The Drug Explosion

If you pick 20 adults at random, the odds are that 15 of them drink moderately, two are problem drinkers and one is a desperate alcoholic. Two who use alcohol are also using marijuana, a couple are taking tranquilizers on doctors' orders and one or two have been popping barbiturates to relieve insomnia and are perilously close to addiction. Three or four have taken amphetamines to stay awake or to lose weight and nearly all of them drink caffeine, another stimulant. Ten or 12 of this group of 20 continue to smoke tobacco even after the medical hazards of that habit have been amply documented. One has probably taken acid or mescaline. The children of some have sniffed glue or carbon tet for kicks (thereby risking brain and liver damage), more smoke pot and some have had an LSD trip. The drug culture, as the newspapers call it, doesn't just belong to the kids; everyone's in it together.

The hard figures on drug use in America today are dramatic. Taking our society's favorite drugs in order of their popularity, alcohol heads the list--and has ever since Colonial times. Just 20 years after the Pilgrims landed, William Bradford was fretting in his diaries about the number of drunks running around Plymouth; and in the three centuries since, the problem has only grown with the population, quite in spite of religious disapproval, temperance movements and even a constitutional amendment. In 1970, in fact, 23,400 highway fatalities were traceable to alcohol. That is 64 every day: almost three every hour.

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Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking is Dangerous to Your Health. But the warnings are recent and a cultural habit as widespread as smoking is not easily changed. Among the 51,300,000 Americans who still smoke, 250,000 can be expected to die from it this year. And the prospects are for more of the same--250,000 deaths every year until the end of this century.

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If there is one drug problem today that remains practically invisible, it's pill taking. Chiefly through television, we've grown accustomed to the notion that the only way to deal with those hammers pounding in our heads, lightning bolts shooting into our spines and gremlins bowling in our stomachs is to take a pill; and in the past decade or so, we have extended that practice to include a considerable variety of psychological ailments as well. Today 35,000,000 Americans use sedatives, stimulants or tranquilizers, mostly obtained legally through their doctors. Despite this medical supervision, between 500,000 and 1,000,000 of these people have become abusers. Manufacturers, meanwhile, continue to produce such pills abundantly and with apparent enthusiasm, turning out roughly 80,000 pounds of amphetamines and 1,000,000 pounds of barbiturates in 1970 alone. Some have bizarre distribution routes: One respectable firm was discovered by the House Select Committee on Crime to be shipping to a golf hole in Tijuana, from which the product returned to the United States and entered the black market. Perhaps 100,000 young people who are introduced to amphetamine-based drugs in this way graduate to methamphetamine (speed), which is injected into the veins like heroin and can cause rapid mind deterioration, while chronic abuse produces severe symptoms of paranoid psychosis. Some meth freaks graduate easily to heroin, seemingly the quickest way to soothe a frantic speed trip.

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Unlike alcohol, tobacco or speed, marijuana apparently has no permanent and only a few transitory side effects--yet in many states, the penalties for simple possession are severe. But all the legal sanctions against it have had about the same effect that Prohibition had on our drinking habits. When Harry Anslinger first convinced Congress in the mid-Thirties that pot was an evil killer weed, it was being used almost exclusively by Mexican-Americans and blacks. But it has flourished under oppression: In the past five years, it has spread throughout the middle class, and right now some 20,000,000 to 30,000,000 people have tried it, with perhaps 10,000,000 being regular users.

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Psychedelic-hallucinogenic drugs, credited for a brief generation of star-wandering rock music and bright melting poster art, are generally less popular now than they were a few years ago. Nonetheless, it's estimated that 1,000,000 Americans have tried LSD, mescaline or similar psychedelics. The number of regular psychedelic users is relatively small in comparison with drinkers or grass smokers, but there are still enough of them--and they still manage to have enough bad trips--to keep acid-rescue telephone services alive and busy in almost every major city.

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There are at least 200,000 (and perhaps as many as 400,000) junkies in the nation today, making heroin addiction one of the smallest yet most sensationalized of our drug problems. Recently, the heroin habit has been changing its nature: Where most addicts used to be poor and black, now a large percentage come from the white middle class. More depressing: Younger children are becoming involved. New York City has had a rash of heroin-overdose deaths of teenagers.

Some doctors are predicting a heroin epidemic. Others, such as Dr. Helen Nowlis of the U. S. Office of Education and Professor Samuel Pearlman of New York's Inter-University Drug Survey Council, insist that students are very aware of the perils of heroin and most want nothing to do with it. What is undeniable is that many children who should know better are playing around with heroin needles.

