Talk on Drug Abuse

What is abuse of drugs? Legally it is abuse of drugs if you get a bottle of sedative pills on legal prescription, and give two of them to a friend to take away her headache. You could be charged with distributing drugs illegally, and your friend could be charged with the illegal use of drugs.

Of course you won’t be charged. You belong to the wrong social group. Even if you swallow every pill on the market, nobody is going to call you a junkie. But among the group who are socially most vulnerable – the vagrants, the drop-outs, the ones who are in and out of jail – any charge will do as long as it holds legally. A marihuana seed lodged in the lining of a coat, the borrowing of a friend’s pill bottle – half the convictions come from that kind of thing.

I prefer to apply the term ‘drug abuse’ in a semi-medical way. If a man uses alcohol in such a way that he is always below par, and is likely eventually to injure his brain, I would call that ‘drug abuse’ though alcohol is a legal drug. If a woman swallows barbiturates every night, so that her mind is very often muzzy, and she feels she can’t do without them, because of various mental pains that the drug alleviates, I would call that ‘drug abuse’ though she has her drugs on legal prescription.

The nervous system does not distinguish between legal and illegal drugs. If Mrs Jones swallows five or ten amphetamine pills a day – to slim or to pep herself up – she can make her way to the mental hospital just as surely as her daughter Alice who gets the same pills illegally. Amphetamine psychosis is the commonest insanity that comes from the use of drugs. Methedrine, benzedrine, dexedrine, ephedrine, ritalin – the amphetamine drugs do more brain damage than heroin. The fact that heroin is illegal, and that amphetamines can be got legally, makes no difference whatever to the effect on the brain.

A while back they did an autopsy on a girl in Auckland who had been using amphetamine pills very heavily for three or four years. Her brain had turned into a substance resembling yellow cheese. There were bubbles inside it the size of a fifty cent piece. Yet she may quite conceivably have got her drugs legally by coasting round a number of doctors.

If you or I wear a tie and a collar, and have a degree in chemistry, and work for some commercial enterprise, producing amphetamine pills by the ton for doctors to distribute by the hundredweight – nobody will complain – we are obviously affluent, respectable and educated. I call this the curse of page 342 capitalism. Drugs make money.

I wrote once to the Head of the Vice Squad in Auckland, asking him why his men spent their time ‘busting’ vagrants for possession of marihuana, while the amphetamine pills poured out on the market. You can live to eighty using marihuana – but you may not reach twenty on ‘speed’. He replied apologetically that he knew the amphetamines were highly dangerous, but it was not the province of the police to interfere with doctors or businessmen.

Our supply of heroin comes from Hong Kong in packets of three different colours, indicating three commercial grades, with a charging elephant on the front of the packet. I said to a policeman in Wanganui – ‘You people arrest the little pushers. The little pushers are only junkies who want to guarantee their supply and scrape up enough to live on. When you bust one, another steps into his shoes. Why don’t you bust the Big Man in Auckland or the Big Man in Wellington – the ones who import ‘smack’ from Hong Kong? Have they got too much money?’

The policeman got angry. He told me the police would certainly bust the Big Men if they knew who they were. But he agreed that money might be a powerful shield. I call that left-handed capitalism.

What can we do about it? The drug bomb has burst. Those who produce and distribute drugs have become aware of New Zealand as a market worth developing. The police are like sheep dogs barking up and down in front of a fence with a hundred holes in it. They can only seize a small amount of the drugs that come in. Heroin is the hardest drug to seize. It comes in small packets, it is concentrated, it is expensive – any sailor can carry it in a hollow boot.

Heroin is at present the most popular drug among New Zealand junkies, perhaps because it is readily available. I would rather see them using legalised marihuana, which they could grow themselves, than killing themselves with ‘smack’. I have seen thirteen-year-olds injecting heroin. It doesn’t make me happy.

What can we do about it? Very little, I fear, at least on the legal side of the fence. The big opiumharvest used to be grown inTurkey. The Corsican Mafia used planes to fly it out. But Turkey has closed down her opium production. The big harvest is now grown in Laos. The American Mafia have taken over the job of distribution.

If Marshall Ky uses air force planes to ferry out opium – who is going to prosecute him? It is left-handed business. If the opium is processed into heroin in South-East Asia, and sold to the American troops, or sent to Hong Kong for further distribution – who is going to prosecute the manufacturers and distributors? The Asian countries are poor countries. They have to get money where they can.

If the American Mafia are taking charge of the drug market in Auckland, and terrorising the little pushers – who can do anything about it? We are page 343 a small, naïve country. We are not equipped to deal with the left-handed businessmen who organise syndicated crime. We have made our bed and we have to lie on it.

