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Drop DARE, Urges Shorewood Panel ('The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel'
Says A Committee Consisting Of Teachers, Staff And Parents Has Recommended
That The Shorewood, Wisconsin, School District Replace The Counterproductive
DARE Program With 'Life Skills,' Published By Princeton Press, For Students
In The Sixth, Seventh And Eighth Grades)
Date: Tue, 23 Jun 1998 01:18:20 -0400
To: mapnews@mapinc.org
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Subject: MN: US WI: Drop DARE, Urges Shorewood Panel
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Pubdate: Mon, 22 Jun 1998
Source: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (WI)
Contact: jsedit@onwis.com
Website: http://www.jsonline.com/
Author: Marie Rohde, Journal Sentinel staff
DROP DARE, URGES SHOREWOOD PANEL
Schools committee concludes anti-drug-abuse program is ineffective
The Shorewood School District has all but abandoned DARE, the police-taught
anti-drug program used in 78% of the state's schools, after a study
concluded that it might be worse than not having any anti-drug effort.
"It was kind of like discovering that the emperor had no clothes," said
Cecilia Hillard, a member of a Shorewood committee that studied the issue
and a professor at the Medical College of Wisconsin who has done extensive
research on the effects of drug abuse.
"The data were so strong that either DARE has no effect, or that in suburban
communities like Shorewood it could be worse than having no program at all."
The Shorewood committee, consisting of teachers, staff and parents, has
recommended that DARE, which is given to students in the fifth, sixth and
seventh grades, be replaced with Life Skills, a program published by
Princeton Press, for the sixth, seventh and eighth grades. The middle school
years are the core age group for any anti-drug program.
A minor component of DARE would continue to be taught by police to
third-graders in three sessions. The committee is considering what materials
will be used in other grade levels, but DARE materials are not likely
candidates.
The committee rejected DARE, an acronym for Drug Abuse Resistance Education,
saying it has been shown to be ineffective and "the materials for
intermediate school are simplistic to the point of being insulting to our
students." They also criticized the materials as dull and the emphasis on
criminal justice consequences as too narrow.
Shorewood's action on the DARE program is unusual locally but not unique.
Cedarburg has dropped all but a small portion of DARE; Wauwatosa has
established a committee to look at its effectiveness; Cudahy has a less
extensive program taught by police and, in Whitefish Bay, it is "on life
support."
"We were asked to cut it from 17 to 12 weeks because of academic demands,"
Whitefish Bay Police Chief Gary Mikulec said. "It cannot be pared down any
more and still be considered a DARE program."
According to a consultant for the state Department of Public Instruction,
78% of the state's more than 400 school districts have DARE programs, and
only a handful have abandoned it.
In Waukesha County, the program is overwhelmingly accepted and supported. It
continues to thrive in the county's public and parochial schools and neither
Waukesha County District Attorney Paul Bucher nor Menomonee Falls Police
Officer Richard Schwabenlander, president of the Waukesha County DARE
Officers Association, has heard of any efforts to replace or scale back the
program.
"My biggest complaint has always been that people expect way too much out of
the DARE program," Bucher said. "When it doesn't solve all adolescent drug
and alcohol problems, they declare it a failure. It's just not the silver
bullet and it is not meant to be."
The program was developed in 1983 by former Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl
Gates and the public school district there.
For nearly a decade, the program has been by far the nation's most popular
anti-drug effort, the primary means of trying to prevent children from
becoming involved with drugs, alcohol, tobacco and gangs.
But it has had its critics, both conservative and liberal, and many
communities -- notably Seattle, Oakland, Calif., and Columbus, Ohio -- have
opted to use other drug education programs. Those communities also
questioned whether DARE was the most effective program.
James A. Holstein, a sociology professor at Marquette University and a
Shorewood committee member, brought together the major research on drug
abuse prevention programs for inclusion in a report to school officials.
"There are no published reports in peer-reviewed, scientific journals that
find DARE to have generalized positive effects on student drug, alcohol and
tobacco use," he said in his report to the Shorewood School Board.
Several studies found that it has had no effect on general drug use and is
less effective than other programs that are available. The only literature
of DARE's effectiveness came from DARE-produced literature, "but there is
reason to be skeptical since the pamphlet does not report technical
information," Holstein said.
Perhaps the most damning study was done over a period of several years by
the Criminal Justice Department at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Not
only were there no long-term positive behavioral effects found but "the
study also shows that suburban students in communities like Shorewood appear
to exhibit a 'boomerang' effect. That is, students exposed to DARE appear to
be more likely to be involved with drugs than students not exposed to DARE,"
Holstein said.
Holstein's report did not include statistics from the Chicago study, but in
looking at Shorewood drug surveys, he drew the same conclusion about the
"boomerang" effect.
A self-reporting survey of drug, alcohol and tobacco use by Shorewood high
school students was done in 1992. Those students had not been through the
DARE program. Holstein compared the results of that study to the results of
a 1995 survey of high school students, who would have been DARE graduates.
He found a higher incidence of alcohol, drug and tobacco use in the students
surveyed in 1995, a finding not inconsistent with the University of Illinois
study.
For example, 90% of the Shorewood seniors surveyed in 1995 said they had
tried marijuana and 23% said they used it more than 40 times a year. Nearly
8% of the seniors and 7% of the juniors said they felt they were "hooked" on
drugs or alcohol, all significantly higher than those surveyed in 1992.
If the bulk of the research has panned DARE, it has still continued to be
the program of choice nationally. Holstein quotes Richard R. Clayton, a
professor of sociology at the University of Kentucky who has studied the
program, to explain this apparent contradiction:
DARE is the program of choice "because it makes all important groups
(parents, teachers, administrators, police, politicians) 'feel good.' "
The Shorewood committee members said that having uniformed police officers
in the classroom created a rapport beneficial to police as well as to the
rest of the community. But the curriculum was a problem.
The committee began meeting last August and its members had considerable
expertise in the field. The membership included Holstein, the Marquette
University sociologist; Hillard, a researcher on the effects of drug abuse;
a child psychiatrist, a psychologist, a social worker and the coordinator of
Shorewood Responds, a community program that deals with the use of alcohol,
tobacco and drug abuse by minors.
They decided to look at the curriculum for the program in the same way they
would look at a curriculum for math, English or anything else taught in the
district.
"From then on we were looking at it as scientists," said Hillard. "But we
are also parents and we were looking at what would be best for our kids."
DARE was one of five programs assessed. It was also the only one not
endorsed by the National Council on Drug Abuse as an effective program.
