The Holy War against Heroin

...Not only does such scientific evidence repeatedly refute any inherent, chemical link between heroin and crime, but our repeated experience further disproves the illusion...

...Nor can most pushers absorb the costs of free samples to anyone claiming to be unaddicted...

...In Britain there is little link between crime and addiction...

...Moreover, the lowly pusher is the last link in the heroin marketing chain...

...The fact that some addicts lead normal lives is remarkable because it mirrors our historical experience while violating our current myths...

...Opiate addiction was primarily a white, middle and upper class vice which occurred among otherwise normal people...

...Like most wars, this one is characterized by a series of self-justifying myths which bolster cruel and repressive laws against addicts...

...Current efforts aim at no fewer than sixty "key" countries capable of massive opium growth at low cost...

...Addicts are forced by the high priced black market to support $20-$50-a-day habits...

...An August 1971 retort in the British Medical Journal set the record straight and put the British system in perspective: "To suppose that the British prescribing system was discredited by the alarming growth in heroin addiction in the 1960s, and thereafter abandoned, would be a considerable misreading of history...

...The pusher would not exist if drugs were legally available...

...Not only were many previously unreported cases uncovered, but duplication resulted from the year-long count...

...Public Health Service, called the belief that heroin use in and of itself causes crime an "absurd fallacy...

...Few pushers can afford the risk of contacting strangers on school grounds and in subways...

...As much as half of major city crime is attributable to addicts...

...W. F. Ossenfort of the U.S...

...The popular image of the depraved and dangerous criminal addict has fueled the fears behind the most repressive of our laws...

...The Consumers Union's follow-up efforts confirmed the "amazingly bland" effects of heroin on the mind and body...

...But the myth that Britain has deserted its system or has experienced U.S.-style increases in addiction is based upon unfounded rumors and half-truths...

...The drug pusher is the invention of criminal law...

...Our criminal laws subject addicts to desperate and diseased criminal lives...

...In 1967 the United Nations reported that the Golden Triangle—Burma, Thailand, and Laos—alone produced 1,000 tons of raw opium annually, about seventy per cent of the world's supply...

...However, subsequent interpretations by law enforcement agencies held that addiction was not a sickness and the addict not a patient...

...Since addiction usually spreads from one addict to another, the pusher is not a Simon Legree-like slave master...

...In Britain only 140 of 1619 addicts in 1972 were maintained on heroin alone, with 297 on a combination of heroin and methadone...

...After moving to Britain where heroin is legal, available, and inexpensive, only six were in jail...

...The act itself does not declare possession or distribution of heroin illegal if employed by a physician "in the course of his professional practice...

...The high cost of addiction leads many addicts to pushing as an alternative to theft...

...Mainlining is the result of laws which force the addict to get the most for his money...

...These myths about the nature of addiction dominate and contaminate our thinking about heroin use...

...Supreme Court characterized the addict as "one of the walking dead...

...Britain did experience a statistically alarming increase in addiction during the 1960s...

...At the base of the pusher myth is the failure to accept the real causes of addiction in the United States...

...Nonetheless, the demand for methadone under illegal conditions and in illegal amounts has led to black markets in every major heroin center, according to a New York Times survey...

...In 1925 Dr...

...In 1968 a compulsory reporting procedure swelled the number of reported addicts...

...Studies in New Orleans showed thirty-six per cent of the patients dropping out...

...The same essential policy is being maintained as heretofore . . . The British response still permits the prescribing of heroin and still gives central responsibility to the individual physician...

...Paul Cushman, director of a New York methadone clinic, thinks that the likely results of the regulations will be an increase in the street price of methadone, the entrance of organized crime into the market, a reduction in attractiveness of methadone clinics, and a loss of patients who favor the less restrictive streets over the controlled clinics...

...The Consumers Union study concludes that the addict is "not a pleasure-craving hedonist, but an anxious, depressed patient who desperately craves a return to a normal mood and state of mind...

...In Vietnam, where thirty-five per cent of the Army's enlisted men used heroin and half of those were considered addicted, no evidence pointed to any resulting increase in criminal activity...

...Recent Federal regulations aimed at a reduction of this illegal market repeat the folly of the past...

...Clinton Sanders, research director of Alternatives, Inc...

...The final report of the joint American Bar Association-American Medical Association narcotics study in 1961 concluded that the evidence overwhelmingly showed crime to be the result of economic pressures associated with a limited supply of illegal and expensive heroin...

...The criminalization of heroin subjects the police to the corruption of organized crime recently documented by the Knapp Commission in New York...

...influence mean that "real control is unlikely...

...Britain's addict population is a small fraction of our own, under control, free of crime, and clearly not public enemy number one...

...The holy crusade against heroin has created the conditions we fear...