I sit in a flat in Palmerston and watch a young friend preparing the drug for a hit. He pours a small amount of heroin crystals into a spoon – not too much – it is very easy to get a fatal overdose on heroin. He pours in some water. He lights a match under the spoon. The crystals dissolve. He places some cotton wool in the spoon, and draws the fluid into a hypodermic, sifting the fluid from any solid that may not have dissolved. Then – ‘Will you hold the strap, Jim?’ – he asks me apologetically. ‘It’s hard to hold the strap and the needle together. I might miss the vein and skin-pop – or I might foul it up and spray blood everywhere.’

I hold the strap tight round his upper arm, while he works the arm up and down to make the veins swell. Then, carefully, he injects himself in the crook of the elbow. My own loathing of the process is so great that I want to vomit. He waits for the ‘Flash’ in the head while the heroin hits the brain. Then he relaxes and begins to talk rationally.

Do you understand? Once I would have smashed the needle. Once I would have called the police. How stupid! The police have no cure for drug addiction. They would simply interrogate him in a belligerent fashion about where he got his drugs. A jail sentence is no cure. With luck, he could get drugs in jail. A term in a mental hospital is no cure.

The Head of the Auckland Vice Squad once said to me, very bitterly – ‘You know as well as I do, Mr Baxter, no cures ever come out of Oakley.’ Oakley is the mental hospital where eighty per cent of the junkies go, if the magistrate decides they need treatment.

If I smashed the needle, or called the police, it would mean no communication from then on with him or eventually any of the other junkies inthe country. They know my views perfectly well.

The young man in Palmerston did say to me, ‘You’re cool, Jim. If I ever wanted to get off the smack I’d come to you.’

To know the junkies – to have their trust – I have to live outside the law. No doubt my file is getting bigger every day. One day the Central Police Station in Auckland will collapse under its weight. ‘Suspected use of marihuana – Communist associations – consorting frequently with known drug-users’. And so on.

I am not a Communist. But you may understand that there are times when I pray for a Communist victory in Laos. Mao Tse Tung does export some drugs. But the American Mafia would not be in charge of it.

Why are they using drugs? Partly, I suppose, because drugs are available. Your son may use heroin for the same reason his grandfather got drunk on whisky. He wants the state of mind it gives him. In Victorian times, laudanum (that is, tincture of opium) and tincture of Indian hemp (that is, marihuana) page 344 were household remedies. No doubt Queen Victoria used them, along with whisky, to alleviate the pains of widowhood. But the commercial enterprises were not so much on the ball in those days. Development of the sale and use of drugs goes along with the great modern development of commerce and technology.

People use drugs for varying reasons. I can find little ground for the opinion that drug-users are a special group, morally retarded, mentally unstable. On the contrary, I find that the most spirited, aggressive and original among the young people are often the heaviest drug-users. I suspect it is because their frustrations are the greatest.

A girl is sitting in a flat in Wellington. Her boyfriend has left her. She feels very bad about it. She has no other close friends. She begins to swallow sedative pills – not to commit suicide, just to induce oblivion. The pills work. But when the effect of the pills wears off, the pain returns. She takes another dose, and then another.

At Jerusalem, a girl in that position said to me – ‘I’m feeling bad because George has gone away. In town I think I’d be in a state of despair. But here the love of the group carries me over it.’

A boy sits in another flat. He is waiting for the police to come and bust the place. These Drug Squad men are not like traffic policemen. They are the commando troops of the Justice Department, the men who drag armed offenders out of houses, belligerent hardened tough police, sometimes with a touch of the psycho in their make-up. Some of them will as readily bash a boy’s head on the wall (or even a girl’s head) to find out where the drugs have come from, as go for a work-out in the police gymnasium. They refer to the junkies as ‘germs’, infectious microbes. Those among the junkies who have read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings see them as relatives of the Orcs, or the Black Rulers, the terrible half-human servants of Saruman the Lord of Mordor. More than anything else, the fact that we turn these special police loose on the teen-age drug-users, confirms them in a paranoid view of our culture. They would no more expect human understanding from a member of the Drug Squad than a Jew would expect it from a German Stormtrooper.

Therefore the boy is very much afraid. He gives himself a hit of heroin. After the ‘flash’ in the head, when the world has reassembled itself, a great tranquillity comes over him. He is logical and capable. He is Buddha on a Diamond Throne. When the Drug Squad break in the door of the flat, he greets them very calmly. ‘Hullo, Mr Stevens. Hullo, Mr Jackson. Is there anything I can do for you?’

