I regard the chances of a major breakthrough which will dramatically change the amount of drug use and abuse among the citizenry or the problems caused by it at the governmental level, as somewhat between small and non-existent. It seems to me that such a change can occur only in two large areas: supply or demand. I see no prospect, however, that the present ability of our government to prevent the supply of drugs will increase so dramatically as to make a major difference.

As I have written elsewhere in more detail with respect to heroin,' insofar as the supply from abroad is concerned, this would mean preventing the cultivation and production of drugs in nations that have insufficient control of their own populations or are not kindly disposed toward the United States. Alternatively, it would mean that somehow we would vastly increase our ability to keep these substances out of the United States through interdiction at our borders. Both improvements I regard as extremely unlikely with respect to heroin and cocaine, though the second is theoretically, if not practically, solvable with respect to marijuana.

If supply is not interdicted outside the United States, the only possibility is interference within the United States. Here the problem is simply that the criminal justice system is so grossly overburdened now and for the foreseeable future that we lack the resources to do a much better job of suppressing the drug traffic than we do today. Indeed, this is even more true now than it was in the past, since our enforcement efforts have grown somewhat more sophisticated in recent years.

With respect to demand for illicit drugs, as I wrote with respect to marijuana in 1970,' the situation is one of only slightly greater hope. Though there could be a religious or cultural change in America which would greatly lower the willingness of the population to use drugs, the chances are that in a society which has already made socially acceptable two recreational drugs of significant danger to the user, alcohol and tobacco, we are not likely to achieve this. Indeed, some have argued that it is basic to the nature of man to choose altered states of consciousness through drugs. Whether it is or not, I do not see in the foreseeable future the citizenry of the United States changing so drastically as to markedly lower the demand for the presently illegal drugs that plague us. Indeed, if I were to guess as to the most likely change in our drug problems, I would predict that a new synthetic drug of some kind would become popular and add to, rather than decrease, our problems.