SEND MUMPOWER BACK TO SCHOOL?

As someone who, as founding chairman of the Department of Psychiatry
at the University of California (La Jolla), established and
supervised the first multimodality drug-treatment program (with over
1,500 patients and treatments ranging from methadone maintenance to
hospital detoxification) in California, I wish to add my comments to
the current and past dust-up evoked by night-time peripatetic Carl
Mumpower and involving the Asheville Police Department and the
members of the Asheville City Council.

Beginning in 1970, I modeled our program after the one that was
highly researched and carefully organized (and repeatedly
reorganized) by the University of Chicago. Before beginning our
program, I spent several months embedded in the university's program
on the South Side of Chicago, getting a feeling for the complexity
and delicate relations between medical treatment, social
psychological intervention, intimate involvement of law enforcement,
the development of indigenous community teams of ex-addict,
paraprofessional psychotherapists and workers in the community, job-
and career-rehabilitation programs and sophisticated oversight by
Cook County, the city of Chicago and the National Institutes of
Health in both consultation and funding.

Continuous evaluation of the efficacy of the various elements of
intervention was always ongoing.

First off, let me say that I've been in town since the mid-1990s and
have been impressed by the relative lack of drug-related violence,
the realistic handling of the issue by Bill Hogan and the APD, the
geographical isolation and non-expansion of Asheville's drug
marketplace, the lack of general community harm by this currently
invariant aspect of urban-American culture and the sophisticated
comments of Terry Bellamy, Gary Jackson and most of the City Council
members relative to the complexity of the social, economic and
psychological causal elements known to be at work in drug use, abuse
and its amelioration.

Mumpower's monotonic, unsophisticated law-enforcement story, with its
potential for personal political valence for the righteous, is, alas,
also an invariant of many urban settings.

The obvious lack of appreciation for the complexities of the issue
is, thank goodness, not shared by the Asheville law-enforcement
community or a majority of Asheville's City Council. If Mumpower
continues to make his unproductive and potentially harmful noise, I
think the Council should vote him a fellowship to spend time not in
safe (please note) and unknowing walkabouts in Deaverview, Pisgah
View or Lee Walker Heights, but in the sophisticated and at least
partially effective university programs in New York, Chicago, San
Francisco or San Diego, where his righteous rage might be replaced
with knowledge and personal motivation to work on the real conditions
underlying drug use and abuse in American cities such as Asheville.

It is my opinion that Asheville has been able to achieve a community
equilibrium in this difficult area, and a lot of thought ought to be
expended before new and potentially perturbing action is taken.

Arnold J. Mandell, M.D. Research Professor, Emory University School
of Medicine Professor Emeritus, UCSD School of Medicine Asheville