home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
HaCKeRz KrOnIcKLeZ 3
/
HaCKeRz_KrOnIcKLeZ.iso
/
drugs
/
hearings.2.1
< prev
next >
Wrap
Text File
|
1996-05-06
|
261KB
|
8,644 lines
1
1
2 THE ASSOCIATION OF THE BAR OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
3 ----------------------------------------------X
4 DRUG POLICY HEARINGS
5 ----------------------------------------------X
6 DATE: OCTOBER 11, 1995
7 TIME: 9 a.m.
8
9 Drug Policy Hearings, held at THE
10 ASSOCIATION OF THE BAR OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK, 42
11 West 44th Street, New York, New York before a
12 Notary Public of the State of New York.
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
2
1
2 THE PANEL:
3
4 KATHY ROCKLEN, CHAIRPERSON
5 ELEANOR JACKSON PIEL
6 DAVID FISCHER
7 CHARLES KNAPP
8 NANCY BRESLOW
9 DAVID AFFLER
10 LEO KAYSER
11
12 * * *
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
3
1
2 SCHEDULED TESTIMONY BY:
3
4
5 MR. ARNOLD TREBACH
6 DR. LESTER GRINSPOON
7 MR. ROBERT GANGI
8 MR. WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR.
9 DR. WILLIAM M. LONDON
10 DR. DIANA GORDON
11 DR. JOYCE LOWINSON
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
4
1 DRUG HEARING
2 MS. PIEL: We thank you Diamond Reporting
3 Service for your pro bono work today and we are now
4 underway.
5 Our first speaker is Dr. Arnold
6 Trebach, who is the chairman and president of the
7 Drug Policy Foundation in Washington and for more
8 than 25 years, he's been an advocate of fundamental
9 drug policy change and he is a professor in the
10 Department of Justice, Law and Society at the
11 School of Public Affairs at American University in
12 Washington. He's written books on the subject and
13 he is a national figure in the field.
14 Without more, I introduce Dr. Arnold
15 Trebach.
16 TESTIMONY BY DR. ARNOLD TREBACH:
17 Thank you very much, Ms. Piel, and it's
18 a pleasure to be here. I remember years ago as a
19 very young lawyer working with other lawyers such
20 as Robert Von Mayo (sic.) and Emory Bounell (sic.)
21 on a committee to the endeavor systems. I think
22 the work of your committee is historic and I want
23 you to know that I want to help and the foundation
24 wants to help you as you pursue further work in
25 this area.
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
5
1 DRUG HEARING
2 I'm in very strong agreement with your
3 conclusion ending prohibition of drugs would indeed
4 be the wiser course of direction for the nation.
5 It's a fundamental point that many good people
6 agree on and there are many people who disagree and
7 we respect their opinion. But, there are many
8 reasons for my opinion which are laid out in my
9 extensive statement which I sent you for your
10 records.
11 Mainly, it is my view and the view of
12 so many other people that the current situation is
13 so horrible that when you look at the cost of the
14 current situation, I think most sensible people
15 would say it's terrible and we have to seek a
16 change. For many years moreover, I was among those
17 people who felt that however bad the situation now
18 is from drug prohibition, there must have been good
19 reasons for commencing with drug prohibition around
20 the turn of the century. Recently, I have gone
21 back and looked at that earlier era and what I
22 found was -- and I'm speaking now as a lawyer and
23 even though I'm social scientist and a lawyer, I
24 tend to approach this as a lawyer. I look for
25 evidence.
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
6
1 DRUG HEARING
2 I recently went back and looked at the
3 evidence at the turn of the century about the need
4 for criminal laws prohibiting the use of drugs and
5 I found no reliable evidence on the need for such
6 drastic legislation. So, I concluded that the
7 original basis for the drug prohibition laws was
8 faulty.
9 Now, that to me, had a profound effect
10 on my thinking. It pushed me even further into
11 being a reformer and seeking change. I think there
12 are many people, many lawyers, many government
13 officials, who are surprised when you tell them
14 that drug prohibition is relatively new in our
15 history relatively. It came into effect on March
16 1st 1915. I mean that's just a little older then I
17 am and I don't consider myself that old and I'm
18 capable of learning new tricks and the country is
19 capable of learning new tricks.
20 Drug prohibition is not something
21 written in the tablets of the bible. It is not
22 written in the constitution. It is not something
23 that is an immunable part of the American life.
24 I'm sure you've spoken to many people who have
25 testified here, who have said if you take away drug
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
7
1 DRUG HEARING
2 prohibition, the sky will fall. Addiction will go
3 through the roof. Crime will be rampant. We'll be
4 a nation of drug zombies. They may believe that
5 from the information they see, but when I look at
6 the information, I don't find any evidence of that,
7 any reliable evidence.
8 When I was speaking to Ms. Rocklen, I
9 said that I would concentrate in my presentation on
10 the early years because I don't think many people
11 have spent time on that. I certainly have not
12 until a few years ago. So, when I went back, I
13 looked at some of the leading scholars such as
14 David Miusto (sic.) or Cartwright, who are very
15 good writers and very good scholars and their
16 research is often used to provide a buttress to the
17 concept.
18 In the old days we had rampant
19 prohibition. Thank God, we got the prohibition
20 laws that repealed prohibition. It's simply not in
21 the records. I used to think it was. It's not in
22 the records. I went back oh, about three years ago
23 with the help of a lot of young people, mainly
24 unpaid interns at the foundation, and I said find
25 me evidence of what was wrong around the 1870's,
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
8
1 DRUG HEARING
2 1880, and we couldn't come up with anything. What
3 we come up with was this. A large number of people
4 were using drugs and a large number of people were
5 getting in trouble with drugs, but on a comparative
6 basis, they were a finite portion of the
7 population. There was no definitive evidence at all
8 that Navy ships didn't sail, that factories closed
9 down, that neighborhoods were destroyed by the
10 process of drugs and as if it were written in
11 stone, the idea of Civil War because of the
12 presence of drugs. Although, information from on
13 the battlefields -- we had battalions of addicted
14 soldiers. As far as I'm concerned, it was a myth
15 which we all accepted.
16 So, what did we have back then? We had
17 a situation where you could buy the drugs sometimes
18 from the Sears, Roebuck catalogue for a very low
19 price. As it also happens, you could buy a cure
20 for a couple of bucks. The cure didn't work, the
21 drugs did. There were many places where it was
22 bought over-the-counter. There were opium dens.
23 We believe it was a custom brought by Chinese
24 workers to do the work that white people wouldn't
25 and in those opium dens, people went and smoked
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
9
1 DRUG HEARING
2 opium and around at the 1870's or 1880's, perfectly
3 decent white folks, men and women of tender ages,
4 went there to enjoy the smoking.
5 This caused enormous resentment and I
6 believe that was the start of prohibition movements
7 in this country. And, if you look at opium and its
8 habits, smoking opium is dangerous. It was
9 generally a peaceful vice. There was no evidence
10 that out of those opium dens people spewed and
11 attacked the neighborhood. Opium was a problem for
12 the people who smoked it and was a problem for
13 families of people who got addicted, but there was
14 no evidence that this disrupted the society, but I
15 believe this was the start of the process of
16 prohibition and once they started that, they
17 realized that those laws didn't work. People get
18 high doing it.
19 Well, the result was, we've got to get
20 tougher. So, they got tougher and then we got the
21 Harrison Act which was passed on December 17, 1914
22 as an amendment to one of the anti-opium statutes.
23 It went into effect on March 1st 1915. That was
24 our first national anti-prohibition law. It's
25 never worked and we keep saying we've got to get
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
10
1 DRUG HEARING
2 tougher, we've got to get tougher. Now people
3 forget this history and they will sit here and
4 appear before Congress and right backs and say
5 national prohibition saved us and I find now no
6 evidence of that.
7 I summarized all of this in my
8 statement and we'll make it available to you. I
9 want to point out one part of my statement which I
10 think was very new for me. I mobilized these young
11 people and said let's see if we can create at least
12 some comparative data -- because there is none --
13 of crime before and after prohibition and I viewed
14 that that was one evidence of a major social
15 problem that could flow from the easy availability
16 of drugs.
17 We found 10 cities -- and we worked
18 like the dickens to find them -- that had records
19 that would be comparative. Ten cities had arrest
20 records in 1918 and 1919. We picked two days
21 essentially apart and we looked at three crimes,
22 homicide, robbery and burglary. Remember our
23 questions was that is there evidence of the
24 presence of easily available drugs a century ago
25 that had the side effects of creating a vast amount
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
11
1 DRUG HEARING
2 of crime. We worked on this quite a deal.
3 It's in my statement on Page 16 and if
4 you look at the table, you realize in almost every
5 case a century ago crime was significantly lower.
6 We did it by rate. We did a rate in population.
7 We didn't look at absolute numbers, but I will just
8 pick up Manhattan and start my questions until, I
9 assume, my time is up.
10 In 1989, whereas far as I can tell,
11 drugs were easily available there and by the way,
12 there were local pharmacy laws, but you would and
13 could get drugs quite easily in Manhattan. It had
14 a population of a million-and-a-half. It had 119
15 homicides and 659 burglary arrests. Clearly, there
16 was more, but I was looking for comparatives and
17 the rates were 7.9 for homicide, 12.2 for robbery
18 and 21.3 for burglary and by 1989, the population.
19 Of Manhattan went down slightly. It was a
20 1,400,000, 1,408,000, but the homicides were 338,
21 robberies were 9,051. In other words, the rise in
22 rates is not something, but the rise in rate per
23 100,000 was 3400. In other words, it went up 34
24 times.
25 Now, what do you conclude from all this
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
12
1 DRUG HEARING
2 data? What I conclude is this. I am not making a
3 cause and effect connection that the advent of
4 drugs prohibition jammed this attendant crime. It
5 may have, but I'm talking very carefully like a
6 lawyer here, I am saying there is an answer absent
7 of evidence that there were a reduction in related
8 crimes problems back before prohibition and there
9 is some indication that crime is much worse now by
10 rate then it was then.
11 Where does this all lead me or I hope,
12 where it leads you? It should strengthen your
13 resolve because while the past cannot foretell the
14 future clearly, we have one test case here as to
15 how the American people react to the presence of
16 relatively, freely available drugs and we can say
17 they behaved quite well, thank you. Some of them
18 got into trouble, but even through the most
19 pessimist text scenarios, the number of people
20 addicted was like .4 percent or .3 percent, and I
21 would say that it should give us hope as we move
22 forward that the American people can do well
23 without your friendly, local policeman telling them
24 what chemicals to put in their own bodies.
25 Thank you very much.
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
13
1 DRUG HEARING
2 MS. PIEL: We're going to start
3 questioning with the panel. Should we start with
4 you Mr. Fischer?
5 MR. FISCHER: Sure.
6 QUESTION BY MR. FISCHER: If the rate
7 of addiction was .4 percent, is that something that
8 I heard correctly --
9 DR. TREBACH: I went over and invite
10 you to do and by the way a lot of this is included
11 in some of my reports and a lot of my section of
12 book which I wrote with Jim Sines (sic.), "Legalize
13 It." It's debate book put out by the American
14 University Press. I went back and looked at the
15 data that these scholars such as Musto (sic.) and
16 Corrad (sic.) used.
17 I concluded first of all, if you took
18 them at their worst -- I will tell you the number
19 exactly -- it's the number itself about -- we had
20 the most. It was either 99.59 percent or 99.67
21 percent of the American population was not
22 addicted. These are figures at their worst, but I
23 went beyond that. My next step was to go back and
24 look at and see is there a basis for their
25 estimates which are widely credited and you find --
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
14
1 DRUG HEARING
2 by the way, the best place you can go for this?
3 Terry Palisi's (sic.) book, "The Opium Problem,"
4 which came out in '28, and they reviewed all the
5 drugs in our surveys that had been done on them and
6 if you read them, it will boggle your mind,
7 especially as lawyers and as social scientists.
8 Their estimates vary so widely. The town of
9 Monroe, Michigan the doctor reported one opium,
10 either as they called them in the town and the
11 pharmacist reported 60. How do you use that as a
12 basis for calculation?
13 So, the conclusion was I made widely
14 available data now responsible. An expert or
15 lawyer can say we have reliable data to compare.
16 MR. FISCHER: Opium is not one of the
17 drugs that's considered much of a problem these
18 days. I believe heroin was developed late in the
19 19th century because it was hoped or expected to be
20 non-addictive and turned out to be much more
21 addictive then opium is; is my recollection
22 correct?
23 RESPONSE BY DR. TREBACH: Well, there
24 were many other drugs available then. Opium as I
25 said, was an emotional thing because there was
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
15
1 DRUG HEARING
2 opium smoking by aliens, but there were many other
3 drugs were available. Information means available
4 and needles were available and on heroin -- if I
5 can talk about that for just a second -- it was
6 widely believed that heroin was developed in the
7 19th century by Bayer Company and it was developed
8 as a cure for mentalism. This field is full of
9 myths. That's another myth. In fact, heroin was
10 discovered by C. Oral Wright (sic.). He published
11 it in an English journal. It was also joined by
12 Antole Dresser (sic.), a fellow physician in
13 Germany. They experimented with it and found it
14 was a wonderful cough medicine. It was never
15 marketed for a cure for morphine addiction. It was
16 used primarily as a sedative for coughs, which was
17 very effective.
18 MR. FISCHER: I guess just to leave the
19 microphone, my question is the extent to which
20 information we have about opium 100 years ago which
21 is not really an abused drug today or certainly not
22 one of the leading abused drugs today. Can you
23 really give us much guidance to current policy
24 where I think heroin and cocaine are probably
25 considered the major problem drugs?
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
16
1 DRUG HEARING
2 RESPONSE BY DR. TREBACH: What I'm
3 getting at is, what I was looking at were all of
4 the drugs available to them then and there were
5 many drugs available then. I simply say that opium
6 was the one that drew the most attention, but other
7 drugs did as well. By the turn of the century
8 heroin was being used and abused and other drugs
9 were being used and morphine was always being
10 abused.
11 So what I am saying is, there is no
12 reliable evidence in the surveys which covered all
13 the drugs that there was a problem of such
14 dimension that we were justified in creating an
15 army of police and prisonkeepers to control our
16 drug appetites.
17 MS. PIEL: Thank you. We have another
18 question from a member of our panel, Mr. Knapp.
19 MR. KNAPP: You mentioned the existence
20 of certain pharmacies in the 19th century?
21 DR. TREBACH: Yes.
22 QUESTION BY MR. KNAPP: Can you give
23 the committee a brief synopsis?
24 RESPONSE BY DR. TREBACH: These were
25 all state laws as opposed to national laws. There
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
17
1 DRUG HEARING
2 were some national laws and, as a matter of fact, I
3 think Musto (sic.), who I criticized, gives an
4 excellent summary of many of the state laws. They
5 put controls on the manner in which drugs could be
6 dispensed and they put internal controls on purity
7 and how the businesses could be run, but there was
8 some restrictions on sales in some states, but it
9 was very easy to get around them and there was no
10 national fabric of control and you could easily
11 order them through the mail. In one of my books,
12 "The Heroin Solution," many people have published
13 it, there is an ad from the Bayer Company saying
14 please send away for aspirin and heroin and one
15 other drug. So, that the controls -- you do order
16 the stuff and I have Sears, Roebuck catalogs with
17 all the drugs listed and you could find many ways
18 of getting that, but if you wish I'd be glad to
19 provide you with information.
20 QUESTION BY MR. KNAPP: But, your
21 overall conclusion in the historical records was
22 that those pharmacy laws proved to be ineffective?
23 RESPONSE BY DR. TREBACH: But mind you,
24 I am not at all against a whole series of new laws
25 that we put together. In fact, I talk about this
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
18
1 DRUG HEARING
2 in some of my work in this book, but I think the
3 task of the future is to create a new set of laws
4 that do not start and end with prohibition.
5 You look at the alcohol laws and I've
6 dealt with that on some occasions and some of you
7 perhaps have, there are a vast array of laws
8 regulating the sale of alcohol, the use of alcohol,
9 penalties for drunk driving, and I think they ought
10 to be the task I recommend as one place to start is
11 right here in New York, and I believe you probably
12 heard from Senator Joseph Gallagher. His law for a
13 new way of regulation is very intriguing and I
14 think worthy of attention.
15 I am not at all recommending that we
16 throw away the laws, but where we --
17 post-prohibition laws, for example, you'd want age
18 limits, you'd want purity standards, you'd want
19 label standards. You would want a requirement that
20 people who sell these drugs not have criminal
21 records. I would hope that they're trained
22 properly.
23 In fact, one of the proposals I made
24 and I would make to you, is that in the future we
25 would consider creating two channels for obtaining
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
19
1 DRUG HEARING
2 these drugs. One would be the tradition channel we
3 now have. If you want to get codeine -- I just got
4 a prescription for antibiotic yesterday -- I called
5 my pharmacist. I went to my doctor and got advice
6 and I think people who want that route should have
7 it. It should still be there. It would be the one
8 I would prefer and there should be a nonmedical
9 route. If you are an adult and you want to
10 purchase these drugs and you have been given some
11 basic education and perhaps, have obtained a drug
12 license, you can go to a nonmedical drug store and
13 buy the drugs you want.
14 I think most people wouldn't go the
15 current route. You want a doctor, a pharmacist.
16 You want advice, but if you are an adult, I think
17 the future ought to hold that you could go to the
18 store and obtain it and with the label saying if
19 you are pregnant, don't use this drug, etcetera,
20 etcetera. I think that's where the challenge is
21 and I think lawyers should take up the challenge of
22 that.
23 MS. PIEL: Maybe our next question is
24 Mr. Kayser. Mr. Kayser would like to question.
25 QUESTION FROM MR. KAYSER: Most you've
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
20
1 DRUG HEARING
2 responded to in advance, which is what I had asked
3 witnesses yesterday, which was their comment with
4 respect to license and pharmacies to sell drugs
5 generally with warning labels and so forth, but
6 there is one other element I would like to ask you
7 about which has to do with the issue of taxes that
8 would have to be collected on the legal sale of
9 drugs under some regulation and if you levy tax
10 commiserate with tobacco and alcohol-type taxes, do
11 you have any estimate as to the type of revenue
12 that might be raised and also whether that revenue
13 might be put into a dedicated fund for purposes of
14 treatment?
15 RESPONSE FROM DR. TREBACH: As a matter
16 of fact, Senator Gallagher's bill recommends that
17 the -- first of all, this is a cardinal rule. They
18 should not be confiscatory. They should not be out
19 of the ballpark. They should not push the drugs to
20 the point where a black market develops. So, the
21 taxes should be reasonable and again your advice,
22 the advice of a group like this -- and again, we'd
23 be willing to work with you on that-- is paramount
24 here. Reasonable taxes-- we had funds in the
25 reform movement estimating how much money we'd
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
21
1 DRUG HEARING
2 gain. It would be a lot. It would be billions
3 there's no doubt about it. I have heard estimates
4 on marijuana in the eight billion range and that's
5 probably in the ballpark, but I think that would be
6 something you want to revisit, but clearly though,
7 I could see those funds. And this, I believe, the
8 Gallagher bill recommends being educated to
9 education prevention and treatment.
