One of the big problems plaguing law-enforcement officers dealing with narcotics addicts is how to determine quickly and conclusively whether a suspect is or is not on drugs. Most seasoned addicts are expert at concealing needle marks (sometimes with tattoos). Although addicts show withdrawal symptoms (goose flesh, yawning, nausea, vomiting) when they are cut off from drugs for one to two days, in many cases there are no legal grounds for holding suspects until the symptoms appear. The solution, California’s Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement believes, lies in a narcotic antagonist called N-allylnormor-phine, known commercially as Nalline.
As doctors at the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital at Lexington, Ky. have already discovered, Nalline, when injected under the addict’s skin, causes immediate withdrawal symptoms. (If given to basically healthy nonaddicts, the drug causes no serious symptoms.) In eight months of testing, Narcotics Inspector Fred Brau-moeller and Dr. James G. Terry, an Alameda County medical officer, also noted that Nalline has a telltale effect on the eyes of people to whom it is administered: while it causes a non-addict’s pupils to constrict, it causes the addict’s pupils to dilat’e.
Using the Nalline test, Inspector Brau-moeller and Dr. Terry have achieved some spectacular results. Addict convictions in Oakland, they report, have risen from 29 in 1955 to 150 in the last eight months, and crimes largely attributed to addicts have declined 12%.
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