In 1956, Jane Tompkins of Maplewood, New Jersey, waged her own war on drugs. Tompkins, who was then the state director of the New Jersey Commission on Narcotic Control, had a difficult job. As she raised the alarm about drugs, she had to persuade the white vo…

Even as Prohibition failed, President Herbert Hoover stubbornly applied the same approach to the trade in narcotics, which soon became a robust source of income for organized crime, as bootlegging ha…