Drug Crazy

How We Got Into This Mess and How We Can Get Out

by Mike Gray (more about this book and author)

Chapter 11: Prescription for Sanity
183

Thirty days after the earth-shaking vote from the Western frontier, Americans were treated to another unsettling dispatch from the front lines of the drug war. Once again it was Ed Bradley in the trenches, reporting from Virginia for CBS.

“Imagine living every day in excruciating pain. Then imagine there was a simple treatment to relieve that pain, but your doctor wouldn’t give it to you.”[1]

Bradley was focusing the 60 Minutes spotlight on one of the saddest byproducts of the drug war—people who legitimately need narcotic painkillers and find it almost impossible to get them. Since the early 1920s the medical profession in the U.S. has been so terrorized by federal drug agents that they have virtually abandoned patients with chronic pain.  These people—victims of accidents, botched surgery, degenerative disease—sometimes require massive doses of drugs like morphine just to get out of bed. Patients who take narcotics for pain generally don’t get high. The opiates just put the pain at a distance and cancel the fear that often accompanies this kind of ongoing
184
agony. With the right dose, consistently maintained, the victim can sometimes lead a reasonably normal life.[2]

But chronic pain patients, by definition, don’t get better and they sometimes get worse. That’s the problem. The drug enforcers may be willing to let doctors prescribe a reasonable amount of pain medicine for, say, a lung removal, but they expect these prescriptions to taper off quickly.  Anyone who gets an ongoing dose of narcotics—let alone an increase—gets the attention of state and federal officials, and every other day they lift some doctor’s license.[3] So the medical profession, not surprisingly, has largely abandoned the field, and most doctors actively avoid treating any of these tortured souls.  For the past half-century, they have been left to their own devices, screaming in a vacuum.

But there’s always some guy who’s compassion gets ahead of his sense of self-preservation, and in this case it was a D.C. physician named William Hurwitz.  It was the trial of Dr. Hurwitz that brought Ed Bradley to Virginia.  The State Board of Medical Examiners was in the process of pulling his license, and the hearing room was full of patients who had come from all over the country begging the officials not to sanction him. Hurwitz, they said, was the one doctor with the courage to help, and between them they represented an awesome collection of physical agony. 

Jim Klimek came from Tennessee. His car had run off the road on a long-ago winter night and when he was discovered the next morning his legs were frozen. Gangrene set in and a series of amputations followed that ultimately cut away everything below his navel. Only his torso, head and arms remain.  But the nerve endings they sliced through are still active, and he claims he needs morphine to deal with the sensation that his lower half is still in the process of being sawed off.  In Virginia, however, narcotics agents are trained to see through this kind of clever ruse. They know that many times people like Klimek are simply faking their symptoms to feed a drug habit. As the Virginia State Police manual warns, “Physicians should be alert for ‘Professional Patients’ showing up in wheelchairs missing various limbs.”[4]

185

But one of these professional patients, a former cop from upstate New York who had been pulverized by a school bus, upped the ante.  He warned the board that if they lifted Hurwitz’s license and cut off his prescription, he would kill himself.

The board was sympathetic but there were larger issues involved. Doctor Hurwitz was clearly prescribing narcotics in amounts that far exceeded the norm.  If this was sound medical practice, then why was he the only one doing it? The board had a statutory duty to protect society at large from this kind of recklessness, and they found Hurwitz guilty of overprescribing and revoked his license. Four weeks later, as promised, the former police officer committed suicide, but first he made a video and Ed Bradley ran it on the air.

“It’s pretty damn stupid that the only person I can get to help me, they turn around and take his license away from him.

“Suicide was not what I wanted.  Pain treatment and control is what I wanted.”

When Bradley played this tape for the medical examiners they were unmoved. “Tragic as this is,” said one, “the Virginia Board of Medicine may have saved other lives by this action.”[5]  In other words, a greater good may have been served by making sure these powerful narcotics did not somehow fall into the hands of young people. But as is so often the case in this conflict, the message sent was not necessarily the one received. Any teenager watching the 60 Minutes broadcast would probably have come away with the clear understanding that this was a society willing to torture its citizens to prove a point.