10 Remember my feeling would be and I
11 don't like the idea of people using drugs. I'm
12 square in that regard and let's assume many people
13 are squares, but I don't want them made criminals
14 if someone disagrees with me -- some of my friends
15 vote republican for God's sake -- but if some of
16 them want to use drugs, why should I say to them
17 they're bad people? As long as they don't hurt
18 anybody else, I would certainly uphold the right of
19 people who use drugs, but I would not in any way
20 use the criminal law. I would use persuasion and
21 use education and everything in my power to
22 convince them that when you do use drugs, there is
23 danger, but I would not use the panelling rate the
24 danger.
25 QUESTION FROM MR. KAYSER: One other
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
22
1 DRUG HEARING
2 question with your lawyer hat on; do you have an
3 opinions as to whether or not it would be best to
4 repeal the Federal regulatory scheme with view to
5 leaving it to the states, the laboratories of
6 states, to experiment with different kinds of drug
7 regulation at the state level as opposed to having
8 a Federal policy?
9 RESPONSE FROM DR. TREBACH: I dealt
10 with that again, as it happens, in this book, and
11 there's a good book. I won't look it up, but it's
12 in here, but in brief, a law professor and
13 economist dealt with us and they literally drafted
14 statutes which I think are pretty good and I would
15 be in favor of a statute not a constitutional
16 amendment. Thank God we don't need that. I think
17 I could see a Federal statute merely following a
18 very conservative principle, let the states handle
19 it. This has a lot of support for this. You get
20 it from prestigious national committees that have
21 stated this and I would simply say that it could be
22 like the -- the amendment repeal prohibition saying
23 that the Federal government will support states in
24 the way they deal with this. So, I would frame
25 this statute in a very conservative fashion and it
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
23
1 DRUG HEARING
2 shudders me, come to think of it, if the current
3 party stays in power in Washington, it will meet
4 their philosophy which is get the Federal
5 government out of the business and speaking as a
6 lawyer, I view the Federal government and Federal
7 police agencies presumptively incompetent in the
8 drug arena.
9 MS. PIEL: Thank you. Kathy Rocklen,
10 our chair, has a question.
11 QUESTION FROM MS. ROCKLEN: I want to
12 return to the subject that we talked a little bit
13 about before, drug related crime, and I think we
14 are pretty well satisfied that crime related to
15 trafficking and crime related to drug traffic and
16 to people trying to support their habits is likely
17 to be vastly diminished by some sort of
18 decriminalization program and the area of main
19 concern to people is drug-induced crime and I guess
20 the question is, do you think that there are
21 particular drugs that are likely to induce crimes
22 whether domestic, violent crimes or crimes to the
23 third parties and if so, what are these drugs and
24 how do we deal with this problem in the context of
25 legalization?
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
24
1 DRUG HEARING
2 RESPONSE BY DR. TREBACH: I recommend
3 to you on page 1818 of "Legalize It," Goldstein and
4 Brownstein in 1990 they studied 414 homicides right
5 here in New York City with the help of the police.
6 They went over them to see whether or not they were
7 drug related and how you could work up a text on
8 the way to describe them. They came up with
9 classic psychological pharmacological, systemic and
10 economic compulsive. And the one thing we are
11 concerned about is crack because you hear that
12 crack is just destroying our city and in my view, I
13 view crack as a bad drug. It is a dangerous drug
14 that can hurt a lot of people. But, what they
15 concluded was and I'm just looking for the date
16 here quickly, and if he found one case and mind
17 you, they worked with the police on this, they say
18 what do you think happened here? They found one
19 case out of these 414 homicides that they randomly
20 selected in New York City that where an 18-year old
21 man beat his daughter to death while high on
22 crack. That's what you hear about and that's
23 horrible and they found out about 106, I believe it
24 is, were involved in the crack trade. So you had
25 one, you know, psychopharmacological induced
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
25
1 DRUG HEARING
2 homicide and 106 in the crack trades for the
3 future.
4 What would happen? I think you would
5 find all of the drugs have some danger of an impact
6 on a human being towards violence that they may
7 push a person toward violence, but in almost every
8 case, the potential is small. It would depend on
9 the particular psychopharmacological of their
10 social situation.
11 The death of that little baby was
12 horrible, but I would say the single drug that
13 would continue to have the most criminal effect
14 hands downs dead and based upon all the research
15 antidotal data is alcohol. There is no drug I can
16 find where there is more evidence of crimogenic
17 impact then alcohol, and I think all the -- by the
18 way, with some prescribed medication there is a
19 danger that a person would take it and have a bad
20 episode. You know, would act badly and cause harm,
21 but I think that danger is at the level of .1
22 compared to a level of 10 for dangers from the
23 prohibition of the crack trade, the cocaine trade.
24 By the way, for reasons I don't
25 understand, the cocaine and crack trade and I will
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
26
1 DRUG HEARING
2 put on my criminologist hat for a moment, is one of
3 the most violent we've ever seen. I've asked cops
4 this and I've asked other people this and I can't
5 figure it out. I think there is a tradition of
6 violence among the people who traffic in it, but
7 that's the business. I can come up with the
8 dangers of prohibition in terms of violence are
9 much higher then the dangers of pharmacological
10 impact.
11 MS. PIEL: Thank you very much. We are
12 not taking questions from the audience because of
13 time considerations and we thank you very much.
14 Our next speaker to testify is Dr.
15 Lester Grinspoon, a distinguished psychiatrist who
16 has written over 200 theses and books. Here is his
17 CV and one that has caught my eye. In 1969 he
18 wrote a piece for my husband's magazine Scientific
19 American on marijuana and I think he can answer in
20 more details some of the answers to the questions
21 of Professor Trebach concerning the effect of drugs
22 on persons, but in any event, Dr. Grinspoon.
23 TESTIMONY FROM DR. GRINSPOON:
24 Thank you. I'm going to talk about
25 just one part of the prohibition. Namely, the
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
27
1 DRUG HEARING
2 marijuana prohibition and I'm going to be even more
3 specific then that. Of all of the harmful effects
4 of prohibition against marijuana, no part is more
5 harmful and more tragic than the proscriptions
6 against using marijuana as a medicine.
7 Now, you know, in 1928, Alexander
8 Fleming (sic.) returned from his vacation to
9 discover that a petri dish, which had become
10 covered with staphylococci, except for one little
11 island where a mold had formed and to make a long
12 story short, this was the serendipitous discovery
13 of penicillin. I published this in 1929 and it
14 wasn't until 1944 when two investigators using just
15 six patients demonstrated its efficacy as an
16 antibiotic. Why did it not happen until 10 years?
17 But, it was at the pressure of World War II which
18 made it necessary to find antibiotics other than
19 sulfonamides, and very rapidly.
20 In 1941, penicillin became known as the
21 wonder drug of the 40's. Why was it considered a
22 wonder drug? It seems to me there are three
23 reasons. One, it was remarkably nontoxic. You
24 could give large doses and no harm would result.
25 Two, once it was produced on an economy of scales,
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
28
1 DRUG HEARING
2 it was remarkably inexpensive and three, it was
3 very versatile. It would a challenged positive to
4 have coccus and various pneumonias and even
5 syphilis. It proved to be vulnerable to this
6 antibiotic. It was truly a wonder drug.
7 Now, if you consider those three
8 criteria, I would make the case that cannabis is a
9 wonder drug which we have been foolishly
10 overlooking for some time. The first criteria,
11 toxicity, well, cannabis is remarkably nontoxic.
12 When you think that this drug has been used for
13 thousands of years by countless millions of people
14 and that there has not been a single recorded death
15 from cannabis alone, that states that considering
16 the most toxic effect of all, death, it makes it
17 the least toxic substance in the armamentarium and
18 that is to say, once cannabis -- and I can go into
19 this in more detail in a question -- but once
20 cannabis resumes or regains its place in the United
21 States pharmacopeia, a place lost in 1941 paramount
22 to the Man Wantague (sic.) Act in 1941, once it
23 regains that place, it will be among the least
24 toxic substances in that pharmacopeia -- no, two,
25 like penicillin, cannabis will be when it's made
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
29
1 DRUG HEARING
2 remarkably inexpensive.
3 It now costs about 200 to $600 an ounce
4 on the street, but if it were available as a
5 medicine, it will cost something on the order of
6 $10 an ounce, maybe $20 an ounce. When you
7 consider post scaling costs a marijuana cigarette
8 weighs about .4 tenths of a gram, so there are
9 about 70 marijuana cigarettes in an ounce, so
10 therefore, one marijuana cigarettes will cost
11 something in the order of 26 cents.
12 So, consider its use in the treatment
13 of nausea and vomiting of a cancer chemotherapy
14 patient. Nowadays, many patients will get relief
15 from the conventional anti-nausea drugs, like one
16 of the newer ones, Dancpon (sic.) or Zofran (sic.)
17 as it's called. This drug, however, costs $20 for
18 an eighth of a milligram pill and then the patient
19 usually ends up paying about $40 for that pill.
20 That pill will give most people relief from that
21 nausea and vomiting, but the 26 cent marijuana
22 cigarette will generally give better relief with
23 fewer side effects and for people who can not get
24 relief from the any of the conventional anti-nausea
25 medicines, marijuana is the substance that will do
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
30
1 DRUG HEARING
2 it for them.
3 For example, there was an investigator
4 by the name of Vince Scura (sic.), who found 48
5 patients who couldn't get relief from the nausea
6 and vomiting of cancer chemotherapy with
7 conventional medicines. These people -- mind you,
8 this nausea is so powerful you feel it right down
9 to your fingernails and many of these people
10 protest that they won't go on with the therapy
11 because it's just so uncomfortable -- and in 48 of
12 these people who could get relief from these
13 medicines, he found that 78 percent got complete
14 relief by smoking marijuana and it will eventually
15 be an exceedingly effective medicine, relative to
16 the medicines whose place it will displace.
17 The third criteria for a wonder drug is
18 versatility. Now, marijuana has a growing list of
19 symptoms and syndromes from which it's useful and
20 for many people, it is the most peaceful substance
21 just to give you a partial list. I forgot to know
22 what time I started, but --
23 MS. PIEL: You've been speaking for
24 about seven minutes.
25 THE WITNESS: Thank you.
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
31
1 DRUG HEARING
2 -- as I mentioned one of the greatest
3 advancements in cancer treatment is the development
4 of these cancer therapeutics, but nausea and
5 vomiting is very discouraging to people. Marijuana
6 is a boom for millions of people. There is a
7 question of glaucoma. There are two kinds of
8 glaucoma. The most common one is called side-angle
9 or open-angle glaucoma. There are conventional
10 medicines since -- this is a decreased intraocular
11 pressure inside the eye which will eventually
12 destroy eyesight if pressure is not brought down.
13 The conventional medicines are difficult to take.
14 They often cause blurring of vision and people
15 don't like them. On the other hand, many people
16 have found that one, not just that they are able to
17 preserve their eyesight because these conventional
18 medicines don't work, but that marijuana will, and
19 they preserve their eyesight. But, for many other
20 people who could use conventional medicines, it's
21 just so much more comfortable and allows them to go
22 about their work so much more efficiently, that
23 eventually they prefer to use cannabis in the
24 treatment of their glaucoma pain.
25 When marijuana first reemerged in
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
32
1 DRUG HEARING
2 western literature in the mid-19th century, one of
3 the most important uses was as an analgesic. It's
4 knots as powerful as the opiates and it takes a
5 little longer for the effect to come on, but for
6 people, particularly dealing with chronic pain,
7 it's much more important then morphine because the
8 opiates are not necessary for that kind of pain and
9 there is no risk of addition with cannabis. And
10 then you take some specialized kind of pain, for
11 example, migraine. As late has his last textbook
12 on medicines, 1914, Sir William Osler (sic.) said
13 the single best drug for the treatment of migraine
14 is cannabis. And given the fact that about 20 to
15 25 percent of people with migraine fail to get
16 relief from the orgotamines (sic.), calcium channel
17 blockers and so forth, cannabis is still very
18 important in the treatment of migraines and then
19 there is multiple sclerosis, and in this disorder
20 people suffer muscle spasms and this is a rather
21 severe kind of pain. Anyone whose had a cramp
22 while swimming knows what a muscle spasm is like
23 and these people get supplemental relief from the
24 muscle spasm with cannabis and furthermore, another
25 often socially debilitating symptom of multiple
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
33
1 DRUG HEARING
2 sclerosis is that people lose bladder control and
3 cannabis very often will restore that control.
4 Similarly, the muscle spasm of
5 paraplegics and quadriplegics are relieved by
6 cannabis. In fact, if you go into some of the
7 paraplegic wards in Virginia hospitals you can
8 smell cannabis. The doctors know that the patients
9 have discovered that cannabis is much better than
10 the conventional medicines for muscle spasms which
11 is doctors' -- called Bactroban and Dantrolene has
12 very significant levels of toxicity and the third
13 one is Valium, but you have to take it in a dose of
14 about 40 milligrams a day, which means you are just
15 about zonked out. So, these doctors pretend that
16 it doesn't happen, that these veterans are smoking
17 cannabis. And furthermore, a number of them have
18 discovered that cannabis restores their ability to
19 get and maintain an erection and they can then go
20 on to have a sexual life.
21 The list is very long, but perhaps
22 given the time, I should just mention one more
23 disease I think which is really pushing -- just as
24 World War II pushed the development finally of
25 penicillin, I think AIDS is the disease which is
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
34
1 DRUG HEARING
2 really pushing cannabis as a medicine at this
3 point. AIDS patients find cannabis useful in a
4 number of ways. First of all, they suffer from
5 nausea, not just from the disease itself, but as
6 well from side effects of AZT and some of the other
7 drugs that we see, and it's very helpful with
8 that. Many others get muscle spasms and it's
9 helpful with that, but the thing that it is most
10 important for is critical in some of these patients
11 has to do with the weight loss syndrome. Many
12 people lose weight. They lose large amounts of
13 weight. Conventional medicine has not been
14 successful in retarding this weight loss. People
15 with AIDS smoke marijuana and they not only -- they
16 can either slow down the level at which they are
17 losing weight or -- and many of them, they turn it
18 around and they begin to gain weight. And, for
19 example, I have one patient who, as a matter of
20 fact, is a graduate of Harvard Medical School who
21 went on to later on get AIDS and once he learned
22 about this, he was so concerned about being
23 apprehended by the law that he moved to Amsterdam
24 and he wrote to me that for the first time in his
25 life with AIDS, he felt he was living with AIDS
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
35
1 DRUG HEARING
2 rather then dying with it. Then he called two
3 months later, "what will I do? I've run out of
4 money. I've got to come back to the United States.
5 What can I do about this?"
6 Now, there are a number of other
7 disorders and as time goes on, we are discovering
8 more and more of these and yet we are unable to
9 find the way to make this substance available to
10 patients. There is a subterranean way known as the
11 Bias Clubs. These are clubs -- the largest one
12 being in San Francisco -- where in defiance of the
13 law, people -- originally just AIDS people but now
14 people with other disorders -- come into the Bias
15 Club and if they have a note from their doctor
16 saying that marijuana would be useful to them in
17 the treatment of the AIDS reduction syndrome and
18 what have you, they are given seven grams of
19 marijuana, which is enough for two marijuana
20 cigarettes per day for a week.
21 The number of these clubs are growing,
22 but the efforts to get the government to even move
23 it from Schedule I to Schedule II and I first
24 testified on this in 1972, and it has made no -- it
25 wasn't until 1986 that the DEA finally agreed to
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
36
1 DRUG HEARING
2 have hearings. The administrative law judge who
3 heard these hearings, thousands of pages of
4 testimony of many patients and doctors, he
5 concluded that indeed, it should be moved to
6 Schedule II, but it was among one of the safest --
7 in his words, the safest therapeutic substances
8 known to man, but yet they did choose to ignore the
9 advice of their own administrative law judge.
10 MS. PIEL: Dr. Grinspoon, the time is
11 up, but we're ready for questions and I would ask
12 the panel first? Kathy Rocklen, did you have
13 questions?
14 QUESTION BY MS. ROCKLEN: Thank you.
15 Could we just talk for a moment about
16 the deleterious effect of marijuana, diminished
17 capacity, diminished productivity, the high
18 associated with it.
19 RESPONSE BY DR. GRINSPOON: Well, when
20 you talk about diminished productivity and
21 diminished capacity, I really don't know what
22 you're talking about.
23 QUESTION BY MS. ROCKLEN: You think
24 those are myths.
25 RESPONSE BY DR. GRINSPOON: Yes. I
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
37
1 DRUG HEARING
2 started my work in marijuana in 1967. I started
3 because I had a little extra time. I had finished
4 my part of a three author book and was waiting for
5 the others and idea struck me to look into
6 marijuana a bit because I was concerned that so
7 many young people were using this terribly
8 dangerous drug and if I could present a
9 scientifically sound statement on this, maybe they
10 would pay attention. They weren't paying attention
11 to what the government was saying.
12 I soon learned several things. One,
13 that while marijuana wasn't addicting, studying it
14 was, I found. I spent three years full-time
15 working on this and the reason I call this
16 "Marijuana, Reconsider,", which was the first of
17 the books I published on this, was because I had to
18 record -- because I realized I had been brainwashed
19 by just about any other sentiment. In this country
20 it is not to say it's harmless. There is no such
21 thing as harmless psychoactive drugs, but the
22 United States government has spent tons of millions
23 of dollars trying to prove its toxicity which would
24 provide some basis for this prohibition and it's
25 failed miserably. And when it takes its place in
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
38
1 DRUG HEARING
2 the pharmacopeia, it will be in the top 10 drugs of
3 limitation of toxicity. The only area that I have
4 real doubts about aside from the fact that I don't
5 want children using it, young people, the only
6 areas I have real concerns about, are the pulmonary
7 effects. Marijuana smoke contains as much and up
8 to some reports, four times as much matter as the
9 cigarette smoke and the lungs were not constructed
10 to take any kind of burned plant matter.
