‘Traffic’ Screenwriter’s Sentiment Is Misplaced

In his article about the making of the movie “Traffic,” Sean Mitchell quotes screenwriter Stephen Gaghan as making a connection between stigma, William J. Bennett and the death of Gaghan’s friend, Rob Bingham (“Protesting Another Misguided War,” Jan. 7).

Bingham, a writer, died of an alcohol and heroin overdose in 1999. “The reason he’s dead,” Gaghan told Mitchell, “is that he couldn’t talk about his problem publicly, because of the stigma, and the stigma comes straight from William Bennett,” who was head of the federal Office of National Drug Control Policy from 1989 to 1990.

Gaghan’s comments are substantially wrong.

Stigma related to addiction to licit or illicit drugs is nothing new. Alcoholics have been stigmatized for centuries. Narcotic addicts were stigmatized even before heroin--see, for example, Eugene O’Neill’s portrayal of the morphine-addicted mother in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” The reasons for such stigma are complex but surely relate to perception of addicts as willfully choosing a lifestyle that brings misery to themselves and the people around them.

Bill Bennett as drug czar did not stigmatize addicts. As his deputy in charge of treatment and prevention, I witnessed many times his compassion for such individuals and his public support for the need for treatment. Federal funds for prevention and treatment doubled on our watch.

What Bennett did do was turn the moral spotlight on so-called casual drug users. These individuals, who can readily stop their use, feed the illicit drug market and serve as role models: Their example implies one can enjoy intense drug euphoria without consequences while carrying on a normal life and stopping whenever one chooses. By the time they get into trouble, it is too late for many who emulated them.

Stigma and a need to keep his drug use private hardly seem to have killed Bingham, as Gaghan states. If the lengthy New York Magazine article (Jan. 3, 2000) about him is any indication, his heroin use was widely known and was seen as part of his “bad boy” persona.

As a practicing psychiatrist who has treated thousands of heroin addicts over a 35-year career, I have seen lives destroyed by heroin and lives redeemed by treatment. Unfortunately, treatment is often unsuccessful. There is no simple answer to this tragedy. Certainly not legalization, which would destroy even more lives. We need to expand and improve treatment and prevention; keep pressure on supply, even if imperfect and frustrating; and avoid glamorizing life-destroying behavior. “Traffic” points out the enduring truth of the title of a book about heroin from the 1970s: “It’s So Good, Don’t Even Try It Once.”