Of the 16 criteria the committee used to evaluate the programs, DARE fared
better than the others in only one category -- the inclusion of community
and parents. Overall, it got the lowest grade of the programs examined.
DARE supporters complain that because of its prominence, DARE has been put
under the microscope in a way that other programs have not. Could Life
Skills just be the untested program du jour, one that will soon be deemed
ineffective?
Hillard says that may be true of some of the more than 100 programs
available, but Life Skills has been studied more than any program other than
DARE.
Life Skills approaches a broader range of behaviors and decision-making
situations. DARE, she said, emphasizes the negative consequences of
decision-making, largely from a criminal justice viewpoint. Life Skills
emphasizes all the possible choices and possible consequences, with legal
ramifications viewed as only a part of that, she said.
Still, there is a place for police involvement in the schools, according to
Shorewood school authorities.
"There is a role there for them and we hope they will participate," said
school Superintendent Jack Linehan. "But this is a wonderful example of
local control, of a community deciding what is best for its schools and its
students."
Shorewood Police Chief Robert Surdyk said his department has found that the
DARE officer's participation in the program not only helped deliver the
anti-drug message but also enhanced the relationship between officers and
the students.
"We have a liaison officer in the high school but he doesn't get a lot of
walk-ins who just want to say 'hi' to Officer Friendly," Surdyk said. "There
are a lot of kids who come up to the DARE officer just to talk, years after
they've finished the program."
Betsy Thatcher of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report.
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Crank - The Drug Once Called Speed Has Come Roaring Back As A Powdery Plague
On America's Heartland (Sensational And Factually Challenged 'Time' Magazine
Article Attempts To Launch A Nationwide Drug Menace, Ignoring The Fact
That The Increase In Methamphetamine Use Was Caused By The Prohibitions
On Cannabis And Pharmaceutical Amphetamine-Type Drugs)
Date: Thu, 18 Jun 1998 01:59:59 -0400
To: mapnews@mapinc.org
From: owner-mapnews@mapinc.org (MAPNews)
Subject: MN: US: Time: Crank article
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Pubdate: 22 Jun 1998 Week
Source: Time Magazine
Section: Vol 151 No 24 Page 24
Contact: letters@time.com
Author: Walter Kirn with Patrick Dawson
The drug once called speed has come roaring back as a powdery plague on
America's heartland...
BILLINGS - It's a full-moon Friday night, and Jennifer, 25, a hard-core loker
(smoker of methamphetamine, known as crank) has been wide awake around the
clock for almost four days. She isn't yet seeing plastic people, shadow men
or transparent spiders-just three of the fabled hallucinations of the
Billings, Mont., crank scene, a hyperstimulated subculture sickeningly rich
in slang and folklore. But she is feeling pangs of remorse about her
three-year-old. On Monday, when she left her parents' house, where she has
been living since dropping out of college, she promised the daughter she
calls "my angel" that Mommy would be right back. Sadly, though, crank
squeezes time like an accordion, and since Jennifer swore her solemn
maternal oath, approximately 100 hours have passed in a sleepless, virtually
food-free blur of hurried parking-lot drug deals, marathon bouts at the
video poker machine and frantic cigarette runs to the mini-mart.
Now, perched at the bar of a downtown dance club where her dealer boyfriend
ditched her ages ago with just $4 for drinks, Jennifer scratches at her
wrists and elbows; her eyes dart from pool table to door; and her butt
compulsively scoots around inside her baggy jeans. Crank kills the appetite,
just wipes it out, and while many women she knows view this as a selling
point, Jennifer doesn't want to lose more weight. Hoping to supplement the
child-support check that turns to drugs the day it hits her mailbox, she'd
applied for a job as a cocktail waitress, but her meth-shrunken breasts
didn't fill the skimpy costume.
"This drug makes you lose everything," she says, gulping a shot of bourbon
and root-beer schnapps to calm her freaking neurotransmitters. "I'm not
afraid, though. I've cranked for seven years," Jennifer says. (Her name has
been changed by TIME, as have the names and various identifying details of
other crank users cited.) "I'm getting pretty used to losing everything."
All over Billings (pop. 91,000), the scrappy hub city of the northwestern
Great Plains, home to oil refineries, regional medical centers and countless
smoke-filled fistfight barrooms where cowboys from Wyoming to South Dakota
come for some urban R. and R., people are losing everything to crank-their
families, their jobs, their homes, their bank accounts and, perhaps
irretrievably, their minds. The potent, man-made stimulant-invented 80 years
ago in Japan, issued to soldiers in World War II, prescribed to chunky
housewives in the '50s, known to '60s hippies as speed and now sometimes
passed out to antsy third-graders with attention-deficit disorder-is, at
least in its crumbly, powdered street form, an upper that leads straight down.
This isn't the carefully calibrated dose of methamphetamine dispensed by
pharmacists in pill form. This is crank-smoked, snorted or injected-and it
makes people live like coyotes, says a cop standing outside a south-side
Billings bungalow while agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration toss
the place for drugs. "This town is coming unhinged," another cop says. As if
to prove their point, the suspected crank house whose street-side picture
windows are sheathed with tinfoil (sunlight is the cranker's natural enemy)
starts belching evidence of criminal lunacy-hypodermic needles clogged with
meth, automatic pistols of several calibers and an AK-47 with a loaded
100-round clip.
Next come the makings for amateur bombs: jars of gunpowder, lengths of pipe
and a homemade blasting cap fashioned from fuse cord and a rifle shell.
Given crank's capacity for rendering even casual users clinically psychotic
(the transparent spiders weave webs inside the brain long after the meth has
left one's system), the arsenal is probably unnecessary, real weapons
amassed for a figmentary showdown.
Marijuana and cocaine were this city's illegal substances of choice until
about four years ago, when a blizzard of crank swept in. "It's pretty much
all we deal with now," says Sergeant Tim O'Connell, who heads the city's
multiagency drug task force. For law enforcers, methamphetamine is a tough
drug to pin down. It's sold hand to hand behind closed doors, in homes and
motel rooms, in the style of a Tupperware party. Worse, its production
requires little overhead. Ephedrine, an over-the-counter cold medication,
can be combined with a shopping list of chemicals easily obtained from
stores and industrial-supply companies (common drain cleaners figure in some
formulas) and cooked in a kitchen sink from recipes downloaded from the
Internet. Billings cops call these homely setups "Beavis and Butt-head labs."