Regardless of what else may happen in the drug war, pain control is one front that is almost certainly headed for a change.  The Baby Boomers are coming up on 60, and as this enormous wave of humanity starts getting liver cancer, they will dramatically alter pain treatment as they have transformed everything else in their path.

And this may be the central problem for the prohibitionists in the coming debate. The seamless propaganda campaign that has blanketed the drug war for 80 years has always had as its
186
central focus the image of the Drug User as Vampire. As long as these wretched monsters could be completely stigmatized—like the Jews in Nazi Germany—anything was possible.[6] You could confiscate their property without due process, put them in concentration camps, and conduct medical experiments on them against their will.  And since they never numbered more than a tiny fraction of the population, they could be fearlessly blamed for everything.

But by demanding that cannabis be included in the sweep of absolute prohibition, the drug enforcers may have overreached their grasp. They are now confronted with a huge segment of the electorate that has had direct experience with marijuana. Over 70 million Americans have taken at least a few drags, and while some of them may not have inhaled, most of them did. When they failed to experience the instant insanity that the authorities had promised, it was for many an epiphany more powerful than the drug itself—the realization that the government makes things up.

No doubt the Anslinger-inspired exaggerations about marijuana sprang from the highest motives, but when you’re caught red-handed in a total fabrication, it dents your credibility. What’s more, the Woodstock generation was also the generation of The Wall, citizens who came to know first hand that the noble crusades of the government can be grounded in illusion.

To bring these skeptics on board the war on drugs, it was necessary to convince them that the basic facts about marijuana had changed dramatically. Drug czar William Bennett was among the first to break the bad news: the children of the Boomers were facing a far more powerful form of cannabis than the stuff their parents experimented with in the ‘60s. The amount of psychoactive THC in the new plants was said to be forty times greater.

But once again, close inspection revealed a flaw in the official tale. It seems the base-line samples from the 1970s were not properly preserved, so there’s really no way to tell what their original THC content was. On top of that, the government’s own long-term study of marijuana potency at the University of
187
Mississippi undermined Bennett’s argument. The official numbers showed an average THC content in marijuana seized by the police since 1981 ranging between 2.3 and 3.8 percent. In the 1970s on the other hand, independent analysts found THC averaging 2 to 5 percent with some samples as high as 14 percent.[7] As one authority put it, “If parents want to know what their kids are smoking today, they need only recall their own experience.”[8]

The fallback line for cannabis prohibition, the moat around the castle, has always been the idea that marijuana is a stepping-stone to the hard stuff. But here again the actual experience of the Boomers did not mesh properly with the official line. Of the 70 million Americans who smoked the weed, 98 percent didn’t wind up on anything harder than martinis. Only a tiny fraction went on to become heroin or cocaine addicts, and the cause-effect connection to reefer for this group was no more evident than the connection to coffee.[9] As these scientific counter-claims began to surface, the prohibitionists found themselves in the same boat as the CIA, who’s operatives always insisted on a right to lie in the interest of national security and then seemed genuinely dismayed when nobody believed them.

When Dr. Hamilton Wright almost single-handedly launched America on the voyage of drug prohibition at the beginning of this century, he believed that opium and cocaine addiction could be cured by simply passing a law. From 1914 onward, with growing dedication and expanding armies, his successors labored to bring the dream to fruition, but the light at the end of the tunnel always turned out to be an oncoming train loaded with exotic new chemicals. After 80 years of brutal combat, the official dispatches from the front lines are harsh and unequivocal:

“During the last two decades, the world has witnessed the ‘globalization’ of the drug abuse problem and the situation has worsened drastically.”
—United Nations Narcotics Control Board, 1993 [10]
188
“The migration of gang and posse members to smaller U.S. cities and rural areas resulted in increases in drug-related homicides, armed robberies, and assaults...”

