Crime in the Cities: The Drug Connection

Bring up the subject of our nation’s cities today, and the subject of crime is likely to lurk just beneath the surface. The perception is growing that our cities are becoming cesspools of violence, and statistics would seem to bear this perception out. While no region of America has been crime-free, the majority of crimes in this country seem to be concentrated in our urban centers. Rural areas accounted for only 730,000 crimes out of an estimated total of 12,153,000 crimes reported nationwide during 1979—a mere 6 percent of the total. The closer we get to our cities, the more likely we are to experience some sort of crime. And when we step into a ghetto area, it seems to surround us.

How much has crime increased in the past few years? According to the FBI Uniform Crime Report, between 1970 and 1979 violent crime had increased by 37 percent; motor vehicle theft, by 15 percent; murder and non-negligent manslaughter, by 25 percent; aggravated assault, by 45 percent. In the category of so-called property crimes, there has been an increase of 33 percent since 1970: robbery is up 25 percent; burglary, up 33 percent; and larceny, up 36 percent. That’s just reported crimes, which understate the true incidence by a factor of 2 to 5. A Newsweek poll conducted by George Gallup reported that 20 percent of those surveyed had their property vandalized within the last year, 21 percent had money or property stolen, and 14 percent had their homes broken into. If a man’s home is his castle, there are millions of castles under seige in America today.

And if commentators are to be believed, everything from high unemployment to hot weather, inflation, and low police morale is to be blamed. But if one factor has been singled out more than anything else, it is drugs, particularly heroin.

The assertions are everywhere. Last April, Presidential Counsellor Edwin Meese III said in a speech before the Prosecutor’s Management Information System Group in Washington, D. C. that a number one priority would be to increase the cooperation of federal, state, and local governments in the war against “dangerous drugs,” which are a major source of crime. And, last May, in his opening remarks to the Law Enforcement Executives Narcotics Committee, outgoing Administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Peter Bensinger stated that “violent crime and drug trafficking are inextricably connected. The underlying cause of this violent crime can be traced to the enormous sums of money that accompany the buying and selling of illegal drugs.”

Nor are federal government officials like Meese and Bensinger alone. Stories in newspapers all across the country have been linking heroin use to crime for the better part of the past two decades. In 1978, The New York Times ran six feature stories in a series entitled “The War on 138th Street,” with such scary subheads as “A Struggle for South Bronx Drug Empire: 27 Murders, Voodoo, ‘Contracts’ on Police,” detailing the warfare—open shootings, assaults, threats, blackmail, and contracts put out on police—between gangs wrestling for control of a $30 million-a-year heroin operation. Similar stories have found their way into the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Examiner, and other papers in Boston, Florida, Texas, Philadelphia, and Detroit.

When, in August 1980, The Washington Post reported a 20 percent increase in crime in the District of Columbia in just one year, drugs were seen by a police official as the chief culprit. “An increased availability of heroin on the streets is producing ‘a new batch of heroin addicts’ who are committing larcenies, robberies, and burglaries to support their habits, said Assistant Chief Maurice Turner, head of field operations.” (August 7, 1980) He was echoing received opinion. Less than a year later, Turner was named Chief of Police, vowing a war against heroin. “When the communities of Washington are free from the menace of narcotics users,” he told the Washington Star after his designation, “there will be a large reduction in the number of burglaries, robberies, and thefts.”

Why is there such a relationship between heroin and crime? Chief Turner, like nearly everyone else in the law enforcement and drug abuse business, thinks the reason is the price of maintaining a daily habit. As he put it in an interview with LR's Lee Williams, “If you see an addict going through withdrawal, he’s in some kind of damn pain. … When they get pretty well strung out, they have about a $100 to $120-a-day habit. When they get that type of habit, they’re going to have to steal approximately six times that much to sell on the open market. They’re going to have to steal about $600 [worth of fenceable goods] to support a $100-a-day habit.”

cost figure, heroin users commit over 100,000 robberies, burglaries, larcenies, or auto thefts each day plus an undetermined amount of crime involving bad checks and credit cards. This results in a cost to society of over ten million dollars per day. Additionally addicts engage in an immeasurable amount of illicit drug sales.

Other studies in turn seem to confirm these sorts of estimates. A study done by John C. Ball, Lawrence Rosen, John A. Flueck, and David N. Nurco, of Temple University and the University of Maryland School of Medicine—funded by a grant from the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) — found that the 243 addicts interviewed committed 473,738 crimes over an 11-year period. The range in crime per addict was from a low of no crimes for 6 subjects to a high of 9450 crimes for one particularly enterprising thief.

The studies

The endless studies done of heroin and crime seem to bear him out. A study by the DEA found,

It is estimated that heroin users committed $3.9 billion worth of property crime in 1974. This represents about 19% of all property crime in the United States. It should be realized that this estimate represents a sizeable amount of property crime. According to this

Another study, by James A. Inciardi and C. D. Chambers, “found that 26 addicts on the street were responsible on a daily basis for 22 major crimes.” In a more recent study, Inciardi found (using a group in Miami) that 239 active male heroin users committed 80,644 offenses during a 12-month period—an average of 337 crimes each.

