Medicine: Narcotic Dilemma

Should dope addicts get their dope free, from the Government? This course was suggested, as a way to kill the illegal drug traffic by extracting its profit motive, at hearings held in Manhattan last week by Texas Senator Price Daniel’s Narcotics Subcommittee. The proposal split the experts—doctors and law enforcers—right down the middle. After the hearings they were farther apart than ever before. About all they had been able to agree on were the basic facts: ¶ Addiction is a growing, not a receding problem, 40 years after the Harrison Act made the peddling of narcotics a federal offense subject to heavy penalties.

¶ Nobody knows for certain how many U.S. addicts there are, but best estimates run from 150,000 up. Nobody knows how many are cured; estimates range from a cynical 2% to a sanguine 15%.

¶ The “pusher” (retail peddler) of narcotics is under irresistible pressure to win fresh converts to addiction. Each addict, in turn, is likely to become a pusher, widening the vicious circle. Reported Manhattan’s General Sessions Judge Jonah Goldstein: 1) 99% of convicted narcotics peddlers are also users, and therefore peddling to insure their own supply; 2) 30% of all persons convicted of any crime are narcotics users, driven to crime because this is the only way they can raise the money ($15 to $100 a day) that they have to pay for the drugs.

Illustrating the grim statistics, a man of 23 (name withheld) testified that he had been taunted into taking drugs by neighborhood friends. Soon he was stealing to get the $25 a day that he needed.

Then he cajoled his wife, 21, into taking heroin or “horse” (“Why don’t you try it just once and see what it’s like?”). She did, and took to prostitution to get money for “H.” Then she goaded her brother, 18, into the habit. In the last few days, testified the wife, she had been offered heroin three times while pushing her baby carriage on Manhattan’s West 53rd Street.

Five witnesses told the subcommittee that the remedy was to let addicts temporarily get their dope free, or at cost, from public clinics, thus eliminating the narcotics black market. For the New York Academy of Medicine, a physicians’ public-service group, Dr. Hubert S. Howe presented a bold program patterned on that used in Britain (which claims to have no more than 400 known addicts and no appreciable black market). Hospitals, said Dr. Howe, should examine, classify and treat addicts, then refer them to specially licensed doctors who would continue treatment. The most drastic break with current U.S. practice that he suggested was rehabilitating the addict first—teaching him a trade, helping him to get a job—and treating the addiction afterward. This would mean dispensing narcotics to the addict until the doctor felt that he was ready to lick the habit. A similar system, tried from 1919 to 1929 at 44 clinics in 15 states, claimed the Academy, showed good results until the Government stopped it.

But New York’s Governor Averell Harriman reported that the clinic plan of the ’20s was a “disastrous failure.” Federal Narcotics Commissioner Harry J. Anslinger called the plan “propaganda that the Government sell poison at reduced prices to its citizens.” Warden Frederick S. Baldi of Rockview (Pa.) penitentiary said that authorities “might just as well give a loaded gun to a murderer.” Senator Daniel’s own recommendation: slap on the death penalty for narcotics smugglers and dealers “who commit murder on the installment plan.”