“Crack continued to be used in epidemic or near-epidemic proportions in most major cities...”

“Worldwide opium production was 4,157 metric tons,” an increase  of 20 percent in a single year. 
—Drug Enforcement Administration, Aug., 1996 [11]

 

“Despite some successes, United States and host countries’ efforts have not materially reduced the availability of drugs... “

“...international drug-trafficking organizations have become sophisticated, multibillion dollar industries that quickly adapt to new U.S. drug control efforts.”
—General Accounting Office, March 1997 [12]

This tragic defeat did not rise from a lack of will or resources.  In the attempt to make America drug free, the taxpayers laid out over $300 billion in the last 15 years alone. To put that in perspective, we went to the moon for less than a third of that amount.[13]

The underlying problem has always been the basic concept. In retrospect, a drug-free America had no more chance of success than an alcohol-free America. As Mark Thornton of Tulane points out in The Economics of Prohibition, the black market is the purest form of unfettered free-market capitalism. The rules are Darwinian—survival of the fittest—and no matter what you do, the pirates will always be a step ahead. With each failure to stamp out the traffic, the authorities will respond by tightening the screws—the only option available—and the increasing risk will increase the payoff.  And the violence. Which will succeed only in eliminating the timid players, leaving the market ultimately in the hands of barbarians like Capone and
189
Escobar who will stop at nothing. And as professor Thornton makes clear, these are structural forces, like gravity, that cannot be altered by moral arguments.[14]

Not only has America nothing to show for this monumental effort, but the failed attempt has clearly made everything worse. After blowing hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives, the drugs on the street today are stronger, cheaper, more pure and more widely available than at any time in history.  Everything from crack cocaine to dilaudid is just a phone call away and chances are they’ll deliver. You can buy it in the school yard, in the alley, you can buy it in small Indiana farm towns that just a few years ago had never even heard of the stuff.[15]

The fallout from this misadventure cannot be looked upon simply as one of our many problems. It rains down on everything, blanketing the nation in a smog of delusion so pervasive nobody can see it, even as it warps U.S. foreign policy, corrodes the Bill of Rights, and successfully reverses years of progress in race relations. One of the most shocking things about the O.J. Simpson trial was the gulf it revealed between black and white perceptions of the criminal justice system. White people instinctively believe the cops—”Why would they lie?” Black America, more accustomed to being spread-eagled on the pavement, has an entirely different perspective of the officer on the witness stand. With one black man in four now behind bars or under supervision by the state, it’s hard to find an African American family that has not had a direct, personal, unpleasant experience with law enforcement—more often than not, something to do with the drug war.

 This is the arena where the fault lines of American justice are clearly visible. In a drug bust, the complaining witness is the cop, who can decide on the spot whether to prosecute or not. This absolute power is inevitably subject to political pressure and favoritism. The white kid in the Mercedes gets a pass and the black kid in the car behind him gets five years without parole. When Indiana Congressman Dan Burton’s son was caught
190
with eight pounds of marijuana in his trunk and thirty plants in his apartment, he got probation.[16]  It would be hard to imagine a black teenager from the South Side of Indianapolis getting the same deal.

Unfortunately, that’s not the worst of it. Far and away the most ominous byproduct is the corrosive flood of illegal cash that is lapping at the foundations. Honest cops all over the country are watching in dismay as their departments are sucked under by payoffs at every level. Former San Jose police chief Joseph McNamara says it’s eating us alive. “Every week, somewhere across the country, there is another police scandal related to the drug war—corruption, brutality—even armed robbery by cops in uniform.”[17]

 But as our friends from south of the border warn us, we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. At a drug policy conference in 1993, former Colombian High Court Judge Gomez Hurtado told the Americans, “Forget about drug deaths, and acquisitive crime, and addiction, and AIDS.  All this pales into insignificance before the prospect facing the liberal societies of the West. The income of the drug barons is greater than the American defense budget. With this financial power they can suborn the institutions of the State and, if the State resists... they can purchase the firepower to outgun it. We are threatened with a return to the Dark Ages.”[18]

As Western Civilization stands transfixed, paralyzed by the specter of 20th Century Vandals devouring one country after another, it’s important to remember that this particular impending disaster could be avoided with the stroke of a pen.  The criminal enterprises that now encircle us from the Golden Triangle to Tingo Maria and Tijuana, from Watts and Bronxville to Bel Aire and Sutton Place—the powerful, ruthless combines that threaten to overwhelm the rule of law itself—all could be cut off by simply closing the black market money tap.

