President
Nixon justified his request for emergency powers to
deal with drug abuse in 1971 by citing an uncontrollable
heroin epidemic which, if not brought under immediate
control, "will surely in time destroy us."
According to official statistics supplied to the media
by federal agencies, the number of addict-users had
increased from 68,000 in 1969 to 315,000 in 1970 to
559,000 in 1971, or what Myles Ambrose declared in 1971
to be a "tenfold increase." Such a geometric
progression threatened the entire American citizenry
with "the hell of addiction" in a few short
years, the president suggested, because every individual
infected with heroin was in turn driven to infect at
least six others. Nor could such an epidemic be brought
under control by ordinary means: the president explained
that the suppliers of heroin "are literally the
slave traders of our time.... They are traffickers in
Living Death [and] they must be hunted to the ends of
the earth."
A tenfold increase in the number
of heroin addicts would certainly be a cause for national
concern; the magnitude of the 1971 epidemic was, however,
more a product of government statisticians than of heroin
traffickers.
Until 1970, official estimates
of the number of heroin addicts were based on a register
kept by the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs
which, like the FBI's Uniform Code Reports, was simply
a compilation of reports from local police departments.
All police departments-and medical authorities-were
supposed to report the names of known addicts to the
bureau. And, on the theory that most, if not all, addicts
eventually would come to the attention of some police
department or hospital, it was assumed that the total
number of names on the federal register constituted
nearly the entire addict population (within "a
deviation factor of less than two percent," Myles
Ambrose explained to the National Commission on Marijuana
and Drug Abuse in 1971). The pre-epidemic estimate of
68,088 in 1969 was based on this register. (By mid-1970
the addict population had grown to only 68,864, according
to the register, which was not published that year.)
The prodigious increase
from some 68,000 addicts in 1969 to 315,000 in late
1970 and 559,000 in 1971 came not from any flood of
new addicts reported to federal authorities in 1970
or 197 1 but from a statistical reworking of the 1969
data. Rather than continuing to publish estimates based
on the federal register, the Bureau of Narcotics and
Dangerous Drugs decided to apply a new formula to the
old 1969 data, which produced first a quintupling, then
an octupling, of the estimated number of addicts. Unlike
the previous theory that almost all addicts would eventually
come to the attention of authorities, the new formula
was based on the belief that only a small fraction of
the addict population would ever be reported to police
or medical authorities, and therefore listed in the
federal register. Joseph A. Greenwood, the statistician
at the BNDD who devised the new formula, explained,
"it is impossible to actually know the number of
addicts in the United States.... The best we can do
is make some assumptions", he then proceeded to
apply these assumptions to the data collected in 1969
to estimate the number of unknown addicts. "The
estimate makes use of a technique similar to that by
which the number of fish a lake ... is estimated,"
he noted.
To understand how this statistical
artifact led to a tenfold ballooning of the number of
addicts in America and provided the president with a
national emergency, it Is necessary to examine the so-called
"tagged-fish-in-a-pond" technique. One way
of estimating the number of fish in a pond would be
to catch an initial sample of fish, tag them, then release
them and allow enough time for a random redistribution
of the tagged fish among the rest of the fish in the
pond. A second sample of fish is then caught, and the
proportion of tagged to untagged fish in this catch
would allow an estimate to be made for the total number
of fish in the pond. For example, if one out of ten
fish in the second sample was already tagged, then the
total population would be assumed to be ten times the
number of fish originally tagged. In applying this concept
to addicts, statisticians at the BNDD divided the total
number of names on the federal register in 1969 by the
number of names that were "tagged" (that is,
reported in 1969) and rereported in 1970, and found
only about one out of five of the tagged addicts was
rereported. After some refinements were made in the
statistical model, the 1969 total of 68,088 was multiplied
by 4.626, the calculated ratio, and an estimate of 315,000
addicts was arrived at. This accounted for the 1969-70
epidemic. The same 1969 data were then, in 1971, further
refined, and a new ratio was calculated of one known
addict to 8.21 unknown addicts, which produced a staggering
total of 559,000 in 1972, an increase of some 244,000
between 1971 and 1972. The total increase was in unknown
addicts, who were not unlike the paper army of nonexistent
serfs in Gogol's Dead Souls. In 1969 it was not assumed
that there were a significant number of addicts not
known to the police agencies; in 1970 it was assumed
that there were 246,912 unknown addicts roaming the
streets; in 1971 -it was assumed that there were 490,912
unknown addicts at large.
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