The New Public Enemy No. 1

IN Richard Nixon's Washington, drug abuse has reached crisis priority. Heroin addiction mounts appallingly among American soldiers in Viet Nam; each returned planeload of G.I.s adds to the drug malaise at home. Once confined to black urban ghettos, the disease has come to invade the heartland of white, middle-class America. In the judgment of some soberminded politicians, the spread of heroin addiction could have the effect of precipitating an American pullout from Southeast Asia. The President moved last week to head off any such repercussions, declaring a "national emergency" and initiating the most intensive antidrug program yet undertaken in the U.S. Said Nixon: "America's Public Enemy No. 1 is drug abuse."

In a message to Congress, the President called for the creation of a Special Action Office of Drug Abuse Prevention, a kind of supercoordinator of the activities of the nine federal agencies already active in trying to control drugs. In both scope and power, its functions will be unique. It is supposed to develop overall federal strategy for drug programs in general, and specifically for those within the military. Among its direct responsibilities will be major federal drug-abuse prevention, education, treatment, rehabilitation, training and research programs. The office was set up on a temporary basis by Executive Order pending congressional ap proval. The director, Dr. Jerome H. Jaffe, 37, Director of the Drug Abuse Program for the Illinois Department of Mental Health, will report directly to the President. The appointment is a sign of Nixon's seriousness: Jaffe is a leading expert on methadone therapy for heroin addicts and a major figure in research on drug abuse.

The President's program will cost $371 million: $216 million has already been budgeted, and the remaining $155 million is new money to be allocated by Congress. There is serious question as to whether such sums are adequate, but at least they mark a start.

The largest share is slated for compulsory treatment and rehabilitation of addicted Viet Nam veterans. What Nixon proposed, and quickly put into effect last weekend at Cam Ranh Bay and Long Binh, is a program that will subject all G.I.s to urine tests before they return to the U.S. to ascertain whether they have been using heroin or amphetamines. Those found to be on drugs will be given a week of detoxification before they are sent home. If Congress approves, they will also receive an additional three weeks of mandatory therapy in the U.S. at Veterans Administration facilities.

Troublesome Addicts. Perhaps more important than compulsory treatment will be the opening of VA facilities to all former servicemen in need of rehabilitation. Under current regulations, anyone with a dishonorable discharge -- the generally accepted means of flushing troublesome addicts from the military -- is not eligible for VA therapy. In the first four months of this year, for example, 394 of the 1,003 Marines dismissed from the service for drug-related abuses were discharged dishonorably and could not qualify for rehabilitation. (Most of the others received either general or undesirable classifications.) The new program would change all that.

One-Way Street. It may also change the nature and techniques of drug control. The President has asked Congress to permit the U.S. Government to use information provided by foreign police to prosecute international narcotics dealers, so long as that information is obtained in compliance with the laws of that country. Nixon has requested $2,000,000 for research and development of equipment and techniques for the detection of illegal drug traffic; $2,000,000 for research and development of herbicides to destroy narcotics-producing plants "without adverse ecological effects"; and an additional $26.6 million for the Treasury Department, primarily to intensify customs controls.

One source of the problem, as Nixon recognizes, lies in the countries where opium is grown and processed into heroin, and he is stepping up efforts to win their cooperation. He is also requesting $10 million for improved education and training in the field of drugs at home. "We need an expanded effort to show that addiction is all too often a one-way street," he told Congress. "It is essential that the American people are alerted to this danger, to recognize that it is not a danger that will pass with the end of the war in Viet Nam, because the problem existed before we were in Viet Nam."

Ominous Specter. Despite the President's disclaimer, the problem has been greatly accelerated by the war. Officially, the estimates are that between 26,000 and 39,000 G.I.s use hard drugs. New York Congressman Seymour Halpern, just back from Viet Nam, puts that figure as high as 60,000, most of them on heroin. There are an estimated 250,000 addicts in the U.S. Some authorities believe that if 75% of them supported their habit by committing crimes the cost to the country would exceed $8 billion yearly. With the return of the addicted veterans, the cost of heroin in dollars, in violence and more subtly in broken lives and suffering, becomes even harder to reckon. Just last week in Detroit, seven addicts were massacred in a gangland-style war for control of the city's $350 million heroin trade. The dead, all shot in a drug dealer's apartment, bring to 50 the number of heroin-related murders in the city this year. The specter of highly weapons-trained, addicted combat veterans joining the deadly struggle for drugs is ominous. Warned Iowa Senator Harold Hughes, speaking in Detroit over the weekend: "Within a matter of months in our large cities, the Capone era of the '20s may look like a Sunday school picnic by comparison."

From President Nixon's viewpoint, the "national emergency" he has declared is crucial to the country's morale and integral to both the resolution of the war and his own chances of reelection. Last week, for example, several votes for the unsuccessful McGovern-Hatfield amendment to set a Dec. 31, 1971 deadline for U.S. withdrawal from Viet Nam came from Senators troubled by the drug problem. Jacob Javits of New York saw drug abuse as "the kind of issue that can change the whole situation," and warned that "the American people could get so fed up that the troops will all be out of there faster than McGovern, Hatfield or anybody else ever dreamed of, regardless of the consequences." Indeed, in the latest Gallup poll, drugs have moved up to become the nation's third most pressing concern, behind only Viet Nam and the economy.

Archaic Thinking. The approaches to eliminating heroin have too long been sporadic, diffused and confused. The President's program is only a first step, but it is a good one. Nixon's program heralds a more sympathetic approach to the addict's problems. Says one of its architects: "As the notion of the right to rehabilitation evolves into the consciousness of America, it will get us away from the archaic thinking that the drug addict is an evil character." It may also end, or at least curb, the spread of addiction. There is an urgency to the President's drug program. Time is running out--both for the President's goal of a measured end to the war, and for the rehabilitation of a growing number of American youths.

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