11 However, even there, you have to
12 consider several things. First of all, people
13 don't smoke the equivalent of a pack of marijuana
14 cigarettes a day. That would be outrageous for a
15 whole bunch of reasons. It doesn't happen. For
16 one thing, you don't get anything out of it if you
17 do. Two, the government says marijuana is more
18 dangerous now because it is more potent, which is
19 the opposite of truth. The fact of the matter is,
20 the more potent marijuana is, the more safer it is
21 at -- a person stated when marijuana just as
22 marijuana -- they will only take as much as it is
23 required to get the high and there is indeed, a
24 study which demonstrates they should give people
25 marijuana cigarettes with very little potentate and
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
39
1 DRUG HEARING
2 they will do an awful lot of puffing of it. If
3 they receive a more potent cigarette they will and
4 just take a few puffs of the more potent one. And
5 the third thing is, that there are ways of
6 separating the cannabinoids from the particular
7 matter. For example, the water pipe. The lowly
8 water pipe does some of this, but of course, the
9 governments in its wisdom -- many states have ruled
10 out paraphernalia. So people can't do that, but I
11 am assured that the technology exists now when we
12 talk about cannabis for patients in the future we
13 won't be talking about smoking. We'll be talking
14 about vaporizing cannabinoids.
15 MS. ROCKLEN: Thank you very much.
16 MS. PIEL: Do we have another
17 question?
18 MR. FISCHER: I have a couple.
19 QUESTION BY MR. FISCHER: My first
20 question is really more an observation of a list of
21 uses. I'm aware of antidotal evidence of its being
22 used for Irritable Bowel Syndrome, which I think
23 fits into some of the other kind of symptoms, also
24 as an insect repellant, and I'd like to follow up
25 on Kathy's questions, though I think perhaps what
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
40
1 DRUG HEARING
2 she was suggesting was that the marijuana high
3 itself is disabling and during the period of the
4 marijuana high, that a person really shouldn't be
5 driving. I don't think he should be writing
6 contracts for clients and there are a lot of
7 things. It's a very psychoactive drug.
8 So, my question is, to what extent on a
9 comparable basis, are there other substitute drugs
10 that don't have temporary psychological disabling
11 effect.
12 RESPONSE FROM DR. GRINSPOON: Well,
13 first of all, I would agree with you that people
14 should not drive automobiles when they are high on
15 marijuana, but they shouldn't drive automobiles
16 when they are on Valium or any of the tricyclic
17 antidepressants and so forth and so on. Marijuana
18 as medicine will not be different from these other
19 substances. Secondly, there is, you know, just as
20 there is clearly some work which shouldn't be done
21 with marijuana, there are people who claim that
22 some kinds of work are facilitated to marijuana. I
23 am limiting myself to the medicinal aspect of that
24 because it is the most urgent part of it, but, in
25 fact, marijuana has some other utilities besides
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
41
1 DRUG HEARING
2 medicinal which we needn't go into those today. In
3 fact, the last three people that I present in my
4 book, "Marijuana, The Forbidden Medicine" are two
5 scientists and a musician who believe this
6 substance has been useful in their work. But like
7 as I say, Valium or any other benzodiazepine,
8 people have to learn that there are circumstances
9 in which these drugs can be used and other
10 circumstances in which they cannot be used.
11 QUESTION FROM MR. AFFLER: I'd like you
12 to briefly address the feasibility or efficacy or
13 if there's an alternative of separating the active
14 ingredient in cannabis or the medically beneficial
15 ingredient particularly in light of the three
16 criteria you used at the beginning.
17 RESPONSE FROM DR. GRINSPOON: Well, in
18 fact, that's already been done with respect to one
19 of the cannabis. First, let me say that whole,
20 smoked marijuana there are at least 60 -- probably,
21 we think, about 61 cannabinoids. Of these 61 of
22 these chemicals that have slight variations, the
23 most active is one called Delta-9 or Delta-1
24 tetrahydrocannabinol. In 1985 the government in
25 response to a growing pressure to make this drug
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
42
1 DRUG HEARING
2 available as a medicine, allowed the production of
3 what is called Dronabinol or the propriety name is
4 Marinol and Marinol is pure THC. It's a useful
5 drug. However, the fact is that the more we learn
6 about cannabis, the more we know that the
7 therapeutic utilities of cannabis do not lie solely
8 in tetrahydrocannabinol in the delta of
9 tetrahydrocannabinol. And again, if one looks
10 through our book, "Marijuana, The Forbidden
11 Medicine," almost invariably the patient who has
12 had the opportunity to use both smoked cannabis and
13 Marinol, almost to every person the whole smoked
14 cannabis itself is more effective then Marinol.
15 And then, there is the particular problem that if
16 you take it by ingestion -- first of all, people
17 who suffer from a lot of nausea have trouble
18 ingesting anything and questions of viability
19 arise. If I take a 10 milligram tablet today, four
20 milligrams are absorbed tomorrow, there may be six
21 and there is that kind of variation within
22 individuals and between individuals. And thirdly,
23 there is no way of titrating it, whereas with
24 smoking, one can get the effect right away.
25 Now, one could imagine that we could go
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
43
1 DRUG HEARING
2 through the whole spectrum of cannabinoids and I
3 think that the particular facts of cannabis, whole
4 smoked cannabis, why it's better then THC is
5 because some of these cannabinoids act
6 synergistically. It's not just THC. But, now,
7 it's theoretically possible we could isolate each
8 and every one of them. That would cost a fortune.
9 Then we could try different combinations of these
10 things so we could get the best combination for the
11 treatment of glaucoma and that would cost another
12 fortune. And then, you know, I mention the fortune
13 because, you see, the problem here, and one of the
14 problems of making this available as a drug in our
15 country -- the way these drugs come about, here's
16 chemical "X. " Let's say Merck Company buys
17 chemical "X" or buys the patent to it and then it
18 puts the money into all of the steps that it takes
19 to get it on the shelf as a medicine. The Phase 1
20 study, the Phase 2 study and so forth. It costs --
21 for the average drug it cost 231 million dollars to
22 do that. The drug companies are willing to do that
23 because the patent allows them to charge whatever
24 they want for 17 years, soon to be expanded to 20
25 years. There is no patent on the planet -- no drug
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
44
1 DRUG HEARING
2 company is going to do the work that I just
3 mentioned -- is going to isolate these cannabinoids
4 and put them together and so forth and so on.
5 The only source of this kind of
6 resource to do this would be the United States
7 government and of course, the United States
8 government is doing everything it can to prevent
9 the development of this substance as a medicine.
10 Right now, the best way to use cannabis as a
11 medicine is to smoke it.
12 MS. PIEL: Mr. Knapp?
13 MR. KNAPP: One quick question. In a
14 recent document produced by the United States
15 Department of Justice Drug Enforcement
16 Administration entitled "Speaking Out Against Drug
17 Legalization," referring to the American Medical
18 Association, the American Glaucoma Society,
19 American Academy of Opthamology, the International
20 Federation of Multiple Sclerosis Society and the
21 American Cancer Society, they say that not one
22 American health association accepts marijuana as
23 medicines. Statements issued by these
24 organizations express concerns over the harmful
25 effects of the drugs and over the lack of solid
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
45
1 DRUG HEARING
2 research demonstrating that they might do more good
3 then harm.
4 I'd ask you in light of your testimony
5 today and the research you've conducted, if you
6 could comment on first of all, the status of
7 marijuana as medicine within all these
8 organizations and two, you've just started to
9 allude to it, since it's a Schedule I drug, the
10 United States government's role in allowing it to
11 be used for the creation of solid research one way
12 or the other.
13 RESPONSE BY DR. GRINSPOON: Well, now,
14 that is absolutely true. These various medical
15 organizations are not supportive of medical
16 marijuana yet, but this is going to change. I
17 think the harbinger of this was the decision of the
18 Journal of the American Medical Association to
19 publish, I think they call it a commentary, that
20 Mr. Becklyer (sic.) and I wrote this past June, in
21 which we made the point that these physicians
22 really should reconsider their position on this
23 drug. That more and more of them are coming to
24 understand that marijuana has an important role in
25 this and the position should no longer be the
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
46
1 DRUG HEARING
2 reason why the government won't support this. One
3 is always hearing no, we can't. But look at the
4 American Cancer Society. It says no, it's not
5 useful and so forth. But, on the other hand, there
6 was recently, a couple of years ago, a survey of
7 oncologists by Mr. Gobler (sic) and Mr. Kleinman
8 that demonstrated that oncologists are better
9 educated about this then most physicians because
10 they see a lot of patients who have to go through
11 cancer chemotherapy and 44 percent of them said
12 that and that was a few years ago. I'd wager it's
13 much higher now that they would recommend cannabis
14 to a patient.
15 Now, you see, why are the physicians
16 lagging behind here? Physicians get their drug
17 education in three ways. One, they read journals.
18 There are no journal articles about marijuana as a
19 medicine and two, they listen to the detail men and
20 women. These are the drug salespeople that come
21 into the doctor's office and ply them with samples
22 and gifts and listen to their spiel about drugs and
23 third, there are various promotional devices and
24 advertisements from the drug companies, but there
25 is none.
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
47
1 DRUG HEARING
2 Physicians are learning about
3 cannabis. How are they learning? A most unusual
4 way to learn about drugs for physicians. They're
5 learning from their patients. There is a patient in
6 San Francisco who comes to his physician who knows
7 he's losing weight very rapidly and he has not seen
8 him in three weeks and he comes in and he says
9 "doctor, I want to get on your scale and show you
10 something. " He gets on the scale and lo and
11 behold, not only has he not been losing weight over
12 the last three weeks, but he gained some and he
13 goes on to tell the doctor he goes to the Buyers
14 Club in San Francisco and getting cannabis and
15 smoking it. This doctor is astonished. He's
16 beginning to pay some attention to this. This is
17 happening very rapidly today and that list that you
18 read, I would be willing to wager that's going to
19 change very shortly. As I said, I think the fact
20 that Gammer (sic.) published that article suggests
21 that something is going on in terms of what
22 physicians are coming to understand about the
23 usefulness of this substance as medicine.
24 MS. PIEL: Unfortunately, we are again
25 out of time, but we thank you very much, Dr.
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
48
1 DRUG HEARING
2 Grinspoon, for your knowledge.
3 MS. PIEL: Our next performer is Robert
4 Gangi, whom I believe is here from the smile that I
5 saw and exchanged with him. He is the executive
6 director of the Correctional Association of New
7 York where he has -- thank you, doctor. You can
8 have your tray back. Glad to have had you with us
9 --
10 DR. GRINSPOON: My pleasure.
11 MS. PIEL: Back to Robert Gangi. He's
12 held the post there for 13 years. It's an
13 organization that advises and analyzes problems in
14 the criminal justice system in New York with
15 special attention to the conditions of the prisons,
16 and Mr. Gangi is a critic of the Rockefeller Drug
17 Laws and he is going to tell us a little bit about
18 them and what the position of the association is
19 and what his opinion is and what some of the facts
20 are concerning the Rockefeller Drug Laws today.
21 TESTIMONY BY ROBERT GANGI, DIRECTOR OF THE
22 CORRECTIONAL ASSOCIATION OF NEW YORK:
23 Thanks alot. I have some literature, a
24 position paper, that I'll be following along with
25 some fact sheets that are relevant to the question
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
49
1 DRUG HEARING
2 of imprisonment in New York State and the
3 Rockefeller Drug Laws.
4 Like the good doctor before me, I began
5 studying marijuana in the late 60's also, and came
6 to a very similar conclusion that he has about the
7 basic benign quality of the drug, although without
8 all the scientific research that he obviously
9 engaged in.
10 As I said, following along the position
11 paper that the Correctional Association has
12 prepared on the Rockefeller Drug Laws, the laws
13 were passed in 1973 with the active support of
14 Governor Rockefeller. The common wisdom about the
15 passage of the laws -- it was right around the time
16 that Rockefeller had decided that in order to
17 advance his political career effectively, he could
18 no longer be perceived as a kind of Javits liberal
19 within the republican party and he had to adopt a
20 more conservative political posture, and he did a
21 number of things in order to advance that agenda.
22 One of the things was the way he
23 handled the prison uprising in Attica and another
24 thing that he did was push through some very harsh
25 mandatory sentencing laws in 1973, the most well
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
50
1 DRUG HEARING
2 known of which are the New York Drug Laws, which
3 have become known as the Rockefeller Drug Laws.
4 Talking about marijuana, the law was
5 amended in 1979, mainly to reduce the penalties for
6 offenses involving marijuana. The punishments
7 required by this law, though at this time for the
8 possession or sale of heroin, cocaine and other
9 hard drugs, are still amongst the most severe in
10 the nation. For example, this statute mandates
11 that a judge impose a prison term of no less than
12 15 years to life for anyone convicted of selling
13 two ounces or possessing four ounces of a narcotic
14 substance. The penalties apply without regard to
15 the circumstances of the offense or the
16 individual's character or background. Whether the
17 person is a first time or repeat offender, for
18 example, is irrelevant.
19 I'd like to sort of quickly run through
20 what we see as the principal problems created by
21 the implementation of this law. The first is
22 simply the expense of it. As of December 31st, at
23 the end of last year there were 8,433 drug
24 offenders locked up in New York State prisons under
25 the Rockefeller Drug Laws. It cost nearly 850
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
51
1 DRUG HEARING
2 million dollars for the state to construct prisons
3 to house these people and the operating expenses
4 for confining them on an annual basis comes to
5 about 253 million dollars.
6 Another problem helped created by these
7 laws is prison overcrowding. To accommodate the
8 tremendous growth in the inmate population caused
9 in part by the application of the Rockefeller Drug
10 Laws, New York State has spent extraordinary sums
11 each year on building new prisons. Since 1981 the
12 state has added nearly 40,000 beds to its prison
13 system at an average construction cost of $100,000,
14 not counting debt service. So, the total cost of
15 this prison expansion program simply for the
16 construction, comes to nearly four billion
17 dollars.
18 Despite these enormous expenditures,
19 New York City prison expansion has not kept pace
20 with the increase in the number of inmates. The
21 state's correctional system is hobbled by crisis
22 conditions. The prisons are overcrowded. There are
23 not enough programs to productively occupy
24 prisoners and idleness and tension levels are
25 high. The system has been forced to double-bunk or
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
52
1 DRUG HEARING
2 double-cell about 9,000 inmates and especially has
3 to this arrangement, given the presence of
4 tuberculosis and its potential to spread among
5 inmates and staff. The state has also been forced
6 to rush a large number of prisoners out the back
7 door of the system to work-release and day
8 reporting programs and have not been able to
9 provide participants with adequate support or
10 supervision.
11 The third problem, and this is
12 probably, I think, the most significant, and that's
13 the skewed effect on law enforcement. These
14 statutes result too often in the arrest,
15 prosecution and long-term imprisonment of minor
16 dealers or persons only marginally involved in the
17 drug trade. Major traffickers usually escape
18 sanctions.
19 The problem -- and this is a key point
20 -- the problem is the Rockefeller Drug Laws place
21 the main criteria for culpability on the weight of
22 the drugs and the person's possession when he or
23 she is apprehended, not on the actual role that he
24 or she plays in the drug transaction. Aware of the
25 law's emphasis, drug kingpins will rarely, if ever,
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
53
1 DRUG HEARING
2 be foolish or reckless enough to be caught carrying
3 narcotics. Whereas, a teenage mother employed as a
4 drug courier by the same kingpin, may very well be
5 picked up on the street and charged with a serious
6 felony for having in her possession a small amount
7 of drugs.
8 Another criticism of the law that's
9 relevant is that major dealers often take advantage
10 of one of its provisions permitting lifetime
11 probation sentences in exchange for cooperation in
12 turning other drug offenders over to the
13 authorities. Less culpable persons generally do
14 not possess information that would be useful to
15 prosecutors. These people often decline to
16 plea-bargain and insist on a trial instead. If
17 these persons are found guilty, they frequently
18 must be sentenced to the mandatory minimum term of
19 15 years to life in prison.
20 Our overriding point here is that this
21 statue as a principal weapon of and as implemented
22 in the so-called "War Against Drugs," results
23 directly in the following misguided practices:
24 Law enforcement agencies focus their
25 efforts on the minor actors in the trade who are
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
54
1 DRUG HEARING
2 the most easily arrested, prosecuted and penalized,
3 rather then on the middle and high-level criminals
4 who are drug dealings' true masterminds and
5 profiteers.
6 The injustices is another problem
7 caused by this statute. The Rockefeller Drug Laws
8 result in many individual cases of injustice where
9 people with no histories of violent or predatory
10 behavior, who function barely on the margins of
11 outlaw drug markets, are slammed with the harshest
12 punishments our criminal justice system can
13 dispense.
14 For example, the Correctional
15 Association's research shows that in New York that
16 95 percent of the women charged with drug couriers
17 in our sample, had no previous criminal
18 involvement. In New York, murderers, arsonists and
19 kidnappers face the same penalty as drug mules.
20 Rape, the sexual abuse of a child and armed robbery
21 carry lesser punishments.
22 Our research showed also that many drug
23 mules are often poor and uneducated women who are
24 coerced by threats of violence or tricked into
25 transporting drugs, and are therefore, highly
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
55
1 DRUG HEARING
2 culpable of the charges against them. However,
3 many of them facing 15 years to life in prison,
4 plead guilty to a lesser offense in exchange for a
5 much shorter term of incarceration. Some who are
6 mothers and primary caretakers of children say they
7 are afraid to risk long-term separation from their
8 families by presenting their cases at trial. In
9 effect and in a mockery of the justice system, the
10 Rockefeller Drug Laws are being used to bludgeon
11 guilty pleas from people who are facing long prison
12 sentences and do not have the resources or savvy to
13 defend themselves.
14 The reform that we propose is,
15 basically, to repeal the Rockefeller Drug Laws so
16 the prison terms would no longer be mandated for
17 drug offenders convicted of less serious crimes.
18 Flexibility in sentencing would allow judges to
19 utilize less costly and more productive punishments
20 for many of the minor drug offenders who are taking
21 up increasing amounts of valuable prison space
22 because of the impact of the Rockefeller Drug
23 Laws.
24 It is important to note that many
25 persons sentenced under the statue are locked up
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
56
1 DRUG HEARING
2 merely for possession of narcotics. At the end of
3 last year, about 3,000 people were incarcerated in
4 New York for drug possession under these laws. It
5 costs the state about 90 million dollars a year
6 simply to keep these people confined.
7 The alternative punishment that we
8 propose, that we think would be the most effective
9 as an alternative to this law, would be intensive
10 supervised probation that includes such features as
11 day reporting, community service, job training and
12 mandatory participation in drug treatment
13 programs. Implemented properly, this program can
14 closely monitor the offenders' behaviors while
15 simultaneously providing them with support services
16 and making sure, where appropriate, that they repay
17 the community and/or the victim for the property
18 stolen or the damage done. The added value of a
19 well-run alternative punishment is that it gives
20 selected offenders a critical opportunity to become
21 more abiding members of society. Under current
22 practices, too many people are unnecessarily
23 relegated to the grim and crimogenic world of state
24 prison.
