On June
10, 197 1, at 3: 10 in the afternoon, President Nixon
met a miracle worker"-at least that was the way
that Egil Krogh, Jr., introduced Dr. Jerome Jaffe, a
well-respected pharmacologist and psychiatrist with
immaculate liberal credentials in his home city of Chicago.
The president, already briefed by Krogh on how Jaffe
had single-handedly reduced the crime rate in Chicago
through the magic of distributing methadone and other
treatment services to drug addicts, asked Jaffe why,
if his program had been so successful, Mayor Daley was
not aware of it. Dr. Jaffe, always exuding confidence,
replied, according to the memo in the President's File,
"Daley did not have to know about the program because
I was taking care of the mayor's city" (apparently
meaning that his drug program had succeeded in reducing
the number of drug addicts in Chicago). "What was
your bag in terms of treatment?" the president
asked. Jaffe replied by describing a complex series
of programs including "therapeutic communities
... methadone detoxification ... methadone maintenance
[and] occasionally psychiatry," which produced,
according to Jaffe, a "40 percent decrease in crime."
The president, obviously impressed, though uninterested
in the details of the program, suggested the possibility
of the death penalty for those in the narcotics business.
Jaffe, distressed, attempted to change the subject by
suggesting that as law enforcement became more efficient,
the price of heroin would increase, and therefore there
would be a need for an enormous "treatment capacity"-the
type he could provide-as an alternative to crime for
heroin addicts. Attempting to impress the president
with the possibility of a technological solution, the
miracle doctor reported that work was progressing on
a saliva test to detect heroin which would replace the
urine test presently being used in Vietnam. (He explained,
according to the memo, "It is easier for men than
women to get urine into a bottle.") The president
seemed unimpressed. Jaffe next suggested that with more
money they might be able to develop a "narcotic
antagonistic" which could "block" addicts
from receiving any sensation from heroin. He further
suggested, at another point, that Naloxone, an already
existing antagonist, could be used to demonstrate to
servicemen the dangers of heroin addiction; since it
would bring about a precipitous set of withdrawal symptoms.
The president "opted for using this method [in
Vietnam] even though there was the remote possibility
of a few fatalities."
As the meeting drew to a close
at four o'clock, Dr. Jaffe suddenly came up with a technological
solution that caught the president's fancy-"an
insect which could consume poppy crops." According
to the memo in Krogh's file, "The President became
excited about the idea and called Secretary of Agriculture
[Hardin] in order to get information on the insect which
he had heard to be bred in such a way as to insure its
own destruction.... The President remarked that the
insect died after intercourse. A member of the group
suggested that this insect be called the 'screw worm.'
" The president then spent fifteen minutes discussing
the screw worm with Dr. Jaffe, according to Krogh. The
president wanted Edward Land, the founder and developer
of the Polaroid camera, and William Lear, the founder
of Lear Jets, "brought in to help develop this
concept." He ordered Secretary Hardin, still on
the phone, to move ahead at full speed in developing
the screw worm, promising to obtain a special appropriation
for it from Congress. Private millionaires and the Agriculture
Department would thus all be part of a secret project
to develop an insect that ate the poppies that produced
the opium that supplied the heroin that obsessed President
Nixon.
On June 17, less than a week
after President Nixon heard of (or invented) the screw
worm, the president asked Congress for a special supplementary
appropriation for the war on heroin which, among other
things, would provide "two million dollars to the
Department of Agriculture for research and development
of herbicides which can be used to destroy growths of
narcotics-producing plants without adverse ecological
effects." Since a herbicide is defined simply as
a "substance used to destroy plants," Nixon's
speech writers were at least temporarily able to disguise
the screw worm as an innocent-sounding ecological weed-killer.
With the screw worm being biologically
designed at the Department of Agriculture's Stoneville
(Mississippi) laboratories, where scientists experimented
in producing various mutations of weevils by manipulating
their life cycles, President Nixon was finally able
to launch a worldwide campaign, under the supervision
of Krogh, to eradicate all the poppies in the world.
Although Turkey had already agreed to eliminate the
poppy cultivation in its Anatolian provinces, most of
the world's poppies grew in countries which were not
vulnerable to the sort of political pressures put on
Turkey by the United States (and NATO). Krogh fully
realized that if the demand for heroin continued, other
poppy areas would rapidly fill the vacuum left by Turkey-especially
at the then current market price of $500 a pound for
morphine base in Europe. The new coordinator for international
narcotics control, Nelson Gross, argued that "it
wasn't enough to eliminate opium in one country. The
cultivation of the opium poppy had to be ended throughout
the world." Nixon tentatively agreed with Gross
and endorsed the idea of possibly using the screw worm
in the so-called Golden Triangle, an area including
parts of Burma, Laos, and Thailand.
Before the poppies of the Golden
Triangle (and elsewhere) could be eliminated through
biological warfare, they first had to be located and
scientifically charted. Gross managed to enlist the
support of Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird and of
the Air Force, which supplied specially equipped SR71
planes, the successor to the U2 spy planes, and Air
Force reconnaissance Phantom planes for mapping out
the poppy fields of Burma, Thailand, Laos, and other
nations. Finally, after all the bad publicity the Department
of Defense had received in Vietnam, it appeared'to Laird
that Phantoms and SR7 Is could be used to alleviate
a domestic problem-heroin addiction. But the planes
came precariously close to the Chinese border, creating
more than one potential incident and threatening
the d6tente with China that Henry Kissinger was then
busily working on. As much as Kissinger and the National
Security Council would like to help in the war against
the poppy, the word came down from Kissinger himself
that the overflights of Burmese poppy fields would have
to be curtailed.
The gap was quickly filled
by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(NASA), which was determined to demonstrate that the
space program could be used to help society fight domestic
problems such as heroin. NASA offered to make the Earth
Resources Technological Satellite available for photographing
poppy fields all over the world, thereby eliminating
the overflight problem. To obtain an authentic "signature"
for photoreconnaissance from the satellite, the Department
of Agriculture obligingly planted poppy fields in Louisiana
and Arizona (photographs of which would be compared
with photographs taken of the suspected poppy fields
by the spy satellite).
While NASA prepared to search
for poppy fields from outer space, the Department of
Agriculture actually created a voracious screw worm
that would rapidly proliferate and destroy any poppy
field in the world. Dr. Quentin Jones, Agriculture's
man on the case, modestly explained that the poppy weevil
"might be offered to such countries as Laos and
Pakistan whose poppy fields border on those of Burma
and Afghanistan," and suggested to Gross and Krogh
that the Department of Agriculture had two alternatives:
Plan A or Plan B. Plan A would entail a crash program
of all the resources of the department and would be
put to the task of getting a poppy weevil airborne within
six months. It could be expected to destroy the world's
poppy crops within a year. Plan B involved continued
experiments for a year to determine whether the screw
worm was host specific. Krogh inquired what "host
specific" meant. Dr. Jones explained that if the
screw worm was host specific, It would eat the world's
poppy crops and then die when it had exhausted the supply
of poppies. If, on the other hand, the weevil-or any
mutation of it-was not host specific, it would adapt
to another host, such as rice or wheat. The specter
of an American screw worm eradicating the wheat and
rice crops as well as the poppies of Asia was sufficient
to dampen the enthusiasm of the president for the crash
weevil-development program. Even if the screw worm and
its mutants were host specific, the State Department
argued, they still might cross international boundaries,,
and work themselves into the licit poppy fields of the
Soviet Union, thereby undermining detente. Given these
drawbacks, the screw worm was relegated to a long-term
experimental program which would be made operational
only if it produced a. categorically host-specific weevil
that would also stop at international borders.
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