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Drugs, the Department of Labor, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Office of Economic
Opportunity, the Veterans Administration. and the National Institute of Mental Health reported to the
Domestic Council that "in terms of the size of the problem. for example compared to the problems of
alcoholism, mental illness. automobile injuries and fatalities, the problem of drug abuse is relatively small." It
further cautioned:
Hasty and ill-considered policies may not only be ineffective, but they may generate different types of
casualties and adverse consequences of the medical, social, and legal nature, such as loss of respect for the
law, extensive arrest records [for youthful violations] ... and accidental death and levels of dependence hitherto
unknown as a result, of leaks in widely dispersed or poorly conceived methadone maintenance programs.
Since there were then more than 9 million alcoholics compared to fewer than 100,000 known narcotics addicts,
the White House strategists agreed that the problem could not be presented simply in terms of a menace to
public health. A Domestic Council staff report on national drug programs was prepared in December, 1970,
with the assistance of the National Institute of Mental Health and other government agencies involved in
drug-abuse evaluation. It noted:
Alcoholism, though a much greater public health and safety problem than other forms of drug abuse, is not
perceived in the public and political minds as a great social and moral evil.... If the misuse of all drugs-illicit
drugs as well as alcohol and tobacco-was discussed in only medical and public health terms, the problem of
drug abuse would not take on inflated importance requiring an undeserved federal response for political
purposes.
This report further observed, "If the misuse of drugs is viewed with proper perspective, it is not in actuality a
paramount national problem.... However, because of the political significance of the Problem, visible,
hard-hitting programs must be highlighted to preclude irrational criticism." In this private report the agencies
of government dealing with drug abuse admitted not only that narcotics was not a paramount national problem
but also that "the dimension of the drug-using population is not known with any degree of accuracy; we don't
even know how many users are being treated. . . ." In the spring of 197 1, the Domestic Council found that
there were no "hard" estimates in any agency of the government of the number of addicts, the amount they
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spent on narcotics each year, the amount of theft they committed, or the effectiveness of law enforcement on
reducing addiction or theft. According to Egli Krogh's recollection, the president himself closely questioned
John Ingersoll, asking him such questions as "Are there less narcotics on the street [now]? ... Are there fewer
addicts? Is there less crime related to the use of narcotics? Can you show me that the problem itself is being
corrected by these operational indices of success? Ingersoll bluntly told the President that that the government
had not yet approached answering these questions, and the president, according to Krogh, "just shook his head
in disbelief."
Since the data of other government agencies were equally elusive when it came to answering these central
questions about addiction posed by the president, Krogh ordered the Office of Science and Technology, in
August, 1971, immediately to commission a complete analysis of all available data on narcotics addiction and
crime. He subsequently explained to me that because of the president's "sense of discomfort over ... the
statistical work" of the government agencies directly engaged in drug programs, "we wanted an independent
unit under the Office of Science and Technology who were professionals at data collection and analysis to tell
us whether or not the assumptions on which our programs have been based were in fact sound." The Office of
Science and Technology (which is a part of the executive office of the president) contracted out the special
presidential assignment to the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA), a think tank established by the Joint
Chiefs of' Stall' to analyze, independently, military strategies and problems. IDA was given complete access to
all the data on drug abuse that the government possessed.
Unlike previous groups that had studied the problems of drug abuse in America, IDA had no bureaucratic or
financial interest in the outcome of its study. The systems analysts at IDA began examining the assumption
that addicts steal billions of dollars' worth of property to pay for their habit. They quickly found that
"expenditures for heroin and the value of addict property crime is not known to within a factor of four or five,"
which meant, in effect, that the government estimates had no claim to being even a rough measure of reality.
The IDA analysts then went on to test the truism, accepted for more than half a century by government
agencies and private treatment centers, that addiction was a major cause of crime in America. Even though it
was generally known that a "majority of heroin addicts have a history of criminality preceding their abuse of
the drug," as John Ingersoll noted in a November 3, 1970, memorandum to Egli Krogh, and therefore were not
innocent persons compelled to commit crimes, it was assumed that the cost of maintaining their heroin habit
forced them to commit more crimes than they otherwise would have undertaken. To determine whether this
time-worn assumption was valid, the IDA team focused on the summer of 1972, when a shipping strike
temporarily interrupted the supply of heroin in Eastern cities and quintupled the street price of the drug when it
was available at all. If heroin addicts had to finance their habit through theft, and psychologically and
physiologically had no choice over the amount of the drug required to avoid physical illness and mental pain
(which was the definition of "addiction"), then there should have been either a sharp increase in crime in these
Eastern cities or an increase in the number of addicts enrolling in methadone-treatment programs (where they
would receive a free substitute for heroin). The analysts found, however, that this elegant hypothesis was, as
Lord Keynes put it on another occasion, "murdered by a gang of brutal facts." The crime rates did not go up,
even though prices increased, and addicts did not enter treatment programs. The IDA report was thus forced to
conclude:
The little evidence available suggests that during a time of severe heroin shortage, addicts may not be willing
or able to increase their crime commensurately with the price increase, and therefore they compensate by
reducing their heroin consumption and/or substituting other drugs. Also the data do not suggest that entering
treatment is the preferred option [italics in the original].
This conclusion undermined the entire theory of the heroin addict as it was developed by Captain Hobson and
his successors in American politics: if heroin addicts could substitute other drugs, such as barbiturates and
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