Why crank? And why now? The crank epidemic is new enough, and its mostly
white, often rural victims quiet enough, that those questions are just
starting to be asked. "The current culture is 'Keep going, keep moving and
do it all.' That would be the initial draw, I think," says Nancy
Waite-O'Brien, Ph.D., director of psychological services at the Betty Ford
Center in Rancho Mirage, Calif. Add to this the wannabe-supermodel factor.
"Women," observes Waite-O'Brien, "get into meth because they think it will
manage weight. Which I suppose it sometimes does-at first."
American drug warriors, welcome to your nightmare-a do-it-yourself guerrilla
narcotic spread by paranoid insomniacs who think they see federal agents
through every keyhole, even when it's just the Domino's Pizza man. In cities
large and small across the West and Midwest crank belt, from Oregon to Iowa,
where the drug is known as the poor man's cocaine in towns that barely had
cocaine in the first place, the drug arrives nonstop from every direction
and by every imaginable route. Wrapped by the ounce and the pound in
duct-tape eggs that can be stashed in the air vent of a car, crank comes up
the interstate from California and Mexico, where it's produced in massive
quantities by organized criminal gangs.
Sometimes it even comes by UPS. In one of Billings' biggest recent crank
seizures, O'Connell, wearing the company's brown uniform, intercepted a
5-lb. package at the UPS warehouse one morning (street value: a quarter of a
million dollars) and delivered it to the address on the label. The men who
answered the doorbell were arrested. Dennis Paxinos, the Yellowstone County
attorney, requested that the men's bail be set at $250,000, but the judge
involved reduced the sum to a mere $1,000. Paxinos publicly called the
decision "asinine." Within a few hours of his release, one of the suspects
was back in jail on another charge.
A lot of Billings crank has to travel no farther than across the street,
from the apartment building where it's made to the tavern or motel room
where it's sold. So pervasive is this bathtub crank that a Billings teenager
trying to kick drugs had to quit her job as a hotel maid because she was
constantly finding traces of meth in the bathrooms she cleaned. While on
assignment for this story, TIME's writer and photographer watched from the
lobby of their motel as a notorious Billings crank dealer, facing state
charges at the time, received a steady stream of predawn customers in a room
directly across the courtyard. ("You know he's in," the night clerk said,
"when the phone lines all light up at once.") Approached for an interview
about his trade, the wanted man, a tattooed giant on a bed surrounded by a
clutch of weary party girls, merely said, "I'm busy. I don't have time now."
Last week the alleged dealer was arrested in another Billings motel in a
raid that netted several ounces of what police identified as meth. Said a
motel employee about her fugitive lodger: "The only problem is that when he
leaves, the mirrors in his room are always broken and all the light bulbs
are missing." (Lokers without a pipe at hand typically smoke crank from a
broken light bulb.)
"How are you going to cut off the supply of something you can produce at
home?" asks Mona Sumner, chief operations officer of the Rimrock Foundation,
Billings' (and Montana's) largest drug-rehab facility. Sumner, in her 30
years at Rimrock, has seen many a drug craze come and go, but she has never
felt this frightened or frustrated. Crank admissions to her facility have
tripled in the past four years.
Crank is too cheap, too available and too addictive, Sumner says. "Honestly,
I don't know where it's going." The crankers who show up at the clinic
require, on average, four weeks of detox, often with the use of
antipsychotic drugs, before the counselors can even get through to them. On
a wall in the Rimrock recreation room hangs a homemade poster showing a
medevac helicopter like those that land at nearby St. Vincent Hospital. The
poster is intended to reassure paranoid recovering crankers, but many are so
unstrung that they fear the helicopter is after them.
Delusions about sinister aircraft are among the milder symptoms of the
Billings area's mounting crank plague. East on Interstate 90, in the town of
Livingston, the body of a young woman, Angela Brown, was found rotting in a
river, and local law-enforcement officials are investigating a Billings meth
connection. A few months earlier, south of Billings, in Hardin, an
admittedly cranked-out 17-year-old, Jonathan Wayne Vandersloot, whose head
hadn't touched a pillow in days, allegedly shot dead his sleeping
grandparents, scooped up some jewelry, guns and cash, and took off in their
pickup. Vandersloot's first trial ended in a hung jury. Prosecutors plan to
retry him this fall.
Farther south, crank has decimated the Northern Cheyenne Reservation,
populated by descendants of the warriors who routed Custer at the Battle of
the Little Big Horn. "Crank will do to the reservations what Custer
couldn't," says Bonnie Pipe, clinical director of a tribal recovery center
in the town of Lame Deer. When James Walksalong, chairman of the local
school board, brought in a team of drug-sniffing dogs last year, kids
climbed out of classroom windows, and by the end of the day the dogs had
detected 30 instances of drug residue. On reservations throughout Montana
and Wyoming, the drug has led to increased domestic abuse, a flurry of
audacious daylight burglaries and overloaded medical facilities.
David Morales, a truant officer for Billings School District 2 and a
recovering addict, deals with the meth problem too often in the form of 10-
and 11-year-olds either on the drug or suffering abuse at the hands of
spun-out relatives. "I call them the ghost children," he says. "I see them
all the time."
Recently Morales called into his office a beautiful little six-year-old girl
who had been missing a lot of school. "I asked her if she needed an alarm
clock to help her wake up on time," he recalls, "and all of a sudden she
breaks down crying." It seems that under the nose of her allegedly
crank-addicted mother, the girl had been raped repeatedly by a teenage
relative, a sadistic sort given to dousing his hands in fingernail-polish
remover, setting them aflame and then blowing out the fire before he was
burned. He warned the girl that he would ignite her if she spoke out.
Morales tells of another girl, 11, whose meth-crazed mother prostituted her
for a onetime windfall of $360. The girl thought this was normal life,
Morales says. Mom needed the money.
The E.R. doctors at Deaconess Billings clinic have their own ugly tales to
tell. The crank casualties who appear in the E.R. break down into three
basic types, according to Dr. Larry McEvoy, who heads the emergency-medicine
department: "First there's the 'I've hit bottom' presentation. They've used
for 10 days, haven't eaten or slept and have run out of drugs. They're wiped
out, feel heavy and can hardly move. Type 2 is the acute public-disturbance
person. They start fighting with people or screaming in the street. Often
they're impossible to interview because they're so paranoid. Third are
people who use crank a lot and notice that their arms are numb or they're
having trouble breathing."
McEvoy has seen a radical increase in all three types: "The amounts we see
are overwhelming. As a physician, I regard it as the worst possible drug. It
really burns people out." And it can do so almost instantly, in McEvoy's
experience.