Before accepting these estimates as accurate, however, we should reflect for a moment. There is no agreement among different government agencies about the basic facts that are alleged. To understand the difficulty in analyzing statistics, consider the claim of the DEA that “heroin users commit over 100,000 robberies, burglaries, larcenies, or auto thefts each day.” This would amount to 36,500,000 crimes a year in these categories. But according to the FBI Uniform Crime Report for 1979, there were only 11,441,100 such crimes committed. Even if we include the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ estimate of unreported crimes, obtained through extensive surveys, this figure is only approximately doubled, to 23,000,000 crimes. In short, according to the DEA, heroin users alone commit 13,000,000 more crimes in these categories than are committed by everyone in the United States. The figures don’t add up.

It isn’t just the DEA’s figures that don’t add up. Local law enforcement officials’ estimates for the number of crimes committed by addicts are well beyond—often by a factor of 10 to 20—the best estimates of the numbers of crimes reported or estimated. The scare stories make good reading—how many times a year do various government agencies report “the biggest drug bust in history?” But each time they do, the public seems to swallow it whole. No one seems to question the basic underlying plot any longer, so taken for granted are the myths, scare stories, government proclamations, and, frankly, lies.

The facts and the scenario

The scenario has always taken this form: We are facing a problem of drug abuse of unparalleled proportions; a whole criminal subculture has developed which is using, and is addicted to, dangerous drugs — especially heroin; being a heroin addict is like being a slave to impulse, and among these impulses is the desperate urge to do anything to get the drug, particularly to commit crimes. And, in increasing numbers, the addicts are dying of heroin overdoses. Our law enforcement and medical drug abuse officials are concerned that the problem is out of hand; what is needed is a coordinated effort to bring it under control. This involves coordinating the efforts of local, state, and national law enforcement officials, together with those of the State Department and the Bureau of Customs, to help stem the flow of drug traffic into the United States from foreign countries, to arrest large traffickers, bust small pushers, and get the poor, hapless, zombie-like addict into a “treatment center,” where, with help from medical personnel and therapists, he or she can be treated for the sickness, and returned to normal life as a productive, noncriminal member of society. Then crimes will diminish, and once again it will be safe to walk the streets. The study by Ball et al. concludes that “a major means of reducing the amount of crime committed by opiate addicts is within sight. If we can control addiction, it is evident that we will reduce criminality appreciably.”

The assumption behind this scenario is that this can be done and that it should be done. The problem with the scenario is that none of its basic assumptions is true.

Consider the very definition of the problem to be solved. We read, in a widely-respected pharmacology text, Goodman and Gilman’s The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics, the following definition of the term “drug abuse”: “Drug abuse refers to the use, usually by self-administra-tion, of any drug in a manner that deviates from the approved medical or social patterns within a given culture. The term conveys the notion of social disapproval, and it is not necessarily descriptive of any particular pattern of drug use or its potential adverse consequences.” In short, “drug abuse” is defined not by any pattern of drug use, or by any given effect of a drug, but by the fact that it is disapproved of. The whole area of drug abuse has not been treated as a scientific matter, but as a quasi-religious one.

The time has come for a rational look at heroin and its relationship to crime, and at our national policies of obstructing commerce, arresting traders in drugs, and mandating compulsory treatment. Let us look at these step by step, using commonly accepted assumptions as the basis for our reasoning.

Some facts and assumptions

At the source of the whole question of drug abuse, in the case of heroin, lies the poppy, a plant which can be grown almost anywhere. Opium, for thousands of years the most popular narcotic, is the dried juice of the poppy. The chief active ingredient in opium is morphine, present in a concentration of about 10 percent. Heroin is morphine heated in the presence of acetic acid (found in vinegar) and is, when consumed, promptly converted back into morphine in the body. Thus, all three opiates—opium, morphine, and heroin —are essentially identical, differing mainly in strength of effect per unit dose. The first recorded use of opium was in 5000 B.C. by the Sumerians; morphine was isolated less than two hundred years ago; and heroin was first synthesized in Germany in 1898. All can be smoked, sniffed, taken orally, or injected. The main difference felt from injecting opiates rather than taking them by other means is the sensation of a several-seconds-long “rush” after an injection, which is described as a flush of warmth to the pit of the stomach. We shall later consider the actual effects and side-effects of the opiates; right now, let us consider how these drugs relate to the commission of crime.

The facts are that some people like these drugs and use them, while others don’t like these drugs and don’t want other people to use them. Informed and uninformed people are to be found in both camps. But today, those who oppose the use of the drug constitute a majority and have passed prohibition laws banning the cultivation, production, importation, sale, and use of the opiates.

From that point on, there are problems of numbers and statistics and studies. According to the NIDA, for example, there are 420,000 heroin users in the United States; while according to the DEA, there are closer to 556,000. Estimates of the number of property crimes committed by “addicts” range from a low of 20 percent to a high of 70 percent. Estimates of the number of heroin users who are true “addicts” differ too, from a low of 20 percent to a high of 75 percent. And the estimate of the number of heroin addicts who support their $100 or so per day habits by property crime ranges from a low of 25 percent (DEA) to a high of 80 percent (local law enforcement agencies). So how many heroin users are there in the United States? The most commonly accepted estimate is the NIDA’s of 420,000. Of this number, the DEA estimates that something over 100,000 are heavy users or addicts, while the rest range from light, occasional use — “chippers,” who do not seem to become addicted, to medium level use—those going on and off the drug, classified variously as hardcore addicts or as light, infrequent users.

The best estimate of the total average dose is 40 to 50 mg per day. The average cost of this per day seems to be around

$100. According to the DEA, which has a tendency to inflate the problem by inflating the statistics,

Most heroin related property crime is committed by less than one-quarter of the heroin user population.... Only the large habit addicts fit into any common stereotype of a heroin user with a strong dependence upon crime. They would appear to be unable to support their addiction without committing theft or selling drugs.