25 I'd like to make a couple of other
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
57
1 DRUG HEARING
2 points that are not included in the position
3 paper. One is to refer you to the fact sheet that,
4 basically, reflects the trends in New York State
5 prison commitments just to show the extraordinary
6 shift there's been in law enforcement practices in
7 New York State.
8 In 1980, for example, 57 percent of the
9 people sent to New York State prisons were sent for
10 violent offenses. In 1994 it was only 33 percent.
11 1n 1980, 11 percent of the people sent to New York
12 State prisons were for drug offenses. By 1994, it
13 had risen to 45 percent. So, there's been an
14 extraordinary shift in the way we apply our law
15 enforcement resources and in part, that's driven by
16 the presence on the books of the Rockefeller Drug
17 Laws.
18 I'd like to make one other important
19 point. There's been a lot of publicity lately
20 about the sort of confluence of race and the
21 criminal justice system. The OJ Simpson trial was
22 one obvious example of this and also, last week an
23 organization based in Washington called the
24 Sentencing Project, published a report that showed
25 that on any given day in the United States about
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
58
1 DRUG HEARING
2 one-third of young African American men are under
3 the custody of the criminal justice system. That's
4 either from jail or prison or on probation or
5 parole. And in large part, that extraordinary
6 disproportion of young black men under the controls
7 of the criminal justice system is due to the way we
8 enforce the Rockefeller Drug Laws. Because again,
9 the people in the inner-city communities in terms
10 of their activities in the drug trade are much more
11 arrestable, since so often the drug trade is done
12 out in the open and in the street. That's where
13 law enforcement concentrates its resources even
14 though all the research shows apparently that more
15 than half the people who use and even sell drugs
16 are white. And the results of that decision by the
17 law enforcement authorities, again backed up by the
18 presence on the books of the Rockefeller Drug Laws,
19 is that the so-called "War Against Drugs" is
20 carried out, if you will, in a discriminatory
21 fashion.
22 So, although again, over half of the
23 people who use drugs and sell drugs are white, in
24 New York State, for example, over 90 percent of the
25 people who are in State Prison on a drug offense,
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
59
1 DRUG HEARING
2 that is the sale or possession of narcotics, are
3 African American or Latino. The exact figure
4 actually, the end of 1994, was 93.8 percent of the
5 people in New York State Prison on a drug offense
6 were African American or Latino.
7 So, those are the major points I wanted
8 to make on the Rockefeller Drug Laws.
9 MS. PIEL: Thank you. Now, this time
10 we're going to have questions from the -- Mr.
11 Kayser has a question and then we'll turn to the
12 audience.
13 QUESTION FROM MR. KAYSER: Mr. Gangi,
14 I'm particularly interested in your testimony in
15 that it does -- what you do is move back towards --
16 you maintain a criminal system with respect to drug
17 regulations. As I understand it, you simply relax
18 the rules and, therefore, the reasons as I
19 understood it, that people move toward more
20 stringent criminal penalties initially, is the idea
21 that you're going to either -- the idea for the
22 people who moved in that direction initially, was
23 they felt that you needed stricter penalties to
24 stamp out drugs and of course, you know, it didn't
25 occur, but to maintain our criminal system, you
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
60
1 DRUG HEARING
2 still have no consumer protection in terms of
3 labeling or substance of drugs when they're sold.
4 There is no reason to think that relaxing criminal
5 penalties would do anything less to keep drugs from
6 being in society. I don't think you contend that.
7 We still would not have the revenues from adequate
8 treatment for people who have drug problems by
9 relaxing drug laws, per se, even though that's the
10 direction we want to go, but we don't have
11 resources for that under your proposal and we are
12 still subsidizing drug sales by not collecting
13 taxes, because we have a black market still in the
14 sale of drugs.
15 Would you oppose or would you think it
16 would be compared to our current system, support in
17 the sale of drugs legally through licensed outlets,
18 like pharmacies, in which we collect taxes,
19 allocate the tax money for treatment and,
20 basically, remove from the criminal arena the sale
21 and distribution of drugs in that manner, at least
22 as to adults?
23 RESPONSE BY MR. GANGI: A couple of
24 responses to your question and to your point. One,
25 is that our view is and this is the position of the
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
61
1 DRUG HEARING
2 Correctional Association, is that the Rockefeller
3 Drug Laws and other mandatory sentencing laws that
4 result in the wide -- broad-based imprisonment of
5 many low-level drug offenders should be repealed.
6 We think that would result in significant savings
7 of money because it would necessarily result in
8 many fewer people going to prison. It would also
9 result in our refocusing of our law enforcement
10 resources. So much of the time and resources of the
11 police and the courts are spent in apprehending and
12 prosecuting these low-level drug offenders.
13 So, our full proposal would be to take
14 the resources that would be saved and that would
15 result in literally hundreds of millions of dollars
16 a year from the dismantling of the mandatory
17 sentencing laws and put that into drug treatment
18 programs and family support programs and job
19 creation and development programs in the inner
20 cities as a way of addressing the crime problems
21 and the other problems that afflict the inner city,
22 including the use of drugs.
23 So, we think that the overall strategy
24 would begin through education, treatment and
25 prevention to help deal with the drug issue.
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
62
1 DRUG HEARING
2 Now, in terms of your question about
3 the decriminalization of the legal --
4 MR. KAYSER: The collection of taxes,
5 the millions of dollars of taxes.
6 MR. GANGI: -- the Correctional
7 Association does not have a formal position. My
8 personal position based on looking at this problem
9 from a number of different angles over the years,
10 is that decriminalization and licensing of some
11 sort does make sense, makes eminent sense, but
12 again, it's not the formal position of the
13 Correctional Association.
14 Let me make another point. I think
15 that critical from our standpoint is that sort of a
16 larger question is of how we use the criminal
17 justice system today and what in our judgement
18 what's happened goes beyond the drug or issue of
19 the drugs and as a critical part of this, is that
20 because of the significant changes in our society
21 and our economy, hundreds of thousands, if not
22 millions of people, that we commonly refer to as
23 the underclass have been disenfranchised and
24 marginalized in our society. There is no
25 institutional role in our economy and our societies
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
63
1 DRUG HEARING
2 for these people and the criminal justice system
3 steps in, apprehends them, criminalizes them and
4 locks them up. If we are going to address that
5 problem, not only do we have do things like
6 dismantle the drug laws, if that's all we did or if
7 we legalized drugs and didn't then address the
8 tremendous economic and social problems that
9 afflict those communities, we would not, in my
10 judgment, be making a major step forward in terms
11 of whatever social progress or improvement for the
12 quality of life in our cities.
13 MS. PIEL: Thank you. Now we're going
14 to ask people in the audience if they would like to
15 ask questions and would you come up and take the
16 microphone and bring it back.
17 Any questions? No questions.
18 Any members of the panel have any
19 questions? Oh, all right, please come up.
20 QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE MEMBER: It's a
21 friendly question. We often hear estimates of how
22 much drug abuse costs Americans in the "X" number
23 of billions of dollars lost in the workplace, etc.
24 What is the average cost to a family where a family
25 member has been in contact with the criminal
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
64
1 DRUG HEARING
2 justice system? Obviously, if your child is going
3 before a court you have to take off from work, you
4 have to hire a lawyer. Very few cases of drug abuse
5 other than the worst cases would destroy someone's
6 life the way an extended prison term would; is
7 there any quantified estimate of what this is
8 costing on that level?
9 RESPONSE FROM MR. GANGI: No, none that
10 I know of. We have not done that kind of analysis
11 and I'm not aware of anyone who has, but I think
12 that you raise an important point though, which is
13 -- and there are more and more social analysts and
14 academics looking at the issue of the unintended
15 consequences of incarceration, if you will. I
16 didn't refer to this, but I think probably most of
17 us know, there's been an extraordinary increase in
18 the use of imprisonment in the last 20 years. Much
19 of it around or driven by the mandatory sentencing
20 laws that I've discussed today.
21 For example, in New York State we had
22 12,500 people in prison in 1973. Today we have
23 nearly 70,000. In the country over that same
24 period of time, the prison population went from
25 about 250,000 to now, 1,500,000. So there's been
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
65
1 DRUG HEARING
2 an extraordinary explosion. I think that's not too
3 dramatic a term to use in the use of incarceration
4 in the prison population.
5 There's an extraordinary shift in our
6 public policy and I think it has had what are now
7 being referred to as unintended consequences that I
8 think policymakers have not considered, and one way
9 when you look at this, to look at the effect on the
10 family and obviously, there are so many more
11 families now who are impacted by the use of
12 incarceration. So many more families where young
13 men have been taken out and so many more
14 communities where young men are virtually missing
15 in action because they are doing time in upstate
16 prison facilities.
17 So again, there has been, as far as I'm
18 aware of, no quantifiable analysis of what the
19 monetary effect of that is, but there is beginning
20 to be some kind of analysis of what the social and
21 economic effects to those particular communities
22 are. It's primarily, as you might imagine, people
23 are seeing it as -- given that prisons are
24 warehouses and they are often criminogenic, that
25 the effect is deleterious to those communities
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
66
1 DRUG HEARING
2 where so many young men who go through those
3 communities experience the prison system.
4 MS. PIEL: Thank you. Mr. Knapp has a
5 question on our committee.
6 QUESTION FROM MR. KNAPP: I have a
7 question concerning the fact sheet. If you look at
8 1985, the percentage of violent felonies with
9 respect to total commitments is 56 percent. The
10 percentage of drug arrests is 17 percent.
11 RESPONSE FROM MR. GANGI: To correct
12 the record, this is prison commitments, not
13 arrests.
14 QUESTION FROM MR. KNAPP: Excuse me,
15 commitments. I stand corrected. That focuses the
16 question even more then. If you go from 56 and 17
17 in 1985 and three years later in 1988, your
18 statistics indicate that the percent of violent
19 felony commitments has dropped from 56 to 38 and
20 the percent of drug commitments has risen from 17
21 percent to 37 percent, do you have any explanation
22 for the dramatic shift which seems to have occurred
23 during those five years, economic, social, any
24 explanation at all?
25 RESPONSE FROM MR. GANGI: Two primary
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
67
1 DRUG HEARING
2 explanations. One was the more widespread use of
3 crack and the effects that was having on the
4 communities and then, basically, the government's
5 response to that problem. The primary response was
6 a law enforcement response so that in New York City
7 under Mayor Koch and Police Commissioner Ben Ward,
8 we instituted what was referred to as the TNT
9 Squad, Tactical Narcotic Teams. Whose primary job
10 was to target drug-infested communities and do buy
11 and bust operations and drug sweeps and arrest lots
12 more people. There was an extraordinary increase
13 during those years in the number of arrests of
14 people for low-level drug offenses.
15 So, the primary reason for the shift in
16 those numbers, was the change in public policy.
17 Although, it was in response to a real problem,
18 which was the great increase in the use of crack.
19 MS. PIEL: Thank you. Thank you very
20 much, Mr. Gangi. We have one more question and then
21 this will be the last question.
22 QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE MEMBER: Mr.
23 Gangi, I have frequently seen in national justice
24 documents and other papers a justification of the
25 prison system as a way of providing treatment for
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
68
1 DRUG HEARING
2 individuals with substance abuse problems and I
3 believe that cuts across the board, not just people
4 who are arrested on narcotics charges, but everyone
5 in prison.
6 I was wondering if you have a comment
7 on the rationale of re-enforcing the prison systems
8 as a means of funneling people into treatment and I
9 am curious if there are any figures on the efficacy
10 of treatment in prison for reducing those numbers.
11 RESPONSE FROM MR. GANGI: I think it is
12 a good question and again, sort of raises a larger
13 issue of how prison systems have in a way become
14 extensions of our welfare and social services
15 system. Because now many people locked up get
16 services, frequently inadequate services, in prison
17 that probably we would have been better off and
18 they would have been better off, if they got them
19 in their community. That's where they get
20 educated. Frequently, that's where they get
21 vocational training, that's where they get
22 healthcare, that's where they get shelter, three
23 meals a day, and that's where they get drug
24 treatment.
25 There has been across the country in
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
69
1 DRUG HEARING
2 some states experiments with different kinds of
3 drug treatment programs, although recently there's
4 been a cutback in the amount of resources set aside
5 for that as sort of a more right-wing philosophy of
6 government that has taken hold in many places.
7 There is some evidence that drug
8 treatment in prisons can work. Frequently, for the
9 first year or two or three somebody is out of
10 prison, but will not work out over the long term at
11 least in terms of recession rates, unless there is
12 some aftercare and some backup in the community.
13 Our view is that drug treatment can be
14 very useful for many people who are addicts and
15 that the criminal justice system has a role to
16 play, but we would prefer to see drug treatment not
17 done in prison. We think it's more difficult in
18 that environment to do effective drug treatment.
19 In fact, drug treatment done in the community and
20 perhaps, the criminal justice system held as a
21 hammer over someone's head -- in other words, we
22 have no problem with the person being forced into
23 drug treatment and to stay in drug treatment and if
24 they fail in drug treatment, a possible consequence
25 of that would be them going to jail or prison. And,
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
70
1 DRUG HEARING
2 the evidence seems to show that that type of
3 approach increases the retention rate of the drug
4 treatment programs that people participate in. As
5 you might easily understand, the longer someone
6 stays in a drug treatment program and the higher
7 retention rate the drug treatment program has, the
8 more likely that person is to have a more
9 successful experience with treatment and finally
10 leave the program and be able to stay out of crime,
11 stay away from crime and hold a decent job.
12 MS. PIEL: Thank you very much, Mr.
13 Gangi.
14 MR. GANGI: Thank you.
15 MS. PIEL: We now have Mr. William
16 Buckley. Mr. Buckley is a distinguished television
17 personality. We know him from the Firing Line. We
18 know him as the editor of the National Review and
19 we know him also as an novelist and we understand
20 also he plays the harpsichord, but he isn't going
21 to do that today. He has also written in the New
22 York Post a favorable review of our committee's
23 report and he is here today to give us his views.
24 I'm a strict taskmistress and I will
25 call your time a little after 15 minutes and then
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
71
1 DRUG HEARING
2 we'll have questions.
3 TESTIMONY FROM MR. WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR.:
4 Thank you, I've never done this before,
5 so tell me if I have the drill wrong.
6 MS. PIEL: You're going to talk and I
7 know you know how to do that.
8 MR. BUCKLEY: I have a brief
9 statement. I've been given 15 minutes to make a
10 statement on a plague that consumes an estimated 75
11 billion dollars a year of public money. Exact
12 estimates is 70 billion dollars a year from
13 consumers and is responsible for nearly 50 percent
14 of those 1.3 million Americans who are today in
15 jail, and consumes an estimated 50 percent of the
16 trial time of our judiciary, and occupies the time
17 of 400,000 policemen -- a plague for which no cure
18 is at hand, nor in prospect. In 15 minutes, on
19 such a subject, I can only offer you a haiku.
20 Perhaps you will understand if I
21 chronicle my own itinerary on the subject of public
22 policy with respect to those drugs that are
23 illegal. When I ran for mayor of New York, the
24 political race were jocular, but the thought given
25 to municipal problems was entirely serious, and in
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
72
1 DRUG HEARING
2 my papers on drugs and in my post-election book, I
3 advocated their continued embargo on unusual
4 grounds.
5 I had read, and I think the evidence
6 continues to affirm it, that drug taking is a
7 gregarious activity. What this means, I reason,
8 that an addict is in pursuit of social company and,
9 therefore, tends to entice others to share with him
10 his habit. Under the circumstances, I've reasoned,
11 it can reasonably be held that drug taking is a
12 contagious disease and for that reason entitled to
13 the police protection extended to shield the
14 innocent from Typhoid Mary.
15 Some sport was made of my position by
16 the Libertarians, including Professor Milton
17 Friedman, who asked whether the police might
18 legitimately be summoned if it was established that
19 keeping company with me was a contagious activity.
20 I recall this reasoning in search of
21 philosophical perspectives. Back in 1965, I sought
22 to pay due deference to Libertarian presumptions
23 against outlawing any activity potentially harmful
24 only to the person who engages in that activity. I
25 cited John Stewart Mill and, while at it, opined
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
73
1 DRUG HEARING
2 that there was no warrant for requiring
3 motorcyclists to wear a helmet. I was seeking and
4 I found it a reason to override the presumption
5 against inviting the intercession of the state.
6 About 10 years later, I deferred to a
7 different allegiance, this one not opposition to
8 state intervention, which opposition is properly
9 superordinated, not as an absolute, but as a
10 presumption. A Conservative should evaluate the
11 practicality of a legal constriction, as for
12 instance, those states tend to do whose statute
13 books continue to outlaw sodomy, which interdiction
14 is unenforceable, making the law nothing more than
15 print on paper.
16 I came to the conclusion that the
17 so-called "War Against Drugs" was not working, that
18 it would not work absent a change in the structure
19 of the civil rights to which we are accustomed to
20 and for which we cling to as a part of our
21 patrimony. And that if that war was not working,
22 we should correctly explore the casualties
23 resulting in its failure to work.
24 That consideration encouraged me to
25 weigh two occurring principles; the calculus of
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
74
1 DRUG HEARING
2 pain and pleasure introduced by the illegalization
3 of drugs. A year or so ago, I thought to attempt
4 to calculate a ratio, however roughly arrived at,
5 towards an elaboration of which I'd attempt to
6 place a dollar figure on matters that do not lend
7 themselves to quantification.
8 Even so, the law, lacking any other
9 recourse, every day countenances to such
10 quantifications, as when asking a jury, for
11 example, to put a dollar figure on the damage done
12 by the loss of a plaintiff's right arm, amputated
13 by defective machinery in the factory. My
14 enterprise, in fact, became allegorical in
15 character, but the model, I think, proved useful in
16 sharpening perspectives.
17 Professor Steven Duke of the Yale
18 University Law School in his valuable book and
19 scholarly essays, reminds us that it isn't the use
20 of the illegal drugs that we have any right to
21 complain about, but it is the abuse of such drugs.
22 It is acknowledged that tens of million of
23 Americans -- I have seen the figure of 85 million
24 -- at one time or another consumed or in whatever
25 manner exposed themselves to an illegal drug. But,
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
75
1 DRUG HEARING
2 the estimate authorized by the Federal agencies
3 charged with such explorations is that there are
4 only one million regular cocaine users, defined as
5 those who use the drug at least once in the
6 preceding week. There are again, an informed
7 estimate of five million Americans who regularly
8 use marijuana, and again, an estimated 80 million
9 who once upon a time or even twice upon a time,
10 inhaled marijuana.
11 From the above, we reasonably deduce
12 that the American who abuses the drug, here defined
13 as the American who became addicted to the drug, or
14 even habituated to it, is a very small percentage
15 of those who have experimented with the drug or who
16 have continued to use the drug without any
17 observable distraction in that person's life or
18 career.
