Obituaries : Dr. Robert Byck; Sounded Warning on Crack’s Effects

Dr. Robert S. Byck, an expert on the effects of cocaine whose testimony before Congress helped focus awareness on the perils of crack, has died.

A professor of psychiatry and pharmacology at Yale University’s school of medicine, Byck died in a Boston hospital Aug. 9 of complications from a recent stroke. He was 66.

In the halls of Congress, Byck was widely recognized as an important voice in the dialogue about drug use in America. In 1979, he gave a House committee an early warning on crack, saying: “Users become totally dependent on the drug, will do anything to get it, and may . . . become social cripples.”

Byck had begun studying cocaine almost a decade earlier in Peru, where Incas and others have chewed coca leaves for centuries. Working with local investigators, he had found that moderate use of coca leaves or even powder cocaine posed little problem, but that smoked coca paste--the basis of crack--was creating a serious situation.

In his House testimony, Byck stressed that crack--because it was cheaper, easier to produce and faster acting--was far more dangerous than powder cocaine and could prompt an epidemic of drug abuse.

Anybody could turn cocaine into crack by a simple process, he said, and the resulting drug could produce an instant high, while powder cocaine might require up to half an hour to achieve effects. The low cost, he added, could make the drug more available among the poor.

By the mid-1980s, several years after Byck’s initial warnings, the burgeoning use of crack in the United States turned control of the drug into a political issue.

Rep. Peter Rodino (D-N.J.), then chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said that crack was “on the verge of becoming the new Pied Piper of American youth.”

Byck again testified before Congress in 1986. He pointedly warned a Senate panel that crack was so cheap and accessible that “it’s as though Ray Kroc [the late founder of the McDonald’s fast food chain] had invented the opium den.” The doctor challenged Congress to “put your money where your mouth is” and take steps to curb the drug.

But, ever the scientist, Byck refused to corroborate a statement by Florida’s Sen. Lawton Chiles that “some experts” believed crack to be 50 times as addictive as powder cocaine.

He believed crack was the more addictive, too, Byck said, but added firmly: “I don’t have a number. . . . The weight issue is incomprehensible to me.”

Years later, he reiterated even more strongly: “It’s obvious to me that crack represents a greater threat to society than [powder] cocaine. What the ratio should be is arbitrary and beyond the feeble brains of scientists. Nobody asked me what the ratio should be, and if they had, I would have said, ‘I don’t have the foggiest idea.’ ”

Nevertheless, Chiles’ 50-to-1 ratio, which was doubled in the final law, is widely believed to have been the basis for the severe sentencing guidelines for crack enacted by Congress in 1986 as part of mandatory minimum sentencing laws.

For the first time, the legislation distinguished between crack and powder cocaine. Crack became the only drug to carry a mandatory prison term for possession, whether or not the intent was to distribute. By comparison, possession of heroin or powder cocaine without intent to sell was a misdemeanor carrying a maximum of one year in jail.

The controversial sentencing law and implied addiction ratio came to be viewed by many as racist--Byck never agreed--because more than 90% of federal crack defendants are black; only 3% are white. Blacks selling crack got much longer sentences than whites selling similar amounts of cocaine.

In 1996, the Federal Sentencing Commission recommended ending the sentencing disparity, but its proposal failed to gain the support of President Clinton and Congress.

The son and brother of doctors, Byck received his medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania and did his internship at UC San Francisco before taking a post as assistant professor of pharmacology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.

While at Einstein in the late 1960s, he achieved prominence when he and three colleagues found that monosodium glutamate, or MSG, an additive then commonly used in Chinese food, could produce burning sensations, a tightness in the head with occasional headaches and chest pain.

Their study resulted in laws some years later eliminating the use of MSG in baby food. Today the effects of glutamate are widely known and studied.

From Einstein, Byck went to Yale, where he received his training as a psychiatrist and later joined the faculty.

Byck is survived by his second wife, Susan Wheeler Byck of Gilford, Conn., three sons and a daughter.

Penny Love of the Times editorial library assisted with research for this article.