PCP: The Darkness at the End of the Tunnel

The PCP menace—you’ve been reading about it in newspapers and magazines and hearing about it on the radio and seeing it on national TV. But documentaries like “Angel Death” (which has been making the rounds of NBC stations) and docudramas like “Angel Dust: The Wack Attack” (which has been screened all over the country by ABC) are only publicizing the latest in a long series of American drug Menaces originated by the State. Drug Menaces sprout from simple roots, as willing sellers meet willing buyers in private exchange. In the absence of fraud there are no victims and no complainants. It takes the State, aided and abetted by the media, to breed a Menace.

Drug Menaces invariably follow this pattern: law ‘n’ order legislation shoves the market for a drug into the criminal underground; busts and confiscations then push the drug into newsprint, giving it advertising that it could never hope to buy; titillating photo-features recruit new users, which leads the State to pass a new round of tough legislation, and the Menace spirals upwards. Therapy, research, and enforcement shake down the State for megabuck grants to battle the Menace. But eventually the upward spiral peaks. John Law chases the drug and its traders into the woodwork, and the story becomes yesterday’s news.

The State then congratulates itself for saving America from depravity, dementia, suicide, amotivation, hypersexual behavior, brain damage, homicide, licentiousness, disease, and psychosis. But while nobody is looking, the suppression of the original drug gives rise to another drug and as the State steps in to squash it, the cycle of drug Menace begins anew.

But not this time. PCP is breaking the pattern. The State has now managed to direct the illicit drug market to a white, crystalline chemical which is the drug Menace equivalent of the insecticide-proof supercockroach. After the body count, PCP will still be with us. PCP’s analogs will also be with us. And scores of new drugs plucked by entrepreneurs from the pharmacopeia will also be popularized and marketed, all thanks to the backlash of the State. Until saner minds repeal drug prohibition altogether, the attempted suppression of drugs will only up the Menace ante, and continually spawn Menaces around drugs of ever higher octane.

There can be no doubt that PCP is now a growth industry of the typical drug Menace sort. Sales, busts, deaths, therapy, research, and news coverage are all booming. The PCP lexicon is booming, too. Besides its generic name of 1-(1-phenylcyclohexyl) piperidine, phencyclidine for short, or PCP for shorter, this drug answers to more than 100 street names, including angel dust, crystal, horse/elephant/ or animal tranquilizer, and rocket fuel. If a drug’s street name is new or sounds goofy, chances are it is PCP. PCP is also often misrepresented as one of the established street drugs like LSD, mescaline, peyote, cocaine, and cannabinol (THC), and is frequently used as an adulterant in a common street drug.

It began in 1956 during a routine search for better living through chemistry, when pharmacologist Graham Chen of the Parke-Davis company conducted tests for psychoactive potential on a compound synthesized in Germany in the twenties. Chen injected lab animals with the stuff—PCP. Rodents got speedy on the substance, dogs yelped and convulsed, and monkeys were sedated. Higher doses of PCP given to monkeys proved it was also an excellent surgical anesthetic.

Parke-Davis was unreservedly enthusiastic. Here was a drug that could be cheaply and easily synthesized from common chemicals (realities which would later appeal to illicit “kitchen chemists” too) and which worked quite satisfactorily. Parke-Davis trade named it Sernyl, took it away from the monkeys and gave it to humans in clinical tests. Several thousand volunteers stood up, took the medicine, and passed out. So far, so good. But the volunteers reported side effects the rodents, dogs, and monkeys hadn’t been able to tell the scientists about. Some volunteers spoke of memory loss, hallucinations, and disorientation after being dosed. Given PCP during childbirth, some mothers came out of anesthesia denying the newborn belonged to them. Other test subjects became “schizophrenic,” that psychiatric catch-all term which defines so many disparate behaviors that it has lost all meaning. Still other patients became violent on PCP, and patients leaping up from recovery room beds and duking it out with nurses hardly constituted surgical efficacy. Parke-Davis lost its enthusiasm, discontinued human tests in 1965, and soon gave the drug back to the monkeys with a new trade name, Sernylan. PCP then languished in the pharmaceutical minor leagues of veterinary medicine until its manufacturer finally ceased production. Now if the monkeys want a PCP fix they either have to score on the street or go directly to Uncle Sam, who still commands a stash.