"One night a boy came in so out of control he thought I was the police and
the police were trying to kill or kidnap him. He was incredibly
violent-biting, slapping, grabbing doctors' private parts. We got hold of
his folks and found out he's usually a good student. Even if he does this
only once every two years, given his psychotic reaction to the drug, he
could end up killing someone.
"I've seen 14-year-old girls with infected arms who have been stuck a bunch
of times by people who aren't very good at hitting veins. And I'm frequently
surprised by the number of people who don't use it every day but don't feel
bad about dabbling in it. They seem to be unaware of the precipice they're
hanging over."
Janet Cousrouf, Rimrock's director of nursing, says crank carries with it
almost a two-week residue of paranoia. "Since the detox time is longer than
most companies are willing to pay for, our biggest problem is insurance."
Cousrouf frankly despairs about the crank plague and in particular its
spread from generation to generation. "A lot of the crankers are products of
crank mothers, or they have fetal alcohol syndrome. And we're seeing a whole
new era of fetal drug syndrome-underdeveloped brain stems, SIDS deaths."
Cousrouf believes crank is one of the main culprits in these cases.
But from their sober point of view, doctors and nurses can tell you only so
much. The best way to see what crank has done to Billings-and perhaps
understand the appeal of a drug made from drain-cleaning crystals-is to
spend time with crankers, both active and reformed. A group of them loiter
outside the Montana Rescue Mission, a private Christian charity that offers
a bed to crash in and, if they choose, a religion-based recovery program,
Reality and Christ.
Tom, 24, a husky blond kid who says he has been drug free for 17 days, is
fresh out of jail for stealing a handgun he planned to sell for drug cash.
The gun belonged to his girlfriend's father, who happened to be a deputy
sheriff. "How dumb can you get?" Tom asks. After flashing a driver's license
photo to show how much thinner he was in his meth days, Tom effuses about
his newfound love of Christ. A few minutes later he reaches into his jeans
jacket and pulls out a scorched, homemade glass crank pipe.
"To be honest," he says, "if I had some now, I'd smoke it."
Huddled on the ground against a wall, Justin and Kim, 24 and 18, scoff at
Tom's pipe. They're bangers-they shoot their crank-and anyone who does
different is crazy, they say. "We've been off it 11 days," says Justin. "I'm
trying to get my tolerance back down so it won't take me so much to get spun
out," he explains. As narcotics go, crank is famously cheap-a $20 bundle
keeps you buzzing for up to 12 jaw-grinding, heart-pounding hours-but
frequent users still have trouble affording it. For one thing, they tend to
get grandiose while high. A recovering addict (in his one year of crank use,
he went from reigning as high school homecoming king to serving a robbery
sentence in a state penitentiary) remembers buying drinks for the house
every time he set foot in a strange bar.
When asked how he's staying away from the needle, Justin produces a plastic
medicine dropper and pokes his arm with it. "Calms me down," he says. "I
quit smoking the same way, by sucking on a crayon." Like so many other
Billings geeters-yet one more slang term-Justin is a teller of wild tales.
He shows off the sunken veins in his arms and describes how he once had to
gaff his shot of crank-inject it straight into his jugular vein-while
watching himself in a rearview mirror. "The jugular," he says, nodding
earnestly, "the only vein in the body that won't roll over on you."
Hovering in the mission's doorway, a sweatshirt hood drawn over his pale,
thin face, is Dracula. That's what the others call him, and he answers to
it. Trembling, high and radically withdrawn, Dracula refuses to speak a
word, but he does show off an arm full of tattoos. The intricate, dense,
almost abstract blue-green filigree seems to say, "This is your brain on
crank." The next show-and-tell item is the eyeglass case in which Dracula
keeps his syringe and razor blade. The case's interior is obsessively
decoupaged with tiny, interlocking pictures snipped from magazines.
Dracula is a great artist, Justin says, and if art is defined as manic
patternmaking for no apparent purpose, he's right.
Across town, at a table in the modest apartment where she supposes she'll
have to go on living until she finds a job, Alicia is quitting crank. Once
an upwardly mobile employee of a FORTUNE 500 company based in a large
Southwestern city, Alicia is in her mid-30s but looks 50. Her face is pocked
and pitted from her attempts to pick out the crystals of methamphetamine
that, she swears, used to form under her skin. Alicia moved to Montana
several years ago in hopes of escaping the bigger city's crank scene. She
says the subcutaneous crystals aren't a problem now; the Billings meth is
not so pure. Not that it matters, because she's quitting.
Tomorrow.
Right now, however, she's lighting one last pipeful in a ritual as intricate
as a Japanese tea ceremony. She ignites a propane torch and holds the blue
flame beneath the smudge of powder in her clear glass pipe. Crank is smoked
differently than crack cocaine; it takes less heat and melts instantly
(burning away the impurities, Alicia says). Once the drug vaporizes in a
white cloud, Alicia inhales. She then repeats the process. The residues in
the pipe, called frosties, are infinitely valuable to crankers, and Alicia
keeps torching them until they're gone.
But such solitary crank use isn't the norm in Billings. Crank is a party
drug here, a social thing, smoked, injected and snorted by tight-knit groups
holed up in houses behind blacked-out windows, talking nonstop about their
hopes and dreams and smoking a joint now and then or drinking a beer to
mellow out the high.
"You think you're with your best friends in the whole world," remembers the
toppled homecoming king. "You stay up all night saying things like 'Man, I'd
die for you,' and then in the morning everybody crashes and you realize you
hate these people. They disgust you."
Paula, 19, who has been clean for six months following a stay at Rimrock,
remembers crank parties as surreal blendings of light and darkness, reality
and dreams. "The sun goes up and down and you lose track, and pretty soon
you're hearing laughs and whispers and seeing things dart around on the
floor. Then the other people turn into monsters."
Boyish, sardonic and stunningly intelligent, Paula, who has never been
anywhere else, calls Billings the crank capital of the universe: "The people
in my neighborhood all learned crank from their parents. I mostly hung out
with 13- and 14-year-olds. It's getting younger and younger every year."
Part of crank's appeal to Paula, and apparently to most users, is that it
helped her get things done. It made her feel capable, on top of things. She
could party into the wee hours (often having sex with virtual strangers
because, as she puts it, once you've stayed up all night with someone, you
feel pretty close to them), go to work the next day, then come home and
clean her room. "I even started depending on it to go to school," she says.
