Getting a Fix on America’s Drug Problem

Given the tone of these troubled times, a package of articles on addiction in the November/December issue of In Health magazine could be interpreted as treasonous. After all, the U.S. government so far has spent less money defending its citizens from Saddam Hussein than it spends each year--$10 billion--defending them from drugs. And when Los Angeles Police Chief Darrell Gates says that casual users of drugs should be shot, you know this is serious business.

But not everyone is ready to accept the rhetoric of the war on drugs at face value.

“Most of the people who use alcohol, heroin, cocaine, or any other recreational drug,” writes Deborah Franklin, “never develop the life-warping, bottomless craving known as addiction.”

Framing this detailed discussion of who becomes an addict and who does not is a study of 32 people in a middle-class Bay Area extended family, whose use of illegal drugs since the early 1970s belies the current thinking. Most group members, for example, inhaled cocaine over several years, then gradually abandoned it, without suffering any withdrawal symptoms.

Which is not to say that the group was immune to the ravages of drug abuse. At least one member has largely ruined her life with cocaine and alcohol use, and another is in a methadone program. But those sad cases lend credence to the article’s main thesis that, because of extremely complex biological, psychological and chemical factors, some people are more prone to addiction than others.

As Franklin states in her piece, society may play a role in individual addiction. Poor people who can’t make their way up the economic ladder and rich folks who “no longer recognize the possibility that they could fall” become like the caged rats “who have nothing to do all day but press a lever for cocaine.”

But those on the impoverished side of that equation are much more at risk, most experts agree, and, contrary to popular opinion, it is not because they lack moral fiber.

As one researcher in the article says, “For the New Right, people don’t abuse drugs because they are jobless, or poor, or depressed, or alienated; they are jobless, poor, depressed, or alienated because they use drugs.”

Another notes: “It kills me to read in the paper about someone who ‘spent all their money on crack,’ as though that’s a sign of ultimate decadence. . . . If you’re on General Assistance, getting $200 every two weeks, all your money won’t buy you much of a drug or anything else. Crack has come along and made those peoples’ lives worse--but not that much worse.”

Still, anyone who doubts that cause and effect, poverty and addiction, are inextricably intertwined in the inner city might take a look at a powerful and heartbreaking photo essay on the crack baby phenomenon in the Oct. 18 Rolling Stone.

“If every year 375,000 white middle-class children lost a limb because of the actions of a strange and implacable cult, national outrage would know no bounds,” Ellen Hopkins writes. “But given the fact that crack is perceived as a minority problem (though plenty of whites are addicts), and given the fact that this society has never leaped at the chance to spend real money on poor children in need, it’s perhaps understandable that the response to 375,000 babies being crippled by crack each year has been so casual.”

REQUIRED READING

* For some art collectors, American Indian objects possess an almost magical allure. For some of the Indians to whom the objects were handed down over generations, there is no “almost” about it: The objects are magic--not art at all (there is no word for art in Hopi) but sacred entities of great power.

Tribal spokesmen say their icons are owned communally and cannot legally or ethically be sold. And with increasing frequency, tribal elders are demanding that artifacts be returned.

So it was that one year ago, at an antiques show in New York City, a Hopi priest identified a “mask” held sacred by his tribe, and an FBI agent had it confiscated.

The mask--or “spirit friend” as the Hopis would call it--had been purchased just three weeks earlier for $75,000. Now it remains crated in a U.S. attorney’s office. But the Pandora’s box of questions about the ethics of dealing in Indian artifacts remains wide open.

In the October Art and Antiques magazine, Catherine Barnett recounts her yearlong investigation into the story behind that 150-year-old kachina mask and the secretive world of artifacts trading. Her beautifully crafted narrative is as engaging a page-turner as a Tony Hillerman mystery. The photographs by Dan Budnick are themselves art.

Exploring the complexities of this intersection of disparate worlds, Barnett concludes that now is a “particularly crucial moment for a sweeping reassessment of cultural attitudes.”

* October marks the 25th anniversary of Washingtonian magazine, and in celebration the publication devotes itself to “secrets.” Among the puzzlers the magazine ponders in an “Unsolved Mysteries” feature is the eternal question: “Who was deep throat?” Maybe Alexander Haig, the magazine speculates.

* The October Money magazine rates “America’s Best (and Worst) Lawmakers,” according to their votes on “pocketbook” issues. At first glance, it might seem that the magazine disproves the old axiom about liberals being freer with taxpayers’ money; 42% of Democrats earned A’s or B’s, while only 18% of Republicans earned better than a C. Closer scrutiny, however, reveals that the right and wrong of the issues were decided by a poll of Money readers. And Money readers tended to support such conservative taboos as raising the minimum wage.

ESOTERICA

Some Greenies may have gone Hollywood after Earth Day, but Backwoods Home Magazine (“. . . for people who value their independence”) remains as funky as a Nitty Gritty Dirt Band concert back at the Hog Farm commune. And what with Saddam threatening to blow up oil wells and Mother Nature threatening another dry year, the September/October issue, with good old-fashioned stories on solar heaters, wood stoves, wind generators and composting toilets, makes for relevant reading ($17.95 for six issues, P.O. Box 1624, Ventura, Calif. 93002).