Uncle Sam would likely be a connection of last resort, however; thanks to its ease of manufacture, angel dust is widely available on the black market. In fact, PCP can be made easily by “kitchen chemists” working in a rented hotel room or “on the roll” in a van. The formula can be found in the right libraries or in The Whole Drug Manufacturers Catalog, a readily available cookbook of drug recipes. With $100 worth of chemicals you can churn out $100,000 worth of PCP. The kitchen chemists pay little attention to quality control, of course, and often cook batches of unreliable potency that are teeming with impurities. Though PCP can be eaten, snorted, or injected, most users smoke it—mixed with mint leaves, parsley flakes, or low-grade marijuana. It’s the easiest way to keep the dose low.

“You gotta watch yourself,” Bob, a steady user, told me. “You never know how strong the shit is gonna be.” Did he ever miscalculate his dose? Bob grinned slyly. “Yeah, all the time.”

PCP’s primary chemical precursor, piperidine, is available from most chemical supply houses. New government regulation require buyers of piperidine to show positive ID and sellers to register each transaction. Law enforcement doesn’t have the manpower to trace every sale, however, and every five gallon drum of piperidine that eludes the dragnet delivers roughly 300,000 doses to the street. But even if the State succeeded in throttling the chemical supply house source, the black market would quickly divert piperidine from the rubber and plastics manufacturers who use it by the tanker-load, or, even simpler, make it themselves.

PCP first appeared on the illicit market in San Francisco as the PeaCe [sic] Pill at the height of the Multiple Drug Menace of 1967. San Franciscans were busy gobbling down all the alphabet drugs they could lay hands on: LSD, STP, DMT and MDA, and smoking anything that would burn, while popping amphetamines and barbiturates with both recreational and spiritual relish. In 1967 street drugs were pure, potent, cheap and plentiful. PCP was quickly branded a bummer drug by users when their highs mirrored the highs of Parke-Davis’s test subjects. The Summer of Love generation rejected PCP and had more compassion than to give it back to the monkeys.

It didn’t take busts, therapeutic programs, or Advertising Council campaigns to reduce PCP use in 1967. That drug market was as self-policing as possible, naturally favoring pure and potent pharmaceutical uppers, downers, and psy-

-chedelics or an identifiable street preparation (e.g., Owsley’s acid) to drugs of dubious quality. One of the kingpins of PCP research, Steven Lerner, has found that the PeaCe Pill did develop a small hardcore of aficionados (proving that there is a market for everything), but the vast majority of druggies were slipped their PCP fraudulently, as it masqueraded as acid, mescaline, peyote, and other psychedelics.

Lerner, 32, and his associate R. Stanley Burns, M.D., midwifed the birth of the PCP Menace in 1975 with articles in the medical press. Their consulting firm of Lerner, Burns, Linder & Associates is devoted to PCP work and keeps busy doing PCP medical research, writing articles (Clincial Toxicology, The Western Journal of Medicine, People), appearing before legislative bodies considering new anti-PCP laws, giving testimony at trials in which angel dusters are tendering “diminished capacity defenses” (which since the Dan White case have come to be known as “twinkie defenses”), and administering programs like the $310,000 State of California-financed PCP Training Project, which, by the end of Summer ’79, had spread the anti-PCP gospel to at least 3,000 of the faithful in medicine, criminal justice, mental health, drug abuse treatment, and education—what has come to be known in the field as the “drug abuse industrial complex.”

Treading the line between urgency and alarm, Lerner is careful not to repeat the errors of his predecessors during other previous drug menaces (e.g., the LSD-broken-chromosome-hoax). Hard science backs all his claims, because he knows that scare tactics only destroy medical credibility. And while Lerner never underplays the debilitating effects of PCP he has observed, he honestly reports the PCP fact that “clinical tests have demonstrated no positive organ damage as of yet.”