The prohibitionists have never been called to account for their part in this disaster, but they are quick to demand a full
191
accounting from their critics.  People like George Soros and Lester Grinspoon are accused of advancing some dark agenda without regard for the consequences. Says the DEA’s Thomas Constantine, “Those who advocate legalization have many motives. But they frequently do not have answers to a lot of the questions we are asking.”[19] Questions like: How many new drug addicts will you create under legalization? Who’s going to give them their drugs? How will they be handed out?  Who’s going to pay all the social and criminal costs? And finally, what drugs would you legalize? Heroin? LSD? Crack?  These queries are assumed to be argument-terminators for which no acceptable answers exist.

But lately answers have been coming anyway. Independent scientists, swimming upstream against the flow of government largess, have been digging into these issues in detail and they’re coming up with interesting information.  For one thing, they point to a University of Maryland survey of high-school students, which contains an amazing revelation. The hardest drug to get, say the kids, is not reefer, but alcohol.[20] And if you think about it for a second, it’s not so amazing after all. Alcohol distribution is controlled by the government. Drug distribution is controlled by the mob.

Ethan Nadelmann—sometimes referred to as the Johnny Appleseed of the drug reform movement—is a former Princeton professor who heads the Lindesmith Center, a New York think tank that is now at work on the problem.  For Nadelmann and his colleagues, the central objective of any drug policy should be harm reduction—cut the damage caused by both drug addiction and drug prohibition. To begin with, he says, marijuana must be available to adults under tight regulatory controls, and some form of drug maintenance has to be established for the incorrigible. Any solution that leaves gangsters in control of the market will not cure the cancer, and no matter what short-range problems may be solved, the corruption will only be fertilized. The only way to destroy the black market is to underbid it. If that means drugs have to be given away to serious addicts, so be it. Anyone who’s determined to use heroin regardless of the consequences must be
192
able to get the stuff from a legitimate source at a price that doesn’t require stealing car radios. A tightly controlled legal market, offering clean unadulterated pharmaceuticals, would quickly erode the cash flow to the street bazaar, and the river of money that has fueled the most brutal collection of criminal combines in the history of the planet would dry up like a Mojave arroyo on Independence Day.

The prohibitionists insist that the black market would still exist because drugs would obviously be illegal for children, but the experience with alcohol after Prohibition suggests otherwise. While it’s possible for a marginal operator to make a few bucks selling booze to kids, there’s not much money in it and the risk is substantial. There are no beer pushers hanging around the playground. You can’t make a living at it.

Crack cocaine, of course, is an unparalleled menace, but the prohibitionists hardly have clean hands on this issue.  Crack is a creation of the black market. The only reason for its existence is economic. It’s cheap. Unfortunately you get what you pay for. The high lasts only seconds before the bottom drops out, but low cost makes it available to the blue-collar market. There are few crack addicts on Wall Street. The traders prefer the smoother ride of the pure powder, and they can afford it.  If prescription cocaine were available to serious addicts, there is every likelihood the demand for crack would disintegrate. In Liverpool, where John Marks gave addicts cocaine by prescription, nobody asked for crack.

As for who would supply these drugs to the addicts, it would be better for all concerned if they got their stash from a pharmacist instead of a fourteen-year-old.