Let us postulate that an estimated 30 to 40 percent of the property crimes in the United States are committed annually by heroin users to maintain their habits. This represents a midpoint between the low estimates of 10 percent and the high estimates of 70 percent, to be used solely for the purpose of allowing us to make some important calculations.

Supply-side prohibition

The fundamental approach of the drug prohibitionists has been to attempt to stop the importation of heroin from other countries. To achieve this end, the Bureau of Customs works hand-in-hand with the State Department. The U.S. has entered into a myriad of treaties with foreign governments—Mexico, Turkey, France, and the like—to destroy the traffic in opiates by destroying the poppy fields where they exist, by closing foreign processing plants, or simply by buying the drugs as they are produced to stop them from reaching the international black market. International law enforcement officials cooperate to identify and arrest major drug dealers. The Bureau of Customs attempts to seize any opiates entering the United States. And local law enforcement officials attempt to identify pushers and users to arrest them, thus stopping the cycle of heroin availability and crime.

So far, none of these measures has worked.

When one nation succeeds in shutting down local poppy growers or opium producers, other suppliers pop up, because of the enormous profitability of the drugs. Like marijuana growers in the United States, growers are readily able to hide crops from authorities and sell them to black marketeers. When the U.S. government made strides toward shutting down the production and shipment of heroin through the Middle East and Europe (especially France), new supply routes were established from Latin America and Southeast Asia. In short, despite billions of dollars spent to curb this aspect of the supply side of heroin marketing, all that has been accomplished has been to shift the source of supply.

Can we stop heroin from being imported into the United States? Consider the numbers. Even if we estimate that those 420,000 users all consume heroin at an average rate of 40 to 50 mg per day, the total supply of heroin which would have to reach the United States to supply the entire heroin-using population for a year would be a maximum of 6 to 8 tons. What is the likelihood that this can be stopped? The total amount of all imports of all kinds that come to the United States each year by plane or vessel—omitting goods imported in trucks and automobiles—is nearly 500 million tons. Thus, to cut off the smuggling of heroin would require that we somehow find that 6 to 8 tons in a haystack of half-a-billion tons. Even if we supposed that total consumption in the U.S. were as high as 10 tons per year, the odds against finding that amount of contraband would be 1 in 50,000,000—clearly an impossible task, no matter what amount of money and manpower the Bureau of Customs puts into its attempt. How much does the Bureau of Customs in fact manage to grab each year? In 1977 there were 245 seizures, totalling 277.7 pounds; in 1978, 179 seizures totalling 186.6 pounds; in 1979, 173 seizures totalling 122.5 pounds; and in 1980, 149 seizures totalling 268.7 pounds. For this pitiful result, the Bureau of Customs and its informants and spies and undercover agents have squandered millions of dollars.

The reasons for this failure are as obvious as they are elusive. The heroin trade is very, very profitable. Between the local, “raw materials” cost of 5 ¢ or less for a day’s “fix” of heroin and the final street price of $100 there is enormous money to be made, tens of billions of dollars per year, to be divided between local growers, processors (the laboratory equipment to transform opium into heroin on a large scale costs less than $2000), international smugglers, corrupt customs officials, occasional foreign government officials, occasional CIA agents, local traffickers, street-level “pushers,” and corrupt policemen, judges, and the like. No matter how hard we attempt to stop the international traffic, we simply will not succeed. It is time to face that fact.

Precisely the same thing can be said about stopping the domestic trafficking once the drug enters the United States. It is a commonplace saying among policemen that for every trafficker who is arrested there is another ready to take his place. The cops who do the arresting know that the main effect of their drug busts will be on their arrest records, not on the streets. Busts may make them look good to superiors, but they will not solve the problem. That, too, is a fact which should finally be faced, without any further rationalizations from authorities.

Indeed, even if it were possible to clamp down more on street drug dealing, it might not be desirable, if the aim is to reduce property crimes. A study in Detroit in 1976 showed that, as anti-heroin laws were more severely enforced, the price of heroin rose and property crimes increased. Conversely, when law enforcement was lax, the supply of heroin increased, the price dropped, and the crime rate fell as well.

Other studies have confirmed this finding. Apparently, as the price rises, infrequent users turn to other drugs or abstain, while hardcore addicts, more likely to commit crimes to support the habit, increase their crime rate so that they can afford heroin.

In short, the attempt to deal with heroin from a supply side has failed, and will continue to fail, no matter what authorities do. Let us turn, then to the “demand-side” approach and its attempt to treat addiction and control crime.

The demand side in action

There are two different concerns on the part of the law enforcement authorities and medical authorities which have been manifested during our war against drugs. One has been to stop the use of heroin, by punishment and treatment. The other has been to reduce the crimes associated with heroin use. Along the way to addressing these issues, we must explode some of the mythology surrounding heroin.

How much crime is committed by heroin users, and how likely are they to be arrested and convicted for such crimes? Two studies cited earlier, “The Criminality of Heroin Addicts When Addicted and When Off Opiates,” by Ball, et al., and “Heroin Use and Street Crime,” by James Inciardi, shed some light on these questions. Both are methodologically flawed, but come up with some very interesting results nonetheless.

