It's.
Now.
When Peg and I moved into this house.
I thought it was just a normal house where people were using some acid some grass.
Maybe some speed. We found out there was a lot of shooting up going on.
Some people were using heroin to the point
that I couldn't trust each other anymore. The work wasn't getting done.
I began to lie to each other.
The Peg and I took a stand against hard narcotics
and they called a house meeting and House members agreed
that we wouldn't have any more heroin or methedrine in the house.
But some people found these two drugs just too groovy to give up
and it sort of destroyed the whole house.
The community was destroyed by heroin to most of us
and more importantly meaningful institutions is also being destroyed with alarming
frequency the American Home Products and their relatives
and data means about the two it's ripped apart the fabric of family life in every
social
and economic level a tragic aftermath shows hospitals prisons rehabilitation
centers across the country. The entire quick.
The drug use is vastly complex the drugs themselves are many
and varied the precise information available to us
when it does exist is often cloaked in myth
and controversy drug users do not fit within any comfortable grouping they are
young as well as old they are disadvantaged.
But often I do the hard narcotics for escape
but to do the more interesting drugs the psychedelic drugs for learning it wasn't
enough for me to smoke. I needed something else.
The drug scene Vietnam is a strange thing.
It's hard to describe why drugs are very prominent They're all over the place you
can get. Marijuana can you can pick it up.
I was very nervous last little and.
After I turned on. I may not have found the answer to everything
but at least you know it didn't seem as such immediate danger to me.
Is it is a pain killer it kills all pain it kills mental physical anguish it kills
anxiety kills boredom. It produces pleasure.
Just based on the drug itself and nothing else.
To the point where everything I did.
Everything I made a PUT INTO have a problem
and I'm in a drug culture at one time it was considered unusual for anyone under
the age of sixty to be experimented with drugs.
Now it is not uncommon to see it among sixth graders
and in one road to do school in the West Coast drug experimenters numbered among
seventy percent of the street.
Population house destroying the house
that can be rebuilt the man who stands at the center of the rebuilding operation
and who shoulders much of the nation's concern of the drug abuse.
Dr Sami lists the aim of a national program is to rehabilitate
they estimated one hundred thousand narcotic addicts.
And the estimated half million persons in the United States who regularly.
Abuse non-narcotic drugs because drug abuse
and drug dependence is apparently the result of physical psychological social
and other factors
and the research the prodded by the National Institute of Mental Health
or carried out directly by the National Institute of Mental Health.
Must range from basic studies on the mechanisms of drug action on the addicting
qualities of new drugs
and how they act in the body to study social patterns of drug abuse as well as
studies of new methods of treatment
and rehabilitation deep in the heart of Kentucky's bluegrass country is the town
first and foremost associated with the treatment not conduct Attucks.
Since the first prison a patient was admitted in nineteen thirty five the federal
hospital at Lexington
and its companion at Fort Worth Texas have borne the brunt of caring for these
little understood and often feed
and much maligned American dope addicts for decades.
These hospitals themselves have been maligned and misunderstood.
They have often been cited as prime examples of how hopeless it is to treat much
less Cuellar an addict is well to remember that
when opened these institutions were only a first step in society's unlike in policy
towards the drug addict.
While still doesn't really windows are necessary to enforce the punitive side about
just. National conscience for the first time suggested research treatment.
We have dilatation since one thousand nine hundred fifty seven many changes have
taken place the balls in the grill sub being removed taking emphasis of the
custodial aspects hospital now called the Clinical Research Center
and administered by the National Institute of Mental Health has intensified its
research into many purposes to rehabilitation one technique basic to many treatment
methods is encouraging addicts to help addicts by working together playing together
and just being together within the same complex like Lexington is another center.
This one engaged in addiction research its mission is to investigate the nature of
the drugs themselves.
Our understanding of the scientific working abroad the physical effects on people.
What changes they cause in the body are questions to which we have precise answers.
You know we're going to transfer chemistry of patients from the clinical research
center volunteer for a variety of tests involving the actual intake of drugs.
To the outside of these tests may appear meaningless
and from a conservative point of view. In law.
However they bring us closer to a clearer understanding of the chemical
relationship between body and the agent whether the agent is marijuana.
A man I want to cigarette a synthetic drug. Or one of the opiates.
