July 19, 1971
Page 25960
A WAR AGAINST HEROIN
(Remarks by Senator EDMUND S. MUSKIE, to the New Hampshire Bar Association, Bretton Woods, N.H., June 18, 1971)
Whenever I think of coming home to New England, I remember the green hills and the clear air and the sense I have always had that this is the place to live.
From here, the problems in Washington seem so distant. From here, the Senate may appear as just a place of honor, not a chamber for tough work and hard decisions. Here, men and women take confidence from the past and keep confidence in the future.
But in this last, difficult decade, the crisis of America has intruded on the calm of Northern New England.
Your sons have been sent to fight and kill and die in a war – started without our consent or even our knowledge – a war no general can win and no reason can now make right.
Your neighbors in the factories and stores of Durham and Newport have felt the swing from bust to boom and back to bust again – a swing which has put workers out of work and pushed prices out of sight.
And each of you has learned through this time and these trials to wonder about the future and the fate of America – something which once looked as secure as Mount Washington.
I wish I could tell you now that all of this will soon pass. But any politician who says that after the events of recent days would not be serving you or the truth. There is too much we do not know – and too little we can still be certain of. So tonight I want to speak with you about another threat which has invaded your communities from the larger world – a threat to your children and New Hampshire's safety.
I am talking about the evil white powder Stewart Alsop calls the "city killer" – the powder that produces half of our crime and most of the fear which stalks our streets.
I am talking about the epidemic of heroin – the sickness of an addiction which has already afflicted people in every part of our land.
And I am talking about the countless condemned Americans:
About 1,000 babies born each year in New York City as addicts, helpless heirs to the terrible pain of their mother's habit. About the thousands of veterans exposed to heroin in Vietnam who are now carrying a horrible curse home to their families and our towns.
About more than 100,000 despondent and disillusioned people whose health and will and hope have been shattered almost beyond repair.
And their disease has infected New Hampshire. For almost a generation, your state and my state seemed virtually immune. But now we know that no place anywhere is immune. Now we know that drugs and addiction can strike at any town or any family. Rockingham County District Attorney Carleton Eldredge warns: "Our county is experiencing an epidemic of drug-related burglaries, larcenies, and robberies. Unless we approach these problems with more effective measures, both drug abuse and drug related crimes will increase – and what is now an epidemic will become a chronic condition."
Yet we are doing so little about a danger that jeopardizes so much. And the little we are doing adds up to even less action against the deadliest drug of all. In Washington, I have seen the crisis of heroin noticed and studied and denounced. I have seen Washington talk a good game against heroin, but the facts show that everywhere people are losing.
You can see why in the sad statistics of the current, half-hearted federal effort.
This year, the federal government will spend only $62 million enforcing our drug laws. That's less than the price of shutting down the SST.
This year, the federal government will spend only $7 million on drug education, $20 million on drug research, and $43 million on treatment and rehabilitation. That equals the cost of the Vietnam War for one day in 1968.
Last year, the National Institute of Mental Health treated only 1,100 patients – at the incredible cost of $10,000 each.
Last year, the Community Health Centers Act reached just a few more than 3,000 addicts.
And, while 25 % of all addicts are veterans, the Veterans' Administration maintains exactly five drug treatment units with an average of fifteen beds each.
In short, the federal government is helping just 2% of the addicts in America. Any system with a record like that is nothing less than an absolute and total failure.
Obviously, we can and must do more by spending more on law enforcement, research, and treatment. But that is not the whole answer or even most of the answer. As long as drugs flow freely into our country, heroin will hook people faster than we can educate them, faster than we can catch them, and faster than we can cure them. We will not even begin to defeat addiction until we care as much about his fix as the junkie does.
We must care at home and abroad. We must care in every neighborhood and in our foreign policy. The federal government must launch a war against heroin as broad as the world that produces it and as defined as the addict who craves it.
That is why I introduced new narcotics legislation in the Senate in May. The legislation calls for two major reforms. I believe both of them are essential.
