drugs on Schedule III were those with recognized therapeutic benefits but with a moderate risk of “physical or high psychological dependence.” That is where Miltown, along with amphetamines and barbiturates, was put. Schedule IV was designed to include combination drugs that had a “low potential for abuse.”
What was notably missing from the statute sent to Congress was any mention of Librium and Valium. Sonnenreich had expected they would later be added to the same category as Miltown, the industry’s original mild tranquilizer. Roche, however, argued that could not happen while its judicial appeal of the FDA’s effort to regulate more strictly the benzos was still pending.22
A new round of administrative hearings attempted to settle the matter once and for all. Neil Chayet, the founder of the Law-Medicine Institute at Boston University and a member of the National Institute of Mental Health’s Narcotic Addiction and Drug Abuse Committee, appeared in hearings as “an expert in legal medicine.” He set forth Roche’s position: Valium and Librium were not “drugs of abuse in the usual sense.” Roche even presented eleven letters from police departments that stated that none had seen criminal problems associated with either Valium or Librium.23
Roche’s lobbying worked. When Congress passed the law in the fall of 1970 it had a fifth grouping, what some called “the Roche schedule.”24 It covered drugs with the lowest potential for abuse, and it included Valium, Librium, and a few codeine-cased cough syrups that contained codeine.II
As Congress debated the bill, Neil Chayet called Sonnenreich. The two had been Harvard law school classmates. Chayet said he did legal work for Arthur Sackler and suggested the next time Sonnenreich was in New York, Sackler would like to meet him “to discuss Roche’s drugs and federal oversight.”25
“Why should I meet with that idiot?” Sonnenreich replied. (“Those are the types of things you say when you’re very young,” Sonnenreich told the author).26
Shortly after that conversation, Sonnenreich visited New York. Chayet arranged a dinner at Sackler’s sprawling apartment at United Nations Plaza. The twin thirty-eight-story towers had opened only a couple of years earlier and had been designed by the same architects who did the United Nations. Sonnenreich knew it was home to some of New York’s most prominent families.
“We had dinner,” recalls Sonnenreich, “and during the discussion Arthur got frustrated and started yelling at me. Well, I don’t respond well to being yelled at and I yelled back. Marietta was there and she got up from the table and left the room. Neil sat there quietly. And Arthur and I went on arguing for several hours. I had all the confidence and cockiness of a young guy and I kept telling him he was an ‘old dog who didn’t know the new things that had to be done.’ He was trying hard to persuade me that I was wrong on the regulations. Neither of us convinced the other.”27
The next day, when Sonnenreich was back at the Department of Justice, Sackler’s secretary called.
“I got on the phone.”
“You know I like you,” Sackler started. “I would like you one day, if you leave the government, to do some work for me. Think about it.”
“I am going to stay in the government,” Sonnenreich told him. “This is what I’m happy doing, this is where I’m staying.”28
Sonnenreich’s career was moving fast. Nixon had embraced Sonnenreich’s idea of a national commission to study and recommend how the government should address marijuana.29 Going into private practice did not entice him.
The president appointed nine of the thirteen members on the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse. They included doctors, academics, psychiatrists, and attorneys. The congressional leadership appointed two U.S. senators, and two congressmen. Former Republican governor of Pennsylvania Raymond Shafer was its chairman (it was mostly referred to later as the Shafer Commission). Nixon tapped Sonnenreich to become the executive director, in charge of a staff of seventy-six.30
Nixon expected that the conservative Republican majority with which he had stacked the Shafer Commission would return with an uncompromising finding about the dangers of marijuana. Instead, after eighteen months of testimony from dozens of experts, Sonnenreich and Shafer knew they had reached a conclusion that Nixon was not likely to embrace: they had not found evidence that marijuana was physically addictive, nor was it a gateway drug.
“When I told them at the White House what we were planning to say,” Sonnenreich told the author, “they thought I was crazy. They could not understand that we were going to recommend decriminalization.”
“You need to take marijuana out of the criminal justice system,” Sonnenreich argued in vain. “These young people are not criminals. You are degrading the criminal system. It can’t handle all of them.”31
Sonnenreich was not a proponent of the drug but thought criminalizing it was the wrong solution. He pointed out when Nixon had come into office, the government “spent a total of $66.4 million for the entire federal effort in the drug abuse area.” That had ballooned to $796.3 million by 1972, and for the next budget it would exceed $1 billion.32
The administration hard-liners were furious with the interim report. They feared the public would interpret decriminalization as an endorsement for using marijuana. “From that moment on,” Sonnenreich told the author, “I was cut off from the White House.”33
The Shafer Commission did not finish its final report, with 3,700 pages of appendices, until 1973.34 Nixon ignored its recommendations.III 35
By that time, a special Senate committee had begun investigating the Watergate scandal. That fall, “Dean told me it was all going south,” recalls Sonnenreich.36
It was evident later that year that the Nixon presidency was in trouble.