The overarching case against drug policy reform has always been the number of new users that would be created if criminal sanctions were set aside.  When Prohibition ended in 1933, say the drug warriors, there was a significant jump in alcohol
193
consumption. If a comparable jump followed repeal of narcotics prohibition, there would be a horde of new addicts. They insist that Prohibition, despite its flaws, actually cut alcohol consumption dramatically.

“Absolutely not true,” says historian Harry G. Levine. “What is true is more complex and more interesting. What prohibition does, it knocks out beer, which is smelly, bulky, and has to be brewed locally because in the 1920s there is no refrigeration. Hard liquor, on the other hand, does not spoil, it’s more compact, it’s easy to ship. So people switch to whiskey, and the total volume of booze does go down, but they’re still drinking as much alcohol, just in a smaller glass. When repeal comes, beer consumption rebounds and liquor goes down, but this is partly because of the new liquor laws. There was a conscious policy on the part of the states to discourage hard liquor consumption. It was taxed more heavily, some states sold it only in government liquor stores, and they made it as hard to get as possible. It’s still prohibited in some counties. But for the next twenty years the total amount of alcohol consumed stayed about the same.” So it turns out that state liquor laws achieved the same thing as Prohibition, but without all the gunplay.[21]

The experience in Europe also suggests there is less to fear from regulated narcotic sales than some people imagine. When narcotics were made available to serious addicts in England and Switzerland, the street trade diminished along with the crime rate.[22] And in the only test of limited decriminalization within the U.S., the results did not support the prohibitionists. Between 1973 and 1978, possession of marijuana was reduced to a misdemeanor in 12 states, but the predicted explosion in cannabis use failed to materialize. The University of Michigan’s annual high school survey, Monitoring the Future, showed the seniors in these dozen states reported no more marijuana use than their counterparts in the other states.[23]  Among adults, marijuana use did go up slightly but alcohol consumption went down. While that may have been alarming to the liquor industry, it was a net plus for public health since booze can kill you and cannabis can’t. In addition, there were significant financial
194
benefits. The individual States saved hundreds of millions of dollars apiece in prosecution and police costs alone.[24]

One of the major success stories the prohibitionists take credit for—the dramatic decrease in cocaine use among the middle class in the 1980s—had a number of causes, and law enforcement may have been least among them. A study of some 200 heavy cocaine users in northern California between 1985 and 1987 revealed that fear of arrest was number six on the list of reasons for quitting.  Far more important were health problems, financial difficulties, problems at work, and pressure from a spouse or lover. “What keeps many heavy users from falling into the abyss of abuse, and what helps pull back those who do fall, is a stake in conventional life.” Jobs, families, friends—the ingredients of normal identity—turned out to be the ballast that allowed these people to pull back from the edge.[25] It seems the real reason most people stay away from drugs—alcohol and tobacco included—is not criminal sanctions but common sense.

And this points to a path out of the swamp. Apparently the one sure-fire way to cut down on drug use is to give people the facts and let them use their own judgement.  In 1914, just before drug and alcohol prohibition began, both drugs and alcohol were in general disfavor and their use was declining among all segments of the population.[26] The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 forced manufacturers to list ingredients on the label, and when people found out what was in some of these home remedies, the use of narcotics dropped by a third—the largest single decrease ever—and that was before prohibition.[27] The most successful anti-drug crusade in history was the one waged against tobacco over the last thirty years, a campaign that avoided prohibition altogether. The tool was education, and it proved far more formidable than coercion. California cut smoking 40 percent in a single decade by using cigarette taxes to finance anti-smoking ads.[28]
195
The conservative wings of both political parties have been urging Americans to take charge of their lives and become less dependent on government, and drug policy reform is one area where the American people will indeed have to do it themselves because they can expect no help from Washington.  As in the 1930s, the political establishment is paralyzed on this issue, like a jackrabbit frozen in the headlights of an oncoming locomotive. Anybody who questions the idea of jailing our way to abstinence is labeled soft on crime, and that is still a career-ender of the first order. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders was hounded out of office, not for suggesting legalization but for suggesting a study of legalization.

