SEEKING A CURE TO DRUG CULTURE
THOSE WHO PUSH LEGALIZATION HAVE FORGOTTEN THE PAST
by Barry R. McCaffrey; Scripps Howard New Service
Copyright (c) 1997, Denver Publishing Company

Recent calls for legalization as the panacea for the
nation's drug ills should be taken with the salt of
history. The tendency to forget much of America's
experience with addictive substances goes to the very
nature of drugs and the culture they spawn. A drugged
society suffers from longterm memory loss to the point of
amnesia. America's confrontation with dangerous drugs dates
back to the 19th century when overthecounter syrups were
heavily laced with morphine, CocaCola and other beverages
contained cocaine, and Bayer Pharmaceutical Products
introduced heroin touted as ''nonaddictive'' and sold
without prescription (one year before Bayer offered
aspirin). At the turn of the century, opium dens catered to
communities throughout the United States.

We do not have to speculate about what would happen if
addictive drugs were legal without prescription. Our
country already tried that route, suffered and roundly
rejected the scourge of drugs on our communities, schools,
work places and families.

By popular demand, the Food and Drug Act of 1906
required that all ingredients in products and medicines be
revealed to consumers, many of whom had become addicted to
substances falsely marketed as safe.

In 1909, the Smoking Opium Exclusion Act banned the
importation of smokable opium providing the first
national antidrug legislation. Five years later, the
Harrison Narcotic Act implemented even broader and more
effective drug control laws. In 1911, the first
International Conference on Opium convened in the Hague to
control narcotics trafficking. By the 1920s, doctors in
America were prohibited from prescribing opiates for
nonmedical purposes, including the treatment of addicts.

Problems with cocaine addiction plagued Hollywood in the
'20s to the point where movie mogul Louis B. Mayer
complained: ''If this keeps up, there won't be any motion
picture industry.''

In response to popular outrage over depictions of drug
use in film, 37 states passed censorship bills by 1922. The
drug problem did not first hit the United States in the
1960s, as is often thought. An earlier drug epidemic raged
between 1885 and 1925, followed by a resurgence from 1950
to 1970 when heroin poured into America from Turkey by way
of France. Ten years later, a third and incredibly
destructive wave of drug abuse brought havoc to our shores
as Colombian cartels flooded our streets with cocaine.

The tendency to underestimate the hazards of drug use
has been made in successive generations. We forget what has
been painfully demonstrated in years past. The seductive
quality of drugs fooled many professionals and laymen. The
father of modern psychiatry, Sigmund Freud, initially
thought cocaine was nonaddictive and relatively harmless
a mistake made in the mid 1880s that was repeated nearly a
hundred years later. Leading universities hosted professors
infatuated with psychedelics in the 1960s and '70s or
stimulants and narcotics in the '80s and '90s. Many
physicians and researchers grossly underestimated drug
dangers. Dr. Morris Manges of Mount Sinai Hospital wrote in
an 1898 issue of the New York Medical Journal about
treating coughs with heroin: ''Apparently, there was no
habituation to the drug.'' By 1900, Manges released a
second glowing report for heroin based on a survey of 141
doctors. The author noted only a small number of cases
where addiction was observed. But three years later, Dr.
George Pettey voiced unequivocal alarm in ''The Heroin
Habit: Another Curse, '' published in the Alabama Medical
Journal. Pettey realized that heroin produced ''what is for
all intents and purposes the opium habit.''

With respect to cocaine, the absence of herointype
withdrawal symptoms tricked some researchers into missing
this drug's addictive quality, which is based on reward,
according to Dr. Robert Dupont, a former head of the
National Institute of Drug Abuse. In 1979, Dr. Robert Byck
of Yale Medical School warned about the devastation caused
by smoked coca paste used in Peru this before crack
ominously captured so many Americans.

Wooed into a false sense of security by the supposed
benign quality of smoked marijuana, unwitting victims of
crack cocaine wrongly concluded that smoking this substance
unlike injecting would be a safe route of
administration. (Dr. David Musto highlights a parallel
misconception a century earlier when physicians and
patients alike mistakenly concluded that the use of a
syringe with pure morphine, which reduced the quantity of
drugs needed to produce the same effect, would limit rather
than expand the likelihood of addiction.)

Actually, crack cocaine made heroin ''look like the good
old days,'' according to historian Dr. Jill Jonnes. The
advent of crack houses and crack babies (the NIDA National
Pregnancy and Health Survey estimated 1 1/2 to 2 percent of
American infants in 1992 had been exposed to cocaine in
utero) marked a new and terrible stage in the history of
drug abuse.

In 1986 the same year that the military reported
cutting drug use by half the deaths of basketball star
Len Bias and football star Don Rogers demonstrated to the
public that one dose of cocaine could prove lethal even to
healthy young athletes. Had anyone bothered to consult the
research, they would have discovered that this fatal
syndrome was identified decades ago. In addition, the
historical experience of cultures as different as China,
Egypt and Japan confirmed that no society could prosper
while tolerating addictive drugs.

Drug use cannot be considered in a vacuum. We must
understand it within the context of crime, violence,
corruption, prostitution, multinational cartels, adverse
health consequences, enormous social costs and the collapse
of our cities. Drug use is not limited to one area of the
country or social class but permeates suburban and rural
areas as well as urban locations. On an international
scale, narcoterrorists use the illegal drug trade as a
means to other ends. Arms deals fueled by drug capital are
part of the deal. On the other side of the drug register
are young consumers. Youths are particularly vulnerable to
the allure of drugs and to the damage toxic substances
cause developing bodies and minds.

The drug problem has personal, psychological dimensions,
but it is also a social, medical, communal, economic and
global problem that involves larger systems beginning
with the family and reaching to the nation and hemisphere.

America always has been a forwardthinking, optimistic
country oriented toward the present and future. In an age
of electronic communication and computers, instant
transmission of information compounds the tendency to value
what is news right now as opposed to yesterday. But
ignorance of the past condemns us to repeat errors
unnecessarily. An antidote to arrogance, memory is the key
to education and collective progress. The history of
illegal drugs informs the present.

Illegal drugs are a byproduct of an industrial society
that has led us to tamper for better and for worse with
the body's inner environment. The United States has one of
the worst addiction problems of any country in the
developed world in part because of our wealth. Now we must
focus our resources, including the intelligence of our
greatest minds, to solve this problem.

We can lead the world in controlling illegal drugs
primarily through prevention and treatment just as we
made great strides in guarding consumer safety and cleaning
up the outer environment. From seat belts to sewage
disposal, America has used the law to protect citizens. The
illtermed '' war on drugs' ' is another such effort. We
must free all people besieged by the tyranny of drug
dependence.