The Case Against the Bill of Rights

Whenever a government seeks to expand social controls beyond acceptable bounds, it must first create the illusion of a danger so grave that spectacular and unorthodox measures are seen by the middle classes as vital to their protection.

Quite apart from its stated purpose--the reduction of drug use and supply--the war on drugs has served only to perpetuate itself and to violate the fundamental liberties set out in the Bill of Rights. This is being achieved by the illusion of grave danger--in this case, the danger of marijuana. To create the required intensity of fear, the people behind the antidrug campaign have tried to convince parents that (1) their children are addicted to marijuana and (2) marijuana is far more dangerous than everyone had been led to believe--in other words, that there is new scientific evidence refuting all previously established scientific fact.

This, in effect, is the case against the Bill of Rights--and it is made through the voices and writings of a handful of "experts" willing to say just about anything to make their message convincing. Here are a few of the more prominent players in this cynical game.

Harold Voth is the author of "How to Get Your Child off Marijuana," a tabloid-newspaper insert that appeared all across the state of Texas. Included in it was the Marijuana Dwarf you see below. The illustration, originally designed by the Advertising Council, was used in Nixon's war on drugs and was later presented, along with Voth's lengthy text, to convince parents that their children were on drugs. As one noted psychologist said of Voth's warning signs of marijuana use by children, "Sounds like the symptoms of puberty to me."

Gabriel Nahas is fond of telling whomever will listen that when he was a child in Egypt, his father took him through the streets to see the wretched human refuse that hashish smoking could produce. Nahas, an otherwise well-credentialed researcher, has been involved in his own antimarijuana campaign for years. In fact, he founded his own International Medical Council on Drug Abuse, which was responsible for putting together a conference in Reims, France, where much of the mythical "new" anti-marijuana research was first put into mass circulation. He published a book based on that conference called Marijuana--Deceptive Weed, which was panned by the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. Nahas threatened to sue the Journal, which re-reviewed it. The second reviewer also panned it. Dr. Norman Zinberg, a prominent marijuana researcher at Harvard University, called the book "meretricious trash." Nahas' comments and writings appear also in Reader's Digest and in a magazine called War on Drugs, published by radical right-wing cult leader Lyndon LaRouche (airline passengers will have seen LaRouche's pod people stationed around major airports bearing signs with such slogans as Support Nasa--send Jane Fonda to the moon!).A Nahas quote in one publication--appearing above an advertisement for a cellulite cure--cautioned that "the upcoming generation may contain a 'majority of misfits.' "

Robert L. Dupont, former head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), is now in charge of the American Council on Marijuana (A.C.M.V), a radical antimarijuana group. He's also on the board of directors and is the president and chief executive officer of A.C.M. Once in favor of decriminalization of marijuana, DuPont is now a (continued on page 210) Bill Of Right(continued from page 136) vociferous proponent of scare literature, frequently predicting--with no scientific basis--that when the real hazards of marijuana smoking are discovered, "we will see horrendous results." A.C.M. also publishes the work of Gabriel Nahas. Harold Voth is on A.C.M.'s scientific-advisory board.

Carlton Turner ran NIDA's pot farm at the University of Mississippi from 1971 until the time he became Ronald Reagan's chief drug advisor. Turner is the author of three often-repeated marijuana-scare statements: THC lingers in the brain cells: there are more than 400 chemicals in marijuana; and marijuana today is seven to ten times as potent as it was a decade ago. He is on the scientific-advisory board of A.C.M. and is a frequent contributor to the antimarijuana literature. He also writes for Drug Enforcement, the Justice Departments magazine.

Lee Dogoloff, a high-ranking official at A.CM., was the successor to Peter Bourne, President Carter's chief drug advisor. Dogoloff has no scientific background and has been on the NIDA and White House payrolls in various capacities over the years. A telling moment in Dogoloff's career in the drug-abuse industry came in 1978, when a report by HEW's inspector general identified him as having helped a small circle of friends to benefit financially from "cronyism" and "loose management practices" at NIDA. The report, which disclosed millions of dollars' worth of undocumented salaries, illegal bonuses and questionable fringe benefits to relatives and associates of NIDA officials, prompted Robert DuPont's resignation as head of the drug agency.

Robert Heath is perhaps the only true superstar of the war-on-drug experts. A NIDA-funded researcher from Tulane University, he first achieved notoriety in 1954, when he announced that he had discovered the cause of schizophrenia--a chemical called taraxein. When this proved to be an untenable position, Heath and a psychiatrist named Russel Monroe turned to the mental patients at Charity Hospital in Louisiana--a captive audience, so to speak--for their experiments. One 27-year-old woman, whose husband had had her committed to Charity for "spells," was given electroshock therapy, sodium amobarbital, subcoma insulin therapy and other treatments, including implantation of electrodes in her brain. Monroe commented: "She put on her clothes without aid and then attempted to escape from the hospital. Apprehended ... she expressed intense anger, resentment and negativism.... Restraint was necessary." The doctors subsequently treated her with LSD and mescaline, which she liked no better. Heath became an advocate of psychosurgery.

Continuing his deep-brain-probe techniques, Heath implanted a group of monkeys with various devices and force-fed them marijuana smoke in enormous doses. According to Hospital Physician magazine, he administered doses "equivalent to 63 cigarettes per day for humans." By the use of a machine that would have pleased Torquemada, the monkeys were forced to take "the entire dose of smoke in a five-minute period."

Speaking of Heath's work, Dr. J. Thomas Ungerleider of the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute says, "It is not very highly thought of.... Julius Axelrod, the Nobel Prize winner, criticized him publicly, which is almost unheard of in the scientific community. He criticized Heath for using those kinds of dosages and extrapolating from monkeys into human beings. What Heath did was strap monkeys down, and every time the monkey wanted air, he got marijuana. It was just a barbaric procedure.... And some of his monkeys died. Even the control monkeys died, monkeys that didn't get marijuana."

Heath is given to making statements such as "People might drink rather heavily for 25 to 30 years and never get into serious trouble as far as alterations in the brain are concerned. But with marijuana, it seems as though you have to use it only for a relatively short time in moderate to heavy use before persistent behavior effects, along with other evidence of brain damage, begin to develop."

Says Dr. Ungerleider: "I believe Dr. Heath testified before the legislature that [marijuana smokers] should go to jail. And this research may indicate maybe monkeys should go to jail; I don't know.

"I would like to emphasize the position taken by the California Medical Association that the major harm from marijuana is the harm of going to jail.... When they ... ranked the drugs of abuse, [the association put] marijuana ... at the bottom both physiologically and psychologically. [They] ascribed the great hazard of marijuana use in terms of jail. If you are caught, [marijuana] can be hazardous to your health."