Leslie Bragg heads the Los Angeles branch of the Do It Now Foundation, the prototype of the hippie crash pad—acid rescue-drug counseling center. “I hate to be cynical, and pardon the pun,” she says, “but PCP has been a shot in the arm to the drug abuse industrial complex. Heroin was getting weaker and weaker, methadone programs were getting those people to work, and people had stopped worrying about marijuana.” While Bragg considers PCP a dangerous drug, she believes it has been blown out of proportion. “PCP has taken on the tinges of a xenophobic crusade, like we’re after some sort of aliens from Mars who are walking about the streets like dangerous zombies and should be wrestled to the ground in a choke hold. We are actually talking about our children! It makes good press.”

It makes terrific press. And without media promotion no drug Menace can grow. It wasn’t until 1977 that the popular media caught PCP fever, two years after the initial medical press flurry. U.S. News & World Report was first, with a story headlined, “On the Drug Scene: New Rival for

Heroin,” which forced an absurd comparison between two totally dissimilar drugs. Satisfied angel dusters must have looked on the article as a product evaluation, and felt prompted to take “The Heroin Challenge” (presumably in controlled blindfold tests). Time gave it the next shot, trumpeting “PCP: ‘A Terror of a Drug,’ ” and promising both heaven and hell on smoked mint leaves.

But 1978 was PCP’s banner year in the media. 60 Minute’s Mike Wallace lent his inimitable sneer to the Menace (Wallace: “You know it’s a terrible drug. Then why do you use it?” Angel Duster: “I dunno.”) Newsweek titled its article “The Deadly ‘Angel Dust,’ ” and illustrated it with four nifty photographs that showed how to take the stuff. New Times contributed “Angel Death,” Human Behavior promised “High on PCP,” the August Reader’s Digest warned of “PCP: the Unpredictable Killer,” People offered the Lerner-edited PCP confessional, “In His Own Words,” and Rolling Stone printed a sympathetic portrait of San Jose car clubs that touched less sympathetically on PCP use, “Moonwalk Serenade.” Except for Rolling Stone every publication emphasized the sensational aspects of PCP, the high, the danger of death, how to use it, the guarantee of superhuman strength and immunity from pain, and the adventure of flirtation with psychosis.

The popular media advertised PCP as a death drug. In late 1978, after devoting a two-page spread to the Menace, the Los Angeles Times fielded an editorial worthy of Harry J. Anslinger (first Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and inventor of “reefer madness”). Said the wise editorial writers, “PCP kills as surely as if it were poison.” Actually only a very few pharmacological overdoses have ever been recorded. The rest of the PCP deaths have been a result of what those in the complex call “behavioral toxicity,” or impaired judgment. Like the infamous “Speed Kills” slogan of the late ’60s (few pharmacological overdoses of amphetamines have been recorded either), the “PCP Kills” variant only offers stage directions for the suicidally inclined.

“Man Smokes Angel Dust: Has No Terrible Side Effects” doesn’t make for pulse-boosting journalism. Grand Guignol stories do. The press is thick with PCPers gouging their eyes out, murdering their mothers, murdering their fathers, murdering their brothers, murdering their sisters, murdering strangers, committing suicide by flying out of tenth floor windows, walking into freeway traffic, hanging themselves, dying accidentally by drowning, falling off cliffs, being shot in confrontations with police, dosing sleeping infants by proxy, castrating themselves, committing rape and robbery, and drooling. While these stories do have some basis in fact, it should be pointed out that the source of all of them is the drug abuse industrial complex itself—which can only stand to gain bigger budgets, greater professional prestige, and more power by fanning the flames of the Menace. “The press comes here,” says Leslie Bragg, “and they don’t pay attention to the information I give them about incidence and prevalence. Recreational users come to our attention only if they flip out, get busted, or scared by the press. Most of the people who use it manage it and if they have a bummer they work it out.” But damn the facts, the drug jingoists say, full speed ahead: let’s have another drug Menace!

If the Grand Guignol is rivaled by the stories of PCP mutilation, death, and mayhem, then Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! is outdone by the tales of superhuman strength and immunity from pain asociated with PCP use. To believe the media is to believe that PCP does everything to the average human being that gamma rays did to turn Bruce Banner into the In-

This Man Is Really A Monster With Superhuman Strength.