Clearly it’s time for such a study whether Congress likes it or not, but the legislators will likely have to be jolted into motion. Incapable of leadership on anything this loaded, they will respond like bellboys to whatever the people ultimately decide.  Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal Congress of 1932 got credit for repealing Prohibition, but it was private citizens like Pauline Sabin, Henry Joy, and the du Pont brothers who led them to it by the nose.

Professor Arnold Trebach of the American University was one of those academics who travelled to England in the late seventies and came home to write a book about it. The Heroin Solution, published in 1982, highlighted the superiority of the old British system and put Trebach at the center of the reform movement.[29]  He began attracting like-minded thinkers and the result was the Washington-based Drug Policy Foundation, with a board of directors that quickly grew to include financiers, lawyers, doctors, scientists, police chiefs, a federal judge, and Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke. The Foundation’s national conferences brought the leading drug policy reformers from all over the world under one roof for the first time, creating a critical mass that ignited the current push for reform.
196
The Drug Policy Foundation is doing essentially the same job that Pauline Sabin’s group performed during the closing hours of Prohibition. It was obvious by the late 1920s that the Noble Experiment wasn’t working, but since the prohibitionists controlled the numbers, people had no idea of the depth of the disaster. Sabin’s organization and others like it funded the research that gave the public its first dose of the unadulterated facts.

Sixty years later it’s equally clear the war on drugs has gone belly-up, and the intellectual heirs of Pauline Sabin are making sure this information gets into the hands of the public. For decades Americans have been assured that if they would “stay the course”—tighten the screws, hire more agents, bring in the military, seal the border, crack down on the source countries, arrest Carlos, or Pablo, or De-De—this vast underworld mechanism could be brought to a halt. Success was always just over the next rise. But with the arrival of well-funded reformers on scene, the prohibitionists no longer have control of the dialogue. Now the public at large is starting to ask questions. The op-ed pages and letters-to-the-editor are peppered with demands for another look at the drug war as people across the political spectrum begin to realize that, despite the most monumental prison-building program in history, despite a skyrocketing commitment of money and manpower, despite the arrest of a million people a year for drug offenses, everything is going downhill. The bad guys are getting richer and whole governments are dissolving in the acid-bath of corruption. The U.S. Constitution is now so riddled with drug-emergency exceptions it looks like the flag over Fort Sumpter.

The parting knell for the Eighteenth Amendment was the 1931 report of the Wickersham Commission, a panel of experts assembled by President Hoover to see how Prohibition could be salvaged. Instead they produced an official catalog of failure so damning it set the stage for Repeal. If Wickersham and his
197
colleagues were around today, they would no doubt be astounded at how little we’ve learned. For one thing, the murder rate is back where it was in 1933 and the country is once again awash in corruption. Unfortunately there is no chance Washington would risk empaneling a group like this today because the results are too predictable. Every major scientific inquiry into marijuana since the Indian Hemp Commission of 1894 has found the weed virtually harmless, and while Richard Nixon was able to bury the Shafer report in 1972, that would be hard to pull off in the age of the Internet.[30]

With the federal government quick-frozen on this issue, the battleground has shifted to the states and this opening is ripe with possibilities. The individual states have always been the testing ground for new ideas. When Prohibition was repealed, it was state legislators who stepped into the breech with a menu of regulatory schemes, and over time the country hammered out a system for controlling alcohol sales that reflected regional concerns.

At this moment, history is repeating itself in California. When the Golden State voted to allow medical use of marijuana, there were hysterical predictions from Washington and Sacramento. But California did not fall into the sea, and after the name-calling subsided, the combatants had to start dealing with reality. The public was then treated to the spectacle of sheriffs, prosecutors, doctors and pot growers sitting down together to hammer out regulations for controlling the distribution of marijuana to legitimate patients.

If California survives this apostasy, other states will follow. Some will enact stringent rules while others may experiment once again with broader decriminalization. When a national consensus finally forms on this issue, it’s almost certain to come down in favor of the sick and dying because they make much more convincing TV commercials than men in suits. At that point, the majority of U.S. citizens will be in opposition to their own government’s policy and something will have to give.

