The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia
Cure the Individual Addict
While small groups of serious heroin addicts can be rehabilitated, there are no known solutions for curing the hundreds of thousands of troubled individuals who make up America's addict population. Every addict has his own complex, psychological motivations for using heroin, and he can only be considered "cured" when these problems have been solved. In most cases, rehabilitation is a slow, difficult process requiring hundreds of hours of individual attention by committed, trained caseworkers. Even if money were forthcoming tomorrow to build the thousands of necessary treatment centers and training institutes, it would be years before results would begin to show. And in any case, such a crash program would probably be doomed to failure. As long as heroin is readily available on the streets, the addict population will continue to multiply at a dizzying rate, and new addicts will become hooked faster than the old addicts can be unhooked.A number of reformers have suggested that the entire problem could be solved if heroin maintenance programs were set up on a nationwide basis to provide heroin at cost to any addict who wanted it. It has been argued that this program will eliminate the profit motive, thereby reducing the amount of heroin-related street crime and destroying international narcotics syndicates. Although a comprehensive heroin maintenance program might well achieve these goals, it would not solve one fundamental problemheroin addiction. The number of addicts would remain constant, or actually continue to increase. Advocates of heroin maintenance point to Great Britain's success in using distribution clinics to stabilize its addict population at 2,000 to 3,000 regular users. (7) Proponents of this approach argue that the program would be equally successful in the United States. However, there is one important difference between the two countriesGreat Britain started its maintenance program well before the heroin problem reached serious proportions. The United States already has an enormous drug epidemic. While the British find an addict population of 2,000 to 3,000 adults acceptable, it is doubtful that the American people are equally willing to tolerate the permanent presence of between 500,000 to 600,000 addicts, many of them teenagers. The British maintenance program is a preventive solution, but the United States is already seriously infected with the disease.
Perhaps if the root causes of drug addiction-racism, poverty, meaningless jobs, alienation of youth-were dealt with effectively, the heroin problem might disappear. But these are all enormously complex problems that will take generations to solve under the best of conditions. As long as these basic social problems exist, there will be thousands of potential addicts; and as long as heroin is available, criminal syndicates will continue to find the United States a lucrative market for narcotics.