...Richard Nixon Even the casual newspaper reader and follower of public opinion can testify that the Government and the American public echo President Nixon's call for a holy war against heroin addiction...

...The Hudson Institute estimates that close to half of New York's heroin is paid for through pushing...

...A new method had each clinic report all addicts under their care on a given day—December 31—of each year...

...In earlier America, as in Britain today, heroin was legal and inexpensive, making criminal activity unnecessary...

...Alfred Lindesmith has identified the relief from withdrawal as the predominant feeling of most experienced users...

...Government officials hope that legal methadone will replace heroin...

...Create a third drug to get addicts off methadone...

...of Chicago, spent three years studying the Vietnam drug scene and thinks opium helped the frightened, lonely, bored soldiers to survive until departure day...

...Certainly temporary shortages and increasing prices have forced some addicts into methadone programs...

...Using this count, Britain had 1,746 addicts in 1968, 1,466 in 1969, 1,430 in 1970, 1,555 in 1971, and 1,619 in 1972...

...The report pessimistically concluded that the corruption, high profits, and limited U.S...

...In Vietnam and in early America, with high quality, inexpensive opium easily available, the nearly universal practice was to smoke or "snort" the drug...

...But we cannot begin to consider carefully such details until we rid ourselves of the suffocating superstitions and fears that warp our thinking...

...Henry Brill of the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene, the Chairman of the AMA narcotics committee, found that neither psychosis nor organic deterioration resulted from opiate use...

...This view of addiction as a crime, not a disease, collided with the experience of Nineteenth Century America...

...It is the beginning user, often escaping intolerable surroundings, who experiences the euphoria we hear so much about...

...In short, prior to the beginnings of the war against heroin, opiate use was not viewed as a substantial social danger, much less as public enemy number one...

...Prior to the 1920s there was only limSteve Slade, who recently completed graduate studies at the University of the Pacific, is a free-lance writer based in California...

...And while only one of the twenty-five addicts studied by the Addiction Research Union held a job in Canada, thirteen held full-time and four part-time jobs in Britain...

...A 1936 study by Dr...

...The truth is that most addicts do not use heroin to obtain the superhigh we imagine, but to avoid withdrawal...

...We have not yet met the enemy, but he is us...

...In 1928 Dr...

...They had spent only two years and five months in jail, one of every fifty years of residence...

...Are we to buy them all off as we sought to do in the case of Turkey's farmers...

...criminal approach, recommended addiction be treated as an illness and heroin maintenance be allowed...

...Decriminalization would go a long way towards improving the lot of addicts and society...

...The ABA-AMA interim report of Judge Morris Ploscowe flatly stated that addiction is consistent "with a reasonable degree of efficiency on the part of the individual user...

...In 1938 Kolb and Dr...

...The addict-pusher has every financial incentive to encourage friends to become heroin users...

...Many were no doubt doctors and other professionals with the access and money to support their habits without the disruptive effects which befall the poor...

...The arrest or imprisonment of a pusher leads to jockeying among friends and associates to determine who will inherit his "connection...

...In 1930 Dr...

...The laws which make addiction illegal and expensive create the public enemy we so fear...

...The researchers surveyed drug literature, contacted government agencies, and queried addiction experts without success...

...America, viewing the addict as a victim of temptation, has made the pusher the devilish enemy...

...Any war demands a specific enemy to blame, vilify, and victimize...

...The success of methadone programs in reducing addict arrest rates is directly attributable to its legal and inexpensive, not chemical, properties...

...Specific killers of addicts, like infectious hepatitis, result from the nearly universal U.S...

...Thus, the typical pusher may be able to earn enough to support his habit, but not to live in the opulent style many imagine...

...A; Z. Pfeffer and D. C. Ruble concluded in 1946 after studying 600 addicts at Lexington that addiction "does not cause a chronic psychosis or an organic type of deterioration...

...These laws bankrupt treatment as an alternative for the younger, newer addicts...

...ited moral opposition to addiction and few societal sanctions against opiate use...

...In Nineteenth Century Britain opiate use was much like that in America...

...Thus, Wilson concludes that "the popular conception" of the pusher "is largely a myth...

...During that century opiates were readily and cheaply available in the United States—even in some grocery stores...

...The addict is not a victim of addiction, but of the laws against addiction...

...The 1924 Rolleston Committee, appalled by the already obvious failure of the U.S...

...Echoing an old charge, a 1971 article in the Journal of the AMA by F.B...

...A 1967 study of Federal records showed thirty per cent of U.S...

...GIs stationed there is minimal because of the absence of these conditions...

...The British government has followed to this day a distinctly medical approach...

...Even with the force of law swelling methadone clinics, fewer than 100,000 of our 600,000 addicts are being treated...

