 Well, good afternoon everybody. I suppose you all know who I am. I'm Jeff Regenbach and I sometimes write and talk about drugs in addition to taking them now and then. And I must confess that when the folks here at the convention first called me up and asked me if I would come and talk about drugs, I felt a certain depression of the sort that people are sometimes said to feel after they come down from cocaine and other stimulants. In this case, the depression was a product of the somewhat pessimistic outlook that I have been inclined to take over the last year or two about the whole topic of drugs, especially as it relates to public policy, the prospects for reform of American drug laws. It seems to me that 1979 may have been the good old days, that things peaked at about that time where it comes to public interest in the issue, where it comes to the question of the truth getting a widespread hearing among the general public, a situation in which a lot of people who were capable of being regarded as respectable and responsible members of society were willing to come out publicly, even including the then President of the United States, until Ronald Reagan became president. I never thought I would find myself publicly praising Jimmy Carter. But in return, in retrospect, he really looks very good to me, and particularly when you think about his drug policy. Here was the only president of the United States who's been willing to stand up in front of Congress and call, for example, for decriminalization of marijuana. This happened in 1978. Since that time, it seems to me it's been all downhill. This is not entirely the doing of Ronald Reagan, but he has had a few things to do with it. He's beefed up the Drug Enforcement Administration, brought the FBI and the certain branches of the military into federal enforcement of drug laws, and has generally made very Nixonian noises about the whole subject. Just a couple of days ago in the paper, I saw a headline which stated that he's now determined to do what he can to wreck the Jamaican economy beyond the degree of wreckiness that it already enjoys by doing what he can to stamp out the marijuana industry there. Outside of tourism, of course, there's hardly anything happening in Jamaica to provide any economic vitality for the population except for the cultivation of cannabis. And it literally, without tourism and without marijuana, would be one of those islands like the one that Samuel Butler posited many years ago in which the people make a living by taking in each other's washing. But nevertheless, Mr. Reagan wants to do this. But let me step back several paces and sort of fill you in on my overall view of the history and development of American drug policy and perhaps make thereby a little clearer why I felt so pessimistic and depressed about the prospects lately. First of all, I should say a few obvious things in case anyone is unaware of the issues as I have them defined in my own mind. When people say drugs in the news, when they say drugs causes crime, you see headlines in the Oakland papers these days that say drugs create pockets of fear, drugs invade neighborhoods, drugs do this and that. What they're talking about really are a relatively small number of substances. Most of them occur naturally in plants and are extracted from plants by chemical processes. A few are synthetics created entirely in laboratories from base chemicals of one kind or another, but usually in imitation of naturally occurring substances. For example, LSD, one of the most notorious of the dangerous drugs that we're always being warned about, is created in laboratories but is in effect a synthetic imitation of substances like mescaline and psilocybin, which occur naturally in cactuses and mushrooms, and which has a very similar effect on the user, although it doesn't last as long. Most of the scare stories that we see in the media about drugs are really focused on a few drugs, heroin, cocaine, marijuana, LSD, and to a lesser extent PCP and a few other drugs that you might classify in different ways. Some people would call them hallucinogenic drugs. The one time I tried PCP myself, I was astonished to find that it had nothing in common at all in my own experience with substances like LSD, and I don't really understand why people consider it a psychedelic, except perhaps that by calling it a psychedelic, they can help to give LSD a bad name. But in any case, this is a relatively small group of substances. Now, except for LSD and PCP, all of these substances have been around for quite a long time. Heroin was first manufactured commercially and offered as an analgesic, really, in pretty much the same way that we now have aspirin as an over-the-counter analgesic to take care of pain in the 1890s. And in fact, if you look through old magazines or get certain old books about the history of drugs in America, come across advertisements that ran back in those days, advertising aspirin and heroin as though they were comparable products, like we have anasin, aspirin, and buffering, then you had anasin, aspirin, and heroin. And you could just go buy it in the form of little tablets at your drug store. And of course, some people, especially people who had already become interested in morphine and other derivatives of the opium poppy for recreational purposes, would take those little tablets and smash them and then snort the powder that resulted instead of using them as recommended. What's the phrase you always hear on the radio commercials? Use only as directed, exactly. But people like me will always exceed the recommended dosage and use the drugs in some way that they haven't been directed to do. And this was happening with heroin back then. The cocaine is derived from the coca plant, which is a little shrub that grows in the Andes around the equator in South America and is extracted by chemical process in a laboratory and ultimately comes in the form of a white powder, which people can smoke or mix in a solution and shoot up or snort. And this drug has been around in the form of the plant itself for thousands of years. The Indians in the Andes have been chewing coca leaves in pretty much the way that most Americans drink coffee. That is, they get up in the morning and they start chewing coca leaves and they do off and on all day long. I've never chewed coca leaves, but the literature tells me that what you get is the same sort of stimulant effect that you get from coffee. It's not so powerful that you would describe yourself as feeling high, but you're stimulated. You have more energy, you feel more wide awake. Now, in the 1860s, the drug was first extracted and purified. The coca leaves, of course, contain a good deal more than just cocaine. Cocaine is merely one of the alkaloids in the leaves. And scientists were first able to isolate it and produce it all by itself in the 1860s. Within about two decades, it had become a very popular substance in Europe and to a lesser extent in the United States. But the United States caught up. It was especially popular as an ingredient in wines and soft drinks. A lot of people know or partially know the story of Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola was originally a soft drink made with cocaine, which had been extracted from coca leaves. And they used other things that were in the coca leaves to flavor the beverage, and they used the cocaine to give it an upper effect on the drinker. And this was a very popular beverage back in that time. There were others as well. And you could also buy cocaine in drug stores, just a box of 100% pure cocaine, which was advertised as an asthma remedy. For example, if you have trouble breathing, you know, inhale some of this and you won't have any trouble. Many of these dangerous drugs, I mentioned before that heroin was sold as an analgesic. Other opium products were sold during this period also as what they called patent medicines in drug stores without prescriptions. And they were offered as cures for all sorts of things that, of course, they can't cure. By and large, these drugs are not useful medically as cures for anything. It's not as useful sometimes as anesthetics. Cocaine is an outstanding local anesthetic. It really created enormous medical breakthroughs when it was first discovered because it was found, for example, that it could be used on the eye. Certain kinds of eye operations previous to the discovery of cocaine had simply had to be performed without anesthetic. You couldn't give a person the general anesthetic because then the eyeball would roll up. You would lose consciousness and you would lose the ability to have the patient control the movement of his eye for you while you were digging into it. On the other hand, you can imagine that would be a rather unpleasant experience for the patient without some sort of an anesthetic, but they couldn't put any local anesthetic on the tissue of the eye without destroying it or damaging it a serious way. Cocaine, the discovery of cocaine, made all sorts of things immediately possible. So many of these drugs have legitimate medical uses beyond simply having fun with them, but they aren't the sorts of drugs that can cure diseases in the way that, let us say, penicillin or other antibiotics can do. They were offered as cures by the patent medicine companies, and what, of course, they did is people had various diseases and they bought these drugs and they took them and they felt better. And that was, you know, enough for them. They didn't cure the disease, but it did make them feel better. They didn't mind being sick anymore. Now, marijuana is really just a weed. The proper name of the plant is cannabis sativa or an English hemp, and it has grown all over the world for as long as anybody knows. It is one of the first plants that was ever identified by whatever those people call themselves who identify plants and give them scientific names. The plant has been used as a drug for literally thousands of years. It's been traced back 2,500 years to China, about 2,000 years in India, and has grown everywhere in the world and been used everywhere in the world. There's some indication, though, it's difficult to interpret the data that American Indians may have made limited use of it as an