It’s true. And it’s not funny. He may seem to be a nice, young, talented musician. And he really is. Until he turns to “Angel Dust.” Then he becomes a madman.

Tonight KABC-TV’s dramatic presentation will open your eyes to the horrors of PCP, the deadly drug. Now you will understand those stories about people who jump to their deaths, run in front of automobiles and attack armed policemen barehanded. Maybe they don’t make sense. But tonight’s program does.

ANGEL DUST: THE WACK ATTACK

Starring Vernée Watson and Philip Michael Thomas

10:00 TONIGHT credible Hulk—except make him green. Non-green PCP Hulks have reportedly tossed a half dozen burly cops around like tenpins, taken pointblank shots in the chest without dropping, broken handcuffs, and burst leather restraints. Few of these reports ever reveal the source of the incredible strength they describe, though it’s a source common to us all, adrenalin. A gorilla-size dose of PCP can help induce a state of fear which floods the body with the same strength-giving hormone that allows dainty mothers to lift Chevrolets off pinned daughters. Also, the anesthetic quality of PCP cancels pain. The onset of pain generally restrains us from exerting ourselves beyond our natural limits. Denied this natural restraint, heavily dosed PCPers overstress their bodies and pay for such outbursts of strength with broken bones, torn ligaments, and an occasional .38 round in the chest.

Gerald De Angelis heads up Pride House, a Van Nuys, California rehabilitation program. De Angelis has worked on drug abuse in the Nixon White House and has established a reputation as a troublemaker. One year, for example, he and an associate presented a methadone conference with a paper which plugged the drug abuse field into the standard marketing model: they identified sales areas of treatment, prevention, enforcement, and research in which salesmen from hundreds of counseling operations, maintenance programs, and therapeutic systems hawked their products to the new markets of drug abuse in industry, and among minorities, gays, the elderly, women, the psychotic, etc., just as any other industry does. De Angelis stokes his pipe and laughs, “We were not well received.”

Chronic PCP cases make up about 25 percent of the kids at Pride House. “We treat the kid, not the drug,” says De Angelis. “If we put a sign out in front of here that said ‘No PCP Cases Allowed’ we would still have a waiting list. We ease PCP kids into the program because many suffer memory loss. For a young person not to be able to remember anything is frightening. We want them to understand that they’re not crazy and they haven’t destroyed their brains and they are just undergoing a chemical reaction and if they give it some time they’ll come out of it. We have stolen a term out of Erik Erikson: we try to provide a ‘moratorium’ for the kids, a chance to get off the merry-go-round and begin to reflect on their lives.”

Parke-Davis originally billed PCP as a “disassociative anesthetic.” Steven Lerner calls it an “inside-outer” due to its unpredictable effects. PCP highs of euphoria, depression, exhilaration, sedation, dulled thinking, speedy or wired thinking, violent and aggressive behavior, submissive behavior, feelings of power, feelings of weakness, fearfulness, fearlessness, self-doubt, high confidence, happiness, sad-demons, gods, devils, heaven, and hell have all been reported to medical researchers. PCP researchers point to these diverse reactions as proof of PCP’s wild, unpredictable nature. But is this unique to PCP?

In The Natural Mind, Andrew Weil, M.D. stresses that “the combined effects of set [mind-set] and setting [environment] can easily overshadow the pharmacological effects of a drug as stated in the pharmacology text. One can arrange set and setting so that a dose of an amphetamine will produce sedation or a dose of barbiturate, stimulation.” Weil places the high in the person, not the drug, and illustrates this by recounting tales of test subjects tripping on placeboes and others getting only stomach cramps on high quality mescaline. The existence of the weeping drunk alongside the violent drunk tells us much more about the individuals than it does about the “unpredictable nature” of alcohol.

In addition to the twin considerations of set and setting, researchers are driven dizzy by the implications of the polydrug phenomenon. More than 99 percent of the PCP users surveyed state that they use other drugs beside PCP. On any given evening of serious drug abuse most users partake in as many chemicals as possible—booze, weed, pills, psychedelics, opiates—orchestrating the polydrug interaction until they get where they want to be: “all fucked up.”