They empty every drawer in the flat upside down on the carpet. They rip down wall-paper. They drag the stove away from the wall, breaking its connections. He is still entirely calm. Even when they go into the bathroom, where he has his drug supply stashed under a loose brick, he does not lose his page 345 cool. This ‘cool’ is invaluable to him. It is a shield against a world in which anything whatever may happen.

At Jerusalem, rangimarie, peace, seems to set aside fears. The police hardly ever visit. You will not get put in jail for being out of work. Nobody regards you as an infectious microbe. I have seen them get off and stay off hard drugs at Jerusalem. As fear goes, anger goes. Fear is the mother of anger, whether in a junkie or a policeman.

A girl sits cross-legged in another flat. Her eyes are ruled up in her head so that only the whites are showing. She is not behaving abnormally. She is engaged in Hindu meditation. Over and over she repeats to herself – ‘Hari Krishna. Hari Krishna. All is one. All is one.’

If she were a guru in an Indian village, the meditation might solve her problems for her. As it is, though, she lives in another culture. She learnt early in a Christian home that she had two selves – a spiritual self and an animal self. When she hit puberty, her animal self began to worry her. She had bad dreams. Her reading in Theosophy suggested to her that she was being attacked, in a more or less sexual manner, by astral entities from the lowest astral plane. She was attracted by men but repelled by their animality. She remained a virgin, much afraid of the pain that might come from total involvement with a man.

Hindu meditation does not work well enough for her. Sometimes it only leaves her with cramped legs and a headache. The point is, of course, that she has started off with a dualist conditioning and is much afraid of her own sexuality.

Speed works twenty times better. When she swallows amphetamine pills, she becomes holy, pure, wise, just, truthful, loving. She becomes a little angel. On her last trip she became, for a day at least, the Virgin Mary, and her friends were the Twelve Apostles. Her pupils enlarge. She talks incessantly until her voice gives out. Her body gives off a penetrating musty odour. On the come-down she falls into confused depression. She takes some ‘stoppers’, sedatives to ease her over it. She is not too far from psychosis.

At Jerusalem she might form an association with a lad in which her animal and spiritual selves were united and became simply human. Or she might remain celibate and persevere in Hindu meditation without pills. Either way, it is not an easy situation.

A university student takes an acid trip. He swallows a tab of LSD. The drug takes him into another world. The intricate mental lenses that his education has planted in his head suddenly go for a skate. Sex is no longer a union of parts of the body. Death is no longer a statistical occasion. He enters a sacred world. The bread he eats is a holy substance, derived from the holy earth. God emerges from behind the stars, and converses with him. He feels that he knows the secret of the universe. Then the trip becomes a ‘bummer’, a bad trip. He thinks he is being nailed into his own coffin. He sees leprous page 346 sores growing on his body. He shrinks till he is three inches high.

After twelve hours he comes off the trip. He may digest the information the trip has given him, or he may not. He may take five hundred trips and remain sane. He may conceivably go mad.

At Jerusalem many seem able to feel they are in a sacred world without using LSD. In the Maori culture everything that happens has a sacred meaning.

A boy of seventeen injects himself with heroin. He remarks, ‘I have a great fear of the drug. I have a great fear of the needle. I have an even greater fear of the areas in my own mind that the drug opens out to me. But I have to go against the fear.’

The odds are that he will not become an addict. He is a ‘hip’ type, like the boy who drives his motorbike at eighty miles an hour at a wall and then swerves. To go against his fear has an integrating effect, in spite of the negative effects of the drug. He will probably overcome even his fear of the very painful withdrawal symptoms that come when a user ceases using heroin. Fear of withdrawal symptoms is the core of addiction. There are no actual marihuana addicts because marihuana has no withdrawal symptoms.

The last boy would be a most valuable leader in the Jerusalem group, because he belongs to the toa, or warrior type.

I will give a list of drugs in order of their danger to life and sanity:

Amphetamines, known as ‘speed’ – methedrine, benzedrine, dexedrine, ephedrine, ritalin. These are killers.

Heroin. A derivative of morphine. Commonly used in this country.

Cocaine. Commonly used. It can produce violent behaviour in the addict.

Morphine. Pethidine. Alcohol. Opium.

Alcohol can be too easily overlooked. It is a rough drug, often tending to violent behaviour. Deaths indirectly due to alcohol may number five hundred a year. Deaths due to heroin would number only one or two. At the present time many of the young people start drinking heavily at thirteen or fourteen. Some are alcoholics by nineteen or twenty.

LSD. A very strong drug. It is almost impossible to determine its physical or mental effects. Prolonged insanity resulting from its use is pretty rare.

