Drug Addiction in America & England

THERE are in the United States about 60,000 opiate addicts, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics estimates, and some medi- cal experts believe that 1,000,000 is closer to the actual number of those addicted to morphine, heroin, and related drugs. Neither figure, however startling, indicates in itself the far-reaching ramifications of the addiction problem. For a complicated web of corruption, degradation, vicious police practice, and secondary crime has developed around the use of narcotics in America. At its center stands the punitive anti-addict policy embodied in our narcotics laws.

The country's first major legislative effort to control narcotics, the Harrison Act, was to set the direction for all future legislation in this field. The law, passed by Congress in 1914 and still in effect, was essentially a tax measure designed to regulate the handling of narcotics by distributors and dispensers. While saying nothing about addicts' as such, it was very broadly interpreted to mean that a doctor's "good faith" prescription of narcotics to an addict was itself improper; and since this law's enactment, few medical practitioners have cared te take the risk of trying to help a narcotics patient with his problems. In recent years, considerably more stringent anti-narcotics legislation has been enacted-much of it, paradoxically, tending to perpetuate the very condition meant to be curbed. The Boggs Act provided minimum mandatory sentences for all narcotics offenses-it followed the 1951 Kefauver Committee's investigations publicizing the narcotics problem. Four years later, a Senate subcommittee investigation, under the chairmanship of then Senator Price Daniel, led to the federal Narcotics Control Act of 1956, which both raises previous minimum sentences for violations and permits the death penalty to be imposed, on adults found guilty of selling heroin to persons under eighteen. This law-like most of the country's drug statutes-fails to provide the proper distinction between the addict and the peddler who is a non-addict: the mere fact of possession, purchase, sale, or transfer of narcotics is made punishable. So, too, a vast array of state laws prohibits the unauthorized possession and transfer of narcotics; finally, in several states, addiction is in itself a crime.