As has been noted, PCP has been labeled a schizophrenia trigger; even the Parke-Davis scientists noted its psychomimetic qualities, its ability to produce behavior which mimics the mythic “mental illness.” The drug abuse industrial complex warns that PCP can push near-psychotics into the never-never land of full-blown psychosis. But is this unique to PCP? Or even to drugs?

Marital problems, emotional problems, the switching of jobs, the starting of college—all of these serious changes have been identified by the mental health establishment as potential psychosis triggers. Yet nobody says divorce, emotions, occupational changes, or higher education cause psychosis and nobody seeks to ban them because a few people react negatively to these experiences. “Psychosis does not come packaged in joints of marijuana, tablets of LSD, or spoons of cocaine,” writes Andrew Weil. It doesn’t come in joints of PCP either. Project Eden in Hayward, California, reports that most chronic PCP users who have come in for counseling have had low self-esteem, criminal records, trouble in school, and difficulty keeping a job, prior to using PCP and had been trying to escape bad things they felt about themselves. They preferred the PCP high to those bad feelings. “An awful lot of kids are self-medicating themselves so they can feel better,” says De Angelis. “The kids say, yeah, we know PCP is the pits, and we ask them why they do it anyway. One kid said he did it because he just getsblotto on it. ‘All my problems go away. Mother, father, school.’ Take this week, for instance. The temperature is hitting 105 over in Boyle Heights (a barrio in Los Angeles) and they’re frying without air conditioning. It makes sense to take something to feel better, doesn’t it?” Dr. Ronald Siegel, a psychopharmacologist at UCLA, told the L.A. Weekly recently that PCP was not a “magical elixir that automatically turned people into werewolves. We began our study because we were under the impression that more than any other psychoactive drug, PCP really turned people schizophrenic. Well, it isn’t true. Emotionally stable people under the influence of low doses of PCP probably will not act in a way very different from their normal behavior.” De Angelis seconds that opinion, explaining, “It’s just another drug that’s come along. The drugs are only a symptom of a deeper problem.”

Around 1974 PCP hit the incline of its growth phase as users started to turn up in emergency rooms and morgues. But it wasn’t until toxicologists turned their mass spectrometers (so sensitive that they can detect opiate metabolite in the urine of a person who has eaten a poppy seed roll) to the search for PCP traces that the bum trippers and stiffs began to be identified as PCP cases.

How was it that PCP, a drug that the drug culture had turned thumbs down on, and which to this day receives nothing but scorn from the drug cognoscenti, made a comeback in the ’70s? The Controlled Substance Act of 1970 holds the key.

The Controlled Substance Act of 1970 was the State’s response to the Multiple Drug Menace of the ’60s. Muscled through Congress by the Nixon Administration and superseding all other federal drug laws, the Act classified controlled drugs into five different Schedules. Schedule I contained the medically verboten drugs: heroin, marijuana, and LSD. No physician could prescribe these drugs and only a Federal dispensation could even make them available for research purposes.

Schedule II semi-nationalized the pharmaceutical industry, effecting governmental production quotas. To plug leaks of certain drugs onto the black market, the government required order forms to be filled out with each transfer. The tail end of the distribution was also tightened up, as written rather than phoned-in prescriptions became the law. Also, new import-export regulations and security measures were mandated. Schedule II’s first occupants were the raw opiates: codeine and morphine.

Schedule III contained amphetamines and barbiturates originally and only limited the number of refills and the lifespans of the phoned-in prescriptions. But the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), which later became the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), quickly agitated for the transfer of amphetamines to Schedule II to dry up the black market supply. That wish came true in 1971, and by 1973 production quotas had slashed amphetamine production in America by nearly 90 percent.

