While
attempting to suppress narcotics, the federal government
had inadvertently become a major supplier of narcotics.
When the Nixon administration first assumed office,
In 1969, It will be recalled, it was discovered that
agents in the New York office of what was then the federal
Bureau of Narcotics had become the leading dealers in
heroin in the United States and were protecting the
operations of illicit dealers (who in turn were providing
them with their sacrificial "arrests"). Most
of these agent-dealers were subsequently indicted, fired,
or relocated.
For very different reasons.
the Nixon administration also went into the business
of distributing an addictive narcotic in the inner cities:
methadone. In the belief that methadone was the only
practical means they had of lowering crime statistics
and overcoming the opposition from both bureaucrats
and cabinet officers before the 1972 election, the White
House strategists had succeeded in 1973 in funding some
450 methadone programs which distributed more than 7.5
million dosages of this synthetic narcotic annually
in the United States. These federally financed treatment
centers doled out daily dosages of the drug to over
73,000 persons (and almost any over twenty-one who desired
to receive the drug could by one means or another enroll
in the program). Although a radical change in government
policy from narcotics suppression to narcotics distribution
had almost been achieved by election time, the White
House strategists were unable to persuade President
Nixon publicly to identify himself with methadone treatment.
Jeffrey Donfeld prepared, he recalled, "dozens
of scenarios in which the president would visit a treatment
center." But all were peremptorily rejected. In
New York, in June, 1972, while the president and his
party were flying in a helicopter from the Downtown
Heliport to Kennedy Airport, Egil Krogh broached the
subject to the president. Pointing downward toward the
borough of Queens, the president replied, "The
people down there couldn't care less about treatment
or education. All they want to do is lock the folks
up involved with drugs ... just lock them up."
Unlike his young and inexperienced staff assistants,
who quested for magic-bullet solutions, Nixon realized,
probably instinctively, that pouring out a synthetic
drug in the ghettos could produce damaging side effects
(with which he did not want to be personally identified
before the election).
One such side effect was that
the treatment centers rapidly became centers for the
illicit distribution of drugs in their communities.
Despite -the elaborate "blockade" theories
which the proponents of methadone advanced, in which
methadone was supposed to prevent the use of heroin,
patients enrolled in these programs persisted in using
illegal drugs. For example, in an extensive month-long
examination of a sample of patients drawn from a maintenance
program in Philadelphia, Carl D. Chambers and W. J.
Russell Taylor found through urinalysis that there was
an extensive pattern of cheating. In examining those
who had remained in the program for more than six months,
Chambers and Taylor found that 77 percent of these long-term
patients were still using heroin - 30 percent were using
barbiturates; and 25 percent, amphetamines. Nine months
later the same sample was again tested for another month-long
period. This time 92.3 percent of the methadone patients
were found to be using heroin; 43.6 percent, barbiturates:
69.2 percent, amphetamines; and 43.6 percent, cocaine.
Moreover, nearly two thirds of the patients tested had
evidence of drug abuse half the time they were tested.
Chambers and Taylor were thus forced to conclude pessimistically:
Even after a year on relatively
high dosages of methadone; neither a narcotic blockade
had occurred nor had drug craving significantly diminished.
These findings must also be viewed within the context
that neither the patients themselves nor the program
within which they were being treated are significantly
different from most other methadone programs or patients.
Since a large number of methadone
patients continued in their pursuit of illicit drugs
(heroin, barbiturates, amphetamines, or cocaine), they
not uncommonly sold or traded the weekend methadone
dosages for money (or traded them directly for the illicit
drugs they preferred). As the BNDD had originally feared,
methadone thus leaked into the underworld of drugs:
by 1973 it had become the major drug of abuse in the
United States. In March, 1974, the New York medical
examiner reported that methadone poisoning surpassed
heroin as a cause of death from narcotics, and national
statistics drawn from emergency rooms and medical examiners
around the country confirmed this trend. An April, 1974.
report from the statistical and data services division
of the newly created Drug Enforcement Agency, entitled
"Methadone: A Review of Current Information,"
stated, "Within the nine months reporting period
[in 1973] . . . methadone deaths showed the most rapid
rate of increase [of any drug]." It also found
that there was "a five to one predominance of methadone
to heroin deaths in the last six months," suggesting
that methadone is partially replacing heroin as a drug
of abuse." The notion that the methadone addict
would be less prone to commit crimes than the heroin
addict he replaced was also debunked by this report,
which found:
Methadone addicts are not necessarily
rehabilitated heroin addicts. A limited study of heroin
and methadone addicts indicates that methadone addicts
are equally prone to arrest, are more prone to commit
property crimes or crimes of assault, and they are equally
unemployed.
Verifying the high leakage
from the federally financed methadone programs, the
report also discovered that "almost half of those
arrested obtained methadone outside of treatment programs"
and that "methadone is readily available and heavily
abused, contributing substantially to the overall drug
problem." In examining police arrest statistics
in New York City, the unpublished report further found
that methadone does not necessarily ... lower the crime
rate," and even where there is an extensive methadone
program, there were more methadone addicts arrested
for various crimes than heroin addicts." Although
this report was never made public, its implications
were not lost on the White House, which began rapidly
to disassociate itself from the funding of these treatment
programs.*
* Jeffrey Donfeld also found
in examining some of the treatment programs in Washington.
D.C., that many of the statistical results were extremely
dubious, if not entirely fraudulent. For example, in
examining one methadone-treatment center in Washington
which claimed to have enrolled thousands of addicts
but refused to provide the names to the Government on
the grounds that it would violate its "black militant
philosophy," Donfeld found that "the necessary
verification and reconciliation of receipts and disbursements
could not be accomplished based on the information supplied
by the center. The accounting procedures made it impossible
to check the application of funds." Of $214,310
in funds made available to this center, $81,579 could
not be accounted for in any way; only $55,517 of the
money paid to the center was deposited in a checking
account , of which $11,000 was used for petty cash (and
checks drawn from the account were payable to either
the local liquor store or to the mother of the individual
who headed the program). Some attempt was made to examine
the patients being serviced by this center. The three
hundred patients claimed in January dropped to fifty
two patients in September (most of whom were also unavailable
for any sort of verification).
As the methadone problem became
more pronounced in urban centers-or at least received
more unfavorable publicity-the White House quietly divorced
itself from the once-vaunted Special Action Office for
Drug Abuse Prevention. This office was moved into the
Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, where
it was in turn merged into the National Institute for
Drug Abuse (NIDA), located in Rockville, Maryland. Dr.
Jerome Jaffe, who had been promised direct access to
the president, was cut off from the White House staff
after the election: in early 1973 his pass to the White
House cafeteria was revoked. Fully realizing that the
White House strategists had been interested only in
election-year public relations rather than the medical
rehabilitation of drug addicts, Jaffe resigned in June,
1973.
In the hopes of increasing
its election margin the Nixon administration had willy-nilly
brought about 'he de facto legalization of a narcotic.
As Nixon had realized in his dealing with the Veterans
Administration earlier, once a problem is turned over
to the medical bureaucracy, it becomes difficult and
perhaps impossible, in political terms, to phase it
out. Thus, even though the heroin "epidemic"
by all measures abated and the number of addicts turning
up for treatment (or for free methadone) drastically
declined after 1973, the methadone programs continued
to expand, and the amount of illicit methadone available
to addicts increased in direct proportion to the number
of treatment programs. The federal government, therefore,
again assumed its unwitting role as a major supplier
of illicit drugs.
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