"The other major issue was the banning of drugs, across the board."

There's just no good evidence for this myth. The Joe/Bill Bonanno team claim that if the State Police just hadn't disrupted Apalachin, they would have banned drugs. How convenient! It's just self-serving bullshit about the early Mafia supposedly being against narcotics. What stopped them from banning drugs in 1958-59?

There's also good factual reasons to doubt it:

First, the 1956 Boggs-Daniel Narcotics went into effect to great fanfare in June 1957-- 3 months BEFORE the 1956 Commission meeting. Why would scores of wiseguys travel across the country all over again, less than year later, to talk about drugs again when the issue had already been in the news in the summer of 1956?

Second, contrary to what Hairy Knuckles says, it wasn't just street-level soldiers-- a lot of high-level Mafiosi were already into narcotics. Three of the Apalachin attendees were already CONVICTED narcotics traffickers: high-level caporegime John Ormento, consigliere Frank Cucchiara and boss Joseph Civello. Yet, they were all invited to Apalachin as high-level leaders.

Third, the Mafia as a whole had already taken over most of the wholesale narcotics trade starting in the mid-1930s. The Corsican connection started in the 1930s--over 20 years before Apalachin. This is confirmed by ex-dealers from that era who were interviewed in 1980 by the Columbia Oral History Center. It was done by a bunch of interviewers who found elderly dealers who had been around in that era.

Fourth, we do have one actual attendee's statements on Apalachin. In 1988, Roy Williams testified that Nick Civella (an actual attendee) had told him about the purposes of Apalachin. "Civella told me that, among other things, territory and cooperation was discussed. Civella said he had Kansas City as his territory. He had working relations with other areas. He had friends in Chicago, he had friends in Cleveland, and he had friends in New Orleans."

The Apalachin-was-to-settle-drugs myth is very cinematic (anyone notice the parallels to The Godfather drug scene?).

But the narcotics trade just didn't operate like that. The drug trade was always much more free-flowing and long-standing in the Mafia.