intoxicant even before Europeans came here. It is certain that a variety of the plant was already growing in this hemisphere. It just seems to have spontaneously grown everywhere. And people who have tried to plant it know that it will grow anywhere. It's one of its characteristics that makes it different from the opium popium from the coca plant. You can plant marijuana anywhere on earth, no matter what the circumstances of climate are, and it will grow. Of course, it grows better some places than it does others, but you can get an effective plant anywhere. The plant is extremely useful for all sorts of things. The fiber was used for centuries commercially to make paper, to make cloth, to make rope, and this is the origin of the concept of hemp rope. This is made out of the fiber inside the stalk of the marijuana plant. The plant has been used medicinally for a long time. During the 19th century there were a number of medical papers written on its use as an analgesic. It's especially useful as a specific against nausea. It has just recently been rediscovered by the medical establishment. In this connection, of course, people suffering from nausea as a result of chemotherapy, cancer patients have begun, have discovered that if you smoke a joint, the nausea goes away. It's more effective against nausea than any other known drug, and it has been this way for 150 years. Now, these drugs, I go through all of this history by way of saying these drugs are not unfamiliar, except for LSD and PCP, which were invented in the 1940s and 50s, respectively. LSD was invented more or less by mistake. A drug researcher at Sandos in Switzerland was doing some experiments with the consequences of combining various items, and he came up with a combination, which he described as lysergic acid diethylamide, number 25, and he took what he thought was a minuscule dose of it to see what would happen. And the thing with LSD is it's an enormously powerful drug. You take micrograms of it, and instead of milligrams, which he would take of any other kind of drug that people know, so that the dose that Mr. Hoffman took was in fact not a minuscule dose, but an enormous dose, and he got on his bicycle and rode home and apparently had a very interesting trip in more ways than one. This was in the 40s, and for a period of 10 or 15 years after that, the drug rapidly became very interesting to psychiatrists, especially, and was used in a lot of hospital experiments and a lot of prison experiments with volunteers, not forced on the prisoners. Psychiatrists were interested in it because it has a profound effect on one's thinking and one's memory. And then, of course, in the 60s, it became popular with young people and was made illegal, and all medical use of it has since stopped. PCP was developed originally in the late 1950s and early 60s as an animal tranquilizer. People were looking for a drug which would be capable of being used on very large and potentially dangerous animals like elephants and horses when you had to do something like pull their teeth or something like this that they might object to. You wanted to have something that would calm them and make them easy to deal with. So they developed PCP, the encyclodine. It has since become popular in some elements as a recreational drug. It doesn't, however, have the effect of making people easy to manage. Now, the drugs that were derived from the opium poppy including heroin, cocaine, and marijuana were not illegal until very recently. The drugs against the opium products originated here in the Bay Area in San Francisco a little over 100 years ago, and they were in the form of laws against opium smoking specifically. Now, at that time, opium was used in a lot of different ways. Morphine existed and people used that intravenously. They drank a concoction using alcohol in combination with morphine, which was known as laudanum and which was a popular drug, especially among the middle classes in the 19th century. It was generally believed by doctors and quite rightly during that period that if you had the choice of being a morphine addict or an alcoholic, it would be much better for your health to be a morphine addict. And doctors generally took the approach of taking people who drank too much and trying to switch them to morphine instead of being considered less debilitating than booze. Cocaine was, as I say, widely used in patent medicines and in soft drinks. Marijuana was not widely used in this country except in states which had large Mexican or Latin American populations, whose Mexicans especially and other Latin Americans had been using it for at least 100 years up to the beginning of the 20th century and had brought the habit with them in the southwestern United States, places like California and Colorado and Texas where they were coming into, in the form of migrant laborers beginning around the 1890s of the first large waves of Mexican immigration. Now, the first opium laws, as I say, originated here in San Francisco and the thing that's significant about them is that they were only laws against opium smoking and importation of opium for the use of smokers. The thing that's interesting about this is that the only people who used opium the immigrant Chinese had come in large numbers to California in large measure to work on the intercontinental railroad on this end and to do other labor and then they had stayed here and during the ensuing series of recessions and depressions that took place over the years, they became periodically very unpopular with the populace. There was already a certain amount of generalized racial resentment against them, xenophobia. These are foreigners. They have filthy un-American habits and they should go back where they came from, intensified during periods of high unemployment when the economy was not doing well because it was felt that the Chinese were taking people's jobs and therefore there was a lot of popular feeling against them and it was during a period of this kind that the opium laws were first passed. To jump ahead a little bit in my story, it was during the 1930s that the first big push against marijuana began, not only in the federal government, the Marijuana Tax Act, the original anti-marijuana law of the federal government was passed in 1937 but it was also during the 30s that most of the American states began outlawing marijuana. The original marijuana laws, the first ones ever to be passed, are less than 100 years old. They date back to about 1909 and they originated here in California and in Colorado and there's a lot of material available from that period that ties it with hatred of the Mexicans and the Latin Americans. I wrote an article quite extensive in marijuana some years ago in Libertarian Review which I'm going to steal a little information out of here to give you an example of the sort of thing I'm talking about. During the 30s, when the Depression hit, you had a similar situation nationwide to the one that I described a moment ago on the west coast with the Chinese. People were out of work. There was a shortage of jobs and here in the southwest and in the west where there were large pockets of Latin Americans living, people had the idea, why don't these people go back home to where they came from instead of staying here taking jobs away from Native Americans. And as I wrote here in the Libertarian Review article, there was one group called the American Coalition which during this period advocated strict bars on Latin American immigration so that mixture with a, quote, inferior race, close quote, would not lead the white majority down the road to, quote, a race suicide, close quote. This group was among the loudest and most enthusiastic of the handful of genuinely influential organizations which favored national marijuana prohibition in the 1930s. An American Coalition spokesman told the New York Times in 1935 that, quote, marijuana, perhaps now the most insidious of our narcotics, is a direct byproduct of unrestricted Mexican immigration, close quote. Harry Anslinger, who was a former prohibition agent who was then out of work because prohibition had been ended in the early 30s and a lot of people think he was looking for something else to occupy his time, took it upon himself to make a big national push in favor of a federal anti-marijuana law at this point, and Anslinger went before Congress in 1937 to testify on the need for prohibition of the weed and submitted, among other things, an evidence, a letter from the civic-minded editor of the Daily Courier in Alamosa, Colorado, a city which had lately been on the receiving end of a good deal of unrestricted Mexican immigration. The editor solicited federal assistance in local efforts to stamp out marijuana abuse, and he said, had become so menacing that it beggared his powers of description, quote. I wish I could show you what a small marijuana cigarette can do to one of our degenerate Spanish-speaking residents. That's why our problem is so great. The greatest percentage of our population is composed of Spanish-speaking persons, most of whom are low mentally because of social and racial conditions, close quote. Harry Anslinger, we know, was pretty much in sympathy with this kind of talk. He had written a magazine article a few years before as part of his anti-marijuana campaign that described dope smugglers, quote, vessels sailing from filthy Central American and West Indian ports, having the lowest scum of the earth as members of the crew, and about how these crew members came ashore in this country bringing dangerous drugs and contaminating the people of the shores with whom they mingle with contagious and lonesome disease. Now, this sort of talk was also present during the early years of the 20th century when cocaine first began to be outlawed. Cocaine was primarily used by black people in the South up until the 1920s. The way that that came about, by the way, is that after the Civil War, a lot of the old plantations, of course, went on existing, although the black people were no longer slaves, they were sharecroppers, and they still went out onto huge expanses of land under white supervisors and did work in these fields. And the white supervisors, cocaine having become very popular in Europe during