The Ball study was based on interviews with 243 male opiate addicts in Baltimore, to establish the number of crimes they committed over an 11-year period. Ball and his associates took a random selection of several hundred heroin users from the Baltimore police records. Then they eliminated those who had died during the period in question, those who claimed never to have been addicts, and those who appeared, through a cross-check of police records, to have lied about crimes committed. But the very fact that their way of establishing a pool of opiate users was to use the police files means that the sample was already slanted toward those who were associated with crime. Thus we cannot generalize from the study to the population of opiate users as a whole. This study found that those interviewed were inclined to commit crimes even when they were off heroin. But what is significant are the numbers: the number of “crime days”—when one or more crimes were committed during a single day—averaged 248 per year while they were on drugs, but only 40 when either they were not, or they managed to obtain the drugs at a trivial cost. (Most of the crimes were thefts—drug use or possession was not classified as a crime. What proportion of the remaining crimes come under the “victimless crime” definition, such as prostitution and gambling, is not identified in the study.) Users tended to commit six times as many crimes when using the drug as when not, and occasional users showed a surprising 50-fold increase in crime when using heroin. The study further noted that “one effect of opiate addiction is to raise the number of crimes committed to a threshhold, or support, level....”

Moreover, one of the findings contradicted the myth that heroin users need heroin constantly. These 243 “addicts” spent two-thirds of their time addicted to heroin, and one-third not addicted. As the study says, “the fact that addiction was not a continuous state of drug dependency seemed significant,” and even more significant is the 84 percent decline in the crime rate when the users were off heroin or could obtain it cheaply. Astonishingly, since the authors of the Ball study fail to discuss the crucially important question of the price of heroin (preferring to limit their observatons to the difference between periods when heroin is being used regularly and when it is not), this last point is lost to them completely. Given the fact that the crimes, by the study’s own admission, were being committed to support the drug use, this omission completely invalidates the study’s conclusion, to wit, “that it is opiate use itself which is the principal cause of high crime-rates among addicts.”

The conclusion simply calls for increased medical intervention to “treat” addicts. Specifically, the authors call for more research (and more research grants?), they ask that “effective” treatment programs be adopted, instead of ineffective (what else?), and they state that “it is time to get on with the task at hand, and not be sidetracked by irrelevant ideological, scholastic, or methodological arguments.” In short, don’t read their study too carefully or critically, just give them more grants, trust them on what “treatment” programs are effective, and shut up. The refusal to distinguish between the effects of drug use per se and the effects of prohibition, which alone causes high drug prices, is unfortunately typical of nearly every study on the subject.

In “Heroin Use and Street Crime,” James Inciardi makes some additional acute observations—again, not without flaws. In a study of the Miami area, Inciardi did not use police records; instead he infiltrated the heroin underworld and interviewed its members. He found that “a clear majority of crimes by male heroin users were crimes without victims: almost 60 percent of the criminal behavior reported here was drug sales, prostitution, gambling, and alcohol offenses... such [addict] criminality is more often victimless crime than predatory crime.” But he also found that most of the other crimes committed were property crimes, not assault-type crimes; and, in a finding which others have confirmed, he established that users are substantially less likely to commit violent crimes than nonaddict criminals. (This could be the result of the tranquilizing effect of the drug, or of some other factor.) Forty-seven percent of those studied had been involved in robbery, 69 percent in burglary, 59 percent in shoplifting, 29 percent in vehicle theft, and 92 percent in drug sales.

The most important finding of Inciardi’s study, however, was the discovery of how often offenses led to arrest. Three-tenths of one percent of the robberies led to arrest, .7 percent of the burglaries, and .7 percent of the vehicle thefts. In short, the risk of arrest for property crime is very low; of the more than 80,000 crimes committed by the 239 heroin users during a year, only .2 percent resulted in arrest. In another calculation, Inciardi found that the heroin users, because of the non-confrontative crimes they tended to commit, faced only one chance in three to four hundred of being arrested for any specific offense.

Obviously, if there is a craving for the drug, and ready availability, even at a high price, most users will elect to take such an insignificant risk. In short, we are bloody well unlikely to bring this crime problem under control by traditional punishment models. This, too, should be accepted as a fact, and our policies questioned accordingly.

Treatment and the medical model

Whenever policymakers become convinced of the two fundamental points we have just made—to wit, that there is no way, realistically speaking, either of cutting off the smuggling of heroin into the United States or of controlling its street distribution and the attendant crime through law enforcement, they turn instead to the medical model—to various forms of “treatment” of the users. These have varied over the years, from maintenance, to isolation and incarceration, back to a version of maintenance again.

After the Harrison Narcotic Act was passed in 1914, doctors continued for a time to prescribe heroin and other opiates to patients who were addicted. But they were increasingly discouraged by the federal government from doing so. Between 1918 and 1920, 44 neighborhood-based maintenance centers opened around the country, but were deemed by the authorities to be failures—first, because they offered long-term opiate-maintenance instead of getting addicts to abstain; second, because doctors had to admit that there was no medically proven treatment for narcotics addiction. The medical establishment itself was split on the worth of the maintenance centers, and the federal authorities used this split as a wedge to drive doctors apart and began closing the clinics as early as 1919. By 1925, the last one was closed.

According to The Facts About Drug Abuse, a report of the privately-funded Drug Abuse Council, issued in 1980, law enforcement officials then “moved to consolidate their authority by vigorously prosecuting any physician personally prescribing narcotics to a suspected addict. Between 1914 and 1938, around twenty-five thousand were arrested, and more than five thousand actually went to jail, merely for prescribing narcotics to suspected addicts.” This effectively sealed the matter, and the great numbers of doctors who were opposed to the new drug policy were silenced. The medical establishment had been blackmailed into supporting the government’s position.

