He writes a prescription for trouble and has to resign
Just 36 hours after a swirl of publicity broke last week over White House Health Policy Adviser Dr. Peter Bourne, 38, his letter of resignation landed with an unwelcome thump upon the desk of his already beleaguered friend, Jimmy Carter. As both Bourne and White House aides agreed, the resignation was an attempt to calm a growing furor, but it came too late to prevent front-page newspaper investigation of a politically explosive topic: the illegal use of drugs, including marijuana and cocaine, in the White House and elsewhere in the nation's capital.
The Bourne affair began as a routine drug arrest. Physical Therapist Toby Long, 26, asked a pharmacist in Woodbridge, Va., a hamlet 25 miles south of Washington, D.C., to fill a prescription. The prescription called for 15 tablets of Quaalude, a potent sedative that is sometimes prescribed for insomnia and frequently abused because of its mythical properties as an aphrodisiac. By chance, a state pharmacy inspector, Kathleen Watt, was in the store and decided to verify Long's prescription. When she tried to call the doctor who had written it and found that the doctor's phone had been disconnected. Watt summoned police. The officers learned that the patient's name on the prescription was fictitious, and arrested Long.
The case suddenly became more than routine once it was known that the doctor who had prescribed the drug was Bourne, Carter's chief adviser on mental health and narcotics policies. In 1970, while Bourne was working as a psychiatrist in Atlanta, then Governor Carter appointed him to head Georgia's office of drug abuse. Bourne later became one of the first aides to urge Carter to run for the Presidency. When he was appointed to the $51,000-a-year White House position last year, the President described him as "probably the world's foremost expert on heroin, cocaine and marijuana—even alcohol—all the drugs that are bad."
Bourne's involvement in a drug case, however minor, shocked the White House. At first Carter's aides agreed to let the psychiatrist try to ride out the controversy. On Wednesday Bourne took a paid leave of absence. He later explained: "I didn't want to create the kind of situation Bert Lance had. The more you hang in, the more people go after you. I will resolve it and come back." Bourne also issued a statement justifying his conduct: he had written a prescription for one of his aides, Ellen Metsky, 25, who was suffering from insomnia, and had used a pseudonym to protect her privacy.
Bourne contended that what he had done was "neither legally nor morally wrong." But legal experts say that he actually violated both federal and state laws by failing to use Metsky's name on the prescription. In a separate statement, Metsky claimed that, because she was busy, she asked a friend, Toby Long, to have the prescription filled on the way home from her job in Virginia.