this period, became aware of its properties, among its properties are it, stimulates, gives you more energy, it gives you more mental alertness, and it kills your appetite. This means that people can work 12 hours a day and not have to eat and not mind it. And, well, I mean, that's obviously a benefit if you're looking at it from the point of view of the former slave-driving boss on a Southern plantation who now has a bunch of uppity sharecroppers working for him. And so the Southern farmers were importing cocaine in large quantities and giving it out free to the black people. And the black people, the farmers liked it and they kept on using it after many of them had moved into the Southern cities. So it was in New Orleans that the original cocaine laws came about and you can read astounding stories. I should have brought some of this stuff with me. I appeared in newspapers in the New York Times during this period about crazed black men who had taken cocaine and raped white women and the police had shot them directly in the chest with seven bullets and they were still coming and had to be subdued by eight men and all the sorts of things that you now hear but it was only black people that you understand that were crazed by this use of cocaine in this way. So there was a definite racial and ethnic tone to much of the original legislation against these drugs and I suggest personally that we can place that sort of an interpretation also on the campaign against LSD in the 60s because although LSD was not the favorite drug of an ethnic minority it was the favorite drug of what you might call a social minority. Here we had a large collection of young people all over the country cutting their hair the way they wanted to instead of the way the older generation wanted them to openly expressing their contempt for authority and for the leadership of the older generation their parents generation the people in the government and leading lifestyles that were regarded as degenerate and they became apostles of LSD use and it seems to me it just fits right in to the general picture the government's reaction to LSD during the 60s seems to me to be exactly the same sort of thing as governmental reactions to earlier drugs when they were the favorite habits of despised ethnic minorities instead of the favorite habit of a despised social minority but of course people who advocate drug laws today don't say well we want to you know keep these drugs illegal because we don't want these uppity ethnic minorities doing anything they want to this has never been the explicit rationale for the drug laws although it was much more explicit in the testimony and writings early in the century of the people who favored these laws because in those days people weren't so sensitive about this and it was not socially unacceptable to be bigoted today of course the justification for the laws is offered along different lines it basically boils down to two propositions first of all drugs destroy the user and second drugs cause crime thereby destroying or undermining society the first part drugs destroy the user is generally has at least two subheads under it one is they destroy the mind and or health of the user and render the user incapable of living his life in a satisfactory manner and second as a result of this they render him unproductive at work so that he has high absenteeism high rate of accidents on the job cheats his employer and reduces the productivity of the American economy fails to support his family and generally creates misery for all those around him this is funny well yes actually it is funny except that it's so ridiculous the fact of course is that I don't know the word that I generally use in reacting to this sort of proposition is lies there is a grain of truth and the kinds of claims that I've just outlined but it is so small by comparison with the rest of what is mixed in that it's very difficult to understand how anyone who has looked into the question at all can take this kind of proposition seriously marijuana for example I'm perfectly prepared to say and most medical people who are not in the pay of the government who are not Dr. Gabriel Nahas or another one of these professional drug abuse mongers will acknowledge is one of the most important to medical science hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent over a period of at least a hundred years starting dating back to the Indian HIP drugs commission report of the British studying drug abuse in India in the 1880s all the way to the present time millions and millions of dollars have been spent hundreds of years and the devotion of people forming commissions and conducting inquiries trying to show that marijuana is harmful no one has ever been able to come up with any evidence that even people who smoke marijuana daily in enormous quantities from childhood through the rest of their lives suffer any damage of any kind from smoking marijuana yes there have been studies that have suggested that and that have also suggested that the sperm count of men who are heavy users of marijuana is reduced which is of course would seem unobviously related or possibly related phenomenon two observations to be made about this one general one personal in general it has not it has not always been possible for other researchers to duplicate these findings this has been the case with so many of the kinds of tests for example tests that show that LSD causes increased multiplication of certain kinds of chromosomes well A you can't not every test shows this it doesn't always turn up and B which leads to questions about whether the LSD is really the cause and then B no one knows for sure what difference that makes that is chromosomes split anyway and it's not clear what consequence there is if they split faster under certain circumstances or for temporary periods of time in the case of the marijuana as I say subsequent follow up studies have not been able to confirm this kind of result in my particular case I was curious about this because back in the 70s I was thinking you know gee that would be an advantage I mean I could see how somebody might have a reduced sperm count lowered but I thought you know it's like this could be a fun sort of birth control you know if you smoke enough dope then you don't have to worry about getting your girlfriend pregnant so I went with my girlfriend to her gynecologist and he was a cool guy and I said I've been reading some of these studies I smoke marijuana every day do you think it's possible I might have a reduced sperm count and I'll take a sample and I'll get it analyzed for UNC so he did and he reported back that I had an alarmingly low sperm count and that there was almost no chance that I would be able to father a child and within a very short time my girlfriend who had in the meantime become my wife became pregnant and the child that resulted is now six years old anyway that's what I have to say you can state as a general proposition that inhaling hot smoke from any burning substance including trash fires or the grass that you cut in your backyard is probably not the best thing for your lungs different people react differently to this kind of thing I mean we've all heard of stories of people who smoke three packs a day of cigarettes for all their lives and die in their sleep at the age of 105 and don't ever get lung cancer whereas other people do get it at the age of 28 suffer any over consequences or get diseases and other people do get diseases when they do this no tests have shown that the smoke and the TARS from marijuana are any more harmful than the smoke and TARS from any other smoke that people customarily inhale except one study down at UCLA which suggested that if people smoked the same amount of marijuana daily that heavy cigarette smoke and we're talking here about two to three packs a day that's wonderful now as again we're in the category of studies where it's not clear what the causes of some of the results were and some of these studies are so sloppy I mean you start reading them and you find that a certain percentage of the people in the study were also cigarette smokers and no effort was made to weed them out beforehand so how can you even tell whether lung damage in particular cases was due to tobacco smoking or marijuana smoking procedural errors could not possibly be guilty of such an error except deliberately because he wanted to load the evidence this is the kind of thing that you run into when you get past newspaper reports and get copies of the studies from the labs that do them and read the things and of course the other thing is nobody smokes that much marijuana I don't know whether it would be possible the rastafarians in Jamaica smoke it all day long and in huge quantities and I have seen the assertion that amounts of marijuana is about what you get a pack of cigarettes weighs about an ounce so personally I cannot imagine smoking an ounce a day I don't know how you could take it all out I don't know how you could burn it all up unless you set up a huge bonfire and inhaled through a giant tube of some kind it would be defeated by the sheer magnitude of the task and to do two or three of them is really amazing so even if the UCLA study is accurate in the sense that the same quantity of burned marijuana produces more harmful tars than the same quantity of tobacco the fact of the matter is that nobody smokes that much even the most confirmed potheds don't smoke that kind of quantity yes marijuana is accused in the literature a lot of hurting short-term memory you hear a lot about short-term memory loss from getting smoking I think from my personal experience that may be true especially while you're stoned it is sometimes difficult to remember things that happened just a few minutes ago and much easier to remember things that happened yesterday or a week ago but this seems to pass with the intoxication and is therefore not a long-term or permanent effect of the drug I really consider marijuana absolutely harmless I don't know of another substance including foods that I think is as benign to human beings as marijuana is now these other drugs there may be more than that I'm inclined to think that LSD is pretty close to harmless too mainly because although