198

The coming engagement promises to be bloody because the outcome of the whole war is at stake. Prohibition, as policy, can only ratchet in one direction. Each failure must be met with more repression. Any step backward calls into question the fundamental assumption that repression is the solution. Ultimately, every available gun will be brought to bear because marijuana is the pawl on the ratchet, the little catch that keeps the drum from unwinding. For sixty years, Harry Anslinger and his successors have put their backs to this wheel, laboring to hoist drug prohibition to the level of a national crusade. But if somebody jiggles that pawl and the drum slips, support for the current policy will plummet like a loose cage in a mineshaft because it cannot sustain a serious evaluation.

With the future of the republic at stake, there is growing consensus that it’s time at last to put the prohibitionists in the dock, time to demand some explanation for a brutal 80-year conflict that has produced the opposite of what was intended. If there was one thing all sides agreed on, it was the necessity to keep drugs out of the hands of children. How, then, do the drug warriors justify a policy that has not only given children ready access to drugs, but has guaranteed them employment as front-line runners in a marketplace so dangerous they have to be armed? Why, after nearly a century of the most stringent prohibition in history, was the nation’s drug czar forced to admit that the latest jump in heroin use was among eighth-graders?

Prior to the Harrison Narcotics Act, if somebody wanted drugs they at least had to go to a drugstore. Now they can get anything they want from the neighbor’s kid. It would seem that if Americans are to have any say at all in what their teenagers are exposed to, they will have to take the drug market out of the hands of the Tijuana Cartel and the Gangster Disciples, and put it back in the hands of doctors and pharmacists where it was before 1914.


CHAPTER ELEVEN—ENDNOTES

[1] 60 Minutes, CBS, Dec 8, 96, Ed Bradley

[2] Jacob Sullum, “No Relief in Sight,” Reason Magazine, Jan 97. “In 1980 researchers at Boston University Medical Center reported that they had reviewed the records of 11,882 hospital patients treated with narcotics and found ‘only four cases of reasonably well documented addiction in patients who had no history of addiction.’”

[3] 60 Minutes, CBS, Dec 8, 96, Ed Bradley. “Last year more than 120 doctors who were prescribing...narcotics for pain had their licenses revoked or suspended.”

[4] Prescription Drug Game, Virginia State Police, quoted in The Activist Guide, Drug Reform Coalition, Oct 96, p4

[5] 60 Minutes, CBS, Dec 8, 96, Ed Bradley

[6] Richard Lawrence Miller, Drug Warriors & Their Prey (Westport CT: Praeger Publishers, 1996). With a remarkable collection of facts, insight, and meticulous research, Miller details the drug war assault on civil liberties and shows an alarming parallel with the stigmatization of the Jews in Nazi Germany.

[7] Lynn Zimmer and John P. Morgan, “ Exposing Marijuana Myths: A Review of the Scientific Evidence,” The Lindesmith Center, N.Y., 1996

[8] Ethan Nadelmann, director, the Lindesmith Center, N.Y., interview [Rolling Stone, Feb 20, 97, 51.]

[9] U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Service, Preliminary Estimates from the 1995 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, Aug 96, NCADI;  There were an estimated 582,000 frequent cocaine users and 196,000 heroin users in 1995.

[10] United Nations International Narcotics Control Board, Report of the International Narcotics Control Board for 1993, Vienna, 93.

[11] Drug Enforcement Administration, National Narcotics Intelligence Consumers Committee Report, 1995, “The Supply of Illicit drugs to the United States,” Aug 96, vii-ix (DEA 96024)

[12] United States General Accounting Office, Drug Control: Observations on the Elements of the Federal Drug Control Strategy, Mar 97. 4 (GAO/GGD-97-42)

[13] Leland Atwood, former chairman, North American Rockwell, interview, Apr 27, 97. Total cost of the moon program was estimated at $28 billion.  In 1990 dollars that would be in the range of $100 billion.

