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Crime is directly fueled by drug abuse. "I believe the crime problem in America today is the drug problem," declares New York City Police Commissioner Benjamin Ward. The sheer dollar volume of narcotics traffic is immense, estimated at anywhere from $27 billion to $110 billion a year. In a study released this year of the link between drugs and street crime in New York and Washington, 56% of suspects tested were using drugs at the time of arrest. In Florida, the burglary rate is up 30% so far this year; cocaine arrests are up 80%.
Great as it is, however, the social cost of drugs has to be seen in a broader context. While it is true that the number of cocaine-related deaths has nearly tripled since 1981, more people (570) died from appendicitis last year than from cocaine abuse (563). The death toll from cocaine is minute compared with the number of fatalities attributed in 1980 to alcohol (98,186) and tobacco (some 300,000 annually). While the health cost of drug abuse was estimated by one National Center for Health Statistics study at $59.7 billion in 1983, the medical bill for alcohol abuse was $116.7 billion. "There is no question that alcoholism in terms of social cost remains our No. 1 problem. We can't lose sight of that because of our emphasis on drugs," says the NIDA's Schuster.
"This is a drug society. We have prescription drugs, over-the-counter drugs and drugs you can buy in the grocery store," says Dr. Ronald K. Siegel, a psychopharmacologist at UCLA. "We have to understand that the drive to intoxication is irrepressible, unstoppable. It functions almost like hunger and sex. Our species has always gotten high on something, long before we were fully civilized primates."
History offers ample evidence. Ritual opium use has been traced back to Greece and Cyprus as early as 2000 B.C. The ancient Aztecs took ololiuqui (similar to LSD), peyote, marijuana and other mind benders. In the Middle Ages, witches rubbed their bodies with hallucinogenic ointments.
The fortunes of early New World merchants were amassed by trading opium and rum (as well as slaves). George Washington, historians believe, probably used hemp (marijuana) to ease his dental pains. President Ulysses Grant took cocaine in his last years while writing his memoirs, on the advice of his publisher Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain.
After the Civil War, opium use was widely tolerated in the U.S. and even extolled by some leading thinkers. Under the influence of opium, wrote Dr. George Wood, the president of the American Philosophical Society, in 1868, "the intellectual and imaginative faculties are raised to the highest point compatible with individual capacity." Doctors began prescribing opium- based concoctions for every malady from headache to skin rash. Respectable Victorian ladies calmed their babies with narcotic potions, such as Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup and Hooper's Anodyne, the Infant's Friend. Heroin, a morphine derivative, was sold legally at the turn of the century in drugstores and by mail-order catalogs and traveling salesmen.
Cocaine first became popular in America in the late 19th century. Parke- Davis, the U.S. pharmaceutical company, sold at least 15 products with cocaine, including cigarettes, cheroots, and coca skin salve and face powder. At the time an estimated 1 in 400 Americans used opiates regularly.