In the 1930s, two federal narcotics facilities were set up, in Lexington, Kentucky (1935) and Fort Worth, Texas (1938). Their underlying purpose was to achieve total detoxification, in prolonged isolation from the environment where the spectively seems inevitable. Synanon attempted to deal with the problem of recidivism by having the user give over control of his life to others—often, it was suggested that this might be necessary for a lifetime. But problems developed because, as the Drug Abuse Council euphemistically put it, there was “the lack of voluntary participation as clients by a large number of addicts.”

The “lack of voluntary participation” proved to be a problem for more conventional treatment centers, as well. In 1961, Edward Brecher reports in Licit and Illicit Drugs,

In its attempt to stop the illegal drug trade, the government has stooped to wiretaps, breaking and entering, illegal searches and seizures, and the harassment of suspected smugglers, sometimes ending in tragedy. drug use occurred. But this program was ultimately a failure, because when they returned to their communities the users simply began using the opiates again. In two different studies of the effectiveness of the Lexington program, one after a few months and one after a few years, only 6.6 percent and 3 percent respectively remained off opiates after their release.

In 1959 the concept of the drug-free community appeared, with Synanon as its earliest model. By now, everyone knows that Synanon also has failed and has been enveloped in scandal and crime — a result that retro- California launched its large-scale civil commitment program for narcotics addicts. This program permits addicts to be locked up without first being convicted of a crime. Instead of being called “prisoners” or “prison inmates,” the addicts are called “residents”—not of prisons but of “rehabilitation centers.”... Part of the time is spent “in residence,” that is, locked up, and the rest on “outpatient status,” that is, on parole.

Naturally enough, the success rate was miniscule. And since in California, as in New York, the law provides for the incarceration not only of addicts but also of “persons in imminent danger of becoming addicted” (usually, a person in possession of an opiate who is not a user), many of the “successes” reported in both California and New York were people who had been imprisoned and then released who swore all along that they were not addicts!

Then the authorities discovered methadone maintenance. Astonishing claims have been made for the success of methadone clinics, but here, too, there is less than meets the eye. Even at a time when such claims were generally unquestioned, Edward Brecher pointed out that the vast majority of those who left the maintenance treatment either had relapsed, or had used other drugs in a disabling way, or had become alcoholics, or had been arrested, or had died. Seven years later, the Drug Abuse Council came to the same conclusion.

On practical grounds, methadone did help some addicts to stabilize their lives, but legal heroin would have done the same. And methadone overdoses occurred perhaps more frequently than did true heroin overdoses. But, more important, let us reflect on the medical ideology at work here. Methadone is a synthetic opiate, but with an important difference. It duplicates many of heroin’s effects, but without the “high” or euphoria that heroin produces, and it also blocks any effect from heroin itself.

“The pharmacological actions of single doses of methadone are qualitatively identical to those of morphine,” says Goodman and Gilman’s The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics, and adds, “Side effects caused by methadone are similar to those caused by morphine.”

Why then is heroin seen as a disease to be treated, while methadone is seen as a drug used for treatment? The only possible answer underlines a particularly ugly form of puritanism—heroin is pleasurable, while methadone is not. Therefore, heroin addicts are to be oppressed, and methadone addicts to be given methadone at taxpayers’ expense. Note that the distinction between the drugs themselves is almost entirely an ideological and political, not a medical one.

No wonder that only a tiny percent of those who leave methadone clinics remain off opiates. And no wonder that many turn instead to alcohol. And that little fact closes a circle which should be remarked on.

In the nineteenth century, opium was prescribed to alcoholics as a nonaddicting cure for alcoholism. After morphine was isolated, it was touted by doctors, praised for its nonaddictive qualities, and prescribed as a cure for opium addiction. When heroin was synthesized in Germany, it was widely lauded as a “safe preparation free from addiction-forming properties,” and was promptly prescribed as a cure for morphine addiction. Then methadone was introduced, as a cure for heroin addiction, and now many people addicted to methadone are getting off it—by turning to alcohol. We have, in little more than a century, come full circle.

Treatment isn’t working, hasn’t worked, and will not work in the future. The primary reason for this, though unadmitted, is that most habitual users do not consider themselves sick; they simply want to use heroin. Indeed, what counselors regard as “treatment” is seen simply as a less distasteful form of punishment than going to prison.

A natural response to these facts might be that we should move to a system such as that in Britain. And the usual retort is that “the British system is failing.” The British system isn’t failing; it’s being sabotaged.

Before 1968, British doctors were allowed simply to prescribe heroin for anyone who was an “addict.” In 1968, the system was changed. Now the distribution of heroin to nonaddicts is illegal, but clinics have been set up to dispense it in carefully limited amounts. The clinics are allowed by law to dispense just enough to keep an addict from going through withdrawal, and no more. This regulation was based on the false assumption that “addiction” causes a person to require a given amount every day. Heroin users, on the contrary, are remarkably flexible about their heroin use.

By the 1970s, the British system of heroin maintenance had begun to mutate into a treatment program. Doctors were given more and more power over their addict clients. They began to catch the “American disease” of wanting to control these clients’ behavior and habits. They were given the power to decide to dispense methadone rather than heroin, essentially because methadone had attained the status of a “state religion,” while heroin-taking was increasingly seen as “heresy.” Since methadone prevents withdrawal, but produces no sense of euphoria or well-being, many addicts subjected to this medical tinkering choose to look for heroin itself on the black market.