Then came what paula claims was a three-month-long, nearly sleepless crank
run that left her homeless, expelled from school and seeing ghouls behind
every tree. Crankers tend to exaggerate, but her memories of the streak have
that patented methamphetamine exactitude. "I knew I had to get nutrition, so
every day I had a pudding snack, an applesauce and a little carton of milk,"
she says.
Her diet wasn't all so wholesome, though. "Also, I was smoking tons of pot
just to calm my nerves."
For Jennifer, the conscience-stricken mother, the party's still not over.
Another crank-warped week has passed; another Friday night has rolled
around; and though she's thinner, paler and less coherent, she's feeling
considerably richer owing to the arrival this morning of her monthly
child-support check. Swaying nautically on her favorite barstool, she
reports that she has made some changes in her life in the past few days.
She's moved out of her parents' place, leaving her daughter behind, and has
taken up residence in a rented house with two male roommates who share her
taste for meth and, unlike her family, don't "make me feel guilty every time
they look at me."
That's where the party continues when the bars close. The tiny house, across
the tracks and across the freeway, is supernaturally tidy. In the spotless
kitchen, at a spotless table next to a box filled with hundreds of empty
beer cans all conscientiously rinsed and crushed (when crankers decide to
clean house, they clean house), Jennifer and her roommates smoke and jabber
while clock hands turn from 3 to 4 to 5. The oldest roommate-his fortyish,
gaunt face so stiff and lifeless it looks taxidermied-veers from a fond
recollection of a camping trip to a paranoid rant about "hidden cameras" and
warnings to TIME's photographer and reporter that "we know how to protect
ourselves in this house."
With daybreak nearing, disaster strikes. Jennifer discovers she has lost her
purse, child-support check and all. A panic ensues. The house is searched,
and the driveway. Someone hatches a plan to drive downtown and retrace
Jennifer's steps, which won't be easy. "Where did you leave it?" her friends
keep asking, but she just sighs and insists she can't remember.
Probably the same place she left her looks, her education, her jobs, her
little angel. Somewhere out there in crank city, in the dark-a dark that, no
matter how hard Jennifer tries to stop it, always turns to dawn.
-With reporting by Patrick Dawson on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation
***
CRANK BREAKDOWN
-METHAMPHETAMINE HYDROCHLORIDE (a.k.a. crank) can be smoked, injected,
snorted or swallowed. It stimulates massive release of the pleasure-causing
neurotransmitters adrenaline and dopamine in the brain and inhibits their
breakdown
-IMMEDIATE EFFECTS (lasting from 2 to 14 hrs. per dose) include euphoria,
sexual arousal, elevated heart rate, tremor, dry mouth, loss of appetite,
insomnia and paranoia, followed by agitation and irritability
-LONG-TERM EFFECTS include malnutrition, psychosis, depression, memory loss
and possible damage to the heart, brain, lungs and liver
-PHARMACEUTICAL VERSIONS of the drug (Desoxyn Gradumet) are approved for
treatment of obesity and attention-deficit disorder
-------------------------------------------------------------------
The Battle Over How To Fight The War On Drugs (Transcript Of The ABC
'Nightline' Discussion Moderated By Forrest Sawyer, Featuring Kevin Zeese,
Mike Gray, Michael Massing, And Ethan Nadelmann On The Reform Side,
Opposed By Herbert Kleber From The National Center On Addiction
And Substance Abuse, David Mactas, President Of The Hazelden Rehab Program,
And Charles Blanchard From General McCaffrey's Office)
Date: Tue, 23 Jun 1998 20:48:34 -0400
To: DrugSense News Service
From: owner-mapnews@mapinc.org (MAPNews)
Subject: MN: US: Transcript: Nightline: The Battle
Over How to Fight the War on Drugs
Sender: owner-mapnews@mapinc.org
Reply-To: owner-mapnews@mapinc.org
Organization: Media Awareness Project http://www.mapinc.org/lists/
Newshawk: DrugSense
Source: ABC News - Nightline
Contact: http://204.202.137.114/onair/nightline/email.html
Website: http://204.202.137.114/onair/nightline/index.html
Airdate: Monday, 22 June 1998
THE BATTLE OVER HOW TO FIGHT THE WAR ON DRUGS
FORREST SAWYER, ABC NEWS (VO) They say the war on drugs is a multi-billion
dollar disaster.
MICHAEL MASSING (PH) Our drug budget now is $17 billion a year and even by
the drug czar's own admission, we're only treating one half the addicts.
FORREST SAWYER (VO) A disaster that has caused more harm than drug abuse
itself.
KEVIN ZEESE, COMMON SENSE FOR DRUG POLICY In fact, we invest more now in
prisons than we do universities because of the drug war.
FORREST SAWYER (VO) But the general leading the way says those critics, who
are some of the most influential people in the world, are dangerously wrong.
GEN BARRY MCCAFFREY, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL DRUG POLICY OFFICE Don't give
prominence to this drug legalization argument. It's sort of a fringe group.
It has increasingly, with enormous cunning, gotten an argument into the
public dialogue of this country.
FORREST SAWYER (VO) Tonight, the battle over how to fight the war on drugs.
ANNOUNCER From ABC News, this is Nightline. Substituting for Ted Koppel and
reporting from Washington, Forrest Sawyer.
FORREST SAWYER If you had been at the United Nations two weeks ago for its
big drug summit, you would have heard a lot of very nice words. President
Clinton was there to say drug abuse is, he believes, sharply reduced. The
UN drug czar vowed to rid the world of the crops that produce cocaine and
heroin in just 10 years. And in the end, the delegates from more than 150
nations endorsed a wide ranging plan to cooperate. It would all be
perfectly lovely were it not for the fact that we have heard it all before
and the illegal drug business is still huge. After all the numbers you hear
tossed around the truth is no one really knows just how huge, how many
people die, how much blood money has been made and laundered into legal
businesses. What is obvious is that it takes little trouble and little cash
to buy a gram of coke on the streets of America and for all the pledges and
dollars spent in this war, there remain countless users and addicts, which
is why so many well known and well respected people banded together to
publish an open letter to the UN Secretary-General, saying the drug war has
been lost and badly. What they propose is nothing less than accepting that
trying to stop drugs at the border is like fighting a flood with a rusty
sieve. Now that kind of talk has a way of getting people worked up and the
temperature of the debate is now boiling, which both sides agree will at
least remind us that there is something important at stake here, the future
of our children. We begin with Nightline's Dave Marash.