Highly sophisticated equipment measures the concentration of drug molecules within
the body. This enables the research.
To compare what he sees in human behavior with what the incident reveals the drug
is doing to the body's organs tissues
and chemistry the through experiments such as the the addiction center has
racked up an impressive record of unmasking supposedly none addicting
pharmaceuticals the center demonstrated the addictive nature of the book
that you are certain tranquilize
and even performed pioneering work in the understanding of alcoholism.
While Lexington's outpost in the wilderness of drug research was amassing
information on the addict
and on the drugs little else bit of else in the country was being done in
the forty's in the fifty's more and more people sold victim.
Not only to heroin but to a hostess and
that takes one long used as a means of temporary escape from the ghetto brown want
to in one thousand nine hundred sixty three became one of the symbols of believe in
evolution our criminal statutes became harsher penalties stiffer
there was virtually no difference in the eyes of the law between selling a deck of
heroin on a street corner
or selling marijuana in a college dorm than in the one nine hundred sixty.
There are also signs of progress in both the understanding of the ethics problem
and our narcotics laws have created a web which the
addicts need for money leads to crimes crimes which reinforces the punitive
enforcement of the narcotics law.
And thus drives the addicts deeper and deeper into Secret Service.
In fear. California started a civil commitment program.
The first state to do so even though high fences
and bob wire were constant reminder
that inmates were still prisoners the accent was not on punishment rather treatment.
Aside from early federal program.
At Lexington in Fort Worth It was the first time the public institution was used to
treat addicts as
that of just confining them New York nine hundred sixty two the midcap OK.
Act allowed many of the state's ethics to elect little treatment instead of prison
sentence.
The one nine hundred sixty seven next month of the first major federal law designed
to realistically appraise the Addicks problem and restore him to his community.
The not crowded addict Rehabilitation Act of one thousand nine hundred sixty six
allows the defendant in certain criminal cases to electric current instead of
punishment including an extensive program of aftercare under the supervision of the
surgeon general soon enough person stablished in Santa Monica is perhaps the most
publicized of the self-help private approaches rehabilitated addicts like Dan
Parker have carried on with the cinema for the last a fee in other cities from
California to New York to Chicago. Each establishing his own therapeutic community.
Residential therapeutic community if I may explain for a moment is a twenty four
hour a day living working situation
and watch people go through all kinds of emotional changes drug addiction of course
is not a physical problem it's an emotional problem
and that's what we approach in these communities the addict is first taken off
drugs by the cold turkey or by gradually medicated withdraws.
He then starts the long humbling process of living shoulder to shoulder with other
addicts people who have made it.
People who have little sympathy with members who refuse to be honest with
themselves. Why don't you be honest with him.
Boil it you can even talk.
LOL And every time you're alone was one of the fight. You've been boiling over.
Why you got a couple are you afraid of.
These are the residents of New York State top village private therapeutic community
supported by federal state
and municipal fund graduates a day top master far more than their past craving for
drugs they learn a new moon lifestyle centered around helping others bettering
their community
when he returns to the streets the day top graduates will be a force for action in
his old neighborhood.
Even if it's only rallying people to clean up their block some of the eight taps.
By products are surprising and then exciting.
This is the stage of a not Broadway theater where Day top residents tell their
story behind the footlights to capacity audiences
and to critical acclaim the
in the
Arab world.
The all of
the the.
Herbal attention during the one nine hundred sixty saw a decade of experimentation
trial and error approaches that sought
and sometimes found cures through therapy through computers
and through the test tube.
In Chicago a young father of two children hopelessly addicted to heroin
and forced to steal support his habit opens the door to possible hope
this is the methadone maintenance approach still in the experimental stage
methadone a synthetic opiate is administered for to use as a substitute for heroin
and at the same time satisfy the junkies need the guns
and like heroin methadone is also addictive but spare the user.
The harmful effects of the program's chief sponsor is Dr Vincent dole at New York's
Rockefeller University so that we estimate.
Conservatively I think that everything that we treat. Saves the community.
Forty thousand dollars a year in goods that are not stolen.
In neighborhoods that are not spoil.
And families
that are not abandoned methadone maintenance as many other treatments
and approaches. Has its critics.
There's no way that in my opinion that a person who is drugged and a person on
that a done is drugs can really take a look at himself most methadone proponents
considered irrelevant whether a patient ever comes off the drug.