the research has not gone on for nearly as long and not nearly the resources have been put into the research yet but it's been very difficult for them to come up with any evidence of anything except that people can't it's very powerful it's I mean if you've ever been really drunk on enormously powerful liquor by drinking you know ever clear green alcohol and chugga lugging a couple of shots of it or something so that you get drunk really fast if you're not used to it it can be extremely disorienting and it is possible for people to do dumb things and it is therefore believable that people jump out of windows and so forth if they do not know what they're getting into if they take too large a dose or they freak out and become hysterical when they start experiencing the changes but in terms of its physiological effect on the body of the user nobody's ever been able to show that there are any harmful consequences from using it cocaine and the opiates are not as if there are degrees of harmlessness they're not as harmless as these other substances but they are not as harmless as nicotine and they are not as harmless as alcohol all doctors know this and harmful I'm sorry it is thank you it is it is very difficult even in these days of enormously increased enthusiasm for the drug abuse myth in the public prints to find reputable people who will claim otherwise because the more people who have looked into this the more clear it has become most of the health problems associated with the use of heroin and the other opiates have pretty well been proved to be in fact the health problems caused by the laws against these drugs this is in two ways first of all the laws drive the price up enormously I'm not real conversant with the exact data on heroin but I can give you an example with cocaine which is in the same general ballpark in terms of its price you can buy an ounce of pure cocaine if you are a physician with an narcotics license you're an eye, ear, nose and throat specialist or one of the couple of other kinds of doctors who still occasionally use cocaine in certain limited medical uses you can buy a jar of it 100% pure for about $50 from Merck or Lilly the two American manufacturers of cocaine now if I go out tonight and buy an ounce of cocaine from somebody that I know in the East Bay this man is going to sell it to me for at least $2,000 probably closer to $2,000 and it will not be pure and I won't know what else is in it or what percentage of that stuff that is before me this white powder here is not cocaine but something else I do know a lot about what kinds of things are commonly used to cut street cocaine but unless I have a little lab kit and I want to go to some trouble to analyze what is in any particular sample I don't know what I'm getting with junkies apparently the situation is even worse than I thought to expect they also have to deal with the problem of the black market supplying them with synthetic heroin substitutes a friend of mine named Jack Schaefer who was for a number of years an editor of Inquiry and is now a freelance writer has an article in I think it's the March issue the current issue of Science 85 on what he calls designer drugs which is the trend toward laboratory manufacture of various substances which are mostly intended to resemble heroin physically and in the effects on the user but are much cheaper to produce and these things have all sorts of undesirable consequences I mean not all of them have the same consequences one particular blend that some chemist cooked up down in San Jose which Jack refers to in his article has given a certain number of its users it seems to have brought on a sort of premature Parkinson's disease so that you have these 28-year-old junkies going around with the shaking and the other symptoms that characterize Parkinson's which usually strikes people who are quite old and so by and large the health problems associated with heroin use are associated with the adulterants that are introduced into the drug the fact that the users cannot get a drug which is pure and second by the fact that the drug that they buy is so outrageously highly priced and they are so devoted to it that they don't invest their money in proper nutrition or care they skip meals they don't bother about keeping their surroundings clean they don't bother about they are placed in a situation by the law in which they can't even take care to be properly clean with things like needles and are sometimes placed in a position of having to share them with other users because of course these needles are also unavailable except by prescription you can't just go out and buy one so that the health problems are in effect caused by the laws of hospitals Columbia University in the 30s there were a couple of specific tests that were very impressive that are mentioned and written up in this book elicit and illicit drugs by Edward Brecker in which volunteer heroin addicts were given pure heroin in the hospital environment and it was made sure that they weren't taking in other substances other than food and so forth while they were in the hospital and it was found two things were found one is that all the health consequences that they had been having as junkies suddenly disappeared once they were getting a pure supply which was free which they didn't have to shell out hundreds of dollars a day for and second they found with volunteers that they could not come up with a dose so large that it would kill anybody this is an interesting phenomenon which Brecker devotes a lot of space to in his book that the heroin overdose experience junkies react to enormously larger doses of heroin than they're used to they just react by getting high and falling asleep they don't die but they do die when there are adulterants in their heroin or when they take the heroin in addition to taking downers or which is to say especially I've lost the term for the barbiturates exactly or with booze if you start if you think for a moment I'll come to you Janice Joplin Jimmy Hendricks who died supposedly of heroin overdoses even if you just read the stupid press reports the press will believe anything the DEA tells them this I will just go off on this for a moment because it's a thing of mine in the 60s you know the news media became partisan we're told the news media became critical of government and it has since been critical of government and it has been arrayed against the government realized that the White House might have a motive for lying sometimes it might be worthwhile to to think about what they said and questioned might this not be true might there be any hidden agenda here and they found that this was also true for the Pentagon but they never found that it was true for any other branch of the government and if you suggest to most editors or most reporters today that the Drug Enforcement Administration might lie they're absolutely astonished why would they lie what motive long ago to find out the news directors and the public service directors and people in these stations what kinds of topics would you like most to have public service announcements on you know what one with 80 some odd percent of all responding stations choosing it spots on drug abuse it's not there's not even any question of is there such a thing as drug abuse are the drugs really harmful are the laws harmful it's just a foregone conclusion drug abuse is a terrible thing it will harm society and the public service for us to speak out against it this is the attitude that you get in the media but even if you read the media accounts alone of deaths like those of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix you find that they were drinking in addition to shooting up heroin there's a lot of evidence that suggests that heroin not only does not harm anybody's health but it can't kill anybody under normal circumstances either unless they mix it with other drugs or unless they take in along with the huge quantity of heroin there are other drugs such as quinine which can have unfortunate effects on you if you inject a bunch of it into your bloodstream I think you had a question I haven't read enough about that aside from the press reports which I feel skeptical about there is a you can kill yourself with a large enough dose of cocaine I don't know how large a dose of cocaine it is alleged that Belushi was given he was supposed to have been given the speed balls repeatedly which are mixtures of cocaine and heroin it is possible to overdose on cocaine it will stop the heart if you take enough in it is a case in which under normal circumstances if you are not shooting it up most users of cocaine snort cocaine and under these circumstances there is almost no danger I mean technically it is theoretically possible to kill yourself with an overdose of marijuana too I found when I was doing some research on marijuana a number of years ago but what you would have to do is take in somehow all at once with a period of a minute or two equivalent of a pound of marijuana now there might be a way to do this by reducing the pound you know to oil or something like that but you couldn't drink it because then it would have to go through the digestive process and it wouldn't all enter the bloodstream at once you would have to find a way to smoke all that all at once or inject it or in some other way so that it would enter the bloodstream and you see it is a big problem it might be solvable but you would have to be determined you would have to want to it is like it is somewhat like drinking yourself to death you can drink yourself to death but usually people who do it are committing suicide because there's not really a danger from sitting here drinking beer that you'll drink yourself to death in order to drink yourself to death you have to set out with a fifth of scotch or something and deliberately chug a luggage or something deliberately take in an enormous amount all at once yes okay yes yeah I will eventually I'm running much longer than I intended to originally with this coming to that ultimately let me just quickly wrap up here and say the drugs are not cocaine and heroin are probably more dangerous than the other popular psychoactive drugs but they aren't as dangerous as booze they aren't as