PRES BILL CLINTON (June 8) Today we join at this special session of the UN
General Assembly to make common cause against the common threat of
worldwide drug trafficking and abuse.
DAVE MARASH, ABC NEWS (VO) It was, a cynic might say, an example of what
the United Nations does best - celebrate itself for simply focusing on a
problem.
PRES BILL CLINTON Ten years ago, the United Nations adopted a path breaking
convention to spur cooperation against drug trafficking.
DAVE MARASH (VO) Ten years later, the UN hasn't come close to solving the
world's drug problem or, as the President put it in his call for another 10
year war on drugs ...
PRES BILL CLINTON Today, the potential for that kind of cooperation has
never been greater or more needed.
KEVIN ZEESE It's because the drug war's not working and everybody knows it.
But our policy makers won't admit it.
DAVE MARASH (VO) To press this argument, Kevin Zeese helped draw up a
two-page advertisement in "The New York Times" that greeted delegates to
the UN drug summit. Signers of the ad included George Schultz, a Republican
former secretary of state, and Dr Joycelyn Elders, a Democrat former
surgeon general, conservative economist Milton Friedman and liberal
journalist Walter Cronkite, one time UN Secretary-General Javier Prez de
Cullar and all time investor philanthropist George Sorros.
GEN BARRY MCCAFFREY It's sort of a fringe group. It has increasingly, with
enormous cunning, gotten an argument into the public dialogue of this country.
DAVE MARASH The ad and the people behind it enraged the Clinton
administration's so-called drug czar General Barry McCaffrey, because he
says all that talk about reducing the harm done by the drug wars by
starting needle exchanges to protect addicts from AIDS or providing
marijuana to cancer patients to reduce nausea is just camouflage for the
group's real aim, which he says is legalizing drug use in the United
States. Not so, says Kevin Zeese.
KEVIN ZEESE Go out on the corner and you can buy an apple. That's a legal
substance. No one's talking about that for any drug, even for marijuana,
even for alcohol. No one talks about that. We're all talking about finding
ways of regulating, controlling, monitoring, preventing harm.
DAVE MARASH (VO) For example.
KEVIN ZEESE In Holland in 1976, they decriminalized marijuana possession.
You could go into a retail shop and purchase small amounts of marijuana.
They have a low level of heroin use, a low level of cocaine use, much lower
than the United States does. What actually happened was marijuana became a
filter preventing harder drug use.
DAVE MARASH (VO) Maybe not, says addiction expert Dr Herbert Kleber.
DR HERBERT KLEBER, NATIONAL CENTER ADDICTION & SUBSTANCE ABUSE The use of
marijuana among individuals in the 18 to 20 age range in the Netherlands
has sharply risen in the past decade.
DAVE MARASH (VO) And, says Kleber, that is bad news today and maybe worse
news tomorrow.
DR HERBERT KLEBER I think we will learn in the next five years or so that
there are changes in the brain that occurs with marijuana that may make it
more likely that you would be interested in drugs like cocaine or heroin.
DAVE MARASH (VO) Dr Kleber's warning makes two larger points about the drug
controversy, one, that we're still learning about the interactions of human
beings and narcotics and two, that nothing about those interactions is ever
simple. Take, for example, America's campaign to stop drugs at the source,
in the coca growing countries of Bolivia, Peru and Colombia or at their
transfer point in Mexico.
MICHAEL MASSING Our relations with Mexico are very strained. We have
peasants in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia angry at us because we want to spray
their crops.
DAVE MARASH (VO) Michael Massing's research for a new book, "The Fix," has
had him flying with the crop spraying troops of the Andes and riding with
the drug busting cops of America's cities. His conclusion - America's
pressures on drug producing countries have had little effect on America's
drug consumers.
MICHAEL MASSING The price of cocaine in this country is as low as it's ever
been. The purity of heroin is greater than it's ever been, both of which
indicate that the drugs are coming in at a greater volume than ever.
DAVE MARASH (VO) Drug prohibition failed, says author Mike Gray, for the
same reasons alcohol prohibition failed in the 1920s, it creates
opportunities for criminals without crimping their access to consumers.
MIKE GRAY, AUTHOR, "DRUG CRAZY" The two maps are identical. The only thing
that's changed is the product and the names of the games. But everything
else is exactly the same.
DAVE MARASH (VO) For 14 years, Gray says, American politicians supported
Prohibition, just as today's UN politicians support another decade of the
drug war.
MIKE GRAY Almost all the delegations agreed that the drug problem is
markedly worse today than it was before and yet they support it because
they apparently can't seem to think of anything else to do.
DAVE MARASH (VO) Nonsense, says David Mactas of the Hazelden drug treatment
program. There are a lot of positive things to do.
DAVID MACTAS, PRESIDENT, HAZELDEN NEW YORK We know that prevention works.
DAVE MARASH (VO) And, he says, we can actually measure how much drug
therapy works.
DAVID MACTAS So if you can get somebody engaged in treatment who needs
treatment, far less likely to use the criminal justice system, far less
likely to contract and transmit HIV into the general population, far less
likely to use entitlement programs and far more likely to regain
productivity, work, jobs and taxpaying. The cost-benefit was $7 for every
dollar spent.
DAVE MARASH Mactas says Americans should invest more in drug treatment
programs, but adds don't take the money away from crop substitution
programs in the Andes or police buy and bust programs here at home. Critics
say such buy at all spending just protects the people prosecuting the drug
war at a terrible price for drug users, their families, their neighbors and
taxpayers alike. I'm Dave Marash for Nightline in New York.
FORREST SAWYER And when we come back, two views of the war on drugs, one
who says we are winning, one who says we've gone terribly wrong.
(Commercial Break)
FORREST SAWYER Joining us now from our Washington studios, Charles
Blanchard is the chief counsel of the White House Drug Control Policy
Office. Ethan Nadelmann is the director of the Lindesmith Center, a drug
policy and research institute funded largely by grants from the George
Sorros Foundation and he joins us from New York. Mr Blanchard, I have a
copy of Mr Nadelmann's recent Foreign Affairs article. It has a rather
catchy beginning. He says, "US drug policy has failed persistently over the
decades because it has preferred rhetoric to reality and moralism to
pragmatism." In other words, you've got a lot of good talk with your policy
but little, if any, success.
CHARLES BLANCHARD, NATIONAL DRUG POLICY OFFICE (Washington) You have to
look at the record and the fact is we've reduced drug use in this country
by half since 1979. Cocaine we've reduced 70 percent. Crime is at an all
time low, at the same level it was in the 1960s. The real problem is we
have folks like Ethan Nadelmann putting out an agenda that's going to
increase access to drugs among our youth. It's been tried in Britain, it's
been tried in Sweden. It'll be a disaster if it's tried here.
