It has become very much the fashion on the left and the righ to denounce the "war on drugs" as a failure so abject that the only possible solution is to legalize drugs. The legalizers have taken to speaking of drug "Prohibition," as if cocaine and heroin were comparable to alcohol, and insisting that the big problem is, and always has been, not the drugs themselves but our drug laws. The latest entry from the left is Hollywood filmmaker Mike Gray's "Drug Crazy: How We Got Into This Mess & How We Can Get Out" (Random House, 251 pages, $23.95).
The latest entry from the right is conservative Republican Dirk Chase Eldredge's "Ending the War on Drugs: A Solution for America" (Bridge Works Publishing Co., 224 pages, $22.95).
Legalizing drugs is one of the few issues that unites those on both the far left and the far right. The legalizers tend to be people with little firsthand experience with the hard-core drug culture. This allows well-meaning people like Republican Eldredge to assert that, "If illegal drugs were legalized ... there is no reason to expect an increase in the number of people whose value systems or psychological profiles destine them to substance abuse." Any addiction expert will tell you that availability and exposure are key.
I certainly understand the simple allure of saying just legalize drugs, because I too once assumed, like many baby boomers, that this would be a nice, clean answer. But the horrors of the crack epidemic and a dozen years spent immersed in the history and policy of drugs have thoroughly persuaded me that drugs are just too addicting, complex, dangerous and corrupting to be made yet more available.
Moreover, there is highly promising news on the anti-drug front that the legalizers choose to ignore: drug courts, the fastest-growing and most successful development in decades. More on that later.
The legalizers, in arguing that illegal drugs are really not so much worse than alcohol, reconfigure both history and medical experience to advance their cause.
Mike Gray in "Drug Crazy" argues that American addicts were happily using such new drugs as heroin and cocaine at the turn of the century, and causing no pain to themselves or society. Yet as early as 1895, Scientific American was writing, "Cocaine habitues are utterly unreliable and disregard all personal appearance, going about unkempt, bedraggled and forlorn. The cocaine habit is a swift road to destruction."
Moreover, claims Gray, our first federal drug law, the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, was foisted upon an unwary nation. He glosses over the hard fact that American cities and states had been steadily passing local anti-drug laws from 1875 on. Why? Because even then Americans could see how easily people became addicted and then anti-social.
Heroin, for instance, had been a popular street drug for only a few years when a Manhattan doctor working in the prison system wrote in 1914, "The increase in the number of people addicted to habit forming drugs has been extraordinary within the last five years. The greatest increase has been within the last year."
The legalizers also like to ignore the 50 years when our drug laws worked quite well. I would argue that the laws were so successful that drugs became a marginal social problem, removed from our public policy radar screen until the 1960s. Yet "Drug Crazy" author Gray declares all events post-Harrison Narcotics Act "a brutal eighty-year conflict that has produced the opposite of what was intended."
In fact, we were doing fine keeping drugs off limits until the late 1960s. But the Cold War gave national security precedence and we winked at Cold War allies - like the French - who did little as their gangsters steadily escalated the postwar heroin trade. By the late 1960s, this growing heroin trafficking set off an inner-city epidemic. At the same time, many baby boomers decided that getting high on illegal drugs was a fun way to express social
rebellion and perhaps even achieve a better, more interesting self. By the time the middle-class began to relearn history's lesson that the down side to drugs is far bigger than the up side, driven home by basketball player Len Bias' death from cocaine in 1986, the Colombian cartels were busy shipping in 300 tons of cocaine a year. When the middle-class turned away, the Colombians refocused on the poor, setting off the crack epidemic, adding more than 3 million crack addicts to the existing half-million heroin addicts.
Are alcohol and illegal drugs really comparable? Medical science shows that alcohol is moderately addicting. It is also legal. We have about 10 million alcoholics. Medical science shows that heroin and cocaine are highly addicting. They are illegal. We have about about 4 million drug addicts. The reality is that making drugs illegal keeps a great many people from trying and using them. If these extremely seductive substances became legal, we could expect our addict population to triple, if not quadruple.
In "The Fix: Under the Nixon Administration, America Had an Effective Drug Policy. We Should Restore It. (Nixon Was Right)," by Michael Massing, (Simon & Schuster, 275 pages, $25), the author, who spent many years as a reporter immersed in the drug culture, is also unconvinced by what he terms the legalizers' "revisionist" view that drugs are not so much worse than alcohol.
Listen to the experience of one of the major characters in "The Fix": "Before trying crack, Yvonne Hamilton was no angel, nonetheless, the drug unhinged her in a way even drinking had not. 'Alcohol is a depressant,' she observed. 'You're down. Drinking allowed me to open up to other people, to venture into new things. Drinking, I never would have thought of robbing people. Crack gave me the confidence to do that. I was very self-centered and selfish, and drugs intensified that. It made me feel smarter than the rest of the world. It made me become very physically aggressive. I did a lot of things under the influence of crack that I otherwise would not have."
Multiply Yvonne by the millions who used and still use crack and we can understand why the quality of life has crumbled in so many neighborhoods. Which brings us to drug courts. We now have an awful drug problem that needs serious attention. In Massing's book, he performs a highly valuable service recounting how the Nixon administration, when confronted with the fast-escalating heroin epidemic of the late 1960s, put together the best drug policy of any postwar administration.
Notably, the White House brought in psychiatrist Jerome Jaffe (a Baltimore resident) to set up 80,000 methadone maintenance treatment slots. For the first time ever, there was meaningful help for heroin addicts.
Equally important, though Massing doesn't emphasize it, was the dismantling of the French Connection. We got the Turks to stop growing opium poppies and the French finally cracked down on their heroin traffickers. Heroin availability would remain low for another 15 years. Massing also then tells the depressing tale of how Jaffe's whole treatment system was subsequently so underfunded that while addiction soared sixfold thanks to crack, treatment slots barely grew.
PTC What is puzzling about Massing's book, which rightfully proposes that treatment should be greatly expanded, is that he barely mentions drug courts, the most promising development in treatment since methadone.
We have gone from one drug court in Dade County in 1989 to 500 drug courts all over the country supervising 90,000 addict-offenders (still a fraction of the total problem).
There is a simple reason for the exploding interest. The 200 oldest drug courts have shown twice as much success in rehabilitating hardcore addicts as the regular treatment system. How is this done? Drug court participants are intensively supervised, expected to work, go to school and remain drug-free or face escalating court sanctions, ranging from sitting in court all day to time in jail.
Most offender-addicts are with the drug court at least a year. If indeed our hardcore addicts consume three-quarters of the illegal drugs, a vastly expanded drug court system could seriously diminish demand and the whole drug scene.
Why not start here in Baltimore? While we've had a drug court since 1994, it only has 600 slots to deal with its offender-addicts in a city said to have 50,000 addicts. How about it, Mayor Schmoke?
Jill Jonnes became interested in narcotics while writing a histor of the South Bronx. That led her to write "Hepcats, Narcs, and Pipedreams," published by Scribners in 1996 and soon to be released as a paperback by Johns Hopkins University Press. She has a doctorate in American history and is historian and curator for the DEA museum, scheduled to open in Washington this year.
Pub Date: 10/11/98