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There is no consistent antidrug movement; but there is a strong ideological conflict over which drugs are socially acceptable and which are not. On one side is the booze-and-trank-using group; on the other side is the pot-and-psychedelic-using group. Conventional wisdom classifies the first group as mostly older and conservative, the second as primarily young and radical. But the lines, if they really exist, are being crossed: Some pot users are past 40, some of the young are conservative and use drugs more commonly associated with the older generation. Barbiturates and amphetamines, on the other hand, are not characterized by any identifiable patterns. LSD, which reached the peak of its popularity in most colleges around 1968 and has been declining ever since, is just beginning to be a fad at some Southern universities; while at Swarthmore a student told The New York Times that "the jocks are getting into drugs and all the freaks are going to alcohol." Meanwhile, conflict continues to flourish on all levels: When the mayor's office of the District of Columbia released a recent report on drug abuse in the capital, it was rumored that one member of the committee that had drafted the report lit a joint during the press conference and smoked it in front of the reporters to dramatize his opposition to the study's anti-marijuana bias.

None of this is as new as most commentators seem to think. Drug taking in America goes back to the Indians' tobacco farms, their occasional use of deliriants such as Jimson weed and the religious use of peyote and magic mushrooms. The first Pilgrims brought in ample rum and made it an integral part of the slave trade; alcohol excesses, some historians think, were actually widespread in England by the 18th Century. In the second half of the 19th Century, along with the Civil War, came a wave of morphine addiction and, soon after, patent medicines consisting mainly of alcohol often spiked with opium derivatives began hooking some of their many users. There was even a Hashish Club in New York City in the 1850s where writers and artists met to turn on and recount their visions to one another, while scholarly Fitz Hugh Ludlow was quite legally (there was no anti-pot law then) gathering the experiences for his famous The Hasheesh Eater. Around the turn of the century, a Harvard psychologist named not Timothy Leary but William James was dosing himself with nitrous oxide and discovering religious significance in the experiences so gained.

Nor is this peculiarly American. The earliest brewery, found in Egypt, is dated at 3700 B.C. and there is evidence that people used alcohol as far back as the Stone Age. Some paleolithic tribes in the Near East even buried their dead with marijuana plants, evidently with religious intent. Around the world, people continue to chew, smoke and drink every plant and shrub that alters their consciousness, provides temporary escape or increases their pleasure: There are more than 200,000,000 Cannabis (marijuana) users in the world today, for instance, and we have only a fraction of them in the United States.

What is unique about the American drug scene are (1) the accelerated rate at which changes are occurring, (2) the controversy over the use of drugs and (3) the increasing lack of discrimination shown by many in their choice of intoxicants and the amounts used. The main factor is the accelerated rate of change, which is also true of all other areas of our life these days and is creating the phenomenon known as future shock. But this cultural mutation, even without the dizzying speed at which it is occurring, would have to create problems in a society that is still flirting heavily with puritanism and still tends to believe that all behavior is molded by punishment. The reaction of people in power to drugs, both those that are truly dangerous and those that are merely annoying to their own prejudices, has been the same: Make the drug takers uncomfortable. When this doesn't work, the next step is more punishment. Harsher laws. Longer sentences. More narcotics agents. And when this in turn doesn't work, the next move is further escalation, and so on. But it's a solution that has created more problems than it has solved. Moreover, it hasn't worked.

The fallacy of the punishment theory is best illustrated by the heroin problem, which is small in terms of the number of individuals involved. A free society of 200,000,000 could easily tolerate and nullify the negative effects of our 200,000 junkies. Instead, they have been criminalized, thereby driving the price of their fix up from a few cents to $50 or more a day. Since few can afford that price, most are forced to steal or become prostitutes--and to earn $50 per day from underworld fences, a man must steal at least $100 worth of property. One hundred dollars times 200,000 addicts is $20,000,000 per day that gets stolen from the rest of us, and that is 7.3 billion dollars per year. Anybody in a large city with an apartment window facing a fire escape has learned the individual application of that figure. Alcohol prohibition produced even more expensive by-products in terms of the black market in that drug, the creation of organized crime and the foundation of the narcotics traffic. Not only did alcohol and pot prohibition increase the use of those drugs but the pot laws have caused countless harmless citizens to spend long unproductive periods behind bars in the company of professional criminals.