FORREST SAWYER Mr Nadelmann, I must tell you, I've covered drug stories for
about 25 years and whenever I hear these kinds of statistics tossed around
I think that there are lies, damnable lies in statistics. Do you believe them?
ETHAN NADELMANN, THE LINDESMITH CENTER (New York) Well, it is true that
drug use has gone done, Forrest, but I actually look at the data in a
different way. I look back at 1980 and remember that the federal government
that year spent about a billion dollars on drug control and state and local
governments maybe twice that. Now the Feds are spending $17 billion on drug
control, two thirds of it for enforcement, and the state and local
governments more than that again. I look back at 1980, nobody had ever
heard of crack cocaine. But by the 1990s, it was a national epidemic. I
look back at 1980, nobody had ever heard of drug-related HIV or AIDS yet
this year we have 200,000 Americans dead or dying from drug-related HIV or
AIDS. And I look back at 1980 and I remember that there were about 50,000
Americans behind bars for breaking a drug law. This year, 400,000 people,
400,000 people behind bars for breaking a drug law. So I look at 1980 and I
look at 1998 and I see things getting a lot worse, not a lot better.
FORREST SAWYER Well, I understand that but we've got some drug barons who
are pretty skilled at getting drugs across into this country. They've been
doing it for a lot of years. Now, how do you know whether those figures are
a result of the American policy or the result of all those drugs coming
across?
ETHAN NADELMANN Well, quite frankly, when it comes to dollar expenditures,
when it comes to the rising escalation of our prison population, when it
comes to the spread of HIV and AIDS because we don't institute proper
public health measures like needle exchange, those are not results of drug
use per se. They're not even results of the drug barons. They're results of
a failed prohibitionist policy that has failed by its very own terms that
are making things worse.
FORREST SAWYER Mr Blanchard?
CHARLES BLANCHARD Well, if you look at, again, drug use is down. You can't
deny that. You can pick a different year, but even crack use is far lower
than it was at the height of the crack epidemic. More importantly, the
consequences of drug use are down. Crime is down. And HIV was not caused by
drug prohibition, it was caused by drug use. The real problem is whether we
want to adopt a system like Ethan Nadelmann's, which would legalize a lot
of drugs or at least make them more available. We, you know, we tried that
in the 70s and 80s in this country, drug use went up very high.
FORREST SAWYER I'm clueless, Mr Blanchard, where do these numbers actually
come from? For instance, the DEA figures show that the cocaine prices have
remained level through all this time so if you want to go out and buy
cocaine you can get it at the price that you could have gotten years ago.
CHARLES BLANCHARD Yeah, but ...
FORREST SAWYER Mr Massing says that coke prices are down and use is up. So
some people say one people, other people say another thing.
CHARLES BLANCHARD Well, if you have lower demand, the market's going to
responsible by lowering prices and actually coca prices went up last year
because we did a good job on supply. And again, look at the experience of
Britain. Britain decided to try to experiment ...
FORREST SAWYER Well, you can't have it both ways. Wait a second. If you
have lower demand the prices are going to go down, but if the prices go up
you're going to claim that you were good at interdiction.
CHARLES BLANCHARD Now, look at the use statistics. Those are the statistics
that are most important and the uses are far lower. Demand is down not just
because of law enforcement but because we're putting emphasis on
prevention, we're putting an emphasis on treatment. But providing heroin to
drug addicts, which is what the legalizers want to do, makes no sense. It
makes about as much sense as offering alcohol to alcoholics.
FORREST SAWYER Mr Nadelmann?
ETHAN NADELMANN Well, you know, it's a shame to keep using these phrases
like the legalizers and such. One of the things that was so powerful about
the public letter to the Secretary-General that Dave Marash mentioned
before was it wasn't just signed by George Sorros or Joycelyn Elders or
Kurt Schmoke. It was signed by a wide diversity of people from around the
world, former presidents and a former Secretary-General. More recently it's
been signed by Paul Volker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve
Board, by Elliot Richardson, the former attorney general, by Kweisi Mfume,
the current head of the NAACP, and by comparable people around the world.
Now, these cannot all be dismissed as free market legalizers and they say,
and when they say that when we need to come up with a new policy, what that
involves is not jumping to the last extreme of legalization. What we're
talking about is shifting from a policy which emphasizes criminal justice
approaches and military approaches to one in which public health concerns
and harm reduction approaches become our principal objectives and the
principal criteria by which we evaluate success or failure in our drug
control policies.
FORREST SAWYER Mr Blanchard, I know you want to answer that. I'm going to
let you answer it when we come right back and we will try to sort through
the differences in your positions and how we can begin to make some sense
of them, when we come back in just a moment.
(Commercial Break)
FORREST SAWYER Mr Blanchard, this is what makes us crazy. You've got Mr
Nadelmann on one side that say to say that this is a disaster and if we
proceed with this we're just going down a terrible road, we're spending
money and putting people in jail that shouldn't be. We've got you on the
other side saying no, no, no, it's not a disaster, look at the numbers. The
numbers say it's fabulous. Now how are we supposed to figure out which one
of you is right?
CHARLES BLANCHARD I think you ask the scientists, ask people who specialize
in studying addiction. I think it's very telling that when General
McCaffrey spoke to the leading group of scientists last week in Scottsdale
who deal with addiction, he got a standing ovation, the first standing
ovation that was ever received because he talks about a need for a balanced
policy. Goal number one is prevention, preventing our kids from using
drugs. But that only works when we have a societal level of disapproval
that's incorporated in our criminal justice laws.
FORREST SAWYER But what we have to do here is make some real sense out of
it because these are terribly important discussions and here's General
McCaffrey, when talking about these people who signed the letter, many of
'em very, very prominent people saying this is a slick misinformation
campaign, it's camouflage, it's a fraud, it's a devious fraud. Does he
really need to attack them so personally? Perhaps they just disagree with
him on principle.
CHARLES BLANCHARD Well, look at Ethan Nadelmann. A few years ago he was
very proud to say I'm in favor of legalization. Even two years ago he said
we want a federal right to use all types of drugs and a guaranteed way to
receive them. All of a sudden when 85 percent of the American public in the
Gallup polls say that legalization is opposed, they switch. Now they want
to talk about things like harm reduction. But look at what they're
proposing in the United States. They're proposing to have, offer free
heroin to addicts in Baltimore, which makes no sense. Instead we should use
what works and treatment and prevention. It makes no sense at all.
