You might be surprised to hear this, but the late 1970s-early 1980s was a relatively mild era when it comes to drug policymaking. Remember that the Sixties-era panic over pot, psychedelics, and opiate addiction had passed even by the Carter administration (which even floated the idea of federal marijuana decriminalization, but a scandal involving drug czar Peter Bourne nixed that notion), and the country was not yet familiar with crack and its associated violence. Jill Jonnes even describes the decade-old DEA of the early 1980s as a rudderless agency with low standing in the Reagan administration and within the U.S. government more broadly.

See Clark and Dufton, "Peter Bourne's drug policy and the perils of a public health ethic, 1976-1978" (AJPH, 2015)

Jonnes, Hep-Cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams (Scribner, 1996)