As society moves toward grudging admission that indiscriminate criminalization in this area just does not work, sporadic efforts are being made toward drug-abuse prevention through education. This, obviously, is part of the answer, but efforts so far have been shoddy. When evaluators employed by the National Coordinating Council on Drug Education examined over 100 educational films about drugs, they found 36 of them inaccurate. Mrs. Sue Boe, assistant vice-president of consumer affairs for the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association, commented recently that children frequently know more about drugs than their teachers (although neither know as much as they should), and Dr. Gelolo McHugh, formerly of Duke University, after giving a drug-information quiz to 60,000 citizens, commented that correct answers were no more frequent than chance; the subjects could have done as well closing their eyes and choosing at random. It is no surprise, in this context, that students at San Mateo High School in California, asked what celebrity they would trust as narrator of an anti-LSD film, overwhelmingly answered, "Nobody."

Intercepting drug shipments from abroad is held out as a panacea by some. This motivated President Nixon's ill-fated Operation Intercept, which clogged the crossover points from Mexico three years ago, infuriated the people and government of that nation and finally had to be abandoned, as marijuana use continued to rise. If some method is ever found to stop the heroin shipments from Southeast Asia, Turkey and Mexico, which feed most of our junkie market at present, without resolving the root causes, the already-high prices will probably escalate further, a handful of addicts will die and most of them will steal more than ever to pay for $100 or $250 fixes.

Something obviously is wrong in our attempts to adjust to the global drug village--to face up to the arrival of marijuana habits from Mexico, speed and acid and downers from the laboratory, hashish cultism from Arabia, opiates from the Orient, peyote from our Indians, magic mushrooms from the ancient Aztecs.

It is hard to affix blame on anyone in particular. Senator Frank Moss recently suggested that we should investigate whether the hypnotic repetitions in the aspirin and other drug commercials on TV are conditioning us to seek a drug whenever we have a problem. (See Corporate Pushers, by Senator Gravel.) This may be true, but people were getting stoned long before TV. Bert Donaldson, director of programs for emotionally disturbed children in Michigan, commented that many students are "actually bored to death in their classes"; others point to the boredom of much of our work in this industrialized world. ("Guys are always stoned," a Dodge auto-plant worker told Time magazine. "Either they're taking pills to keep awake or they're zonked on a joint they had on a break.") Considering the interminable Vietnam war, increasing air and water pollution, the continuing threat of a thermonuclear holocaust and the dehumanizing effect of our bureaucracies, there is much cause for people to feel nervous and to take something to calm down or to get away from it all.

The sinister fact is not that most citizens are taking drugs; people have always done that, although never as many or as much. The real terror implicit in our current drug culture is that so many, incredulous about official pronouncements, are experimenting, sometimes lethally, with very dangerous ones.

If the attempt to stop people from using all psychoactive drugs is hopeless, society nevertheless can and should try to persuade its members to use fewer drugs and safer ones. Libertarians from Jefferson and Mill to the present have emphasized that government has no business trying to enforce its notions of morality via police power--and there is something absurd and repulsive about a martini-guzzling bureaucrat imprisoning a pot user. Ideally, government and such powerful paragovernmental institutions as the schools, churches, labor unions and businessmen's organizations should be using their influence to provide positive alternatives and to genuinely enlighten people instead of trying to get them to march to a particular morality; but the times often seem less ideal than ever. If we were more committed to actually solving the problem than to whipping the people who have it, we could have been seriously and creatively looking for real solutions for over a generation. But instead we have tried to beat one another into submission with drug laws that have no parallel in the free world and can only be duplicated in totalitarian societies.

Drugs of one kind or another have had an extraordinary effect on contemporary American life, with the discussion of them usually generating more heat than light. On this and the following pages, we have tried to examine as dispassionately as possible the extent and complexity of the drug explosion. Dr. Joel Fort, an authority on the subject, begins with an overview that describes the extent to which drugs have become a part of our everyday lives, often without our realizing it. In the following pages, Senator Mike Gravel of Alaska treats one of the causes of the problem: how our legitimate-drug manufacturers--"Corporate Pushers"--perpetuate a chemical culture by flooding the advertising media with the message that drugs offer relief for every possible malaise. Craig Karpel's "Buyer Beware" examines another facet of drug sales: how the adulteration and misrepresentation of street-purchased dope often cause disability and death. In "Stone Cold Fever," Playboy Staff Writer David Standish relates the pathos of a junkie hooked on heroin. And a comprehensive chart provides detailed information on virtually all the drugs society uses and abuses as it muddles through these gloomy times.