dangerous as nicotine neither of them has been shown to cause serious diseases neither of them and used in a normal fashion if they were available on a free market at a rational price in a condition of purity of the kind that we normally associate cigarettes and beer and things of that sort that we buy would be they would be much more benign substances than the legal drugs that we have in our midst I should briefly throw in one other example which I just love because many people smoke tobacco especially cigarettes a lot of people don't know that very recently in the 20s say about the time Ronald Reagan was 12 years old marijuana was actually legal in more states than cigarettes were in this country for 18 years the situation had reversed and cigarettes were universally legal and marijuana was illegal but cigarettes were once widely illegal prominent Americans Thomas Addison as an example once stated publicly that he believed that cigarette smoking caused irreversible brain damage and would not hire anyone to work for him who smoked cigarettes but we don't think of cigarettes in this sort of way today nor do we think of cigarettes as destroying the health and related diseases but during at the end of World War Two during the occupation of Berlin cigarettes were rationed as a I mean it was one of many things that were rationed and this is a small sidelight but I want to read you a paragraph or two from Edward Breckers listen and illicit drugs on this because indirectly illustrates a point about these health effects following World War Two he starts out by saying when the supply of cigarettes is curtailed cigarette smokers like heroin addicts following World War Two for example the tobacco ration in Germany was cut to two packs per month for men and one pack per month for women I don't know why the sexism in that case but whatever Dr. F. I. Artson of the Research Center for Psycho Diagnosis in Münster, Germany questioned hundreds of Germans during the cigarette famine and reported his findings in the American Journal of Psychology in 1948 up to a point Dr. Artson noted the majority of the habitual smokers were in extreme conditions of nutrition rather than to forego tobacco thus when food rations in prisoner of war camps were down to 900 to 1,000 calories smokers were still willing to barter their food rations for tobacco of 300 German civilians questioned 256 had obtained tobacco at the black market 37 had bought tobacco and food and only five had bought food but no tobacco many housewives who were smokers battered fat and sugar for cigarettes in disregard of considerations of personal dignity conventional decorum and aesthetic hygienic cigarettes were picked up out of the street dirt by people who on their own statements would in any other circumstances have felt disgust at such contact smokers also condescended to beg for tobacco but not for other things and reports on subjective impressions 80% of those questioned declared that it felt worse to do without nicotine than without alcohol he goes on in subsequent paragraphs to indicate that there was also a certain amount oh yes here it is reports of women willing to prostitute themselves with alcohol and goods for cigarettes were also common after the war in effect they started doing all the same things that junkies do and yet we don't see this around us now it seems to me that the obvious conclusion is that it's not the drugs that cause this behavior it's the laws against the drugs the indirect consequences of saying the related question of how can people function it's always asserted if you take these drugs then you can't do what you have to do and so you become unproductive Thomas Zies in a wonderful paragraph in his book heresies has said what it seems to me is the bottom line on this so let me read you this paragraph ostensibly the use of illicit drugs like marijuana and heroin is prohibited because they're said to impair the social functioning of the person who uses them this claim is inconsistent with the fact that the authority is concerned mainly parents politicians and physicians usually don't know who uses the subject's knowledge of being tested or without his consent to it if illicit drugs impair social functioning a contingency which is clearly absurd without specifying drugs and dosages then we need no special tests to identify the users and if they do not necessarily impair social functioning which is clearly the case then testing people for drug abuse by examining their urines is unlike testing them for diabetes and instead more like testing men for Jewishness by examining their penises think about this when you read sports pages or the drug pages all the teams are giving tests to their athletes to find out if they're taking drugs why don't they know there was one celebrated case a few years ago of a national basketball association star who had done fabulously well I think with the Kansas City Kings is that right I'm not up on basketball enough who said you know he was high on cocaine during all these games and he played one game on LSD there was a picture at the San Diego Padres who pitched a game on LSD and nobody thought there was anything wrong with the game until later when they found out that he pitched it on LSD there have been all sorts of prominent people over the years who have been lifelong drug addicts and have gone on functioning anyway William Halstead is probably the most celebrated example American surgeon in the 19th century who developed a lot of breakthroughs and surgery and helped to found the Johns Hopkins University Medical School and was found in his career and presumably was performing his operations under the influence of what today we would call smack but this did not somehow make it impossible for him to function properly. And for the first time in a life they feel good where does that nagging feel that my goal has had do you know anything about that? I have I've run into assertions of that type just here and there without any quantitative backup Zaz makes the comment somewhere that basically that some people do take drugs in order to cope that quite the contrary that just as you say that their purpose in taking drugs is that it makes it easier for them to assume their responsibilities and do what they need to do rather than harder and that so there are really two types of drug users those who use them in order to cope and those who use them to dramatize and flagrantly symbolize the fact that they refuse to do what people expect of them and what society now the related claim that drug use causes crime can be dispensed with pretty clearly I think I don't nobody claims any more that marijuana users commit crime in the case of marijuana and the opiates heroin by and large the effect of the drug is such as to mitigate against crime I mean a lot of people when they drink get violent and go out and pick fights but when people smoke marijuana or shoot up heroin they tend to get laid back and relaxed and they tend to go to sleep it's not the sort of thing that's likely to make you go out and commit violent crimes against your neighbors stimulant like cocaine might theoretically do that but in fact it's been very difficult for anybody to induce any evidence that people take cocaine and are buy the cocaine rather than buy their previously made plans induced to go out and commit crimes most studies suggest that the reason so many criminals use crimes is because they're in the criminal world and the I mean I'm sorry so many criminals use drugs is because they are living in the criminal subculture in the criminal world and the drugs are easily available around them and they know people who are selling them and that they were criminals before they began using drugs rather than that they became criminals after using drugs again a lot of property crime is committed especially by junkies to get junk and the reason is because the price is driven up astronomically by the laws there was a controlled study taken in Detroit some years ago in which the police tested this by selecting areas of the community and alternately enforcing the drug laws harshly and just ignoring them and letting it go on and what they found is that when they ignored the drug trade and did not try to enforce the laws the prices slowly fell and the property crime fell at the same time and the more harshly they enforced the laws the higher the prices went and the more property crime was created we don't think of I mean do you see people out in the street committing property crimes to buy cigarettes or prostituting themselves to buy cigarettes as they were doing and we're in Berlin after World War II because they don't have to pay outrageous prices for cigarettes I mean by comparison to what I used to have to pay for them back in the 1960s they seem pretty outrageous but by comparison to black market drugs they're absurdly low sure and the reason again is that the price is so high I mean why do they stand to make so much money that this is attractive only because of the laws these things I mean they're just plants they grow all over the place especially marijuana there's no reason on earth that it should cost much of anything in terms of just the cost of producing a product and under a normal system of competition in which everyone could grow it and anybody who tried to sell it for a high price would be running the risk of having a competitor move in on his business very quickly it simply you know it would have to have a very low price yes sir heroin isn't legal anywhere anymore a lot of these drugs were legal in other parts of the world for many years but the United States has taken care of that it has made drug prohibitions of the US type a precondition of certain aspects of its foreign aid in many parts of the world and has bullied other nations into imitating its laws what you may be hearing about is what's going on in Holland in Amsterdam in particular all the drug laws are still on the books including the laws against marijuana but there are clubs in the city of Amsterdam in which marijuana is just sold openly and the police just I mean in effect the laws are just literally a dead letter they're not being enforced they are on the books Amsterdam is still a signatory of the United Nations