...Efforts to crack down in Turkey have already led to expanded growth and profits elsewhere...

...Ironically, the inability of our treatment programs to attract and maintain addicts is linked to the criminalization of addiction...

...Public Health Service of more than 1,000 patients at the Federal treatment center in Kentucky supported Kolb's conclusion...

...But addicts recruited in this manner merely use methadone until heroin returns to the streets or more money becomes available...

...The final defense of the mythical image of addiction is that regardless of actual physical and psychological harm, addiction prohibits normal, productive living...

...addicts leading normal, "legitimate" lives...

...About half of the addicts were being maintained on methadone alone...

...What will we do then...

...The real enemy is the law which confirms the myths and fulfills the prophecies...

...Kolb insisted that addicts could lead normal lives if the drug were readily and cheaply available to them...

...The governor's words echoed President Nixon's 1972 pledge to "drive the drug pusher off the streets...

...Fifty years of scientific evidence support these myth-shattering conclusions...

...Wilson reports that "when asked how they got started on heroin, addicts almost universally give the same answer: they were offered some by a friend...

...The exact policy or program the United States should follow requires careful consideration of complex relationships among heroin, the addict, and the law...

...The pushing of drugs, Nixon intoned, is "the most reprehensible of all crimes . . . worse than a crime like murder...

...Heroin's expensive black market gives the addict-pusher a desperate reason to recruit, encourage, and pressure friends into addiction...

...Vietnam addicts were so indistinguishable from fellow soldiers that urine tests were necessary to detect them...

...A policy so threatening to our assumptions is itself attacked by rumor, innuendo, and myth...

...A study of twenty-five addicts who lived under Canada's repressive, U.S.-style system before moving to Britain is a revealing example of how myths and addicts fare when transplanted from one environment to another...

...In 1963, Dr...

...Lawrence Kolb, Assistant Surgeon General of the U.S...

...influence...

...The addicts spent a total of 141 years in jail, one of every four years...

...Glaser and J. C. Ball asserted that the British had abandoned their medical approach for a U.S.-style system...

...Thus, many of the less selective methadone programs with minimal waiting periods report much higher dropout rates than the twenty per cent reported in Washington, D.C...

...The myth is that an addict gets high half a dozen times a day...

...The data," O'Donnell reported, "confirm the generally accepted conclusion that drug use per se does not cause crimes . . . Addicts with a stable legal source of narcotics were unlikely to acquire a criminal record, while those who bought most of their drugs on the illicit market were likely to acquire one...

...American cities are filled with frightened people because the law has forced addicts into lives of crime...

...In Nineteenth Century United States, the middle and upper class addicts did not haunt the streets in search of victims...

...Criminal sanctions clearly explain the fear and distrust among many young, black addicts...

...We cannot even begin to search for solutions to the complex problems of addiction until we have faced up to what Alfred Lindesmith, professor of sociology at Indiana University and a recognized authority on narcotics, has called the "superstition, half-truths, and misinformation" which make up the "dope fiend mythology...

...A New York study by Dr...

...The heroin laws thus assure organized crime of a continual supply of eager recruiters...

...Britain enacted laws similar to the Harrison Act but established a committee to study the matter of interpretation...

...Only a mad nation, mindlessly pursuing some mythical devil, could endure such costs...

...And the innocent public is subjected to constitutional violations by overzealous police...

...The treatment programs have been unable to attract anyone but older addicts weary of the criminal life imposed upon them...

...The illegality of heroin subjects the public to enormous pressures of crime and fear...

...O'DonnelPs statistics clearly draw the distinction between crime caused by heroin use per se and crime caused by the need to obtain high priced heroin illegally...

...George B. Wallace of Bellevue Hospital did a study in New York which confirmed the conclusion that addiction "resulted in no measurable organic damage...

...Signing a tough mandatory minimum sentence law for pushers, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller declared "war on the pusher . . . who roams the streets freely, while decent citizens are imprisoned by fear...

...Addiction is a complex psychological state closely connected to environmental conditions...

...Opium production in Burma (400 tons annually), Syria, Afghanistan, and a score of other countries will be almost impossible to limit given minimal U.S...

...A White House report noted that only twenty-nine tons of Southeast Asian opium was destroyed in 1971-1972...

...Whether experienced or beginning, the heroin user is attempting to escape from the abnormal into the normal...

...Addiction seen in this light need not and does not hinder normal, productive living...

...As recently as 1971, the estimated number of new heroin addicts in New York City exceeded the total number of methadone addicts...

...addicts in the Nineteenth Century led normal, successful lives...

...Economist Donald Phares has shown that as heroin gets closer to the streets the profits decline and the risks increase...

