DEA SURVEY: 71% OF 'WINNERS' EXPERIMENT WITH DRUGS

WASHINGTON, DC -- In a surprise announcement with wideranging implications
for U.S. narcotics policy, Drug Enforcement Administration director Thomas
Constantine acknowledged Monday that some winners "may occasionally" use
drugs.

"Apparently," said Constantine, addressing reporters at Justice Department
headquarters, "contrary to the DEA's longstanding conviction, drug use may
not be limited solely to the domain of losers. It appears that some
successful Americans have experimented with illegal narcotics, as well."

The announcement was the result of a comprehensive threeyear DEA study of
more than 40,000 U.S. winners, including thousands of successful business
executives, doctors, lawyers, scientists and civic leaders. The study,
originally designed by the DEA to help shed light on the qualities shared
by winners that make them resistant to drugs, instead revealed that over 71
percent of winners had at one time or another experimented with controlled
substances.

Constantine said that it remains unclear why winners, who enjoy successful,
productive careers and feelings of love and acceptance from their families,
would choose to engage in drug use.

"Time and time again, DEA tests have shown that no feeling you could get
from drugs could be better than the great feeling you get from being a
winner," Constantine said. "Why a heart surgeon, an architect or a
straightA student would use drugs when his senses are already enormously
heightened by the 'high' that comes from being a winner is beyond me."

Making drug use by winners all the more puzzling, Constantine said, is the
fact that winners are more than strong enough to resist the peer pressure
associated with drug use, do not need to get high to escape from a terrible
life, and do not associate with the sort of people most likely to use
drugsnamely, losers.

DEA scientists said it also remains unclear how drugusing winners have
managed to avoid addiction and the many wellknown destructive sideeffects
of controlled substances.

"Winners seem to have an unknown quality that enables them to use drugs and
keep on winning," DEA head researcher and narcotics expert Howard Tobin
said. "It goes against everything we know about drugs, but many of the
drugtaking winners we studied did not, in fact, become losers. They did
not lose control of their lives, nor did they lose their loved ones, their
jobs, their homes, or their physical or mental wellbeing. There is clearly
something at work here that we still do not understand."

Tobin cited the fivetime Super Bowl champion Dallas Cowboys as a good
example of winners who achieved greatness while engaging in frequent
recreational drug use.

"In 1993 and 1994, the Cowboys clearly were winners, trouncing the Buffalo
Billsa team with no drugusers on its roster, mind youin two straight
Super Bowls by a combined score of 82 to 30," Tobin said. "It's puzzling,
to say the least."

One winner, Cupertino, CA, neurosurgeon Richard Frankel, a devoted family
man and casual marijuana smoker, said that the DEA should not necessarily
be surprised. "I find that a little pot every now and then really helps me
relax," he said. "When you consider that marijuana is less addictive and
less harmful than both nicotine and alcohol, it shouldn't be all that
surprising that I, like so many of my esteemed and accomplished colleagues,
choose to smoke up occasionally."

As a result of the study, the DEA has been forced to change many of its
antidrug awareness campaigns. On Tuesday, the agency ordered the recall of
more than 150,000 U.S. video arcade games displaying antidrug messages,
including 27,000 Mortal Kombat II and N.A.R.C. units, which will be
reprogrammed with an altered onscreen message from former FBI director
William Sessions, "Very Few Winners Use Drugs."