single convention on narcotics abuse which binds it to stamp out marijuana and other dangerous drugs within its borders but it isn't doing this at all with marijuana and there are certain places in Amsterdam where I read that you can also freely buy heroin and nothing is done about it although it's not sold openly it stands in the way that marijuana is and the prices are therefore low and as far as I have seen the assertion that there is heroin related crime in Holland but I don't know what to make of this because it doesn't jibe with what I generally know to be in the case and I haven't seen enough detail to know on what basis that kind of claim is being made I'm sorry on high on what oh sure if you couldn't I wouldn't be able to get anywhere you know it feels different and just as I mean have you ever driven when you were drunk studies yeah there are studies and the studies show that reaction time has slowed down in certain cases there have been a couple of studies which have been more or less suppressed because in their conclusions the people who wrote the studies pointed out that they found that drivers who were in the habit of smoking and driving tended to have fewer accidents actually when they were high than on the average than when they weren't and the reason that was proposed was and everybody who has much to do with potheds will recognize this is that they become paranoid about attracting attention to themselves or doing something wrong and therefore drive very slowly through the effects of the drugs this is a common observation just among people who use the stuff and it has even turned up as I say in a couple of the studies but by and large again I mean this has been the general category of the observation I made before nobody has been able to come up with a study that shows that marijuana is nearly as harmful as alcohol in affecting the aspects of one's well-being that affect one's ability to drive as long as the price was anything higher I suppose than the we even have a certain amount of trivial crime in certain parts of the United States with things like tobacco people smuggle cigarettes into and out of places like Virginia and North Carolina because there are differences in state taxes which can create if you get a large enough shipment of cigarettes a sufficient difference that it provides an incentive to crime okay well okay let me retrace my steps here okay to sum up what I've said so far then the basic rationale for the drugs for the drug laws that we have is that the drugs are harmful it seems to me that even judging our laws by the standards implied by that analysis if we come into it and say okay I won't quibble with you about this the drugs are harmful just as harmful as you say they are is the policy an effective one no even judged to advocate the policy the policy is not only ineffective at achieving what it is supposed to achieve it is counterproductive it actually exacerbates the problems that it is supposed to solve if we have the policy so that we won't have crime caused by drug use the policy creates more crime than would exist if it weren't there if we only had the drug use there we want to safeguard public health and make sure that people's bodies and minds aren't destroyed by drug use the policy causes more minds and bodies to be destroyed by securities and high prices than would be destroyed by it if the drugs were simply freely available and there was no policy there is literally no way to justify what we are doing in our drug policy even by the standards of those who want the policy to be there it is a failure and worse than a failure now of course judged by libertarian standards it's even worse than that not only because we don't accept presumably the goals that it has we think these are none of the government's business people even if the drugs are harmful they have a right to destroy themselves to commit suicide slowly or rapidly as they prefer if the drugs lead people to commit crimes the fact that somebody has taken a drug does not mean he's responsible and not responsible for his behavior he's responsible for committing the crime whatever he had in his body whether it was salt or sugar or milk or heroin at the time that he committed it this is not a special problem from the libertarian point of view our policy from a libertarian example the exclusionary rule and the whole issue of search and seizure law fourth amendment law is all tied up in victimless crimes if you go into a law textbook and look at the cases that established the exclusionary rule in the first place you find that they're all victimless crimes cases cases like map versus Ohio which was a pornography case the cases that it's upwards of 90% of all the cases in the federal courts in which evidence is thrown out for illegal search and seizure in victimless crimes cases in the gambling, pornography and drugs categories the main reason that police exceed constitutional guidelines in conducting searches is because there is no other way for them to enforce laws against victimless crimes the people who are committing a drug crime they're just sitting in somebody's living room you know and one of them hands the other one a package and the other one hands the other one some money and they both agree to the transaction and no one complains how are the police are tapping the telephone line or you know knocking down the door without a search warrant or any grounds for suspicion that anything is happening we're doing something else which can ultimately under exclusionary rule law get the case thrown out this in some ways actually I would say that we hardly would need those kinds of protections if we didn't have victimless crime laws of different sorts on the books so and you can look at the development of fourth amendment law it starts in the 20s with prohibition it was during the 20s that you first suddenly start having all these cases in which lawyers are going in arguing that the fourth amendment rights of the defendants were violated and the reason is because the only way to enforce prohibition was for the prohibition agents to do just as I said and so one of the one of the significant features of our constitutional protections in this country has been eroded and it has been eroded specifically by our drug policy this is a consequence that libertarians would presumably deplore that is an additional effect right now it has had deleterious consequences also for our foreign policy it has made it is one of the factors that has made the United States extremely unpopular with a lot of people in Latin America especially in those parts of Latin America in which the coca plant has grown because traditionally the coca plant has not been against the law the Indians have been chewing the coca leaves for centuries as I say and in fact in Peru and Bolivia still the governments of those countries are in the cocaine trade and part of this is not just because there are a bunch of generals who are looking only for the money it's because in that country in those countries despite decades and decades of US pressure otherwise people have never got to the point that they think of cocaine as something evil they think of it the way we think of booze it's just you snort cocaine or you chew the leaves or something like that it's just not they haven't been willing to accept the American vision of this stuff yet despite how totally indefensible our drug policy is by any existing standards ours or anybody else's it is one of the most popular policies that we have if a politician wants a policy to get up on a platform and announce his fervent enthusiasm for and he doesn't want to have to worry about offending anybody drugs we won't offend anybody at all Wilson is staging an enormous publicity stunt on behalf of his third campaign for the Merrill's office and the Merrill office in Oakland you know the drug crisis in Oakland well the drug crisis in Oakland isn't any different today from the way it was five years ago or ten years ago it's the same thing all that has happened is that here's a politician he comes up and he says ah the drug crisis we have to have a war on drugs in Oakland now he puts himself in an infeable position right away there's no one will argue with him he's very harmful the laws are harmful instead we should get rid of them Wilson Ryles Jr. can't say that he's Wilson's opponent so he's placed in the position of having to say well yes I agree with Mayor Wilson and he's automatically placed in a secondary position he did not have the fortitude to come forth in the beginning and crusade against this horrible problem and instead somebody beat him to the jump Nancy Reagan wants to improve on clothes and so forth well she gets into drug abuse it's one of the most popular kinds of things for first ladies and other useless types in the political world to get into because no one questions it it's what the broadcast stations want for their public service announcements everybody is against drug abuse I have here from Harper's magazine October of last year 1984 they delved into the bulletin of the Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics 60,000 Americans were asked to rank the seriousness of 204 different crimes based on their responses a severity index was arrived at for each crime and then they list the 20 most serious and most heinous crimes that anyone might commit number 10 is running a narcotics ring let me list for you the 10 crimes the next 10 crimes that it outranks in seriousness in the public mind number 11 plants a bomb in a public building the bomb explodes and one person is injured but no medical treatment is required number 12 an armed person hijacks an airline and holds the crew and passengers hostage until a ransom is paid number 13 a person plants a bomb in a public building the bomb explodes and 20 people are injured but no medical treatment is required number 14 a man rapes a woman because of her physical injuries a plane demands to be flown to another country number 17 a man rapes a woman no other physical injury occurs number 18 a man tries to entice a minor into his car for immoral purposes number 19 a person intentionally sets fire to a building causing $100,000 worth of damage number 20 a person intentionally shoots a