19 About such users one might say that
20 they are the equivalent of those Americans who
21 drink liquor, but do not become alcoholics, or
22 those Americans who smoke cigarettes, but do not
23 suffer a shortened life span because of that drug's
24 effects.
25 Curiosity naturally causes us to ask
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
76
1 DRUG HEARING
2 next how many users of the illegal drugs, in fact,
3 die from the use of them? The answer is
4 complicated in part because marijuana finds itself
5 lumped together with cocaine and heroin, and nobody
6 has ever found dead from marijuana. The question
7 of deaths from cocaine is complicated by the fact
8 of impurity.
9 It would not be useful to draw any
10 conclusions about alcohol consumption, say for
11 instance, by observing that in 1931, 1,000
12 Americans died from alcohol consumption. If it
13 happened that half or more than one half of those
14 deaths were the result of drinking alcohol with
15 toxic ingredients extrinsic to the drug as
16 conventionally used. When alcohol was illegal, the
17 consumer could never know whether he had been given
18 relatively harmless alcohol to drink -- such
19 alcoholic beverages as we find today in the liquor
20 store -- or whether the bootleggers' distillery had
21 come up with paralyzing rot gut.
22 By the same token, purchasers of
23 illegal cocaine and heroin cannot know whether they
24 are consuming a drug that would qualify for
25 regulated consumption after clinical analysis.
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
77
1 DRUG HEARING
2 But, we do know this, and I approach
3 the nexus of my inquiry, which is that more people
4 die every year as a result of the "War Against
5 Drugs" then die from what we call, generically,
6 overdosing. These fatalities include, perhaps most
7 prominently, drug agents who compete for commercial
8 territory, but include also people who are robbed
9 and killed by persons desperate for money with
10 which to buy the drugs to which they have become
11 addicted.
12 This is perhaps the moment to note that
13 the pharmaceutical cost of cocaine and heroin is
14 approximately one percent of the street price of
15 those drugs. In as much as a cocaine addict can
16 spend as much as $1,000 per week to sustain his
17 habit, he needs to come up with that $1,000. The
18 approximate fencing cost of stolen goods is 80
19 percent, so that to come up with $1,000 in which to
20 pay a narcotic dealer can require stealing $5,000
21 worth of whatever -- jewels, cars, cash. We can
22 see that at free market rates, $10 per week would
23 be sufficient to provide the addict with the
24 cocaine he now needs to procure in our wartime drug
25 situation to come up with $1,000 worth of cocaine
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
78
1 DRUG HEARING
2 to support his habit.
3 My mind turns, then, to auxiliary
4 expenses -- auxiliary pains, if you wish, the crime
5 rate whatever its modest little curtsey last year
6 towards diminution, continues brave and, probably,
7 will continue to rise; indeed, serious crime is 480
8 percent higher than it was in 1965. The
9 correlation is not absolute, but it is helpful.
10 Namely the crime is reduced by the number of
11 available enforcers of law and order, namely
12 policemen.
13 The heralded new crime legislation,
14 passed last year and proclaimed so boisterously by
15 President Clinton, would provide for 100,000 extra
16 policemen, even if only for a limited amount of
17 time. But 400,000 policeman would be free to
18 pursue criminals engaged in other activities than
19 the sale and distribution of drugs if such sale and
20 distribution, at a price that pursues no profit,
21 were it be done by say, a Federal drugstore?
22 So then, we attempt to put a value on
23 the goods stolen by addicts, the figure arrived at
24 by Professor Duke being 10 billion dollars. But we
25 need to add to this pain of stolen property,
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
79
1 DRUG HEARING
2 surely, the pain suffered by victims of robbers.
3 If someone breaks into your house at night, perhaps
4 holding you at gunpoint while taking your money and
5 your jewelry and whatever, I think it is reasonable
6 to assign a "higher cost" to the episode then the
7 commercial value of the money stolen and the
8 missing jewelry to what you have suffered.
9 If we were modest, we might reasonably,
10 if arbitrarily, put at $1,000 the value of the
11 victim's pain. But then the hurt, and
12 psychological trauma, might be evaluated by a jury
13 at ten times or even 100 times that sum.
14 But, we must consider other factors,
15 not readily quantifiable, but no less tangible.
16 Fifty years ago to walk at night across Central
17 Park was no more adventurous than to walk down
18 Fifth Avenue. But walking across the park is no
19 longer done, save by the kind of people who climbed
20 the Matterhorn.
21 Is it fair to put a value on a lost
22 amenity? If the Metropolitan Museum were to close,
23 might we, without fear of distortion, judge that we
24 have been deprived of something valuable? If it is
25 valuable, how valuable is it? What value might we
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
80
1 DRUG HEARING
2 assign to confidence that, at night that one can
3 sleep without fear of intrusion by criminals
4 seeking money or goods exchangeable for money?
5 Pursuing the Utilitarian analysis, we
6 ask: What are the relative costs of on the one
7 hand, medical and psychological treatment for
8 addicts, and on the other, incarceration for
9 drugs? It transpires that treatment is seven times
10 more cost effective. By this is meant that one
11 dollar spent on the treatment of an addict reduces
12 the probabilities of continued addiction seven
13 times more than one dollar spent on incarceration.
14 Looked at another way: Treatment for
15 addicts is not now available for 40 percent of
16 those who would benefit from such treatment. Yet,
17 we are willing to build more and more jails in
18 which to isolate more and more drug users, even
19 though at one-seventh the cost of building and
20 maintaining jail space, we would subsidize
21 commensurately effective medical care and
22 psychological treatment.
23 I have spared you, even as I have
24 spared myself, an arithmetical consummation of my
25 inquiry, but the data here cited instruct us that
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
81
1 DRUG HEARING
2 the cost of the drug war is many times more
3 painful, in all these manifestations, then would be
4 the licensing of drugs combined with intensive
5 education to nonusers and intensive education
6 designed to warn those who experiment with drugs.
7 We have seen a substantial reduction in
8 the use of tobacco over the last 30 years, and this
9 is not because tobacco became illegal, but because
10 the sentient community began in substantial numbers
11 to apprehend the high cost of tobacco to human
12 health.
13 If Ninety-five percent of the American
14 people can experiment with drugs and resist
15 addiction, using their own resources and profiting
16 from information publicly available, we can
17 reasonably hope that approximately the same number
18 would resist the temptation to purchase such drugs
19 even if they were available at a public or Federal
20 drugstore at minimal cost.
21 Added to the above is the point of
22 civil rectitude. Those who suffer from the abuse
23 of drugs have themselves to blame for it. This
24 does not mean that society is absolved from active
25 concern for their plight. It does mean that their
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
82
1 DRUG HEARING
2 plight is subordinate to the plight of those
3 citizens who do not experiment with drugs, but
4 whose life, liberty and property are substantially
5 jeopardized by the illegalization of the drugs
6 sought after by the minority.
7 I have not spoken of the cost to our
8 society of the astonishing legal weapons available
9 now to policemen and prosecutors of the use of the
10 penalty of forfeiture of one's home and property, a
11 violation of laws which, though designed to advance
12 the "War Against Drugs," could legally be used --
13 I've learned from learned counsel -- as penalties
14 for the neglect of one's pets.
15 I leave it at this, that it is quite
16 simply outrageous to live in a society whose laws
17 tolerate sending young people to life in prison
18 because they grew or distributed a dozen ounces of
19 marijuana. I would hope that the good offices of
20 your vital profession would mobilize at least to
21 protest such excesses of wartime zeal, the legal
22 equivalent of a My Lai massacre. Perhaps you might
23 succeed in recommending experimentally the
24 legalization of the sale of marijuana, except to
25 minors.
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
83
1 DRUG HEARING
2 And perhaps what is primarily needed is
3 to encourage our political representatives to
4 reject any suggestion that to permit traffic in a
5 drug is to condone the consumption of it. We are
6 free to view "Deep Throat" on television, but it
7 does not follow that those who interpret the First
8 Amendment as making that legal, endorse the
9 enterprise. It is humiliating to suppose that the
10 distinction cannot be communicated to adult voters
11 who are to be distinguished from those adults who
12 encourage adult movies.
13 Thank you.
14 MS. PIEL: We have questions from the
15 panel.
16 QUESTIONS FROM MR. KAYSER: Mr.
17 Buckley, good morning. The question I've asked a
18 number of witnesses is what their position would be
19 on a scheme of things which -- first the issue of
20 should drugs sales and legalization be left to the
21 state as opposed to the Federal policy on it?
22 RESPONSE FROM MR. BUCKLEY: I would
23 favor a movement in any such direction as we have
24 in over 11 states who have here and there played
25 with marijuana. Alaska went quite far, but at the
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
84
1 DRUG HEARING
2 this strenuous insistence of Federal agencies, they
3 repealed that particular law. So, if you say let's
4 inform by urging the states to exercise their
5 authority, I think we are moving in the correct
6 direction.
7 QUESTION FROM MR. KAYSER: And
8 secondly, in terms of what your position might be
9 in the state that you live, what your position
10 would be if the state favored licensing pharmacies
11 to sell drugs and collect taxes on those drugs and
12 proper labeling and distribution and consumer
13 protection and dedicating the tax money to
14 treatment, what was your position on that?
15 RESPONSE FROM MR. BUCKLEY: I think
16 that would be very prudent and pervasive and
17 positive. It's important not to tax them to the
18 extent that would encourage the revival of the
19 black market.
20 QUESTION FROM MR. FISCHER: Mr.
21 Buckley, could you comment on the effect that our
22 drug policies has, as a matter of foreign policy,
23 with regard to, for example, our Latin American
24 neighbor?
25 MR. BUCKLEY: We have a technical
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
85
1 DRUG HEARING
2 problem. It states most directly who will and who
3 doesn't want to repeal its ratification of that
4 treaty, that covenant, that requires an individual
5 country not to do anything that promotes the use of
6 drugs. So, what they do is simply permit the use
7 of drugs and say nothing about it. We are not good
8 at that kind of thing because we are too exposed.
9 However I am advised by authorities that a
10 rescission of that commitment provided as an
11 agreement of an attempt ultimately to reduce the
12 ill effect which in the first instance were adduced
13 as a reason for that covenant would be persuasive
14 to International counsel.
15 QUESTION FROM MS. ROCKLEN: Thank you
16 very much. I want to explore a little further
17 something you touched on at the end of your
18 speech. One of the frequently thrown up questions
19 is what are we going to tell our children, and I
20 guess the question is do you have any thoughts on
21 how we legalize drugs without legitimizing them or
22 whether that's even a useful concern?
23 RESPONSE FROM MR. BUCKLEY: Well, I
24 think a concern -- it has to be a constant by
25 individuals who over the course of experience have
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
86
1 DRUG HEARING
2 decided how their children respond to different
3 forms of persuasion. One thing we absolutely need,
4 of course, is that the illegalization of drugs has
5 had practically no effect on the consumption, say
6 in the college population of marijuana. I was told
7 by students at Harvard at it is much easier to get
8 marijuana in Cambridge then booze. But if you bust
9 the person who sells it to you illegally because
10 you are a minor, he stands to forfeit his license.
11 Where there is no cap tap plan and I've run into
12 nobody who says it is any problem in doing so.
13 As far as parents exercising any kind
14 of authority over their children, it's of two
15 kinds, morals and issues with respect. The moral
16 information says don't do it because it's harmful
17 and self-mutilation. It doesn't in the long run
18 pay off and inform in the sense that you are
19 entitled to say the percentage of people who
20 experiment with marijuana end up with about 78
21 percent addicted and there is a certain aspect of
22 Russian roulette, therefore, if you played with
23 it. That fact I think we simply know from
24 experience that the overwhelming majority of 17,
25 18, 19 year olds do experiment with it and do to
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
87
1 DRUG HEARING
2 some point put it to one side. But I'm not -- I
3 have a son who smoked marijuana. I'm simply not
4 informed on any magical way in which to communicate
5 the authority, moral and instructional, that
6 individual parents have over their children.
7 MS. PIEL: Thank you. Mr. Knapp.
8 QUESTION FROM MR. KNAPP: Mr. Buckley,
9 taking advantage of your political acumen, I'd like
10 to post the following question: Your views in this
11 area as you speak them have evolved to what extent
12 in life as a an example of failure of the plan to
13 disband the drug enforcement administration and
14 place its functions with the Federal Bureau of
15 Investigation; in light of failure of that, have
16 you been able to identify any governmental interest
17 in at least exploring a change in the drug
18 policies?
19 RESPONSE FROM MR. BUCKLEY: Well,
20 there's an interest, but it's pretty much in the
21 closet. It's extremely difficult to find, but you
22 do occasionally find it despite those who speak
23 about it overtly, but we have to also remember that
24 there enormous lobby in fear of continued
25 enforcement. A lot of people lose their jobs if we
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
88
1 DRUG HEARING
2 legalize drugs. On the intramural question further
3 injuries resulting from agency A to agent I is
4 simple. I am neither informed or particularly -- I
5 haven't had, but that to the extent that those
6 discussions happen and they illuminate the basic
7 questions which you are considering here then I
8 would well tell them.
9 MS. PIEL: Thank you.
10 Now we have questions from the
11 audience. Anyone here? Come up and take the
12 microphone and place it back, please.
13 QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE MEMBER: I'd
14 like to follow up on the questions of policy of
15 change. I'm a reporter from Channel 9 and it seems
16 that I've witnessed a good deal of mileage
17 politically covering events on the issues of the
18 "War On Drugs," and I'm wondering if there have
19 been any mileage gotten politically out of changing
20 that position and moving more towards legalization
21 and more towards your point of view?
22 RESPONSE FROM MR. BUCKLEY: Not quite
23 yet. The reason they haven't is because the other
24 person is going to say is that what you have really
25 in mind is a general side for blacks and Hispanics
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
89
1 DRUG HEARING
2 and you're indifferent to the suffering you have
3 Congressman Gephardt or my dear friend, Charlie,
4 that I ran against, that does make light of it
5 every day. That's why the way it has to be
6 prepared for absolving the crime and an
7 enterprising candidate to say it's simply incorrect
8 to suppose by espousing this measure indicates my
9 approval of drug experimentation. That can only be
10 done by education. You know, Jefferson told us
11 that "laws are merely a confluence of public
12 opinion," and public opinion has to be changed by
13 people like you.
14 RESPONSE FROM AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank
15 you.
16 QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE MEMBER: I was
17 very moved by your talk. I just wanted to say --
18 RESPONSE FROM MR. BUCKLEY: Thank you.
19 QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE MEMBER: I have
20 been working for years to try to support the
21 medical use of marijuana and democratic
22 administrators failed if they approve it and they
23 will place a ban on drugs and recently, Pat
24 Buchanan has come out in favor of the use of
25 marijuana and other republican candidates or the
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
90
1 DRUG HEARING
2 president asks if you think there is a way we might
3 approach them about it.
4 RESPONSE FROM MR. BUCKLEY: There's an
5 identifiable movement that is taking us in that
6 direction saying if the doctors say marijuana would
7 actually help you or help your nausea after
8 exposure to various therapy, it's okay. A habit
9 that I spot here and there and the probability is
10 that change would come and as you know, there was a
11 very active movement for a few years to authorize
12 the use of heroin for terminal cancer patients. It
13 was narrowly defeated on the grounds that you would
14 use in coping with the marijuana problem, but it
15 came close enough, and finally, went down only when
16 doctors who served as witnesses persuaded the
17 congressional committees that you could, in fact,
18 contrive a series of drugs and call them cocktails
19 in Great Britain that would have an effect as
20 powerful as heroin, but the general sympathy that
21 is given to people who are sick and can benefit
22 from marijuana is I think growing increasingly. I
23 had a sister who had radiation -- no, who had
24 chemotherapy and she wrote me and said that I'm
25 trying to get some marijuana because I'm told it
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
91
1 DRUG HEARING
2 would help me. So I wrote a column about it and I
3 became briefly the marijuana center of the United
4 States and everybody sent it to me. She, in fact,
5 did try it, but it didn't help her simply because
6 she reacted to the inhalation, but anyway, my point
7 is that it is a widespread acknowledgment that it
8 is used. Richard Brickheiser (sic.) here in New
9 York City wrote a piece on it for the New York
10 Observer and he had the same problems and his wife
11 who is a medical professional brought it to him and
12 simply did so, and I think that it's creeping in
13 the direction of quite general acceptance.
14 MS. PIEL: One more question and then
15 we have to go on.
16 QUESTION FROM THE AUDIENCE: The effect
17 of drugs -- Richard Bennett said on an ABC
18 television special recently that any form of
19 legalization of drugs would almost immediately make
20 50,000,000 hard-core drug addicts in the United
21 States; I disagree with that, but I wonder what
22 your comment is?
23 RESPONSE FROM MR. BUCKLEY: My comment
24 is that is simply an extrapolation not based on any
25 evidence. We know for instance, that in Amsterdam
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
92
1 DRUG HEARING
2 where marijuana -- they have had a legal rate of
3 consumption higher then in Cambridge Massachusetts,
4 so there's evidence to the contrary, but Professor
5 Duke persuasively says that even if the consumption
6 of drugs was to increase tenfold, we would still
7 in the calculus that I attempted today, be better
8 off then we now are.
9 Fluctuations in the use of drugs have a
10 lot to do with experimentation circumstances. As
11 many as 35 percent of Americans used and when they
12 got back within a matter of months they were on
13 reduced use of four or five percent. Some people
14 would experiment simply fashionably to sell before
15 the fact of legality, but it's not probable.
16 When prohibition rolled in the
17 consumption of alcohol dropped very sharply at
18 first because people were afraid to violate the
19 law. It then went up to about 50 or 70 percent of
20 what the consumption had been pre-prohibition and
21 when prohibition was repealed, it didn't rise at
22 all. It was more than a decade, but it rose to the
23 pre-prohibition level and there we have a
24 distorting experience where it did not increase the
25 alcoholics by 50 million Richard Bennett and James
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
93
1 DRUG HEARING
2 Wilson are extremely committed intellectually and
3 emotionally and I don't think they were
4 sufficiently the calculations that I attempted to
5 interest you in.
6 MS. PIEL: Thank you so much, Mr.
7 Buckley.
8 We'll take a short recess.
9 Off the record.
10 (Whereupon a short recess was taken.
11 MS. PIEL: We're about to get started,
12 would you please take your seats.
13 Our next speaker we are happy to have,
14 Dr. William M. London, who is director of the
15 Public Health American Counsel on Science and
16 Health in New York and he is here to tell us the
17 top priorities of his organization which is to help
18 Americans distinguish between real and hypothetical
19 health risks. A number of questions were asked
20 today of the other speakers concerning this and
21 we'll be very happy to hear you. Dr. London, tell
22 us what we should know about this.
