How Drug Abuse Affects You and Your Neighborhood

YOU personally may not misuse drugs. But so many persons do, that you cannot help but be affected.

Drug addicts terrorize people on the streets and in their homes. They reportedly commit half the crimes in metropolitan areas of the United States! As a result, you may fear to venture from your home alone after dark.

It is reported that addicts “shoplift” over $2,000,000,000 worth of merchandise a year; so stores raise prices to compensate for their losses. Also, drug abuse by employees costs American corporations thousands of millions of dollars a year; a cost passed on to you in higher prices. And hundreds of millions of dollars are spent yearly on programs to fight drug addiction​—increasing your taxes.

But you can be affected in other ways. A driver “high” on drugs may ram into you on the highway. Or perhaps a member of your own family will fall victim to drug abuse​—bringing you untold sorrow.

Appalling Epidemic

Drug abuse has clearly reached crisis proportions. “The real drug scene involves millions of Americans,” science editor Alton Blakeslee wrote, including adults “who are abusing alcohol and tobacco and sleeping and pep-pills and tranquilizers to get through their day.”

But youths particularly are affected. Drug abuse has become “an extremely deadly epidemic” in American schools, the House Select Committee on Crime reported this June. The Committee said:

“Our investigation demonstrated that the drug crisis in our schools greatly exceeded our worst expectations . . . It is infecting our youth and contaminating our schools and leaving a trail of devastation.”

“It is only the uniquely gifted and self-possessed child who is capable of avoiding involvement with some form of drug abuse.”​—Los Angeles Times, June 30, 1973.

Appalled by the problem, President Nixon declared: “America’s Public Enemy No. 1 is drug abuse.” The director of one of New York city’s addict treatment centers, Dr. Mitchell S. Rosenthal, said: “The misuse of drugs is pandemic [a wide-spread epidemic], with no segment of society spared.”

Is this true? What is the situation in your neighborhood?

Your Neighborhood Affected

If you live in New York city, you probably have little doubt about the magnitude of the drug problem. You may regularly see drug addicts “nodding” on the streets. And if you are a youth in school, you may see drugs being passed around.

New York Congressman Charles B. Rangel wrote: “Heroin has destroyed the functioning of our school system. . . . drugs are as available as chewing gum, young girls shoot up in the locker room and 13-year-olds buy dope from 15-year-old peddlers.” But what if you live in other cities?

The drug problem is there too. Professional all-star basketball player Nate Archibald noted: “Drugs are everywhere. It’s not just New York. I see ’em in every city we go to. You go to the bottom, it’s there.” Here are some reports:

✔ A subcommittee of the House Commerce Committee investigating organized sports said: “Drug use exists, in varying degrees, in all sports and levels of competition with few exceptions.”​—Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, May 12, 1973.

✔ “The Navy revealed yesterday that its drug problem has reached such proportions that there is no Navy ship afloat or Naval station without a drug problem, and ‘many of them are major problems.’”​—San Diego Union, July 21, 1971.

✔ “Addicts sporting habits that often cost $200 a day have spawned a wave of drug-related crime. Authorities ascribe as much as 70 per cent of Detroit’s armed robberies​—90 per cent of its bank holdups—​to the upsurge.”​—Newsweek, February 28, 1972.

✔ “Drug abuse has risen dramatically in Oklahoma City . . . and no slowdown is in sight.”​—The Daily Oklahoman, April 17, 1971.

✔ “A state survey of teen-age drug use reported that more than 40 percent of pupils in the ninth to 12th grades in Massachusetts have used illegal drugs in the past year.”​—Boston Sunday Herald Traveler and Sunday Advertiser, August 27, 1972.

✔ A comprehensive survey of over 15,000 pupils in grades seven through twelve in Anchorage, Alaska, shows that over 41 percent of the students have used drugs, other than tobacco and alcohol.​—Journal of the American Medical Association, February 5, 1973.

✔ “Southern California drug abuse authorities report that as high as 80 percent of all high schoolers experiment with illicit drugs. Young people are frequently exposed to drugs as early as fifth grade.”​—Up-Look, Vol. 1, No. 1.

Wherever you go​—east, west, north or south—​drugs are there. They are even in small towns. In Palm Springs, California, for example, the drug problem is so bad that some parents worry about sending their youngsters to school. In Aspen and Boulder, Colorado, drugs are freely used in public. In East Jordan, Michigan; Nashua, New Hampshire; Lansing, Illinois; yes, in just about any place one looks, illegal drugs are used.

Even if some may think otherwise, the illicit use of drugs is probably rampant in their neighborhood too. Fred Hilligiest, whose thirteen-year-old son became a missing person in Houston, Texas, found this to be so. ‘I didn’t have any idea what was going on,’ he said, ‘how many kids were hanging around, taking drugs, and all that. But in the first three weeks we started looking for David, I got a college education.’

‘I thought it was maybe 10 percent of the kids in that kind of life, taking drugs,’ Hilligiest said. ‘But as I went along, it seemed like everybody’s kids were into it, maybe more like 80 percent.’ It is just as Archibald said: “You go to the bottom, it’s there.”

But is drug abuse only an American problem? What about other countries?

Drug Abuse World Wide

United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim observed: “Drug abuse . . . grows and takes on new forms. In some countries, it has reached the dimensions of a national emergency.” The Medical Tribune of November 22, 1972, carried the headline “DRUG TAKING FOUND COMMON IN CHILDREN WORLDWIDE.”

Drug abuse is a particular problem in Britain. London’s Daily Mail declared: “Illegal drug use is today virtually out of control.” Dr. H. Dale Beckett, chairman of the British Association for Prevention of Addiction, said: “There is probably not a school in the whole of the United Kingdom in which drug experimentation does not take place.”

The situation is similar in Australia. The Minister for Customs, D. L. Chipp, observed: “I can guarantee that if you have a child entering teens this year that child will be offered dangerous drugs or narcotics of some description before he or she is 18.”

The Spectator, a newspaper in Ontario, Canada, carried the headline “HEROIN EPIDEMIC THREAT​—NATIONAL TALKS CONSIDERED.” To the west, in British Columbia, the illegal heroin market is said to be among the province’s top ten industries. So widespread is heroin addiction that Vancouver’s mayor said: “We would need an army to clean it up.”

And so it goes in country after country. Like a gigantic, ugly tidal wave, drugs have inundated the world.

What is the reason? Why do people abuse drugs? How great really is the danger?