We must set up a central federal agency with overall responsibility for fighting drug abuse.
This agency must have as much money as it needs. It must be directly responsible to the president. And it must devise and implement a coherent national effort to pull all our present programs together and push them to their maximum limits. A single office of drug abuse offers far more hope than a federal effort fragmented among several cabinet agencies – each of them hobbled by inadequate power and insufficient skills – all of them partly responsible for a problem none of them can resolve.
Destroying heroin at its source will be difficult. It will take a long time and it will cost money. But this country spends $75 billion on defense and war. Surely, we can afford a fraction as much to protect our children, our cities, and our safety.
Today, the Administration sent the Congress a bill similar to my proposal for coordinating the domestic war against heroin. I welcome the bill. Though it is somewhat different from mine, the aim is the same – to exterminate addiction in America. That goal is so easy to say, so hard to reach. And it is too vital for destructive partisan disputes or debates about who deserves the credit for what. That is why I am cosponsoring the Administration's bill – and that is also why I will try to strengthen it. I will have criticisms and I will offer amendments – not as a Democrat against Republicans, not as a Senator against the President, but as a concerned American, worried about what drugs are doing to America.
I think the Administration's program is not enough – and I hope that together the Congress and the President can do better. The Administration's bill provides coordination only for treatment and education programs. Law enforcement and veterans' problems are still left in their current condition of fragmented disarray. Moreover, the bill simply ignores the challenge of foreign heroin production. It calls for no expansion in our efforts to substitute other crops for opium around the world – an expansion that is essential to any successful attack on heroin.
Finally, the Administration has asked for some new funds to fight drugs. The amount will just about make up for the failure to request the anti-drug money Congress has already authorized.
Last year, for example, Congress authorized $102 million for narcotics treatment and education.
But this January, the Administration requested less than one-quarter of that amount.
A nation with as much wealth as ours must do more than this for the health and safety of our people.
The Administration's bill is a late but encouraging beginning. Its provisions must be toughened and its financing must be vastly increased.
There are no easy answers to heroin – and there is no single answer. Methadone maintenance can pull some junkies away from heroin – but it cannot help others and it is itself addicting.
Antagonist drugs may someday virtually immunize heroin's victims from further disaster – but there is too little money for research and probably too much time to wait. Perhaps the most vital step would be a truly effective anti-drug education program in our schools – to teach our children the terrible truth about the dream in a hypodermic needle or an amphetamine pill.
And beyond all this, we must ask ourselves why this has happened to America and we must do something about the answer.
Only a month ago, an army psychiatrist reported that the reason soldiers in Viet Nam were turning to heroin was because they did not want to be there. "The men," he said, "were reacting to Viet Nam much like the deprived in a ghetto." So our task – yours and mine and every American's – is not only to battle heroin directly, but to go after the conditions which breed addiction. Not just poverty in housing or in income, but the poverty of soul which leads people to lose faith, to drop out, cop out, and turn on. Not just the wrong of a war over there which drives young Americans to drugs, but the wrongs back here which leave so many with the sense that there is no way to build a better life or make the system respond.
You and I realize that the American ideal can work. Now we must make it a reality for every American.
No one can claim that this will wholly control heroin. We also need a tough, all-out effort by police and prosecutors, courts and treatment centers, schools and parents. But in the final analysis, all of that will fail unless we build a country worthy of our beliefs – a country where prosperity and politics alike serve all of the people.
When I visit New Hampshire now, I think here as elsewhere of the problems of American life. But here, too, and across New England, I see the promise of American life.
I see what our fathers and their fathers before them were able to do.
I see the character that gives us the strength to fight for what is right – in our own towns and wherever else America is in danger.
I see people who understand how to live in peace with each other and in harmony with their surrounding.
And I am convinced that the promise of our country can be kept. Recession and war, credibility gaps and drug addiction will test America. But they will never defeat America – if we care enough to do enough about them.
You know how much you care – and so do I.
And that is why I believe we will prevail – in New Hampshire, in New England, and in the nation.
You know how much you care – and so do they.