The important point.
They make is that addicts are rapidly returning to society
and are able to cope with responsibility.
The cost
and inexpensive clinically administered glass of orange juice on the way to work
another chemical approach to keeping an addict of hard drugs is Cyclades as seen
cycling those seen as a narcotic antagonise blocking effects of heroin as it tries
to act upon the central nervous system.
There are other approaches neighborhood centers like Exodus House New York's
teeming slums concentrate help during the period when it's needed most.
During aftercare as another valid treatment approaches X.
Addicts who have begun to remake their lives work closely with the residents
helping them through each day rising on time reporting to work relearning the
simple day to day life style the rest of us take so much for granted in
time many of them will be eased back into their communities stronger perhaps by
their experience after care is one of the most important phases of restoring a
former addict to useful life. The counselors know the patient.
They know his daily routine
and they are wary of it for this you may have an argument with your wife you might
go to work in the morning
and all of a sudden used to handle twenty five cartons a day.
The boss gives you thirty cartons and this is no excuse this excuse to go
but I got out very close. So and one should go.
You can be free from drugs for five six seven months.
And all of a sudden you want to reward yourself.
You know like well I've been clean for six months. I'm doing great making money.
I got money in a bank my wife loves me my kids love me and this happens.
So these are the things you have to be aware but the point that I want to bring.
Is
that as you do you don't be afraid to come by and colors.
Because that's what we're there for treatment programs are important
but even more important is prevention ten years ago drug use among
the young was concentrated in the ghetto.
We thought at that time that eliminating the slums would eliminate
that aspect of the drug problem
and the answer is not so simple drug abuse including header
when a wide range of synthetics has sprung up among the children of upper middle
class families as well here excellence is a lifestyle and the pressures
and anxieties of the ghetto unknown.
Perhaps there are anxieties in the suburbs anxieties of a different nature.
It's like a fortress to protect this community forty thousand people live in one of
three months of term cultural starvation if not for to thank the prison
of tight shell and people in Ne Ne Ne only in the Only from for their brain.
They get in television and boobs and.
And ultimately the only everyone has money there's no identity in money.
You can only say I have more money and less money
and there's no identity that's just quantity.
The only thing you can do with money is buy mass produce products
and everyone has mass produced Detroit makes five million cars all the same.
The tragedy is that in rejecting all of that use.
Too often uses more than rhetorical to express dissatisfaction with
an excessive rate of speed
and grabbed by any.
Man searched in on his person found of a white powder
that is since been analyzed by the family
another has been convicted on the narcotics the why should we be concerned.
Why because the nephew of those under twenty five will make up one half of our
population college kids use only one drug one
population group but it serves to illustrate
that our interest as a nation has been more than somewhat
hypocritical.
It seems as though the college kids of the middle class kids in this country
suddenly discovered marijuana in the mid sixties the early sixty's.
Up until
that time our water was used almost exclusively by Negroes Puerto Ricans
and jazz musicians who gave a damn about them so
that we could have all kinds of repressive laws
and nobody would bother with these people are even to look at the laws
but all at once.
As Murphy's kid from the suburbs who was attending a prominent university gets
busted for marijuana
and I can tell you from personal experience I have had medical students law
students.
Kids going to scientific institutions on National Science grants.
I had all kinds of people who had been arrested for marijuana violations and
when this happened suddenly I society was fast to become aware of a problem solved
called.
The entire question of drug use is vastly complex cutting across the boundaries of
the law medicine
and society's attitudes the source of the problem is a simple flower hardy plant
beautiful in their natural habitat that they are dangerous often lethal
when abused by man in his in mind after sixty centuries of abuse
society's attitude is only now beginning to change beginning to bring in like them
into our understanding of drugs
and why people used in the beginning also to realize the fact
that there is no single that will return the ethic to society.
There are many drug takers in each take his journey to nowhere.
The numerous
and complex reasons bringing them back home require many bridges many different
approaches each designed to reach one segment of the drug dependent society
whether solutions are found in the maintenance approach a therapeutic community
or not conduct and taken is one thing is certain.
We we must continue to build bridges back
into society as many bridges as possible.
It's called the bridges from no place.
Who's up who's wheat
with the
where where we've moved
one to
the to the.