DRUG PUSHERS NOT ALWAYS IN ALLEY

Before the new year gets much older, our airwaves will be filled with
anti-drug commercials - paid for, in part, by you. The Office of National
Drug control Policy, in cooperation with the Partnership for a Drug-Free
America and the Ad Council soon will launch a $350 million ad campaing
against drugs - $175 million to be provided by the American taxpayer.

Why not continue to expect corporate America, including the networks, to
provide this public service, as they have been doing for years? But there
is a larger question that affects the drug war - on which the government
porposes to spend $16 billion in 1998, a 400 percent increase since 1986.

"Why do we have such intense punishment," Dr. Dean Ornish told me, "for
people who take drugs illegally while drug companies make billions of
dollars in profits every year by selling mood-altering drugs to millions of
Americans, including children?"

There are undoubtedly some children whose conditions are properly diagnosed
as clinically depressed and are legitimately prescribed antidepressants.
But there are 2.5 million prescriptions filled every year for Zoloft,
Prozac and other antidepressants for children under 18. At the same time
that we are being bombarded with commercials trying to convince the young
that it is "uncool" to do drugs, we are also being seduced with commercials
making it very cool to respond to every emotional pain, stress and
discomfort by trying an exotically named pill.

Tom Oberdorfer, a clinical social worker who works with many anxious,
depressed or hyperactive children, traces a lot of these problems back to
the family. "The troubled kid," he told me, " may in fact be the ticket for
the whole family to recognize and deal with the problems they have been
ignoring. In one of my cases, one of the parents - to escape from a bad
marriage - never left the bedroom. To have put that child on Prozac or
Zoloft would have completely masked the real cause of the child's anxiety."

Ornish echoes this deep concern. "It is all too easy to write a
prescription and stop looking at what is really troubling the child. But
sometimes, depression is an appropriate response to life, and can be one of
the greatest catalysts for change."

The aggressive marketing - to both doctors and directly to consumers - is
supplemented by many subtler forms of persuasion. Medical journals are
predominantly funded by the ads they carry from pharmaceutical companies,
while much of the research on drugs, including antidepressants, is
sponsored by the drug companies. And then there are the junkets drug
companies offer, the lobster dinners, the doughnuts in the emergency room
and, above all, the "detail" men and women, as the sales reps are called,
who are a formidable grass-roots army traveling around the country, leaving
a trail of samples behind.

Employees of Eli Lilly, the manufacturer of Prozac, found their way to a
suburban Washington high school. "They gave out pens and pads and little
brochures, pushing Prozac to these high school kids," Sidney Wolfe,
director of the Publi Citizens Health Research Group, said in a "Nightline"
show last March on the continuum between legal and illegal drugs.

As Heather, a heroin user who runs a needle-exchange program in Santa Cruz,
Calif., said on the same show: "If you live in a neighborhood where you
can't afford $150-an-hour therapists and Prozac, and you've got brown tar
heroin down the street, and you know that's going to ... get you through
another day without killing yourself, that's what you're going to use."

Why has there not been, host Ted Koppel asked, a massive study on the
relationship between legal drug use and illegal drug use? There have been
studies done that show a correlation between the use of alcohol and
cigarettes and the use of illegal drugs. And there is plenty of anecdotal
evidence of children who move from legal antidepressants or sleeping pills
to street drugs. But we never will win the war against drugs unless we stop
turning a blind eye to the connection between a culture that offers a pill
for every ill and a culture that cannot wean itself from illegal drugs.