Barbiturates. Convulsions are quite frequent during withdrawal.

Hashish. Hashish is to marihuana as whisky is to beer.

Other sedatives. Any sedative can be dangerous in an overdose. Any sedative can be used addictively.

Tranquillisers. Coffee, tea, tobacco. (I am setting aside, no doubt unwisely, the matter of lung cancer. If that is taken into effect, tobacco is at least as dangerous as morphine.)

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Marihuana. I have seen no serious physical or mental or social effects. It is true that people who use marihuana may use other drugs – for the same reason that a man who goes into a pub to get cigarettes may stay for a drink. Marihuana and heavier drugs come from the same sources of supply. If the use of marihuana were legal, this would not be so.

I leave it at that. We can’t crack the marketing of drugs by legal means. The doctors themselves seem only to have alternate drugs to offer.

Some radical social changes are needed. For a beginning, Halfway Houses for junkies in the towns who want to get off drugs – where they can help one another. The police would have to adopt a hands-off policy.

The greatest single obstacle to recovery is probably our present drug legislation, provided in panic, continued in muddle and brutality.

Jerusalem is not an answer. It is too small to count.

Why do they use drugs? I can offer one clue. Our Western culture seems to be deeply obsessed with the excretory functions. To be clean is to be good. To be dirty is to be bad.

The junkie off drugs will say – ‘I’m clean.’ Drugs are called ‘shit’, just as alcoholic liquor is called ‘piss’. Urine and excreta are tapu substances. In both alcoholism and drug addiction there is some kind of magic involved. A ritual absorption of the forbidden substances gives one power over a chaotic environment. Something like that.

Another clue. A society, like our own, whose values turn so heavily on the acquisition of money and cynical self-advancement, is bound to produce heavy tensions in its members. After all, we do have souls. The commonest rock-bottom feeling I strike among the young could best be described as a sense of horror at being unavoidably involved in a kind of cultural brothel. It is common among them whether they use drugs or not. And not many of them think they have the power to change the world. They are realistic enough to know that they aren’t very virtuous either.

Perhaps I have a harder shell. Perhaps I grew up in a less determinedly materialistic environment. Perhaps I am just an old prostitute who has grown used to the game. But my horror is less. It amounts to no more than a dull vomitorial loathing which I keep well in control. But the young are inclined to blow their tops and run for shelter.

Certainly to use drugs is to escape. It is like hiding your face with your hands if you’re being raped or being forced to witness an execution. It does no good. The rape or the execution continues. But something has to be made quite clear. Most of the young ones who are using drugs are trying by chemical means to shield their inner being against a society that they loathe from the bottom of their hearts. Yet people they love – in particular, their parents – are part of that society. You can see what will happen. They turn the aggression back against themselves.

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The answers then will very likely have to be militant. To love our children we may have to change our society. Liberal answers are not enough.

Short of that – what can we do? Begin by respecting the drug-users. They are simply people who use drugs. And their knowledge of their own scene has to be exact. I am an old alcoholic. I am a chronic addict to tobacco. But I wouldn’t try to instruct a heroin user. He knows his own territory, like a soldier in the shallow trenches of the First World War, who knows just where the German sniper was situated, just how to move in order to stay alive. He regards the police as enemies. Why shouldn’t he? Their view of drugs is highly irrational. Their view of him is that he is a kind of crawling insect.

When the police got rid of most of the marihuana in Hamilton, the students shifted on to LSD – a thousand times more powerful drug. When the police got the chemists to padlock their hard drugs in their safes throughout the country – then the overseas left-handed businessmen turned their vulture eyes on this country, and said – ‘It’s a small market, but it can be developed’ – and sent in a flood of heroin that has never stopped. Couldn’t the police think, for a change?

The junkie regards the doctors as imbeciles. Why not? A young man I know was in Oakley Mental Hospital under a court order, for the use of heroin. Dr Savage, Head of Oakley, said to him – ‘What will you do when you get out of here?’

‘I’ll get a job and make as much money as I can,’ the young man said.

Dr Savage patted him on the shoulder. ‘Now you’re beginning to think sanely,’ he said.

My friend intended to come out and live in a shack and occupy himself with Buddhist meditation. It might have removed his drug problem. I’ve seen it happen. If a man loses his attachment to his ego, he loses his attachment to drugs as well. Instead he followed neither his solution nor Dr Savage’s solution. I think he is still using drugs.

Dr Savage identified sanity and conventionality. I would prefer to let people find their own normality. It happens to work.

The few who get off the drugs have the knowledge to help others to get off, who want to get off. Nobody else has the knowledge. I hope to see a Drug Users Anonymous come to life in this country.

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