And, with the typical incomprehension of “experts,” most of those in the drug abuse business didn’t understand what was happening. To therapists, the addict needed help to solve a problem, the problem being that he took a drug of which they disapproved. But to the addicts, the only problem was how to get the drugs they wanted. They didn’t see themselves as “sick,” and they didn’t want “treatment.” Those who were intervening to control their behavior reacted as such people always do—whether they be central planners trying to make people conform to some national plan, or foreign policy planners trying to control people in other countries—by getting angry with people who didn’t appreciate their “expert” intervention into their lives. The victimizers, in short, blamed the victims. This is a problem, but it is a problem with drug prohibition, not drug addiction. The problem is that therapists refuse to face the fact that some people do not want to be controlled. When other people try to treat them for something for which they don’t want treatment, they usually try to free themselves from the controllers. This is why the British system is failing, and why our own methadone programs are failing, as well.

Naturally, as the systems and clinics and treatments fail, there are always a flurry of “new” studies ready to be released, studies pretending, once again, to have discovered the true problem, to propose new solutions, and to accept new government grants for research and treatment. There is a good deal of money to be made in “studies” and in “treatment,” but not much in simply letting people alone. That and that alone is why we face our present impasse.

Demythologizing heroin

Why then should heroin remain illegal? The answers usually given are crime, biochemical effects, social consequences, and overdoses. Let us examine them in turn.

D.C. Police Chief Maurice Turner was asked about the effect of crime on making heroin legally available, in an interview with LR, and his answer was that the user would still have to pay $100 a day and would still commit crimes. Only if the government subsidized the price of heroin, to get it down to about $10, he said, would there by any marked change in the crime rate.

Unfortunately, Turner’s answer demonstrates the amount of misinformation held even by responsible law-enforcement authorities. The fact is that it is only government prohibition of drugs such as heroin which keeps the price as high as it is. Let us calculate what the price of heroin (or morphine, a nearly perfect substitute) would be if it were available, with a doctor’s prescription, or over the counter at drug stores, to anyone of legal age. Morphine is already legal—although tightly controlled—for some uses in the United States, so it is known that it costs, to a pharmacy, 15¢ per 30 mg tablet. The ratio of effectiveness of morphine to heroin is 1:2 or 1:3, differing from person to person. Therefore, a 45 mg per day heroin habit could be maintained by a maximum of 135 mg of morphine, at a cost per day of 68¢. Even with a 100 percent pharmacist’s markup, the price would only be $1.35 per day (plus approximately 15¢ for a disposable syringe, if it could be purchased legally). In short, the cost of maintaining a daily heroin habit on a relatively free market would be about $1.50 per day. Who would become a professional criminal for the cost of a gallon of gasoline or two packs of cigarettes a day?

If we combine this finding—which is actually of a higher price than would exist in a truly free market (morphine manufacture is monopolized by one or two drug companies, at the government’s insistence)—with the finding of the Ball study, we can conclude that if heroin or morphine were legally available, the rate of heroin users’ crime would drop by 84 percent. If, as is commonly thought by police, heroin users commit some 40 percent of the property crimes in this country, then a policy permitting legally available heroin would cause about a 30 percent drop in crime, virtually overnight.

This leaves the problem of the harmful effects of heroin, overdoses, and social consequences still to be addressed.

Let us begin with a quotation from one of heroin’s sharpest critics, neoconservative James Q. Wilson: “There are apparently no specific pathologies—serious illnesses or physiological deterioration—that are known to result from heroin use per se.” (“Heroin,” in Thinking About Crime)

Virtually everything which is popularly believed about heroin’s effects is untrue. Government and media-spread scare stories about drug-crazed zombies roaming the streets, preying on innocent victims, have for years now obscured some important medical facts about heroin. The opiates are essentially central nervous system tranquilizers and pain-killers which are often, but not always, addictive. “Addiction” means that when deprived of a substance, an “addict” experiences uneasiness and psychological craving and also certain “withdrawal symptoms” of both a physical and a psychological nature. Some people experience few unpleasant symptoms from “detoxification,” others experience extreme nervousness, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea.

When used by addicts, heroin relieves pain and produces mild euphoria and tranquility, sedation, and sometimes sleep. It relieves coughing and can relieve diarrhea, even sometimes producing constipation.

Studies and experiments have failed to show that the average dose taken by a heroin user today produces any long-term physical or psychological deterioration. The most common side effects of taking the drug are constipation and constriction of the eye pupils.

Several studies have determined how heroin users themselves perceive the drug. In one survey, 71 heavy users made a total of 449 checks to describe how they were affected. Only 8 said it was “thrilling”; 11 said that it made them “jolly”; 53 said it “relieves worry”; and 65 said that it “relaxed” them. It apparently relieves a user’s fear of pain, anxiety about pain, and physical and emotional reactions to pain. It also seems to relieve depression.

Anyone who wishes to understand the depth of our misperception of the opiates should read books such as Edward Brecher’s Licit and Illicit Drugs (written with the editors of Consumer’s Union) and Thomas Szasz’s masterly Ceremonial Chemistry: The Ritual Persecution of Drugs, Addicts and Pushers, as well as a reputable pharmacology text, such as Goodman and Gilman’s The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics. For now, let us examine a summary of some surprising findings in these works.

