Drugs for Addicts?

U.S. law says that it is a crime to possess narcotics, and by jailing many of the 20,000 addicts arrested in the U.S. each year, it brands them as criminals. But most doctors and lawyers believe that drug addiction is not primarily a matter of wilful lawbreaking, agree that most cases result rather from some form of emotional disturbance, which is a medical condition. In a new book, Drug Addiction: Crime or Disease? (Indiana University; $5), a joint committee of the American Bar Association and the American Medical Association suggests that the law, no less than the addict, may need overhauling.

Federal and state laws on narcotics, together with court rulings and the regulations of the Bureau of Narcotics, are aimed mainly at preventing or penalizing the sale and possession of the drugs, not at rehabilitating the addict. The need for such laws arose almost half a century ago, when physicians unwittingly created ari army estimated at 250,000 addicts by too freely prescribing morphine as a painkiller. After possession of nonprescription narcotics was made a crime, the law cracked down so hard on prescription peddling that cautious physicians began to turn away addicts appealing to them for treatment. They still do.

The result of tough laws has been to create a profitable black market (estimated annual take: $400 million) and thievery or prostitution to finance addiction. By the Bureau of Narcotics' estimates, there are now 50,000 to 60,000 addicts in the U.S.--some authorities say 150,000.

Realizing that it might be stirring up a hornets' nest, the commission looked long and hard at the British and Continental European ways of handling addiction. Britain, with almost one-third the population of the U.S., claims to have only 400 to 500 addicts and no problem of an illicit drug trade or larceny or prostitution to finance the habit. In Britain, a physician may prescribe morphine, or even heroin (which no U.S. doctor can prescribe for any purpose), to a thoroughly "hooked" addict, who then gets his shots at a chemist's shop for two shilling's (28-c-) apiece. Most Western European countries report comparable addiction rates, have similar prescription laws.

To most Americans, writes Sociologist Alfred Lindesmith in Drug Addiction, the suggestion that the U.S. should switch to something like the British system comes as "a startling, radical or dangerous idea." Narcotics Commissioner Harry Anslinger opposes it. But the A.B.A.-A.M.A. joint committee--while flatly against anything like "indiscriminate distribution" of narcotics--recommends trying something like the British system on a pilot-plant basis. This would be an "outpatient facility, on a controlled, experimental basis." For a site, the committee suggests the District of Columbia, "being an exclusively federal jurisdiction and immediately accessible to both law-enforcement and public health agencies"--and, it might have added, an adequate supply of addicts.

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