[14] Mark Thornton, The Economics of Prohibition, University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, 91

[15] Indianapolis Star, Apr 7, 97, B4, “Drug Market Takes Hold in Small Towns.” Police Captain Dave Van Baalen of Peru, Indiana: “For every one we arrest, two more pop up... Anyone who thinks they are going to run crack out of town is foolish... All drugs are up,” and so are drug-related burglaries and thefts.

[16] The Atlantic Monthly, Apr 97, p96

[17] Joseph McNamara, “A Truce in the War on Drugs,” Washington Times Op-Ed Apr 4, 97, A19

[18] Senator Gomez Hurtado, interview, International Network of Cities on Drug Policy conference, Baltimore, Nov 17, 93.

[19] Thomas Constantine, Administrator, Drug Enforcement Administration, How To Hold Your Own in a Drug Legalization Debate, Aug 94.

[20] University of Maryland, Center for Substance Abuse Research, CESAR-FAX, October 28, 1996, vol. 5, Issue 42.

[21] Harry G. Levine, M.D., Queens College; interview, July 3, 97; see also, Harry Levine and Craig Reinarman, “From Prohibition to Regulation: Lessons from American Alcohol Policy for Drug Policy,” Confronting Drug Policy, Ronald Bayer & Gerald Opppenheimer, eds., Cambridge University Press, 1993, p160-193; National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse, (Shafer Commission) History of Alcohol Prohibition.

[22] New Perspectives: "Heroin Treatment - New Alternatives." Proceedings of a seminar held in Canberra in 1991 by the Australian Institute of Criminology. Edited by Bammer and Gerrard. M. Lofts of the Cheshire Drug Squad, "Policing the Merseyside Drug Treatment Program,” Pages 97-108; A. Uchtenhagen et al, Programme for a Medical Prscription of Narcotics: Final Report of the Research Representatives, Swiss Federal Office of Public Health, July 10, 97, Berne.

[23] L.D. Johnston, P.M. O’Malley, and J.G. Bachman, “Marijuana Decriminalization: The Impact on Youth 1975-1980,” Monitoring the Future, Occasional Paper 13, Univ. of Michigan, Institute for Social Research.

[24] Michael R. Aldrich, Tod H. Mikuriya & Gordon S. Brownell, “Fiscal Costs of California Marijuana Law Enforcement 1960-1984,” Medi-Comp Press, Berkeley, 1997.  The state saved $360 million in 1984 dollars.

[25] Dan Waldorf, Craig Reinarman, Sheigla Murphy, Cocaine Changes: the Experience of Using and Quitting, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 91; Crack In America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice, Craig Reinarman and Harry G. Levine, eds., University of California Press, Berkeley, 97.

[26] David F. Musto, The American Disease, Oxford University Press, NY, 87; p281 n13; “...most authors who have closely studied the question of the addict-population in the past (Wilbert, Terry, Pellens, Kolb, DuMez, Lindesmith) tend to agree that there was a peak in addiction around 1900 and in the teens of this century this number began to decrease and reached a relatively small number (about 100,000) in the 1920s.”

[27] David F. Musto, The American Disease, Oxford University Press, NY, 87; p22: The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 required the listing of narcotics on the labels of patent medicines.  “Within a few years of the inclusion of this simple device, it was estimated that patent medicines containing such drugs dropped in sale by about a third.”

[28] Los Angeles Times, Nov 8, 96, “Fewer Californians Lighting Up, Study Says.”  Only 15.5% of California adults smoked regularly in 1995, down from 26% in 1984.

[29] Arnold S. Trebach, The Heroin Solution, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1982

[30] Lynn Zimmer, PhD and John P. Morgan, M.D., Marijuana Myths, Marijuana Facts: A Review of the Scientific Evidence, The Lindesmith Center, N.Y. 1997, p. xvi.

 

About Libertary | Contact Us | Privacy Policy | FAQ © 2010 Libertary