victim with a gun the victim requires hospitalization all of these in the San Francisco Chronicle there's a story on the front page Governor Duke Magin is demanding more funds to combat child abuse armed robbery and marijuana growers I look at that and to me this is hysterically funny those three people child abusers armed robbers and people who grow a plant this is the way the public perceives this issue now why does the public perceive it this way I think part of it is the media as I have said sort of getting ahead several times in the course of standing up here the media they think they just they don't want to even consider that there's any questions to be asked on the conventional wisdom on drugs and if anything I work in the media this is how I make my living if anything it seems to me it's gotten worse this is one of the reasons that I have for this pessimism that I said was gripping me when I first stood up here in the since about 1979 what's that six years ago now if anything the people in the media many of them are drug users themselves and then they go on the air or write in the newspaper and they just hand out this pablum that they get from the Drug Enforcement Administration's news releases as though there's nothing wrong with it and it's a reflection of the truth and back in the 70s some groups arose normal was probably the biggest one the national organization for the reform of marijuana laws it grew with Hugh Hefner's money to a substantial size and it had a lot of influence in that statement that I referred to the president Carter made calling for decriminalization of marijuana was written for him by Keith Strott the founder of normal normal today is in a shambles it's closed down it's regional offices it's California office which was the last of its regional offices to continue to exist has now been closed down the national office has maybe half the budget that it used to have it no longer has any contact with the governments of the federal government no ends with the administration or anything of the kind it has its efforts have fallen off completely you read more in these days in the newspapers about parents groups in Georgia fighting the sale of bongs to their children and roach clips and things of this kind then you ever see anything about normal doing anything the issue is regarded by a lot of people who do understand the truth on it as relatively unimportant this is true I think especially among libertarians libertarians have the right idea on this I have found some resistance among some older libertarians especially to my kind of analysis that the drugs aren't really harmful they don't either they don't want to believe it or if they don't if they do believe it they think it would be hard to sell to people so why don't we just you know push that aside and say even if they are harmful on grounds of individual rights people have a right which of course is true so libertarians have the right idea on the question but look around yourselves you know it's going to be one of the biggest problems trying to sell this to the general public you start looking at it in the way that someone in the libertarian party does not just in terms of the correctness of the position and the beneficial consequences of adopting it but how can I persuade people of the wisdom of this course it's one of the worst tasks to try to undertake is to persuade them of the wisdom of the course of getting rid of drug laws and this obsession which the media is constantly hammering over and over day in and day out the people are being told about the menace of drugs they hardly ever hear anything on the contrary you got a real uphill struggle trying to sell them on something like this and is it that important of course it's important people's rights are being violated people are being thrown in jail there are some you know outstanding cases of some kid sells a cop a joint and goes to prison for 16 years or something like this that are outrageous violations of individual rights on the other hand not as many people are as affected by it as are affected by the welfare system as are affected by the selective service especially in the event of another war taking place down in Central America there are all sorts of larger issues that looked at from a purely pragmatic point of view as a libertarian you have to say are more important they would be an easier sell they will do more good more quickly if we can actually turn public policy around on these issues so there's a natural tendency to say well you know people are irrational on this topic so we won't put a lot of emphasis on it and a lot of emphasis is not put on it and I can't I can't be too critical of this it makes sense to me if I were in a strategic sort of position in the party and trying to choose issues with an eye to how we can have the most effect on the general public I too would be inclined to say let's not put a lot of resources into drug reform because we can use our resources better in another way we aren't so rich that we can afford to do this so how can there be hope? I really, you know I'm supposed to be writing a book on this subject for the Cato Institute and I have been supposed to be writing it for some time and as perhaps you can tell I've done a little reading and I know something about it but I'm having trouble doing the actual writing and part of the reason is that the more I read and the more I learn the more I realize that all of this has been known everything I've told you today is none of this is new a couple of decades people have been writing this kind of thing many many books have come out in articles and magazines and journals it's well known all of it and it has been for decades to anybody who goes into the goes to the trouble to study the topic and what has happened the general public still doesn't know it the media still doesn't know it the people in the government still don't know it can anything and you know what am I writing this book for just to get money from the Cato Institute that's what I find myself thinking yes yes sir you're right I'm saying that all this stuff has been well known especially among law enforcement agencies who have seminars on drug use and the effects but I don't think it's of interest to people unless you put it into a context of who benefits and who suffers and the hypocrisy and all the things unless you write the book with that kind of a focus on context I don't think it's a market point just that nobody bothers to read the stuff that's already been published including that book you got there which consumers reports distributed at a very moderate price 10 years ago about that almost 20 now rather than I mean either write a similar book to that and you'll get nowhere because it's facts and it's not in context it's not I was up to Mendocino last week talking to people about the drug traffic there and some of the effects the pros and cons of food benefiting and so forth as a fascinating subject the newspapers have run a few articles on that but take it in a broader scope and not just Mendocino but the whole United States the extent of drug use and the who benefits from it including possibly the CIA which is not inconceivable because that's happening in southeast Asia drug traffic that can run out of military unless you put in that context and I'm going to argue the problem Dan pretty obvious that there are some combinations of substances but they're very game and I know people that literally destroy themselves with their mind and they're like you know for 30 years old they're going to be not be the rest of the line but what extent the present law keeping that kind of information about well I find myself suspicious of the question a little bit because I haven't ever encountered this and increasingly I'm inclined to think that people who do exhibit zombie-like behavior at the age of 30 after a number of years of using drugs that we may be barking up the wrong tree if we think it's about drugs that rather they might have been using drugs for the same reason that they are now looking like zombies that they have certain kinds of psychological problems or as Thomas Zeiss would call them problems in living that make them want to escape from just normal awareness in whatever pleasant way they can and so they take a lot of drugs but that in itself is not necessarily what's causing the zombie-like behavior and part of the reason that I feel this way is because nobody's ever you know there isn't any evidence that drugs harm the mind or anything else as I pointed out on the other hand Jack Shaffer whom I mentioned earlier in connection with the designer drugs concept made a point of arguing once in an L.R. article on PCP that he wrote that with regard to PCP and other cases as well one of the consequences government drug prohibitions is first of all there are certain people who are attracted to drugs in effect because they are prohibited this is one of the factors that people sometimes forget when they talk about well how many huge numbers of people would we have out there taking drugs if there were no laws against them in some cases they might not be any larger than they are now because a lot of the people try these drugs mainly because they're not supposed to if they were as coffee is for example in our society and a lot of people in the first place and on the other hand if it were freely available there would be accurate information available about the contents of the drugs there would be an economic incentive for private companies as well as the government to do tests on what kinds of consequences might be fallen individual who took it in what quantities or in combination with what other things there would be all sorts of information available that isn't so that the government prohibition which is supposedly intended to protect people from the consequences of the drug may actually on the one hand serve as an advertisement for the drug and get them to try it in the first place and then set things up in such a way that they're denied the information that they would normally have access to to tell them why they might not want to take it I don't know if that exactly answers you but that's my reaction yes sir this is the designer drugs concept or another