The
mobilization of public fears and anxieties to support
the president's offensive was based not on the
damage heroin addicts inflicted on themselves but
on the damage they presumably inflicted on innocent
members of society. "The real problem is that heroin
addicts steal, rob, and commit every other kind of crime,"
Ambrose told U.S. News & World Report in 1971, "so
we have this terrible problem of crime in the cities,
much of which is related to heroin addiction."
(This image was reinforced by the antidrug messages
in television programming and commercials which depicted
addicts as glassy-eyed fiends compulsively driven to
commit violent crimes.) Nixon also postulated, in a
speech to Congress, "Narcotics addiction is a major
contributor to crime. The cost of supplying a narcotics
habit can run from thirty dollars a day to one hundred
dollars a day. This is two hundred ten to seven hundred
dollars a week, or over ten thousand dollars to over
thirty-six thousand dollars a year." The president
went on to explain that since "addicts do not ordinarily
hold jobs ... they often turn to shoplifting, mugging,
burglary, armed robbery, and so on." Administration
officials then calculated that "the total annual
crime cost of the country-largely crime on the streets-is
roughly 18 billion dollars." This staggering figure
of $18 billion which was based on a series of assumptions
about what fraction of the value of stolen goods addicts
receive from "fences"-was then released to
the press and to Congress as the official estimate of
crime caused by heroin, and was included in the government's
"briefing book" used to inform reporters writing
about the problem of drug abuse.
While such authoritative-sounding
figures were widely reported in the press and no doubt
added to public anxieties about crime and narcotics,
they were not in fact related to any actual statistics
compiled by the government. Indeed, the $18 billion
worth of crime which government spokesmen claimed addicts
were committing to buy their supply of heroin was actually
more than 25 times greater than the total sum of property
that was stolen and unrecovered throughout the United
States in 1971 (including hijackings, embezzlements,
automobile, fur, and jewelry thefts), according to the
Uniform Crime Reports published by the FBI. (in New
York City alone, where more than half of all of the
nation's addicts were presumed to reside, addicts would
have to steal goods worth more than $9 billion, if one
used the calculus of the Nixon administration; yet the
total value of property stolen that year according to
police-department records was only $225 million-or one
fortieth the amount that addicts alone were presumed
to have stolen.) To be sure, not all theft is reported
to the police-though the dollar value of stolen property
is more often exaggerated, or overreported than it is
underreported. However"' a study commissioned by
the Law Enforcement Administration Agency in 1972, using
census-taking techniques to poll the citizenry about
crime, estimated that no more than one half the crimes
in New York City and other urban areas with major addiction
programs go unreported. Even if the total amount of
crime was doubled in 1971, addicts would still be stealing
more than twelve times all the property actually stolen
in America in 1971. This 1200-percent discrepancy between
the claims of the Nixon administration and government
statistics was further compounded by the fact that the
sorts of crimes which accounted for the bulk of stolen
and unrecovered property such as car theft, hijacking,
bank robbery, embezzlement, and fraud were not normally
attributed to addicts by law-enforcement officials.
The $18-billion figure did
not correspond to reported or even actual crime in America;
it was merely another datum in the campaign to brief
the press and thereby better organize public fears about
heroin addicts. Though journalists widely reported such
billion-dollar hyperbole as fact, Egil Krogh and the
White House strategists fully realized that the "magic
numbers," as Krogh put it, were based on very dubious
assumptions about the relation of crime and drug addiction.