Next the DEA had the potent barbiturates amobarbital (Amytal), secobarbital (Seconal), and pentobarbital (Nembutal) moved to Schedule II. This 1973 tightening of the barbiturates market steered the recreational downer market to methaqualone (Quaalude, Sopor). A short Quaalude Menace raged until this previously uncontrolled substance raced directly to Schedule II in 1973 like a hit record with a bullet through it. The pharmaceutical downers of guaranteed purity, potency, and low price were thus squeezed off the black market.

The stage was now perfectly set for the triumphant returnof PCP. There was an enormous gap in the market for a cheap downer. As the potent barbiturates and methaqualones vanished, PCP, an imperfect downer by anyone’s measure, returned. 1978 saw the standard State reaction to the Menace: PCP was transferred from Schedule III to Schedule II; but since more than 90 percent of black market PCP came from the labs of kitchen chemists, this did nothing to curb supply. The PCP Menace was exploding.

The crackdown on illicit manufacturing of LSD and amphetamines included new restrictions on the esoteric chemical precursors of those drugs. As a result, homemade LSD and amphetamines became exceedingly difficult and expensive to make properly. John Van Diver, Western regional director of the DEA, has told the New York Times that many labs that formerly produced illicit LSD and amphetamines have now switched to PCP because the ingredients are cheaper and easier to produce. And not only did the State’s moves recruit new manufacturers, they also recruited new customers—with The Great Paraquat Scare of 1978. As Federal monies aided the Mexican government in dumping the toxic herbicide Paraquat on Mexican marijuana farms, many grassers switched to PCP. “We had people calling up saying we’re going to smoke dust because at least we know what’s in it. We’ve had a lot of people trying other drugs because of the Paraquat affair,” Leslie Bragg says.

“We’ll switch drugs fairly soon and another chemical will replace PCP,” muses Sgt. Michael Guy. More likely it will supplement PCP. There are more than 35 PCP analogs whose similar chemistry allows them to mimic PCP’s psychoactive effects. Currently only the TCP analog is illegal, while PCE and PHP are perfectly legal and on the street. It only makes sense to brew the analog which doesn’t carry the 5 year/$15,000 felony rap.

For those who feel sympathy for Parke-Davis, believing all they got out of PCP was poor publicity and a lot of crazy monkeys—relax. Parke-Davis eventually developed a PCP analog without all the bad side effects, ketamine (Ketelar), and besides its surgical applications it is already turning up on the sophisticated Dr. Feelgood circuits.

The drug abuse industrial complex would have you believe that there is no answer to the question, why do people take PCP? Yet the answer is simple. People take PCP for the same reason they take every drug Menace drug—because it is cheap, plentiful, and they want to medicate themselves. There are 35 million Americans currently consuming prescribed psychoactive drugs, but because they have medical sanction their consumption is called use. The 7 million whom the government estimates have tried PCP in self-medication or recreation have their consumption defined as drug abuse because they have not been given that medical sanction. Let us not delude ourselves by thinking that drugs enjoy a brief popularity until their street reputation catches up with them and they are replaced by new drugs. Peter Koper ended his New Times PCP article with the comment that “a society gets the drug it deserves.” No way. A society only gets the drugs the State can’t keep from it. The next time you read a PCP horror story about a madman slashing throats with a straight razor just remember who directed the market for drugs from downers, psychedelics, and weed to PCP: the State.

And once and for all let us banish the notion that PCP is “the drug of choice.” What choice? The obvious solution—the abolition of the drug laws—would banish PCP to an idiot coterie as the return of quality pharmaceuticals made the concept of “the drug of choice” reasonable once again.

During the nineteenth century America was a doper’s paradise. No laws restricted drugs: opiates were sold freely over the counter. Users of drugs were impossible to distinguish from non-users. The concept of the drug addict had not yet been born. Dr. Thomas Szasz writes in Ceremonial Chemistry (Doubleday, 1975) that no pre-twentieth century definition linking the word addiction to drug use can be found in the Oxford English Dictionary. Nineteenth century America had no drug laws, no concept of addiction, and no drug Menace.

Then, around the turn of the twentieth century, during the heyday of the Progressive “reform” movements, a number of state and local governments began enacting restrictive laws against drugs. And by the middle of the new century’s second decade, the federal government had jumped on the bandwagon with the Harrison Narcotics Act.

The Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 provided the mold for every drug Menace we have since enjoyed. After the U.S. ratified the Hague Convention Treaty, which was negotiated to end the Opium Wars, the Harrison Act was passed to fulfill our treaty obligations. Designed to regulate rather than prohibit narcotics, the Act was interpreted by law-enforcement officials to exclude prescription of narcotics to habitual users because habitual use was not considered a disease, and prescription for any non-medical purpose was declared outside a physician’s ‘professional practice.’ Physicians were arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for prescribing opiates. And, as the crackdown evaporated the quality licit market, the sleazy black market we associate with opiates was created.

Prohibition of alcohol spurred a 13-year-long Menace until the moralists finally gave up the ghost. But during the ‘Noble Experiment’ Americans began their own noble experiments with alternatives such as another eventual Menace, marijuana. Harry J. Anslinger did his successful best to spark the marijuana Menace once booze was legal again, planting reefer madness stories in the press and lobbying for marijuana legislation patterned after the Harrison Act (which he finally got in 1937). Chances are we would have had our marijuana Menace in the ’40s except that during the war years menace spoke with Japanese, German and Italian accents.

The 1940s saw popularization of the recently synthesized amphetamines and barbiturates. Controls on uppers and downers were lax, and Americans in factories and on the war fronts used them judiciously to wake up and go to sleep. A post-World War II mini-Menace grew up around barbiturates, but not even gunslinger Anslinger really wanted to tangle with this potential Menace. Anslinger told Congress, ‘I would prefer to see the barbiturates problem remain a medical problem . . . rather than to suddenly make it a police problem. I think we would probably be as popular as the Prohibition Bureau if this thing [barbiturates legislation] went into effect.’

The 1950s reared no new drug Menace of its own until the eclipse of the decade, which saw the emergence of the first pop drug Menace of the 1960s. The drug? Glue.

According to Edward M. Brecher’s study, Licit and Illicit Drugs (Little, Brown, 1971), the first published reference to glue sniffing came in an August 2, 1959, story in the Denver Post which told of juveniles in the West cupping glue to their faces and inhaling the fumes. Other Post articles pictured how to inhale glue fumes from a handkerchief and described the high—dizziness, drowsiness, altered reality. One article tied in an earlier industrial study that showed that prolonged exposure to volatile fumes could result in brain damage. The headline read: SOME GLUES ARE DANGEROUS, Heavy Inhalation Can Cause Anemia or Brain Damage. By June, 1960, Denver police had investigated 50 cases of glue sniffing and a new headline advertised the Menace thusly: COULD BE FATAL, Plane Glue Gives Kids a Kick.

Quickly the Menace went nationwide. The media ignored the medical findings that no physical damage was in evidence in even the most serious users. Time headlined its story ‘The New Kick.’ Newsweek came back with ‘The New Addicts.’ The FBI urged legislation limiting the sale of glue to those over 21. And Brecher points out that every step of the anti-glue sniffing campaign directed by the State and the media was to be repeated during the LSD Menace in the ’60s. Brecher writes that both campaigns ‘featured solemn warning of dire damage . . . sensational police raids, scientific studies demonstrating hazards—and an endless bombardment of publicity. Both campaigns were followed by increased use of the drugs attacked.’ The PCP Menace grows directly out of this tradition.

Like the fool who has stuffed himself with prunes and believes that the bulk contained in the next mouthful will return him to regularity, the State believes that one more round of get-tough legislation, a new ‘no-knock’ law, another damning article in the press, and one more drug seminar will solve the drug Menace. Yet short of abolishing the drug laws there is nothing the State can do that won’t fuel the PCP Menace and other new Menaces.

The military cold warriors in Vietnam similarly believed that they could see ‘the light at the end of the tunnel’ and pleaded for more time, more money, more power, more bodies. The drug abuse cold warriors plead the same case. But as one of the grunts who actually spent time exploring the intricate tunnels the Viet Cong built told Michael Herr in Dispatches, ‘I been down in that tunnel. There ain’t no light.’

Jack Shafer writes frequently for LR.