aspect of it and this is a researcher's article in science 85 it's possible to make chemical analogs which are slightly different from the formula that's listed in the federal schedules so that until they get around to adding it to the schedule it's legal and it takes a certain amount of time because of the bureaucracy to get something scheduled so that even though the Reagan administration has now given emergency scheduling authority to the Drug Enforcement there are thousands of of close analogs of many of these drugs so that it would be theoretically almost impossible for the government to keep up with it and Jack contends that he did a cover article in Inquiry on this topic too the war on drugs is lost it can't be won because now that we have this synthetic capability it's impossible for the government to keep up it's illegal but any new drug unless FDA approves it and if we're not careful we might get to the same point all EDA type drugs as well I figure they're going to do the law but I just I know it's generally pessimism but I do too I'm thinking of course on where the policies and where are coming and to see the level of one thing that I see that seems to always blind the cycles through American history there have been episodes through drug popularity and drug unpopularity and drugs and at the moment the illegal drug is not very popular but you know 10 years ago they almost got illegal but what's going on a cultural hypothesis is that who are the kids who are these well they're kids of 1950s generation who in fact are going to use generation they're the last conservative generation 1960s generation still has its kids coming up from the culture when they reach the age of experimentation in 10 15 years I don't think they'll ever turn around and I hope they'll have all the right again and they're waiting for it yes sir in the future as we found DNA whereby all these efforts to close off the supply of the coronations will be of no effect because people like it will be of equal and bacteria gene splicing will be able to reduce all these things and so certainly something to look forward to I see but the fact that the chronicle put it that way you know most people they don't doesn't even make them do a double take it just fits right in armed robbers child molesters and marijuana I don't know yes sir oh well actually there could be something to that because especially country I made the cracks about Jamaica earlier my portrait of Jamaica is similar to what you could say about Peru and some of the nations which have which are big producers of drugs or the plant precursors of them have no other viable economy and there are enormous profits to be made thanks to these laws so obviously they are strongly attracted to that I saw just the other day I read news on the weekends at a radio station and Saturday morning I had a story that President Reagan said that the Sandinistas and other Soviet sympathizers in Central America destroyed the minds of American youth so that it will be easier for the Soviet Union to take them over so it isn't only obvious nuts like Lyndon LaRouche who think along these lines but you know I think Ronald Reagan is an obvious nut too but obviously a great many people disagree with me about this yes this is a character that long time used to be a very tacky place famous for taking large quantities of drugs it's Timothy Leary at the time well I wrote some notes as an example of a productive person who used drugs but then I realized that even among libertarians I couldn't necessarily count on people not thinking that that was a tongue-in-cheek example I'm inclined to agree with you but I've run into a lot of people who would say that Timothy Leary is an example of a great mind destroyed by drugs you know doesn't surprise me well there was a book called High in America and it had a subtitle something like the story of normal and it's attempt of marijuana laws or something by Pat Anderson which came out in 1981 as I recall early and that's the extent of my knowledge that plus conversations with Gordon Brownell who used to a San Francisco lawyer who used to be the head of the West Coast Office of Normal and briefly for about a year was also head of National Normal toward the end and he basically verifies the book which is that Keith Strop and several of the other people who were in the organization had always had a certain number of contacts with the yippies the yippies were one of the best factions during the 60s from the standpoint of having a rational attitude toward drugs and one of the yippies a guy named Tom Forsad who founded High Times Magazine was along with Hugh Hefner an early heavy contributor to normal and I can't recall the exact details as I stand up here not having looked at the book not anticipating this question but basically what happened is that normal had a conference in 1979 late or early 1980 in Washington they used to have an annual conference which was partly scientific partly legal in its emphasis and they had got to the point that their conferences were attended by people in the government and they had DEA people and National Institute on Drug Abuse People and National Institute on Mental Health People who agreed to come and speak and be on panels because they had got themselves to the point that the opposition regarded them as serious respectable people and not a bunch of kooks and this was one of their great achievements I think I mean that's a huge public relations coup to have done that in less than ten years but the yippie element convinced Keith Strop to agree to funding a pie hit on I'm trying to remember I can't remember the official's name but he was an official with the National Institute on Drug Abuse who had done a turnaround a few days before the conference and made public statements about the dangers of marijuana which conflicted with his earlier statements on the same subject and which were felt as sort of a personal betrayal by people in normal I find myself thinking of Robert Dupont who's now the head of the Institute on Drug Abuse of whom what I just said is also true but it wasn't Dupont himself it was a lower ranking official was up there on the platform at the table and Aaron Kay who's a among people who know the yippies well-known yippie pie hitter came rushing in with a cream pie and smacked the guy in the face with it and after that seemingly trivial incident was all over with normal none of the people were obvious influence stopped then you know funding started becoming a problem when I was closest to the organization myself in the late 70s when Gordon was running it for a year as an interim national director they were already in a situation in which Hugh Hefner was saying to them look I've been putting up most of the bucks for your organization now for almost 10 years and I want you to show that you have widespread appeal that's the point that their influence in Washington was going down the tubes they could no longer take prospective donors to functions that they held in Washington and say you see all the people from the Department of Health Education and Welfare here and the people from National Institute on Mental Health and we have friends in high places and we're really going to be effective because it wasn't happening anymore it does seem kind of amazing it's almost like it was just a pretext if this is the excuse to stop this and so the pie gave them an excuse I don't know of any it used to be that there were people in places like NIMH and NIDA that took reasonable or semi reasonable approaches but over the last few years the reports that I get I know some people around the country lawyers and doctors who are interested in this and our academics and want to do scholarly work on the use of drugs and they tell me that it is literally it's no longer possible to get any funding unless it is obvious from your past publications and your credentials that you can be expected to do a study which shows how harmful the drugs are and how beneficial our laws are part of their three part series yeah four part yeah four abusing on child children has been realized has dropped five out of four of these these problems associated with children yet you know there are signs that the sales of especially marijuana and cocaine are constantly escalating this is one of the anomalies to me you gather from the paper even though you have to assume with the DEA and therefore with the press every drug bust is the biggest ever have you ever noticed this everyone it's just they just get bigger and bigger and bigger to some extent you have to discount this but there is evidence that the sales and the value of the products is steadily growing who are these users I see I see surveys that are done that show that marijuana use is declining this was brought into my mind by what you just said in certain age groups such as children and so forth well if this is true who is smoking all this marijuana who is snorting all this cocaine isn't it I have always assumed that it was people who were the 60s generation and a little before and a little after who are now you know and they're people who are early middle-aged people but and these people presumably according to my understanding of the way the world works because they are now in their 30s and early 40s ought to be coming into just the beginnings of coming into being politically the most powerful group they're large the baby boom generation is so large it's formed such a huge segment of society this group of people presumably understand about drugs you shouldn't be able to tell these people that marijuana rots the brain if they don't use it themselves and 25 million Americans are supposed to be users of it they know somebody who does lots of people who do but yet where is their evidence of public opinion being in conflict with the current newly fashionable war on drugs all over again it doesn't look to me as though public opinion is necessarily inflamed in support of it but it just seems very apathetic and I would think these yuppies who used to be hippies and who are supposed to be self-interested in so many ways would be more interested in this because why should they pay $100 a gram for their cocaine when they could be getting it a lot cheaper you know