For one thing, the multibillion-dollar estimates were
based on the BNDD's projection of 559,000 addicts. This
projection, in turn, was based on a statistical artifact
which was later revised downward (when no evidence was
found of the 400,000 or so unknown addicts). Moreover,
the $18-billion calculus assumed arbitrarily that each
addict required $16,750 worth of heroin every year to
sustain his habit; yet there was no hard evidence that
the average heroin user purchased even one tenth that
amount of the drug. More important, there was no reason
to assume that all heroin users were compelled to support
their habit through crime rather than through part-
or fulltime employment (or through support provided
by friends, relatives, or welfare programs). As Krogh
readily admitted, the government had no empirical basis
for estimating the proportion of addicts who supported
themselves through theft. If all the projected 559,000
addicts committed two or three burglaries a day, as
President Nixon postulated, they would have to commit
at least 365 million burglaries a year. This sum would
be two hundred times more than all the burglaries committed
in 1971 in America. (Nixon's speech writers apparently
borrowed this particular hyperbole from the rhetoric
of Governor Rockefeller in New York State.)
In computing the costs of addiction
to the rest of society, the administration's sharp departure
from reality proceeded from the myth of the vampire-addict
that had been developed almost a half century before
by Captain Hobson. So long as it was assumed that all
heroin users were ultimately transformed into fiends
who were driven by their insatiable appetite for the
drug to commit any crime or take any risk to obtain
enough money to satisfy their habit, it followed that
the total cost of their crimes could be computed simply
by multiplying the cost of their drug consumption by
the number of addicts. Although such a model of addict
behavior became an integral part of television dramas
depicting themes of' drugs and crime (partly owing to
the efforts of the Nixon administration), such dramatic
stereotypes grossly oversimplified the behavior of most
heroin users. For example. a study prepared for the
State of New York by the Hudson Institute on "The
Economics of Heroin Distribution" concluded that
39 percent of those classified as addicts were either
"joy poppers," "intermittent users,"
"apprentices," or addicts with otherwise "small
habits." Less than one quarter of those classified
as addicts used more than $25 a day worth of heroin
and were considered to have "large habits."
Moreover, the assumption that heroin users cannot work
at legitimate jobs is questionable. Findings of the
United States Army in Vietnam showed that hundreds of
thousands of soldiers were able to perform their normal
duties while using heroin (which is why the problem
was not detected for three years). To be sure, a large
number of addicts are engaged in illegal occupations,
but even addicts engaged in theft tend to avoid the
more risky crimes of robbery, mugging, and other crimes
against persons. Instead they tend to concentrate on
such low-risk crimes as shoplifting, boosting (that
is, stealing from parked trucks), or burglarizing abandoned
buildings. In a study of sixty-five active heroin users
in New York City, Heather L. Ruth found that less than
10 percent of her sample ever engaged in robbery or
mugging. Presumably, the reason why criminal addicts
avoid high-risk crimes against persons is not that they
have higher morals than other criminals but that the
costs of being imprisoned and denied-their drug are
higher than for nonaddicted criminals. Since from the
available data there is no way of knowing what proportion
of heroin users support themselves through regular or
part-time work, welfare, or dependence on other persons,
any crime nexus or calculation of the amount of crime
that addicts commit must be ultimately problematic.
The White House staff itself
had little confidence in the huge crime numbers that
were being supplied to the press through briefing officers
in the various agencies. For instance, a 1970 Domestic
Council staff report in Egli Krogh's file explains,
"The National Institute of Mental Health estimates
that addicts in the United States commit up to five
billion dollars worth of crime in the country."
Krogh's staff estimated that in fact the figure was
"closer to one billion dollars," but explained
that "the high figure of the National Institute
of Mental Health can be attributed to their desire to
evidence need for treatment programs, thereby aggrandizing
their territory." In other words, Krogh and his
staff presumed that the multibillion-dollar numbers
attached to drug crimes were simply a product of bureaucracy's
attempting to excite the public. Nor was the Domestic
Council staff unaware of the fragile nature of the connection
between heroin and crime. On March 19, 1971, the Domestic
Council decision paper, "Narcotic Addiction and
Drug Abuse Program," drawn up by Krogh and Donfeld,
stated, "Even if all drug abuse were eradicated,
there might not be a dramatic drop in crime statistics
on a national level, since much crime is not related
to drug abuse."
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