...The very smallness of the British addict population cautions against direct and unqualified analogies between their system and ours...

...Heroin use begins and continues in environments characterized by boredom, anxiety, and powerlessness...

...In an article a year ago in The Public Interest, James Q. Wilson, professor of government at Harvard, and head of the President's National Advisory Council for Drug Abuse Prevention, admitted that "no specific pathologies—serious illness or psychological deterioration—are known to result from heroin use per se...

...He has been studying the problems of drug addiction for the past two years and has written on this subject and others for The Christian Science Monitor...

...After substantial Congressional harassment, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs estimated in November 1972 that thirty per cent of the 6.5 to ten tons of illegal heroin entering the United States annually originates in Southeast Asia...

...Kolb's study of 119 medical addicts led him to insist that "none of the normal persons had their efficiency reduced by opium...

...Twelve had no charges against them and none had more than four convictions...

...The Court's listing of the fearful symptoms which plague the addict is a piteous, contemptuous, and unsupported view of addiction...

...Without dealing with increasing demand, the Government is again attempting merely to limit supply...

...After all, methadone is not grown in foreign countries that can be bought off...

...But the statistics were alarming partly because Britain had only 112 addicts in 1961...

...As economist Phares notes, small countries like Turkey, Burma, and Thailand are lured by sizable profits for poor farmers hesitant to change usage...

...These crimes occur because the law makes heroin an illegal and expensive habit...

...Moreover, the laws give addicts a powerful incentive to become pushers...

...The great heroin crusade began with the 1914 Harrison Act...

...Richard Brotman in 1965, published in Comprehensive Psychiatry, concluded that "medical knowledge has long since laid to rest the myth that opiates inevitably and observably harm the body...

...John O'Donnell of the National Institute of Mental Health studied 266 Kentucky addicts, most of whom had obtained heroin legally since the 1920s...

...Britain's experience is useful as a guide to the myths of addiction...

...The committee deplored the "hysteria" promoted by public officials who attributed crime to heroin use in itself...

...The ruling elites have given no indication that they intend to give up the goose laying golden eggs...

...And without undue complacency it may be claimed that this policy seems to have had some real success in containing what threatened to be an explosive epidemic...

...In neighboring Thailand, where heroin is readily available and cheap, addiction among U.S...

...practice of "mainlining"—injecting heroin directly into the blood...

...Kolb's studies found nothing in the soothing effect of opiates to encourage crime...

...A look across the Atlantic finds a sane Britain without the crime, corruption, disease, or excesses which characterize our system...

...It is an all-pervasive and yet elusive enemy...

...The pusher is not less a slave to the illegal habit than is any other addict...

...government tactics to limit supply focused on the still important efforts to stop heroin at the source...

...The recent, much-praised Consumers Union report carefully traces the laborious efforts of a 1956 British Columbia, study which tried but failed to turn up scientific proof of assumed dangers of heroin...

...In Canada the twenty-five addicts had been convicted a total of 182 times, with sixteen having five or more convictions...

...criminal laws virtually guarantee the deterioration of the addict's health...

...According to Professor Wilson's "contagion model," addiction spreads among friends through peer pressures...

...The San Francisco Committee on Crimes Without Victims concluded that criminal laws served to deter addicts from seeking treatment...

...It is folly to suppose we can outbid organized crime for all the farmers and rulers in the world...

...The Consumers Union inescapably concludes that "almost all of the deleterious effects ordinarily attributed to the opiates, indeed appear to be effects of the narcotics laws instead...

...In 1962 the U.S...

...Public Health Service reported that not one of 3,000 Lexington addicts suffered from opiate-induced psychosis...

...One of them became a co-founder of Johns Hopkins medical center and the father of modern surgery...

...M. J. Pescor of the U.S...

...Estimates of the cost of addict crime range between $10 billion and $30 billion a year...

...Moreover, addicts are more susceptible to other diseases because of the lifestyle the heroin laws impose upon them...

...The experience of the twenty-five Canadian addicts who transplanted themselves to Britain tends to confirm the view that addicts and society are best served by decriminalizing heroin...

...Constantly trying to find money and drugs and constantly fearing or experiencing withdrawal, the addict is unable to devote time, energy, or money to his health...

...Most addicts need to steal goods worth between $60-$ 100 a day to raise that kind of money...

...Contrary to public fantasy, addiction does not typically begin with the offer of free heroin by a mysterious stranger...

...Before the recent war on the pusher, U.S...

...addicts cannot afford the comfort or safety of opium smoking...

...Finally, the success of methadone programs at providing many addicts with jobs is attributable to the legal and inexpensive nature of the drug...

...America's laws strip treatment of its attractiveness until the addict has lived through years of crime and sickness...