FORREST SAWYER Mr Nadelmann, from everything that, common sense tells us if
we want to stop drug abuse, it does seem hard to imagine that it's a good
idea to decriminalize marijuana at any rate and to give heroin to heroin
users.
ETHAN NADELMANN Forrest, I think what common sense tells us and what the
science tells us is that we have to look at the evidence. We have to look
at the last 10 and 20 and 50 years and ask ourselves what have been the
results of the government's drug war policies.
FORREST SAWYER Well, Mr Blanchard, as you hear, keeps insisting that the
evidence is that the use is down.
ETHAN NADELMANN I know. But, you know, there are some objective criteria. I
mean the drug czar and even the President like to say we should have a
public policy, a drug policy based upon science. You know, if I look, for
example, at what the National Academy of Sciences concluded, look what they
said about needle exchange. They said do it. It saves lives and does not
spread drug abuse. But the general vetoed that. Look what they said about
marijuana 15 years ago, essentially that marijuana, the harms of the war on
marijuana are greater than the harms of marijuana itself yet we now have a
rhetorical war on marijuana based upon a lot of myths. Look what they said
about ...
CHARLES BLANCHARD But there's been 15 years of science, Ethan, that make
the dangers of marijuana look even worse than they were 15 years ago.
ETHAN NADELMANN No, well, Mr Blanchard, if, in fact, it was based upon the
science how do you explain the general's decision on needle exchange? Here
he had the National Academy of Science, the Centers for Disease Control,
the AMA, the American Public Health Association, President Clinton's
advisory commission, President Bush's advisory commission, every
independent commission ever to look at this issue all coming down to the
same recommendation, which is that providing sterile syringes to drug
addicts reduces the spread of the deadly disease AIDS without increasing
drug abuse.
CHARLES BLANCHARD But you want to go far beyond that ...
ETHAN NADELMANN We'd rather ...
FORREST SAWYER Mr Blanchard, go ahead, answer him.
CHARLES BLANCHARD But you want to go far beyond that. You're talking now
not just about needles, providing the heroin itself. That was tried in
Britain and a disastrous effect. The number of heroin addicts went up
dramatically, a lot of them children. So why should we adopt that same
policy here? It failed in Britain, it's failed in Sweden.
FORREST SAWYER Mr Blanchard, is it possible, though, that there's, the
truth might be somewhere in between you? You know that a lot of people are
saying interdiction doesn't really work, the stuff is coming across. Why
not take some of that interdiction money and use it on education and use it
on prevention and use it on treatment?
CHARLES BLANCHARD It's not an either/or. We should do both. We have a
budget before Congress now for $200 million more for treatment and I would
love to see the support of people like George Sorros and Ethan Nadelmann
and Congress trying to get Congress to increase funding for treatment. But
they're not there. They're more interested in fighting about legalization.
I don't see Maponimis (ph) talking about treatment.
FORREST SAWYER Mr Nadelmann, I've got to pause for one second. I promise
I'll come right back to you in just one moment.
ETHAN NADELMANN OK.
(Commercial Break)
FORREST SAWYER Once more, discussion of the war on drugs and gentlemen, I'm
pretty clear now that I'm not going to get much agreement between the two
of you, but I wonder if we could use the last minute and a half or so to
try to get a clear picture of exactly what it is you want to do. Mr
Nadelmann, take a shot at that. What should we be doing now?
ETHAN NADELMANN Yeah, my view Forrest essentially is that where we do agree
is on the need to protect our children. I mean, that's what drives the drug
war in some sense, it's our fear about our kids, a fear about what will
happen to them. Now, my answer to that, it's not legalization. I think the
best way to put it is to say that what I favor is a mensch - like drug
policy. I mean, as you may know a mensch is a Yiddish word. It means ...
FORREST SAWYER A kinder, gentler policy.
ETHAN NADELMANN Well, it means a good human being, a person who uses their
heart and their mind to come up with decent solutions, who doesn't forget
that your fellow citizens are human beings even if they have drug problems.
It means base our drug policies on the science, base it on the evidence,
base it on the common sense.
FORREST SAWYER Well, by that what you actually mean, I think, is that you
don't want to go after users and put 'em in jail, you want to provide for
them some help.
ETHAN NADELMANN That's right. That's a good start. I also think we should
have drug education programs that are based a little more on the truth and
less on myth and demonization.
FORREST SAWYER So perhaps, Mr Blanchard, the key difference between you is
the policy of going after drug users, that is to say not people who sell
but drug users and attacking them with criminal penalties is not effective
and, in fact, might actually be doing more harm than good.
CHARLES BLANCHARD I think what we should do is use diversion programs and
drug treatment within our criminal justice system. It's worked very, very
effectively. I've dealt, talked to a lot of addicts who are thankful
there's a criminal justice system that brought them into treatment. But we
need to increase funding.
FORREST SAWYER They're thankful that they have jail hanging over their heads?
CHARLES BLANCHARD Exactly, because if it wasn't for that threat of jail,
they wouldn't have taken treatment seriously and they're thankful to the
police officer that arrested them and to the judge that said either you
complete drug treatment or you're going to jail. That's the kind of policy
I want is sanctions but treat, use treatment in the criminal justice system
to solve the problem. And we want to mainly, though, however, focus on
preventing kids from using drugs in the first place and legalization is
going to be a disaster because kids are going to use a lot more drugs if we
legalize.
FORREST SAWYER Just a few seconds left Mr Nadelmann, I mean a few seconds.
Do you see any possibility of dialogue between the two groups here?
ETHAN NADELMANN Well, this is a start, Forrest. One hopes that Congress can
eventually hold hearings that will afford some open, honest dialogue as
well. I think this is a start. We're going to keep moving forward. That
list of names, that was just the beginning, the tip of the iceberg. More
and more are signing on and quite frankly more and more would have signed
on except they're still afraid. But it is going to change.
FORREST SAWYER I understand you, sir, and we're completely out of time. I
thank you both and I hope we'll be talking about this more in the future.
CHARLES BLANCHARD Thank you, Forrest.
FORREST SAWYER That is our report for tonight. For the latest overnight
developments, be sure to watch Good Morning America. That's tomorrow
morning. I'm Forrest Sawyer in Washington. For all of us here at ABC News,
good night.
Content and programming copyright 1998 ABC News
to 1998 Daily News index for June 18-24