In investigating the actual effects of heroin, Edward Brecher found scientific support for common assumptions about it difficult to find. In 1956, Dr. George G. Stevenson and his British Columbia associates made an inquiry into narcotics addiction, during which they researched the existent medical literature exhaustively. Brecher quotes their report, as follows:

When we began this project, it was immediately apparent to us that the actual deleterious effects of addiction on the addict, and on society, should be clearly understood.... To our surprise we have not been able to locate even one scientific study on the proved harmful effects of addiction. Earlier investigators had apparently assumed that the ill effects were so obvious as not to need scientific verification. . . . We have assembled over 500 documents on various phases of addiction...but not one of them offers a clear-cut, scientifically valid statement on this problem.

They began their research with The Traffic in Narcotics by U.S. Commissioner of Narcotics Harry Anslinger, but that book contained only a single reference to “a decrease in the potential social productivity of the addict,” and even this was unsupported by evidence. Stevenson and his associates wrote to the most eminent research workers in the field, trying to get scientific information on the deleterious effects of opiates.

They indicated, in their reply, that there was no real evidence of brain damage or other serious organic disease resulting from the continued use of narcotics... but that there was undoubtedly psychological and social damage. However, they made no differentiation between such damage as might be caused by narcotics and that which might have been present before addiction, or might have been caused, at least in part, by other factors.

Moreover, they were unable to direct us to any actual studies on the alleged harmful effects of narcotic drugs.

Neither, in fact, was the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs, nor the Narcotic Control Division of the Canadian Government’s Department of Health and Welfare. Brecher surveyed the entire literature written since this Canadian study was performed, and said in 1972 that his efforts had been only slightly more successful. What he concluded was this: “Almost all of the deleterious effects ordinarily attributed to the opiates, indeed, appeared to be the effects of the narcotics laws instead.”

The classical study was done in the 1920s, in a Philadelphia hospital, of 861 addicts. Each had been addicted for at least five years, some for as long as 20, taking on the average 21 grains of morphine per day—more than 30 times the dose taken by an average street addict. The study showed that “morphine addiction is not characterized by physical deterioration or impairment of physical fitness aside from the addiction per se. There is no evidence of change in the circulatory, hepatic, renal or endocrine functions.” The members of the group each weighed within one percent of the norm for height and age.

What about other deleterious effects? Let’s take a quick checklist: (1) Yellowness of skin. This is present only when addicts live in unsanitary conditions; otherwise their skin is normal. (2) Anemia. This is caused by poor dietary habits, generally caused by addicts spending most of their money on drugs. (3) Dental problems. These are caused by not going to the dentist; again, users tend to spend most of their money on drugs. (4) Hepatitis. This is caused by unsterile syringes, a problem which would be alleviated if syringes were legally available. Also, if heroin were available in undiluted forms, users might sniff, smoke, or take it orally rather than injecting it.

All of these “commonly observed” harmful effects are the results either of drug prohibition or of user irresponsibility—not of heroin itself.

Do users exhibit bizarre behavior? Dr. George Wallace made a study of that at Bellevue Hospital, and said, “The addict when not deprived of his opium showed no abnormal behavior which distinguished him from a nonaddict.” In the case of returning Vietnam veterans, it was also impossible to distinguish between heroin users and non-users by behavior or appearance. Tests of urine were required.

Finally, let us take up the case of overdoses. In very heavy doses, opiates can produce death through respiratory depression, although this is in fact very rare. Death from such an overdose is a slow process, taking between 1 and 12 hours, and there is a commonly available antidote, nalorphine. In 1931, Drs. Lawrence Kolb and A. G. DuNez of the U.S. Public Health Service estimated that it would take 500 mg—50 street “bags”—injected as a single dose to kill an average non-addicted person. And because of the factor of growing tolerance, most addicts would require even more (in the Philadelphia study previously discussed, some addicts reported using 28 grains—1680 mg—per day). In a hospital study, one user was injected with 1800 mg of morphine over two and a half hours, and it didn’t even make him sick. In the same study, heavy users, given sudden dosage increases of 6, 7, and 9 times normal, didn’t even become drowsy.

What of the overdoses commonly reported in the press? They are generally not the result of heroin alone, but of several substances in lethal combination. It should be noted that the “heroin” on the street is only 3 to 5 percent heroin—the rest is a combination of other substances, including, on occasion, quinine, strychnine, talc, battery acid, and sugar. One Brooklyn study found 16 different additives in a sample of street-quality heroin. When such a combination is injected directly into the bloodstream, some people have an allergic reaction which can cause instantaneous pulmonary edema, thus stopping breathing. (Another lethal combination which is commonly called an overdose is the taking of street-quality heroin while drinking alcohol—probably what caused the death of Janis Joplin.) Street quality heroin contains the impurities which result in these reported fatalities only because the drug is illegal. If heroin were legal, there could be quality control.

Moreover, the fact that most heroin-related deaths are not caused simply by taking too much heroin is known to many medical examiners. In February 1969, N.Y.C. Deputy Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Michael M. Baden told a meeting of AMA physicians that “the majority of deaths are due to an acute reaction to the intravenous injection of the heroin-quinine-sugar mixture. . . . Death is not due to a pharmacological overdose in the vast majority of cases.”

Why has the myth of massive numbers of heroin overdoses persisted? Political propaganda is an important factor, as is deliberate talking down to reporters by medical examiners. Medical examiners who know that deaths are in fact resulting from impurities, or the mixing of different drugs have become content to use the term “heroin overdose” or “heroin-related death” as medical metaphors covering a multitude of sins. Finally, there is the unfortunate fact that journalists do not choose to educate themselves on these issues. The real story that needs to be told is not one about a mythical 8-year-old addict, such as the falsification which won Janet Cooke a Pulitzer Prize at The Washington Post, but the story of how the press and public came to accept the heroin mythology in the first place.