23 TESTIMONY BY DR. LONDON, DIRECTOR OF PUBLIC HEALTH
24 AMERICAN COUNSEL ON SCIENCE AND HEALTH:
25 Thank you. I'm very pleased to be here
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
94
1 DRUG HEARING
2 and absolutely thrilled to have read the
3 committee's report and I'm honored to be here with
4 so many distinguished speakers. I'm one of the few
5 speakers that I ever even heard of today. It's
6 very hard for me to comment on this report because
7 the report says many things that I would like to
8 have said myself and I can't say it any better. I
9 want to bring some other perspectives to the issue
10 that I think may be helpful to you.
11 I'm a health educator by training in
12 public health and people often ask me as a health
13 educator what do I coach and I tend to get
14 flustered when they do so. I'm actually somebody
15 who spends time promoting healthy life-styles and I
16 have been Professor of Kent State University for 10
17 years and a drug abuse prevention specialist and
18 receive funding from the United States Department
19 of Education to do training grants in drug
20 prevention. I want to bring some of those
21 perspectives alive today. It seems to me that Woody
22 Allen described the situation best, "We are in
23 America at any time in history mankind faces
24 crossroads and only one path leads to despair and
25 utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction.
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
95
1 DRUG HEARING
2 Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose
3 correctly. "
4 It's amazing to me that people chose
5 utter extinction over utter despair and
6 hopelessness. Extinction is not nearly as nice.
7 Actually, I'm not so sure that that dichotomy
8 presents the only alternatives and the way we think
9 about things tends to narrow the possibilities of
10 solutions and often it distorts our perspectives on
11 our risks. So, I spend a lot of time trying to
12 place risk in perspective and dealing a lot with
13 how we think about things in our world and science.
14 So much of the time it's not the things we don't
15 know that get us in trouble, but the things we know
16 that ain't so.
17 One thing that fits along those lines
18 of this kind of thing and I'm very much interested
19 in, is the concept of addiction and this is how it
20 presented to us. There are two basic kind of ways
21 of looking at it. The drug addict as sick
22 requiring help, a treatment center and basically
23 viewed as some of kind of victim or criminal
24 stigmatized, jailed, and deviant. And, I think the
25 fact that we are having this session today suggests
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
96
1 DRUG HEARING
2 to us that the speakers on most sides of the issue
3 are tending to reject the criminal view of this and
4 you hear of criminals who are still advocates to
5 compassionate treatment. And compassion, I
6 certainly value, and I don't necessarily think the
7 sickness model is the only way we can look at the
8 question of addiction and I want to summarize the
9 point that I'd like to make. I'm sure I will not
10 have time to elaborate on all of them and please
11 cut me off when it's necessary.
12 Here's my basic summary in life of my
13 session, regarding addiction in particular: No. 1
14 is drugs do not have any special power to enslave
15 people to use them. It's a sickness model. Rather
16 some people organize their lives excessively and
17 destructively around activities to medicate for
18 what I like to call the unbearable heaviness of
19 being, the pain of life, the search for the meaning
20 in life.
21 Point two, addiction is something we
22 would like to try to prevent as well as drug abuse
23 and in doing so, requires that we litigate risk
24 factors and this is what I have been trying to
25 promote for years as a drug abuse prevention
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
97
1 DRUG HEARING
2 specialist. The risks factors that lead people
3 away from organizing one's life around responsible,
4 prudent moderation and health.
5 Three, is what I like people to
6 consider. I actually asked the questions of Dr.
7 Kleber yesterday and I don't think what is fact, of
8 does it mitigate risk factors for drug addiction or
9 is it possible for a climate of drug prohibition
10 that the risk factors are actually exacerbated? My
11 view is that they are exacerbated.
12 No. 4, we do allow almost everybody who
13 talks about policy reform to advocate education. I
14 think it is often a mistake. Any notion about what
15 education is, my point is anti-drug propaganda is
16 not from education. It's a big distinction from
17 what propaganda is and what education is.
18 My fifth point is that drug education
19 efforts are likely to produce significant benefits
20 only in the context of comprehensive, school,
21 community health programs, integrated with all as
22 aspects. The point is you need to take all health
23 very seriously and drug education is another list
24 not simply as some coined feeble efforts, but as
25 part of mission of education really is and that's
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
98
1 DRUG HEARING
2 my point six. The true mission of education should
3 be the empowerment of information, living, loving,
4 learning and liberty, along with responsibility and
5 I believe drug education, not drug propaganda is an
6 essential component to achieve this mission.
7 My first point about addiction is if
8 you got rid of drugs today, we would still have
9 addiction. There is nothing magical about drugs
10 that enslave people to behaviors and excess and
11 that's really what addiction is about. That's
12 where the term comes from. It comes from a Latin
13 word. Addiction means the surrender to give into.
14 It's very similar to the word abdicated with a
15 different prefix essentially, but similar root, and
16 if abdicated sort of give away from, we give up and
17 give away. With addiction people surrender and
18 they surrender to behaviors. Behaviors in excess.
19 The term addiction had been used in the
20 19th century for activities other than drug takings
21 and later on became much more frequently used and
22 associated with drug abuse. Addictive behaviors
23 are habitual. There is apparent limited personal
24 flexibility, feelings of compulsion, overwhelming
25 feelings for engaging in involvement, repetitive
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
99
1 DRUG HEARING
2 and chronic, and they frequently occur. There is
3 difficulty in quitting without lapses and without
4 full-blown relapses and rejoined power to the
5 report. I focused on that aspect that made a claim
6 that tobacco and alcohol weren't as addictive as
7 other drugs by two criteria, I disagree. The two
8 criteria of judging addictiveness is the percent of
9 people who use in the manner I just described and
10 the difficulty in quitting. And tobacco is hot in
11 hand down there. The approximately 75 to 80
12 percent of current smokers want to quit and are
13 having difficulties and by the same notion we have
14 and should recognize that millions of people have
15 quit smoking and the vast majority have done so
16 without any formal program. The news that we are
17 enslaved to these habits, I think, undermines your
18 approach to the problems and result in a
19 problematic, self-fulfilling prophecy and that's
20 all I have to say about addiction.
21 In dealing with prevention, we need to
22 consider what your goal is. For instance,
23 establish inner and at a glance or these are the
24 people behind the development project in the report
25 who talk about five particular broad conceptions of
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
100
1 DRUG HEARING
2 what the prevention deals with. What are we trying
3 to prevent? Are we trying to prevent drug abuse?
4 Let's be clear what we mean by drug abuse. I don't
5 think it should be socially acceptable use
6 deviating from legal or medical standards. I
7 believe it should be used and viewed as
8 self-administration without reasonable likelihood
9 of medical benefit that results in harm of medical,
10 physical, social or emotional nature.
11 Two, regular use of psychoactive drugs
12 is a broad conception of the times that people want
13 to focus on. I think that misses part of the
14 issue. If we're truly interested in the whole, we
15 want to take a view that takes into account how
16 people use a whole range of substances. We also
17 want to take into account how people relate to a
18 whole range of behaviors.
19 The television program "Dateline"
20 yesterday, they talked about shopping addiction.
21 Very, very destructive. We cannot ban shopping,
22 yet we still have addiction. If we ban shopping,
23 but people destroy their lives in all sorts of
24 ways. So focusing just on psychoactive drugs and
25 neglecting other drugs and also neglecting a whole
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
101
1 DRUG HEARING
2 range of behaviors in existence, I think misses the
3 boat. Any use of psychoactive drugs. No. 3, we
4 have had it with the mandate in drug education
5 programs. The clear message that drug use is wrong
6 and harmful, that's propaganda, not education.
7 No. 4 and five to me were more
8 propagandizing and that's what the Seattle
9 development project does. The people who get into
10 the most problems with drugs are those who start
11 young, particularly preadolescent use. Let's focus
12 on the risk factors there and how we can prevent
13 them and mitigate those risk factors. The use of
14 particular drugs, so-called gateway drugs like
15 tobacco and alcohol have been more obtainable even
16 as the prevention goal -- even as the Department of
17 Education shifted in its funding that way. The
18 trouble with the conventional gateway drugs that it
19 makes it seem like the real problem once you pass
20 on the gateway and drugs on the gateway themselves
21 are less significant. That, in my view, distorts
22 perception of risks.
23 When we focus on drugs as in terms of
24 their power to enslave us, we miss the whole
25 picture. In public health we focus on actual lives
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
102
1 DRUG HEARING
2 and the environment. The drug is the agent who is
3 the fact that we bring to it as individuals that
4 effect our vulnerability susceptibility and the
5 environment, the -- our social environment. We
6 need to focus on setting a total of an individual
7 at time a drug is administrated and physical,
8 mental and emotional characteristics are part of
9 that and setting the total external environment of
10 the individual at the time the drugs are
11 administered. Yesterday Dr. Kleber gave you the
12 example of availability as a setting related
13 factor. He cited Vietnam as where drugs were
14 available and where people used drugs to a great
15 extent. There was more to the setting of Vietnam
16 then simply that there were lots of drugs
17 available. And there was a setting where the
18 unbearable heaviness of being might have been quite
19 great and people might have wanted to medicate for
20 it. In other Southeast Asia countries where our
21 folks were, there was not the same type of use and
22 as I think Mr. Buckley says, when people returned
23 to the United States, soldiers returned to the
24 United States, the drug use was not nearly to the
25 same extent -- three more minutes I'm doing better
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
103
1 DRUG HEARING
2 then I thought I would.
3 Let me talk to you about my point of
4 addressing risk factors and how I think prohibition
5 may actually exacerbate that. Let me tell you what
6 the risk factors we need to address are
7 particularly when dealing with early onset.
8 Prevention. There is economic deprivation -- by
9 the way, none of these risk factors in an of
10 themselves will explain drug abuse, but let's look
11 at the whole. Particularly, economic deprivation
12 is a risk factor and consider whether the "War On
13 Drugs" has as an impact on that. Low neighborhood
14 attachment and community disorganization. I ask
15 you to consider to what extent does -- you know, we
16 can do programs that provide culturally relevant
17 rights of passage programs, community based utility
18 development programs and programs that orientate
19 communities to available services, but what kind of
20 impact does having vigorous enforcement on
21 neighborhood attachment and organization of
22 community have? Does it strengthen community ties
23 or does it bond community ties for the poor or
24 inconsistent management practices? Again, consider
25 what happened with the "War On Drugs" as who had --
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
104
1 DRUG HEARING
2 that availability of drugs again is a risk factor.
3 In some communities you may want to consider that
4 the "War On Drugs" makes drugs more available
5 because you can buy it on the street and it's
6 really not too hard to find them.
7 On the other hand, if the "War On
8 Drugs" keeps drugs completely unavailable in other
9 communities and No. 5 is I think the most important
10 risk factor from my perspective is low commitment
11 to education, school and learning. I don't think
12 propaganda programs enhance that. I think we
13 enhance our educational programs by actually doing
14 education. I think I'm involved in doing education
15 and creating a stimulating environment for kids to
16 live in, not one where there is a grim, oppressive
17 environment. I think education is all about
18 promoting critical things. I don't think drug
19 education has drastically done. It means not
20 arguing when someone doesn't know something, but
21 knowing when someone needs more information to
22 answer a question. Knowing there is a difference
23 to a conclusion that might be truth and must be
24 truth knowing that people have been trying to avoid
25 common mistakes in his or her own reasoning of the
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
105
1 DRUG HEARING
2 meaning of words.
3 I disagree with Dr. Grinspoon who
4 referred to marijuana as not being addictive. I
5 think of many drugs as being addictive, as
6 behaviors being addictive, drug taking is
7 addictive, not the drugs itself. Drugs provide
8 experience people seek, but the addiction people
9 often equate addiction with some kind of physical
10 dependence reaction and that's not the nature of
11 the behaviors that we're talking about and you
12 don't need to have a physical withdrawal reaction
13 to demonstrate behaviors.
14 I'm getting cut off, right?
15 MS. PIEL: Time is up. Questions from
16 the panel?
17 QUESTION FROM MR. FISCHER: There was a
18 study done at the beginning of the year or at least
19 the result were announced at the beginning of the
20 year by the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit which
21 showed a high correlation between an absence of
22 drug use and the level of parental supervision of
23 very young children. The study started with
24 children in grades three and four. Are you
25 familiar with the study and do you have any
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
106
1 DRUG HEARING
2 particular opinion of it.
3 RESPONSE FROM DR. LONDON: I am not
4 familiar with the study.
5 QUESTION FROM MR. AFFLER: I'd like you
6 to elaborate a little more on the distinction
7 between addictive behavior rather then physical
8 addiction. My understanding is there are some
9 drugs that can be physically addictive, but at
10 least the majority -- if I'm wrong, correct me --
11 but the majority of abuse is more behavior other
12 than that and I am just curious what percentage of
13 that breaks down --
14 RESPONSE FROM DR. LONDON: This is the
15 issue in critical thinking that I'm raising for
16 us. How we use language is very, very important.
17 This isn't the issue that has not been resolved,
18 but I take a very firm stand here. I'm sort of a
19 purist, that I go back to how we originally use the
20 term and how in common language we use the term as
21 addiction referring to a behavioral pattern.
22 In the 60's, I think the
23 pharmacologists kind of took over and equated
24 addiction with withdrawal. They called it physical
25 dependence. I would suggest to you that physical
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
107
1 DRUG HEARING
2 dependence is a weak explanation of why people
3 engage in behaviors to excess. First of all, the
4 idea that people would engage in the behaviors to
5 express withdrawal reactions, but people don't
6 often wait around for a withdrawal reaction. They
7 don't really experience them. They don't need them
8 to have cravings for the drugs. Many people will
9 often go from a drug like cocaine to a drug like
10 heroin that are pharmacologically unrelated. That
11 has nothing to do with experiencing withdrawal and
12 in studies on relapse, negative and physical states
13 account for a very small percentage of precipitance
14 of relapse for gambling or for alcohol-related
15 alcohol use.
16 Addiction, as I like to refer to it --
17 textbooks in the 1970's refer to cocaine as not
18 addictive because there wasn't a clinical
19 withdrawal action. The idea with withdrawal is
20 take more of the same drugs and repress the
21 physical reactions to the drugs. With cocaine, if
22 you try it to repress the withdrawal, you have a
23 depressed effect. What you do is you go on a run
24 and you produce a psychotic reaction. You can't
25 repress it cleanly. I would suggest to you that
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
108
1 DRUG HEARING
2 these are completely different concepts and I
3 overstate it. These are different concepts and
4 that the real issue that we should focus on is a
5 relationship to how one is living once life starts
6 and that most activity people engage in, they can
7 again engage in destructively and to excess.
8 Raising shopping addiction as an example is
9 minimizing the horror of drug addiction. I think
10 it may be the other way around. People have all
11 sorts of ways of destroying themselves with or
12 without drugs and with or without withdrawal
13 symptomatology.
14 QUESTION FROM MR. KAYSER: Dr. London,
15 from your testimony so far, I'm not exactly sure
16 what you would support in terms of a regulatory
17 scheme. I know that you're not satisfied with the
18 way it is now, but I'm not sure what you would
19 support. The question I have asked other witnesses
20 is, is what their position with respect to licensed
21 various pharmacies or some other appropriate outlet
22 for sale of drugs properly labeled collecting taxes
23 on these drugs commensurate with alcohol and
24 tobacco-type taxes and dedicating those taxes to
25 funds for research and for prevention and for
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
109
1 DRUG HEARING
2 treatment, also leaving it to the -- getting the
3 Federal government out of the issue because we
4 would be going back to the state level to
5 experiment for results in these hearings and I'd
6 like your reaction?
7 RESPONSE FROM DR. LONDON: That's where
8 the real debate needs to be with respect to those
9 questions. I'm not real firm on all my ideas in
10 this area, but let me give you a few. Regarding
11 labeling, I'm skeptical about the merits of a
12 government mandated label on drugs and I'm telling
13 you why. It seems to have insulated tobacco
14 companies from liability in these cases, that there
15 is a government mandated label. I would like to
16 see whoever manufactures drugs to be firmly
17 accountable and have as much incentive as possible
18 to insure there is as low a risk as possible. I
19 think they should be responsible for labeling
20 accordingly. So, that's one area and if they are
21 not responsible, there will be plenty of public
22 outcry and outrage and I think it would be to their
23 detriment to not be as responsible as possible.
24 So, I think that civil law is a very good way of
25 handling many of these problems. I'm not sure that
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
110
1 DRUG HEARING
2 -- I'm not sure that those particular kind of sin
3 taxes are necessary, but I think it will be very
4 beneficial simply to be able to collect income tax
5 from people selling drugs as legitimate business
6 people rather then not being able to collect
7 anything from them as they are hiding their assets
8 now. I don't know if licensure is the way to go or
9 not, this is where I want to hear more.
10 MS. PIEL: Any more questions from the
11 panel? From the audience?
12 QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE MEMBER: I'd
13 like to thank you for being the only person who
14 used the term abuse to actually give the
15 definition. By my way of thinking, I really like
16 eating. But seriously though, I'd like you, taking
17 your definition of abuse, to run through various of
18 the subjects which we would be dealing with
19 cannabis, cocaine, whatever, and say have those in
20 the United States, what would be your estimate
21 these days of the fraction of users whose primary
22 use of these materials is abuse.
23 RESPONSE FROM DR. LONDON: I'm not
24 really prepared to answer that going through all
25 those drugs. What I can do for you though and I
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
111
1 DRUG HEARING
2 think I even have it on an overhead. If I take
3 this up with me. I don't know if you can read this
4 or not, but the numbers I want you to see on the
5 top of Table 2 reflect cocaine, cocaine in terms of
6 millions of people who annually use cocaine, and in
7 1985 it was 12 million and in 1988 it was the eight
8 million from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
9 Then you have weekly cocaine users reported the
10 same years and I think of weekly cocaine use as a
11 rough indicator of addictive use. Not everyone who
12 uses drugs once a week are addicted. Some people
13 may be addicted and use it less frequently. It
14 depends on one's relationship to the drug, but it's
15 a fairly rough indicator with what you see there,
16 which is $647,000 and less than one in 12 in 1985
17 were weekly users and in 1988 it was one in 10
18 there, and it also shows the effects of any kind of
19 intervention or trends in drug use which may differ
20 somewhat from trends in terms of how harmful the
21 use of drugs is. And setting factors are very
22 important in that regard. Compare these numbers to
23 tobacco where about 75 percent to 80 percent of
24 users would like to quit and think of it also --
25 the other point in terms of difficulty quitting,
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
112
1 DRUG HEARING
2 smokers have a much more difficult time and there's
3 several lines of evidence for it, including a study
4 from the Addiction Research Foundation which asked
5 addicts which do you prefer; which gives you more
6 pleasure, your cocaine or the tobacco? What do
7 they say? Cocaine, which is harder to quit and
8 people are more likely to say that the tobacco was
9 more difficult to give up and we've seen this in
10 many ways. To get in treatment facilities you
11 often have to be drug free, but an exception is
12 often made for tobacco there. So, I think it's a
13 very important reference point in terms of
14 difficulty of quitting and the percentage of users
15 who use addictively. I'm not prepared to answer
16 your questions on drugs, but much less than
17 tobacco.
