American drug problem

Press, Volume CXIII, Issue 33141, 3 February 1973, Page 11

American drug problem

(Prom

KERRY MYERS)

NEW YORK. Kevin McDow, aged 16, is a selfadmitted heroin addict—an addict who police allege stabbed to death a 64-year-old man in broad daylight in mid-town Times Square.

Kevin was after money—cold hard cash he needed to satisfy his habit, a habit which cost $5O a day. It is easy to believe reports that the American drug problem is being alleviated, until you hear of someone like Kevin. Yet his case, and the stories of tens of thousands like him, still make up a terrifying drug scene. It was the prospect of another year of violence, fear and suffering that prompted New York’s Governor Nelson Rockefeller to advocate life sentences without parole for drug-pushers. The Governor’s proposal had a mixed reception and separated into two camps those striving to solve the problem. Social disease The harsh punitive measure was greeted favourably by people who believe the only way to get the addict off the streets is to remove the source of his drug supply—the pusher. If the penalties are harsh enough, they reason, the pusher will stop selling drugs to people like young Kevin. Against this proposal is a group of people who believe the only way to solve the problem is by continuing existing therapeutic programmes. These people consider drug addiction a social disease which must be treated as such, rather than an act of anti-social behaviour which must be punished. “Rockefeller is throwing in the towel in a hysterical way,” said the Health Service Administrator, Mr Gordon Chase. “When he talks about the failure of treatment programmes he must be talking about his own, because we’ve been doing fairly well.” Decline shown Mr Chase said that arrests of addicts had fallen sharply recently, there was less demand for drug treatment facilities, police statistics showed a decline in crime attributed to addicts, and fewer addicts were dying from heroin overdoses. Existing treatment programmes rely heavily on dispensing of the synthetic heroin substitute, methadone. At present, more than 30,000 of the city’s estimated 150,000 addicts receive daily doses of the laboratoryproduced drug from licensed clinics throughout the city. Methadone is not a cure for heroin addiction. It merely provides a substitute that the addict can live with. He feels nothing from his daily dose and is open to counselling and other rehabilitative treatments. Methadone is also cheaper ($2O a week, compared with $3O to $5O a day needed for heroin), eliminating the need to steal to satisfy his craving. Some look at the methadone programme as “not a solution, but a disaster.” Desire remains Dr Mitchell Rosenthal, director of one of the city’s therapeutic communities, believes the problem of drug abuse can only worsen if methadone treatment is seen as the solution. “In five years people will look around at all the methadone addicts and say: ‘My God, what have we done?” he said. Although methadone stops the addict’s craving for heroin it does not eliminate his desire to “get high.” Many addicts under treatment still resort to other drugs to experience the euphoria they miss from “shooting” heroin. One addict, a young man of 24, said he had used cocaine, barbiturates and marijuana, as well as his methadone dose, all within 24 hours. He also said he would switch back to heroin if he could get hold of some “good

stuff, not the rubbish that’s been around lately.” It is that attitude, one that demonstrates no interest in returning to a drug-free existence, which makes the prospect of rehabilitation so grim. Congetial craving The latest declaration against drugs by Governor Rockefeller has also stirred up more publicity about the country’s youngest addicts—those infants bom with a craving for drugs. An estimated 800 babies were born to drug-addicted mothers last year according to a “Time" report. Doctors estimate that without proper attention more than 50 per cent of babies bom with an addiction are likely to die. The report also stated that more than half the babies born to mothers using methadone are either premature or small for their gestational age. “Their symptoms of withdrawal last longer and worsen progressively,” said Dr Lawrence Gartner, of New York City’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine. The only hope seems for those infants bom of mothers who can “kick” their habit during pregnancy or can live in a therapeutic drug-free community. One such community in New York, however, reports that only 10 per cent of addicted mothers stay beyond the first six months of pregnancy because the craving for drugs is too strong. Causative problems Other critics of the Governor’s proposals say the drug problem can be solved only when the economic and psychological problems conducive to heroin use are eliminated. They point to areas where addiction is at its worst—in the depressed areas and ghettos—and say that if man or woman has a job, respectability and self-confidence there is no need to turn to an escape. Some spokesmen for blacks and Puerto Ricans fear that an alleviation of the drug problem will mean only a lessening of the white society’s attention to it. “We’ve had three generations of heroin addicts in the ghetto,” said one black minister, “We started to hear about a heroin epidemic only when white kids started taking it. “And now they’re giving it up we’re starting to hear that the epidemic is over.” But the epidemic is not over for boys like Kevin McDow, now facing a murder charge, or for the 120,000 other addicts now taking part in any sort of rehabilitative programme.