“I got a call from Arthur Sackler one day. And he says, ‘Remember when I told you I wanted you to be my lawyer? Are you interested now?’ ”
“And then, in one of the great all-time stupid things I’ve said, I told him, ‘If I was interested, you couldn’t afford me.’ ”
“Try me,” replied Sackler.
“I named a number, which I refuse to disclose,” says Sonnenreich. “The next day, a check was on my desk.”
What Sonnenreich did not know was that Sackler was more anxious than ever to hire him. It was not only because Sonnenreich was exceptionally smart, something Arthur considered an indispensable trait, but also because within eight months of each other the Sacklers had lost two of their most loyal confidants, Bill Frohlich and Félix Martí-Ibáñez. Frohlich was only fifty-eight when he died from a brain tumor on September 28, 1971. Just prior to his death, he had acquired a network of leading underground FM radio stations he christened the National Science Network.37 And over several years, he oversaw IMS International’s growth into one of the largest compilers of private medical and pharmaceutical information, with offices in thirty-two cities. He had expanded his eponymously named medical advertising agency in New York to seven countries. It had 340 employees.38
Martí-Ibáñez had just turned sixty when he died of a heart attack at his Manhattan townhouse only eight months after Frohlich. At the time of his unanticipated death he was the editor of five international medical journals and the chairman of the History of Medicine Department at New York Medical College. Martí-Ibáñez was the author of several dozen illustrated histories of medicine, science, and philosophy, as well as half a dozen novels and several hundred academic articles and commercial short stories and essays (he left behind eleven unfinished manuscripts on varying projects).39
Marietta had hoped that the unexpected deaths of Frohlich and Martí-Ibáñez might serve as warning signal for Arthur. When she raised it, Arthur argued their deaths were unrelated to how hard the two had pushed themselves. Frohlich had the bad luck of developing cancer, he told Marietta. And Martí-Ibáñez was an inveterate smoker, he said, someone whose only exercise was lifting a martini glass every evening. Marietta was not surprised that Arthur tried brushing aside any suggestion that the death of his close friends should be a reason for him to slow down.
Although Arthur may not have seen a lesson in the early deaths of Frohlich and Martí-Ibáñez, he and his brothers mourned their passing. They had been two of their most trusted friends, as close to the brothers as family. The five had secretly owned stakes in each other’s companies and all had more success than they could have imagined when they began. Now, their deaths had created a vacuum.
Having unexpectedly received the check from Sackler, Sonnenreich called Arthur’s office. His secretary answered.
“I’d like to talk to Dr. Sackler.”
“Who should I say is calling?”
“Tell him his lawyer is calling.”40
I. La Follette, nicknamed “Fighting Bob,” was the founder of the Progressive Party under whose banner Teddy Roosevelt made his final run for the presidency in 1912. Under La Follette, a former Wisconsin governor, U.S. congressman, and senator, the progressives and the socialists fought for similar issues. La Follette advocated against the abuse of workers, the corruption of the moneyed industrial class, racial inequality, and suffrage. He ran for president in 1924, garnering 17 percent of the national vote. The Progressive Party dissolved after his death the following year.
II. The Schedules were amended repeatedly even after Nixon signed it into law on October 27, 1970. They were regularly updated with drugs added or removed and others transferred from one schedule to another. Barbiturates, originally on Schedule III, were reassigned to the more stringent Schedule II in 1972. In 1973, when the DEA was created, it upgraded the benzodiazepines to Schedule IV and moved Miltown there.
III. The “temporary” placement of cannabis on Schedule I, along with heroin, LSD, and ecstasy, became permanent once Nixon refused to follow his commission’s decriminalization proposal. As anecdotal accounts accumulated over the decades that marijuana might have some medicinal properties, its advocates abandoned their effort to get it reclassified to a lower Controlled Substances schedule. Instead, starting in the 1990s a movement coalesced around legalizing medicinal marijuana. That opened the door for broader legalization arguments. As of December 2019, thirty-three states have approved medical marijuana and ten of those have legalized recreational use. The opioid crisis has created a possible market for medical cannabis as scientists debate mixed science about its pain-relieving properties.