Mayor Schmoke has now gotten a grand jury of people who have no experience or expertise with illegal drugs to endorse his misguided notion of handing out heroin and cocaine to drug abusers.
Considering the huge impact of the drug culture on our society, it's amazing how little even highly educated Americans know -- historically, sociologically and scientifically -- about cocaine and heroin. Like our mayor (and many fellow baby boomers), I too once held similar fuzzy thoughts about legalizing drugs. Then I began researching the history of illegal drugs in America. Handing out drugs to hard-core addicts is no solution, as both history and pharmacology make clear.
City youth were abusing cocaine and heroin as long ago as 1909. In that year the dean of Chicago's Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul could see kids outside his rectory window openly snorting Gray's Catarrh Powder, which contained eight grains of cocaine. Each morning the trim rectory lawn was strewn with hundreds of empty Gray's vials. Elsewhere in Chicago's squalid "dope district," empty catarrh bottles were scooped up by the bucketful from the gutters.
Nor was the "dope" problem unique to Chicago. By 1910 President William Howard Taft had identified cocaine as "more appalling in its effects than any other habit-forming drug in the United States." He urged Congress to ban it apart from medical use.
From 1919 to 1922, government-sponsored clinics (including one in Baltimore) handed out drugs to addicts in hopes of controlling their anti-social behavior. This effort was without success. Active enforcement of effective laws against heroin and cocaine sales, however, combined with society's revulsion against drugs, slowly but surely eliminated most of the problem. The original "war" on drugs was so successful that we have no collective memory of that era.
This forgotten history teaches an important lesson. Many people today believe that it is anti-drug laws that have forced addicts into anti-social behavior. But in fact it was the alarming anti-social behavior of the original turn-of-the-century addicts 33 that brought on the drug laws. It was the growth of such addicts in city slums -- then called "tenderloins" -- that finally brought about federal anti-drug legislation.
Cities and states (including Baltimore) began passing anti-drugs laws in 1875; San Francisco's anti-opium smoking law was the first. But it became clear that only a federal law could be effective. Historian David Courtwright has shown that the ranks of anti-social addicts expanded rapidly before the opiates and cocaine were outlawed in 1915.
Mayor Schmoke is not the first well-intentioned person to think giving out drugs might help addicts. Back in the late Sixties (when our drug problem was opiate abuse and not opiates and cocaine) Dr. Marie Nyswander suggested that perhaps legalized morphine was the answer. She tried out the idea at Rockefeller University with addicts she knew well. What she and her research partner, Dr. Vincent Dole, discovered was that the addicts' daily tolerance of morphine rose swiftly.
Recalls Dr. Dole, "The doses on which you could keep them comfortable kept going up and up; the addicts were never really satisfied or happy. It was not an encouraging experience." Dr. Nyswander saw unhappily that "Much of the time they [the addicts] sat passively, in bathrobes, in front of a television set. They didn't respond to any of the activities offered them. They just sat there, waiting for the next shot, . . . their interests ebbing and flowing with the morphine injections."
The two doctors went on to discover that methadone, a synthetic opiate taken orally, could satisfy opiate cravings and allow addicts to function at the same time.
The problem is that most drug abusers simply want to get high. Because the body daily develops more tolerance for abused drugs, addicts must use escalating dosages to achieve euphoria. This is pharmacological reality. Cocaine especially is noted for being used in huge binges followed by exhausted sleep. Cocaine binging can lead to aggression, paranoia and, not infrequently, frank psychosis.
Does the city intend to hand out ever-increasing doses of heroin and cocaine each week to individual drug abusers? If not, the addicts' ever-growing appetites will not be satisfied and they will get supplementary fixes from drug dealers.
If the city does hand out increasing doses, what will happen when inevitably an addict dies of an overdose? Is the city prepared to defend lawsuits for providing lethal or disabling doses?
As any policeman or emergency room doctor can attest, cocaine in large doses can incite psychotic, violent behavior. Is the city prepared to be responsible for the behavior of those it supplies with legal cocaine? The practical problems in providing these extremely destructive drugs are insurmountable.
The war on drugs is denounced as a complete failure. But it has re-stigmatized the use of illegal drugs after almost two decades when
middle-class popular culture made them seem hip, a way to enjoy life and deepen one's understanding of the world.
Only 10 years ago, public figures celebrated and encouraged drug use. You will no longer see a Time magazine cover featuring an elegant martini glass full of cocaine with the headline, "High on Cocaine."
The drug-paraphernalia stores are gone. Our military is now drug-free, a huge accomplishment. Much of the work place is drug-free.
Middle-class drug use is way down from the highs of 10 and 15 years ago. Our mayor is understandably frustrated by the large pool of hard-core abusers. But this is an aging cohort whose health has been badly impaired by relentless self-destructive drug use.
We as a moral society should not abet the self-destructive behavior of hard-core heroin and cocaine users. History offers no example anywhere of a civilized society that has successfully tolerated or sanctioned widespread use of such highly destructive drugs as heroin and cocaine. Baltimore should offer a better example to its law-abiding citizens.
Jill Jonnes' history of illegal drugs in America will be published next year.