18 QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE MEMBER: I
19 wanted to ask, given your model of addiction as
20 excessive behavior, what does that say as to the
21 effectiveness of different types of effectiveness
22 or ineffectiveness of different approaches to
23 treatment.
24 RESPONSE FROM DR. LONDON: I think the
25 question of the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
113
1 DRUG HEARING
2 various approaches of treatment doesn't necessarily
3 -- I don't see how it relates necessarily to how I
4 conceive of addiction. However, I think I'm a
5 critic of many treatment programs that I think are
6 promoting some sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy
7 in viewing drugs as things that can totally take
8 over people and that being sort of the person that
9 sort of extremely radical resolution is necessary.
10 I think that creates a self-fulfilling prophecy
11 that tends to grow against trends in psychology to
12 promote self-efficacy, the sense of people that
13 they can perform various types of behaviors.
14 That's my business though, and I can't really
15 defend it one way or the other that that's the
16 case, but that undermines programs, but it's a
17 controlling trend for me to see that in treatment
18 programs and I think it could be improved by
19 approaches that take a view that addiction is sort
20 of a pitfall of human existence and recovery can be
21 sort of a journey out of that pitfall, and that
22 tools can be learned to do that. That's my
23 preference, but I think there's some promising
24 aspect to that. I can't give you any firm
25 conclusion about mine is the right way to go.
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
114
1 DRUG HEARING
2 MS. PIEL: Thank you, Dr. London. Dr.
3 Gordon, an author of a book which is entitled "The
4 Return Of The Dangerous Classic Drug Prohibition
5 and Politics." It's all yours.
6 TESTIMONY FROM DR. DIANA GORDON:
7 Thank you, very much. I'm delighted to
8 be here. I've had a long experience in analyzing
9 the policies of criminal justice and I've sort of
10 moved on now to looking at policies of drug
11 prohibition and I'd like to talk first about a
12 little bit about the report and some of my
13 reactions to the report, and talk about a little
14 bit about my works. I would think the sources are
15 important as we try to reform drug policy to deal
16 with the sources of our commitment to prohibition
17 which I think are much more complicated then we
18 sometimes admit.
19 I'd like to congratulate and compliment
20 the Committee on Drugs and Law of the Bar
21 Association for an extraordinarily intelligent and
22 sensible synthesis of many of the problems, rigid,
23 but selective, of prohibition of mind-altering
24 drugs, and I'd like to go beyond the comments on
25 drug historic effectiveness, which I think are
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
115
1 DRUG HEARING
2 incontrovertible and I think the public knows
3 almost as well as the experts. To talk about -- to
4 comment on some points that I think the committee's
5 report makes particularly strongly.
6 First, it provides an accurate
7 description of the distortion of the priority
8 occasioned in the huge increase in the drug arrests
9 and convictions beginning in the early and mid
10 80's. Drug prohibition can sort of be said to be
11 the lump in the boa constrictor in the crime
12 controls direction in the past decade or
13 decade-and-a-half, and in the State Prison
14 convictions in 1990 as in 1980 where property
15 crimes and violent crimes were only slightly --
16 arrest, etcetera -- were only slightly more likely
17 to result in conviction. Secondly, I think the
18 report does a fine job of predicting the cost of
19 prohibition to civil liberty, the due process of
20 1970 and 1980, hence all the theorizing, and
21 advocacies of most vigorous law and order promote
22 lawyers wide-eyed refer to the drug exception, does
23 prohibition unreasonable search and seizures -- and
24 I think that's not an inaccurate characterization
25 and finally, I'd like to congratulate the committee
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
116
1 DRUG HEARING
2 on its recital of the dangers to public health of
3 the drug prohibition policy itself. The
4 development of more concentrated and dangerous
5 forms of drugs is being attributed to prohibition
6 and I believe that injuries and deaths caused by
7 transactional violence, that is the buying and
8 selling of drugs, far exceeds physical harm and
9 death from serious pharmacological damage done by
10 illegal drugs.
11 Now, I'd like to talk a little bit
12 about my work which tries to trace the sources of
13 our commitment as a nation to prohibition. The
14 research that I did for three years leading up to
15 the book that Ms. Piel referred to really was
16 conceived around two principal questions. Why is
17 the conventional definition of the drug problem so
18 inconclusive of encompassing so much violence and
19 suffering and attributed to harmful, social, urban
20 disenchantment and things like that. And secondly,
21 why has it became more intense and substantive as
22 evidence has mounted with its declared goals. We
23 have a strongly prohibitionist or strongly punitive
24 strain in American culture going back a very long
25 way and it's important to note here that while drug
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
117
1 DRUG HEARING
2 policymaking is dominated by law enforcement
3 measures, that it does enjoy still very wide public
4 support.
5 Yet, the political demands that
6 sustains what appears to be a popular and political
7 consensus has many concerns about many sources
8 besides concern about reducing the physical and
9 social harm that can occur as a result a
10 experimenting with psychoactive drugs. The variety
11 and depth of wants and needs that sustain
12 prohibition is extraordinary. A concern for
13 personal safety which gives government elites a
14 chance to determine straight, social, control
15 capability of state and an interest in going what
16 are increasingly seen as dangerous classes in
17 society, minority male youth. Sometimes I am in
18 agreement with the sometimes so-called cultural
19 liberals and the chance to advocate a policy about
20 which people have great fear and, therefore, convey
21 the extensive protectiveness which supports
22 political candidates and bureaucratic growth in the
23 area of law enforcement and sometimes in the area
24 of social welfare. I argue that the weight and
25 profusion of all the national functions of our drug
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
118
1 DRUG HEARING
2 policy -- current prohibition drug policies are at
3 least as equivalent in the medical and some social
4 harm caused by drugs and, therefore, if we are
5 going to address the drug prohibition policy and at
6 least mitigate it partially, if not change it
7 entirely, we are going to have to address these
8 political sources of support for drug prohibition
9 as well as the substantive issues of physical and
10 social harm that drug abuse or the consumption of
11 illegal drugs. Because, of course, it's not always
12 drug abuse that is punished in this system. So, I
13 maintain that there is a kind of shadow agenda in
14 drug policy as in some other areas of social
15 policy. By think, I don't mean a hidden agenda.
16 It's often quite open, but a sort of dark and
17 volatile shadow which accompanies the concern about
18 physical and social harms of dangerous drugs. I
19 don't mean by any means to suggest that there isn't
20 a serious public health and other kinds of sorts of
21 family communication problems and things like that
22 caused by drugs. I don't mean to say that they
23 don't cause significant problems, but rather that
24 there's an agenda shadowing the agenda of reducing
25 those harms which reflect rational and generational
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
119
1 DRUG HEARING
2 conflicts. Prospects of political and material
3 gain and bureaucratic devotion to or commitment to
4 bureaucratic growth.
5 In order to route my exploration of my
6 basic questions in the flesh and blood of the
7 contest over drug policy, I studied five cases of
8 drug politics in action in a variety of arenas.
9 They included:
10 One, the development of a congressional
11 consensus supporting the death penalty for drug
12 kingpins even where no murder is committed.
13 The adoption and revision of a Michigan
14 law mandating life imprisonment without parole for
15 people convicted of possession of more than 650
16 grams of opiates or cocaine derivatives.
17 The decriminalization in Alaska by a
18 citizens' iniative of possession of small amounts
19 of marijuana for personal use after 15 uneventful
20 years of decriminalization.
21 The passage of an anti-drug sales tax
22 in the era of taxpayers' revolt also in the part of
23 the country most committed to the taxpayers' revolt
24 to fight drugs.
25 In Jackson County, Missouri, which is
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
120
1 DRUG HEARING
2 Kansas City, the adoption of a Seattle ordinance
3 making it illegal to loiter with intent to engage
4 in an illegal drug transaction.
5 The results of these actions, these
6 legislative actions, taken of a prohibitionist sort
7 are quite interesting and illustrative. In
8 Michigan, the legislators who voted for the 650
9 plus law in 1978, did so because they thought it
10 would ensnare the big heroin dealers, but the
11 evidence is overwhelming that the law has served up
12 a different kind of defendant. The bulk of people
13 sentences to life imprisonment -- I think there are
14 about 160 of them now under the law -- are merely
15 couriers in the trade. Autoworkers laid off, who
16 do two or three jobs and get caught in this web.
17 More than half of the defendants who have these
18 life sentences have no prior records whatsoever not
19 just no drug record, but no record of kind.
20 The recriminalization of marijuana
21 possession in Alaska has produced virtually no
22 defendants. The police and the public apparently
23 share a lack of interest in arresting people in
24 their homes and prosecuting them for possessing
25 small amounts of the drug and the criminal law has
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
121
1 DRUG HEARING
2 always covered more problematic situations.
3 With respect to the Jackson County
4 anti-drug drug sales tax, adding 14 million dollars
5 of tax money annually to the "War on Drugs" in
6 Kansas City, initially failed to drive up arrests
7 and prosecutions for drug offenses, although that's
8 no longer true, but two years after the tax went
9 into effect, neither officials, including law
10 enforcement people, nor anti-drug activists,
11 believe that illicit drugs were less available on
12 the streets of Kansas City.
13 The Seattle Loitering Law has not
14 resulted in the large number of arrests that could
15 be relied upon to produce solid convictions.
16 Furthermore, the deployment of 100 police officers
17 appointed since the law went into effect has more
18 impact on the downtown open air markets then the
19 loitering law has. The perception that the law
20 contributes to police harassments of young minority
21 males persists and has been buttressed by a local
22 affiliate ACLU study, which found that something
23 like 92 percent of the arrests under the drug
24 loitering law were of young minority males and that
25 over half of those were never charged for -- were
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
122
1 DRUG HEARING
2 such poor arrests that they never amounted to real
3 criminal cases.
4 This, of course, doesn't mean that --
5 it doesn't mean that there wasn't something
6 accomplished at the political level with these
7 prohibitionist contacts. Supporting and voting for
8 the death penalty presumably helps furnish images
9 of some members of Congress as leaders in securing
10 security to their constituents.
11 Positioned at the extreme end of the
12 range of Federal penalties, the proposal lends
13 legitimacy to other more conventional designations
14 of capital crimes -- and I think we'll see the
15 expansion of capital crimes in Federal anti-crime
16 legislation in the next few years --
17 Recriminalizing pot in Alaska made some
18 parents feel empowered to effect their children's
19 futures and to exert their own authority and it's
20 kind of a symbolic strand in the tightening
21 cultural bond between the last frontier and the
22 lower 48. Alaska doesn't want to be seen as the
23 outlying roughneck place that appealed to its early
24 residents.
25 The drug sales tax program in Kansas
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
123
1 DRUG HEARING
2 City has insured organizational and fiscal health
3 for criminal justice. It was clear that the city
4 and county law enforcement people needed new
5 computers and new walkie-talkies and new technology
6 for the normal function, ordinary functions, of
7 criminal justice and they were hard to get in an
8 era of taxpayer concern, so this campaign provided
9 a kind of -- I don't want to say cover or excuse
10 because that sounds too conspiratorial, but
11 provided them with an alternative route which put
12 the emphasis on the drug problem of Kansas City and
13 not on the larger issue of providing adequate
14 assistance to law enforcement and criminal
15 justice.
16 In the cases of both the Michigan 650
17 Plus law and the Seattle Drug Loitering Law, the
18 most important effect however unintended or
19 inadvertent it may have been, was to foster and
20 reinforce for many the association between young
21 inner city black males and the drug problem. Both
22 in the Midwest and the northwest, drug prohibition
23 has helped to focus, target and label the often
24 effuse threats of dangerous classes.
25 I'm not, I would say, a proponent of
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
124
1 DRUG HEARING
2 legalization in the same way that I'm not a
3 proponent of prohibition. I think the legal
4 advisors and prohibitionists make some of the same
5 mistakes in assuming that the larger problems of
6 the cities of our social and criminal malaise will
7 be solved by either legalization or by
8 prohibition. But, I think, in order to move toward
9 a set of reforms we are going to have to address
10 the more complex supports for prohibition that
11 exist both among the public and among
12 professionals.
13 MS. PIEL: Thank you, Dr. Gordon..
14 MS. PIEL: We are now going to have
15 some questions and your conclusion, I think, will
16 provoke quite a few. Members of the panel?
17 QUESTION BY MR. KAYSER: Actually your
18 conclusion -- is it professor or doctor?
19 RESPONSE BY DR. GORDON: Professor.
20 QUESTION BY MR. KAYSER: -- is
21 interesting to me is -- actually a question I was
22 going to ask you as a political scientist, is that
23 it seems to me that one -- I'd like your comment on
24 this.
25 Is one of the problems in getting the
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
125
1 DRUG HEARING
2 reform of the system as you say, is the consensus
3 that it's not working?
4 RESPONSE BY DR. GORDON: I think one of
5 the problems with getting reform --
6 QUESTION BY MR. KAYSER: I think you're
7 saying the consensus is that the current system is
8 not working. Is one of the problems in getting
9 reforms on the system is that there is no consensus
10 of what the reform might be and that, just as your
11 conclusion seems to leap up in the air with no
12 definitive place to move, and of course, I have
13 been asking witnesses what their position is with
14 respect to if you did have a legalized system,
15 would you leave it to the states and then debate it
16 at the state level a system in which you could
17 license pharmacies to sell drugs and collect taxes
18 and use the taxes for some dedicated ways for
19 prevention and treatment and so forth; at least
20 until there is a model that people can respond to
21 in terms of a system that might be an alternative
22 system.
23 RESPONSE BY DR. GORDON: I hear two
24 questions there and I'll answer the second one. I
25 think your scenario of a regulated system probably
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
126
1 DRUG HEARING
2 makes a good deal of sense. I would think you
3 would need to do it in a gradual sort of way. Now
4 we're not talking about politics, we're just
5 talking substance. Because I think one of the
6 things that we need to do is test for substitution
7 effects. One of the criticisms that is made of
8 legalization and decriminalization proposals is
9 that if you legalize or decriminalize, you'll
10 suddenly have lots of new users or lots of new hard
11 users and there is some evidence that that's just
12 not going to be true because there are other ways
13 you can substitute a less dangerous form of the
14 drug, for instance, for what you're now taking or
15 if you have -- you know, if you can drink cocaine
16 tea or smoke opium or find less concentrated
17 forms. It may be that you are able to produce
18 substitution effects, but I would want to do that
19 gradually. I wouldn't do it all at once.
20 There is only one example I can think
21 of where that's been quite successful and that is
22 with the prohibition of absinth in France in the
23 19th century. When I was working on this book I
24 got fascinated by that example of drug prohibition
25 that actually worked. But, it worked, I think,
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
127
1 DRUG HEARING
2 because there were plenty of substitutes for
3 absinth and, in fact, what was generally done was
4 that clear liquors were dyed Grinspoon to look like
5 absinth so people could pretend they were still
6 drinking absinth. I think we need to test this
7 substitution fairly gradually.
8 What I heard as the first question, a
9 different question, has to do with the difficulty
10 of persuading people below the -- beyond the
11 medical uses of marijuana for example. You're
12 really going to have to convince Americans that not
13 just that drug prohibition is ineffective. I think
14 they already believe that, but that we shouldn't
15 hold on to it for other reasons. I mean drug
16 prohibition gives people the chance to express
17 their frustrations and concerns with the
18 rebelliousness of youth and the conditions in the
19 ghettos and participating in anti-drug neighborhood
20 watch patrols which gives people a sense of
21 participation that they don't have in a lot of
22 areas that maybe they used to have with their
23 political parties or unions or wards.
24 I think we really have to address the
25 attitudes of Americans that drug prohibition has
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
128
1 DRUG HEARING
2 moral -- conveys moral values that are important to
3 uphold and I mean that I think the fact that people
4 believe that drug prohibition is ineffective as a
5 substantive matter, doesn't mean they're going to
6 easily relinquish it as political matter.
7 MS. PIEL: Questions? Mr. Knapp?
8 QUESTION BY MR. KNAPP: Professor
9 Gordon, with respect to the experience in Alaska,
10 are you aware of any studies investigating at the
11 time of decriminalization of small amounts of
12 marijuana for personal use, the effect, if any, on
13 the consumption other any harder drugs or on
14 alcohol; is there any change in the rates?
15 RESPONSE BY DR. GORDON: Alaska has not
16 had much of a hard drug problem. When I was
17 interviewing in Alaska in 1990 and '91, I was told
18 nobody had ever seen crack, but they expected it to
19 come up from the lower 48 at any moment, but this
20 was five years after crack had been a major problem
21 in the big cities in the lower 48. Well, mostly
22 Alaska is a place where people drink and then there
23 is a small marijuana-using culture and it's going
24 to be very difficult to change that because
25 marijuana is easily grown -- easily and invisibly
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
129
1 DRUG HEARING
2 grown along the banks of Alaskan rivers. So I
3 don't think there was a hard drug problem before
4 and there wasn't a hard drug problem afterwards.
5 When I talked to the Attorney General
6 of Alaska about the significance of marijuana as a
7 criminal problem of decriminalization, whether
8 decriminalization had created more problems of
9 other criminal sorts, he said we just have not
10 noticed any difference.
11 MS. PIEL: Any more questions?
12 QUESTION FROM THE AUDIENCE: In terms
13 of the five models, sort of, different drug laws,
14 in particular the Michigan one which seems harshest
15 that you studied and which all seem to either have
16 not reach their intended results, what is the
17 perception of the public at large in those
18 jurisdictions; does the public at large realize
19 that these have not reached their intended results
20 and if so, what is their reaction?
21 RESPONSE BY DR. GORDON: Well, I can't
22 really tell you about the public at large, but I
23 can tell you about their representatives. For
24 example, in Michigan after the ineffectiveness of
25 this and the fact that the 650 Plus Policy was
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
130
1 DRUG HEARING
2 netting only these little fish, rather than the big
3 heroin dealers, after there was some publicity
4 about that, people in the state legislature --
5 representatives in the state legislature began to
6 feel empowered to try to change it and there has
7 been a effort, unsuccessful thus far, but there has
8 been an effort. Which I think could not have been
9 possibly mounted 10 years earlier to make the law
10 less harsh.