Unfortunately, by continually falsifying, intentionally or not, the truth about heroin overdoses, the press, police, and medical examiners are having the effect of keeping the truth away from people who do in fact use heroin and risk death. By telling the truth, we can save lives.

The repeal of prohibition

We have shown that neither the supply of nor the demand for heroin can be controlled, that drug-related crime is committed because of drug prohibition, not drug abuse, that treatment centers don’t work, and that addicts, victims of crime, and taxpayers alike are being harmed by our policy of drug prohibition. Perhaps some people will now step forth and propose an experiment (isolated and controlled, naturally) in the legalization or decriminalization of the opiates.

The fact is that such an experiment has already been performed. It is called the nineteenth century.

In the nineteenth century, the century of individualism, individual responsibility, great achievements, risks, and liberty, there were no drug laws. And neither was there any drug problem. Brecher writes, “drugs were not viewed as a menace to society . . . and they were not in fact a menace.” Drugs were “as freely accessible as aspirin is today.” Opiates were regularly used in most communities throughout America, and by some of the most prominent people—including noted temperance advocates, who fought the use of whiskey. Yet there was no significant disruption of family life or of society. There was no crime because of the drug use.

Citing Brecher again,

Opium use was . . . frowned upon in some circles as immoral—a vice akin to dancing, smoking or sexual promiscuity. But while deemed immoral . . . opiate use was not subject to the moral sanctions current today. . . . Addicts continued to participate fully in the life of the community. . . . Thus the nineteenth century avoided one of the most disastrous effects of current narcotic laws and attitudes—the rise of a deviant addict subculture, cut off from respectable society and without a “road back” to respectability.

Why did we abandon such a policy of tolerance and freedom? The sad, ugly little truth is that the first anti-opiate laws were passed in San Francisco and elsewhere as part of a vicious policy of scapegoating and harassing Chinese people, for whom opiate use was as much a part of normal life as alcohol is in contemporary America. Just as in the case of the prohibition of alcohol, nothing worked, and we were led, by the logic of bigotry and intolerance and failed programs, into a nightmare of prohibition of the opiates. That policy, misconceived and unworkable, has continued from 1914, when the Harrison Narcotic Act was passed, until our own time. And few people today, even those who know better, are willing to speak the truth about the problem.

Some time ago, in commenting on a new piece of legislation, a reputable authority said,

The really serious results of this legislation . . . will only appear gradually and will not always be recognized as such. These will be the failures of promising careers, the disrupting of happy families, the commission of crimes which will never be traced to their real cause, and the influx of many who would otherwise live socially competent lives into hospitals for the mentally disoriented.

That was the New York Medical Journal, in May 1915, commenting on the newly passed Harrison Narcotic Act.

And American Medicine criticized the law, too, claiming that as one of its effects, drugs would be driven into an unsanitary and criminal underworld, that “afflicted individuals [would be] under the control of the worst elements of society.” This is precisely what has happened.

And for what? To prevent overdoses? There would probably be fewer if heroin were legal, since adulterants would not be present. To stop the spread of drugs? But it is the enormous profit in dealing in illegal drugs that encourages that very spread.

Nor should it be said that if drugs were legal, there would be no way of helping addicts who needed help. Alcohol is legal, and there is everything from Alcoholics Anonymous to detoxification centers to profit-making programs like that promoted by the Shick Centers. Similarly, if heroin were legal, there could be true treatment of a problem, when a drug user felt he had one. There would be the choice of whether to seek treatment, and of what kind. There would be competitive solutions, with no threats of incarceration or of forms of ‘treatment’ which were really punishment.

Almost no one is really looking at the problem from the addicts’ point of view. Why do people take such drugs as heroin? Any visit into any ghetto will supply the answer:

people are unhappy, in pain, frustrated, and full of a sense of futility about life. Many of them feel trapped in lives of angry desolation, as if there is no path to fulfillment or cause for hope. And, despite their criminal activities, it should be noticed that many of these are the best, not the worst, of the poor. In their “hustling” and seizing of opportunities, they are classical entrepreneurs whose energy and abilities, if only channeled into productive rather than criminal areas, would seem nothing short of amazing. What we should do is deregulate our cities and give them a chance to succeed.

Looking at the problem another way, centuries ago, we experienced massive bloodshed during religious wars, when people who accepted one religion tried to stamp out those who accepted another. We solved this problem of religious warfare by accepting the principles of freedom of religion, and tolerance. Today we can only stop the drug war by a similar principle: what Thomas Szasz calls the right to self-medication, or the right to inject whatever drugs one wants, so long as one takes responsibility for one’s actions.

Our drug prohibitors have become humanitarians with a guillotine, causing the very suffering that so many of them want so desperately to end. Let those who want to help others with problems with drugs, be free to do so—but only with the full, voluntary consent of those with whom they deal. And let us have an end to the new prohibition, which is bringing us crime and degradation. It is no vice to admit that our policies have been wrong; it is no virtue any longer to remain silent, while lives are ruined and cities destroyed. Authorities find themselves at their wits’ end; it is time to use our wits anew. □

Roy A. Childs, Jr. is the editor of The Libertarian Review. This article was written with the aid of substantial research done by Lee Williams, LR’s research director.