11 The Supreme Court of Michigan finally
12 threw out one tiny aspect of this law. Now, you
13 can't be -- if you can show that you had no intent
14 to sell, you can't be given a life sentence. But
15 still, most of the possession cases are, I think,
16 probably situations in which the defendant did
17 intend to sell and, you know, it's very difficult
18 to prove otherwise, and there was no -- when this
19 modification of the law was made, the principal
20 reaction as I could gauge it from the newspapers,
21 was that it didn't go far enough. I can't tell you
22 more about the public.
23 MS. PIEL: All right. We're going to
24 take one question from the audience and maybe
25 another and then our time will be up.
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
131
1 DRUG HEARING
2 QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE MEMBER: I am
3 wondering from a political science standpoint, what
4 do you think is the origin and essence of the
5 historic distinction made between the possessor and
6 the person who provides that possession to the
7 possessor; why it is that we have always made such
8 a strong distinction?
9 If the possession and consumption of
10 the drug constitutes a serious danger to society,
11 he ought to be punished severely. If it doesn't,
12 why is the person who gives the drug to that person
13 subject to serious penalty.
14 RESPONSE FROM DR. GORDON: I'm afraid I
15 really don't know the answer to that, but I do know
16 that in Holland, the relaxation -- it really isn't
17 legalization in Holland, but the relaxation of drug
18 laws has been sharply divided between -- there's
19 reform with respect to possession laws, but not
20 reform with respect to dealing laws.
21 My sense is that even in that much more
22 relaxed, pragmatic society, there's still a sense
23 of moral turpitude associated with purveyors that
24 is not so terribly different from what it is,
25 qualitatively at least, from what it is here. I
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
132
1 DRUG HEARING
2 think that would be extremely difficult to counter
3 from a political point of view.
4 QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE MEMBER:
5 Professor Gordon, I don't know whether you are
6 aware that this committee invited several
7 representatives of the Federal government to
8 participate in the current dialogue and all the
9 invitations were declined.
10 I wonder if you could comment on the
11 prospect for a wide-ranging debate of a wide
12 variety of policy options considering the current
13 political situation and this administration?
14 RESPONSE BY DR. GORDON: I think it's
15 going to be very difficult. I think, you know,
16 there have been on occasion at the Federal level
17 reformers who have gotten their wrists slapped and
18 I sort of assumed that that's not going to change
19 in the immediate future.
20 In Germany there is a huge gap and to
21 some extent in the United Kingdom, between the
22 rhetoric at the center and local iniatives and on
23 the continent there's something called the Hamburg
24 Resolution, which now must have 3035 signatories.
25 Each city is a signatory to a resolution to adopt
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
133
1 DRUG HEARING
2 the policy of harm reduction as the principal focus
3 of drug control rather then law enforcement.
4 There are lots of little local programs
5 and it's fascinating to be in Germany studying
6 this, because you go from one little local program
7 to another. For instance, one local program I saw
8 also in Hamburg, was teaching heroin addicts to
9 shoot up safely so they don't hit the arteries of
10 the femoral artery, and of course, that's mixed
11 with concern about shared needles.
12 So, here you go and you go see these
13 shooting-up rooms with a public health nurse
14 present all the time and then you listen to or you
15 see German television and there's Chancellor Cole
16 waving his drug treatment and enforcement plans and
17 it looks exactly like the national strategy for
18 drug control that is put out by successive
19 administrations in this country.
20 So, I think it may be that one approach
21 is not to deal with it -- not to try even to deal
22 with it at the national level at this point, but
23 rather to work on small local reform efforts and
24 find a few more brave mayors like the mayor of
25 Baltimore -- I think there are a few more brave
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
134
1 DRUG HEARING
2 mayors -- and to also explore the weakness of
3 support for drug prohibition in law enforcement.
4 There are a lot of people in American
5 law enforcement now who say this is a terrible,
6 terrible failure and we don't want to spend our
7 time on these kinds of things and we see kids who
8 need families and social supports and that's what
9 they have to have first before you get them off the
10 drugs. I think that's a much more profitable route
11 then making it a national political issue at this
12 point.
13 MS. PIEL: Thank you, Professor Gordon,
14 very much. We now have one more speaker this
15 morning. Her name is Dr. Joyce Lowinson and she is
16 going to bring a very special kind of knowledge to
17 this committee and this group having to do with
18 methadone.
19 Professor Dr. Lowinson is a
20 psychiatrist and she has been for many years a
21 professors on the staff of Albert Einstein School
22 of Medicine and for the last 25 years has headed
23 the Division of Substance Abuse there and she has
24 had personal experience with knowledge of the
25 methadone program which was instituted in New York
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
135
1 DRUG HEARING
2 not long ago.
3 I don't believe we've had anyone
4 telling us about methadone, which is both legal and
5 a controlled drug, but has its problems both
6 politically -- I don't know if she'll tell you
7 whatever problems there are medically, but
8 politically it still has a lot of problems.
9 Dr. Lowinson?
10 TESTIMONY BY DR. LOWINSON:
11 Thank you very much and thank you for
12 inviting me to speak here and I want to pay a
13 tribute to the Committee on Drugs and Laws for this
14 excellent report which I find challenging and I'm
15 dismayed to hear that we don't have Federal
16 officials who are interested in commenting on
17 this.
18 This report deals in part with public
19 health conditions which are caused by our punitive,
20 puritanical, prohibitionist attitudes and laws and
21 I, as a physician, am going to confine my remarks
22 to the role of methadone maintenance treatment in
23 reducing harm reduction and reducing harm and risk
24 to intravenous drug users. That is, the
25 transmission of HIV, Hepatitis and other infectious
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
136
1 DRUG HEARING
2 diseases, including Tuberculosis.
3 In the mid-80s it became increasingly
4 apparent that intravenous drug users were
5 exceedingly at risk for HIV and AIDS and that's
6 really what surfaced the great concern to the care
7 of intravenous drug users. This was because of
8 needle sharing and risky sexual behavior.
9 Methadone is perceived as one means of helping to
10 curb the spread of HIV among this group. We have
11 studies from Norway by Blitzenal (sic.), from the
12 Bronx by Diana Hartel (sic.) and from the Institute
13 of Medicine which support this.
14 Now, although expansion was recommended
15 by several prestigious bodies and that includes the
16 Executive Office of the President, it was known it
17 would take several years at least to expand
18 treatment to set up clinics in a customary manner
19 and for this reason, Dr. Robert Newman at Beth
20 Israel Medical Center proposed interim care which
21 he felt would help reduce the risk of HIV to this
22 population. In 1985 he opened a pilot, interim,
23 methadone clinic which proved to be moderately
24 successful. It was funded by the Federal
25 Government and then in 1988 it was approved by the
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
137
1 DRUG HEARING
2 FDA. But, it also faced a lot of opposition from
3 the professional methadone providers who felt this
4 would undermine their efforts to provide extensive
5 needed comprehensive services to patients who had
6 huge medical and social needs. And so, as a
7 consequence of this, the plan never really went
8 through.
9 Another way of extending or expanding
10 treatment was considered to be to allow the private
11 practitioners to treat intravenous drug users, to
12 accept them into their practice the way they do
13 other individuals with chronic disease. It's
14 important to go back to some of the other earlier
15 studies that were on the outgrowth of research at
16 Rockefeller University where I had the privilege of
17 participating with Dawn Eislender (sic.), Lori Jo
18 Crete (sic.), working with them, did studies on
19 Hepatitis and demonstrated that patients who were
20 on methadone and who remained on methadone had a
21 reduction in the incidence of Hepatitis B which at
22 that time was a serious medical problem. Beyond
23 reducing it in this population, it was demonstrated
24 that in the general population there was a similar
25 decrease, so that there was this public health
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
138
1 DRUG HEARING
2 reform.
3 In 1966 while I was still a resident of
4 Einstein, I had interrupted my residency to do the
5 research with Dawn Eislender (sic.) and I returned
6 to Einstein, where they had a TB program and we had
7 been told that if heroin addicts who were infected
8 with TB could be kept in the hospital until their
9 sputum turned negative, that TB would disappear.
10 So, I went to the head of the chest
11 disease program and made a proposition that I would
12 treat those patients in the hospital who were
13 addicts and treat them with methadone for a year
14 and see what the outcome was. Now, prior to the
15 introduction of methadone, 95 percent of the
16 patients left the hospital against medical advice
17 with positive sputum. After one year, the results
18 were reversed. In 95 percent of the patients were
19 remained in the hospital until their sputum had
20 turned negative and moreover, they continued to
21 come into the hospital on a regular basis where
22 they got their follow-up anti-TB therapy.
23 This was probably the first experiment
24 where a methadone program was providing directly
25 observed therapy, DOT, which is the treatment known
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
139
1 DRUG HEARING
2 today. It has really special relevance due to the
3 reemergence of TB, because TB never really went
4 away, but there was a myth that with all the
5 wonderful knew drugs, the TB hospitals could
6 closed, but it persisted and began to reemerge long
7 before HIV due to declining socioeconomic
8 conditions. But, with the appearance of HIV we had
9 double trouble. HIV and TB and multiple-drug
10 resistance TB.
11 Don DeJaLais (sic.) who is an
12 epidemiologist now working at Beth Israel heading
13 their chemical dependency unit has shown that
14 methadone patients have significantly lower rate of
15 HIV infection. Those who have been in treatment
16 then those who are currently entering treatment.
17 Those who have in treatment 10 years or more have
18 an insignificant incidence of HIV, whereas 40 to 50
19 percent of those entering treatment today are
20 infected.
21 Now, I'm sure you often hear that
22 methadone is just substituting one narcotic for
23 another, but the important difference between
24 methadone and heroin is that methadone can be taken
25 once daily, orally, and it markedly diminishes the
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
140
1 DRUG HEARING
2 craving for narcotics and as a consequence, it
3 allows IDUs, intravenous drug users to assume or
4 resume a normal way of life. Moreover, it moves
5 patients into the mainstream of medicine and it
6 turns out to be cost effective because patients get
7 regular medical care keeping them out of emergency
8 rooms. There is no good actuarial studies on this
9 which I think should be done, especially as we
10 enter the age of managed care.
11 At Einstein as elsewhere, women of
12 childbearing age have their urine tested on a
13 regular basis to determine whether or not-- that is
14 on a monthly basis -- to determine whether or not
15 they are pregnant and if they are, they receive
16 early prenatal care. Those women who are HIV+ --
17 although though there is a law in New York which
18 prevents you from examining anyone against her will
19 -- most patients are willing to do that and those
20 who are HIV+ during the last trimester of their
21 pregnancies are able to receive AZT, which has had
22 a dramatic effect on reducing the transmission of
23 this virus to the fetus.
24 So, whereas, prior to this approach, 25
25 percent of the children, the babies, were HIV+,
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
141
1 DRUG HEARING
2 only eight percent -- only eight percent, but still
3 it's a marked reduction.
4 I want to get back to the issue of
5 expanding treatment and some of the ideas that have
6 been put forth by Dr. Newman. Patients are
7 reluctant to enter these major methadone clinics
8 because of all of the controls that are placed upon
9 them. In addition to the regulatory controls,
10 patients, like programs, superimpose their own
11 conditions, and it makes it difficult. It's not
12 easy to be a methadone patient.
13 In terms of the interim methods, we
14 found that patients who might have been reluctant
15 to go into a standard clinic, are willing to go
16 into a clinic where they get minimal services and a
17 physical examination and they get HIV education.
18 They do not get counsel and counseling is one of
19 the services about which I have serious
20 reservations. I'm never quite sure what counseling
21 means. I think social services are necessary, but
22 not counseling.
23 But, one of the important things to
24 know about these interim clinics is that according
25 to the regulations, they have to be integrated into
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
142
1 DRUG HEARING
2 a program that has comprehensive services with the
3 goal of moving patients into standard treatment
4 where they get the services they need.
5 We are also currently pursuing other
6 ways of expanding treatment. Now, in Australia,
7 New Zealand, Western Europe and other parts of the
8 world, private practitioners are seeing patients,
9 intravenous drug users and providing methadone
10 where necessary. In Australia they are about
11 15,000 patients in treatment with somewhat over 200
12 private physicians and this is the way of
13 destigmatizing treatment of methadone patients. You
14 never hear a methadone patient boldly announce "I
15 am on methadone." Even staff don't have that
16 feeling because of the stigma attached. I think
17 part of the stigma derives from the fact that the
18 patients are not seeing any regular medical care.
19 They are seen in a clinic where they receive
20 methadone. It doesn't happen if you have
21 hypertension or cardiac disease. You are seen in a
22 practice with other patients who have a variety of
23 diseases.
24 Some of the other things I wanted to
25 talk about have really been fully covered and they
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
143
1 DRUG HEARING
2 don't -- they are not related to methadone, but we
3 certainly are aware of the great costs that are
4 placed on the prohibition system -- the criminal
5 justice system and this report outlines beautifully
6 how our courts are cluttered with IDUs and Federal
7 judges are refusing to see these cases and prisons
8 are flooded with them and there is no education,
9 there is no treatment, there is practically no
10 healthcare in our prison system. It's a source of
11 social and medical illness for our society.
12 With the public health problems in
13 general, which were created by prohibition cannot
14 be overestimated and I think the report does bring
15 that out.
16 MS. PIEL: Thank you, doctor. Members
17 of the panel, any questions?
18 QUESTION BY MR. KNAPP: I recall when
19 methadone treatment first came about in the 60's
20 and 70's and that there were stories in the press
21 about how a black market had developed in methadone
22 and this was now a new problem; was that a myth or
23 did there in fact exist a black market and what is
24 the current situation with respect to a black
25 market for methadone.
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
144
1 DRUG HEARING
2 RESPONSE BY DR. LOWINSON: Well, you're
3 talking about diversion which is a major concern of
4 the DEA and I think if there were adequate
5 treatment for all who needed it, diversion wouldn't
6 take place. There is selling of methadone, but it
7 is sold to patients or individuals who need the
8 methadone because they are dependent on narcotics
9 and they can't get into a program because of the
10 long waiting list and/or they don't want to get
11 into a program because of all of the social
12 controls.
13 I think the DEA did a study which
14 showed that there was something less than a gram of
15 methadone that was bought in the South Bronx which
16 might amount to something like 10 doses.
17 MS. PIEL: Mr. Davis and then we'll take
18 from the audience.
19 QUESTION BY MR. DAVIS: Dr. Lowinson, I
20 wonder if you could address whether you think there
21 are any prospects for using some of the models that
22 you described, perhaps the interim methadone
23 maintenance model, for the distribution of drugs
24 that are currently illegal in safe doses at some
25 point in the future through the medical system.
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
145
1 DRUG HEARING
2 RESPONSE BY DR. LOWINSON: Well, there
3 are examples in Switzerland of the clinics where
4 heroin, morphine, methadone are available. We have
5 an example in the Netherlands where marijuana bars
6 exist and people can go and have marijuana and not
7 fear being arrested. Their laws are a little less
8 clear than ours, but certainly, they don't have as
9 heavy a hand in regard to marijuana as we do.
10 Should such a possibility exist?
11 That's one of issues that we are faced with and I
12 think the question was asked earlier could
13 pharmaceutical companies prepare medications and
14 could they be made available either in the
15 pharmacies or the way alcohol is readily available
16 under license. Should they be taxed? I think we
17 would run into greater risks and see fewer side
18 effects and I don't subscribe to the idea that we
19 have we would have more or significantly more
20 people using drugs, if that were the case.
21 QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE MEMBER: Dr.
22 Lowinson, you are aware that the Federal sentencing
23 scheme with respect to sale of the long list of
24 prescribed substances is based upon the weight of
25 the substance sold, and these weights are
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
146
1 DRUG HEARING
2 translated by an equivalency to marijuana, which is
3 the common denominator.
4 I am going to ask you about a situation
5 with respect to methadone in particular. I
6 recently became aware of a case where a person was
7 arrested for selling five doses of methadone and
8 they come in 70 gram vials, that's 350 gram total,
9 which I gather was sold --
10 DR. LOWINSON: Milligram.
11 QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well,
12 actually grams, I think, because they did it in
13 terms of weight rather than volume and it was sold
14 for something less than $100. The equivalency was
15 174.5 kilograms of marijuana, which would amount to
16 presumably something over a million doses if it
17 were translated that way and certainly close to a
18 million dollars.
19 I just wondered about your comment on
20 the equivalency of five doses of methadone to 175
21 kilograms of marijuana in the sentencing scheme.
22 RESPONSE FROM DR. LOWINSON: I can only
23 say I think that's a ridiculous comparison and you
24 certainly couldn't buy that amount of marijuana for
25 $100.
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
147
1 DRUG HEARING
2 QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well,
3 it's really a clarification of that. The statutes
4 are written to say a substance containing any
5 amount of X, Y, Z, so the solvent, the carrier, the
6 blotter paper for LSD, all that counts because it's
7 a substance containing any amount of etc., so
8 that's how it must have been figured. He really
9 did mean grams because it was milliliters of water.
10 MS. PIEL: Thank you, Dr. Lowinson.
11 We've now come to the end of our
12 morning session. Thank you very much. And I have
13 been asked to announce that the committee will be
14 in recess now for a half an hour and resume again
15 for the afternoon session at 1:30.
16 (Whereupon, at 1:00 p.m., the testimony
17 of these witnesses was concluded.)
18
19
I, MARYBETH E. MUIR, a Notary Public
20 for and within the State of New York, do hereby
certify that the above is a correct transcription
21 of my stenographic notes.
____________________________
22 MARYBETH E. MUIR
23
24
25
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
148
1 DRUG HEARING
2 I N D E X
3
4 WITNESS TESTIMONY Q/PANEL Q/AUDIENCE
5 DR. TREBACH 4 13
6
7 DR. GRINSPOON 26 36
8
9 DR. ROBERT GANGI 48 59, 66 63, 67
10
11 MR. W.J. BUCKLEY 71 83 88
12
13 DR. LONDON 93 105 110
14
15 DR. GORDON 114 124 129
16
17 DR. LOWINSON 135 143 145
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
149
1 DRUG HEARING
2 DOG SHEET - MARYBETH MUIR - OCTOBER 11, 1995
3 CASE:
4 DRUG POLICY HEARINGS
5 CLIENT: GARBARINI SCHER
6 TIME: 9 AM am
7
8 TIME: 9 AM - 1:00 pm
9
10 BILL:
11 *** AS PER FRAN, PAY REPORTER HEARING RATE &
12 APPEARANCE, DO NOT BILL CLIENT ***
13
14 SEND 3 1/2 INCH ASCII TO:
15 KENNETH BROWN
16 2 PARK AVENUE
17 MASSAPEQUA, NY 11758
18
19 * SEND CONDENSED TRANSCRIPT TO:
20 KATHY ROCKLEN
21 515 MADISON AVENUE SUITE 130
22 NY, NY 10022
23
24
25
DIAMOND REPORTING -718-624-7200- 16 COURT ST., B'KLYN, NY
