Edward Epstein Agency of fear Opiates and politican power in America

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Drugs released information to Congress and the press which suggested that Turkey, not Mexico, was the
crucial source of supply. When the White House then succeeded in pressing the State Department into action
against the Turkish poppy fields, the CIA released its "survey, which showed that Turkey produced only a
small fraction of the world's illicit opium, and that if this supply were curtailed, it would rapidly be replaced
through other countries in Asia and the Middle East. In another case John Ingersoll had hired systems analysts
to demonstrate to the public that there were nine primary systems of narcotics distribution in the United States.
When the BNDD was focusing almost all its efforts on these nine systems rather than on the small trafficker,
Eugene Rossides and the Bureau of Customs found a tenth system, unlisted by the BNDD in its charts. More
embarrassingly, it was the largest single supplier of heroin to United States markets.
Nixon called Ingersoll and Krogh to his office to clarify the situation, and after Ingersoll presented a number
of bar graphs depicting the increased value of seizures of narcotics through this systems approach, Krogh
recalled that the president responded, "Now this is very impressive, but does it have anything to do with
solving the problem of narcotics ... are there less narcotics on the street? Are there fewer addicts? Is there less
crime related to the use of narcotics? Can you show me that the problem itself is being corrected by these
operational indices of success?" Since Ingersoll could not specify the number of addicts in the United States,
or the total amount of heroin that was consumed, Nixon realized that there was no way of knowing what
proportion of the heroin traffic passed through the nine systems that Lngersoll was concentrating his forces on.
Even Rossides readily admitted to anyone who asked that less than one fifth of all narcotics shipped into the
United States was intercepted before it reached its ultimate customers. At one point, when Ehrlichman brought
him a report on bureaucratic charges and countercharges, the president shook his head in dismay and asked,
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Conflict of Interest: Egil Krogh's Version
"Why are they fighting each other ... instead of drug traffickers?" Yet the continuing conflicts between the
law-enforcement agencies involved in the war on drugs were relatively minor compared to the "bureaucratic
in-fighting," as Krogh put it, among the nine agencies involved with the problem of treating narcotics
addicts-and thereby reducing demand.
The federal government had first become involved in the treatment of addicts in 1929, when Congress
established facilities at Lexington, Kentucky, and Fort Worth, Texas, to treat the large number of imprisoned
addicts in federal penitentiaries, and to provide an alternative to the private clinics that had recently been
outlawed by the federal government. These "narcotic farms," as they were called, detoxified addicts by
gradually reducing their daily dosages of heroin until they were completely withdrawn from the drug under the
supervision of government-employed psychiatrists. Detoxification proved unsuccessful in permanently
changing the behavior of those who underwent the treatment-more than 70 percent of those who were
committed to the government's narcotic farms eventually resumed the use of heroin. It was debatable whether
this resumption was due to the environment to which they returned or to the chemical lure of the drug itself. In
any case, detoxification became the central focus for government research and data collection on narcotics
addiction. By the time the Nixon administration assumed office, the National Institute of Mental Health
(NIMH), which administered the "farms" and employed the psychiatrists engaged in the detoxification
programs, had developed a "bureaucratic interest in maintaining the status quo," as Egil Krogh explained the
situation. Despite White House pressures, NIMH resisted the Idea of using treatment as part of the
law-and-order campaign which focused on the ghetto population. It claimed that this was because the methods
of treatment were untried and possibly unsafe. Krogh, however, saw this as a bureaucratic problem. He
explained in a memorandum to John Ehrlichman that the "primary orientation of NIMH is towards
professionals and psychiatrists not other approaches the Institute's target populations have historically been
non-poor; ... philosophically, NIMH orientation could not accommodate non-Mental health approaches...... In
September, 1970, the president himself became concerned over the independence" of NIMH, when its director,
Bertram Brown, was quoted by the Washington Post as recommending that marijuana violations be treated no
more seriously than traffic violations and that offenders simply be given a ticket. Since this conflicted directly
with the administration's bete-noire strategy, to appear merciless and unrelenting in prosecuting crimes, Krogh
recalled, "The president hit the ceiling." He even wrote Krogh a personal note suggesting "that clown Brown"
be fired immediately, and then angrily reiterated this demand in a meeting a few days later with Ehrlichman,
Krogh, and Krogh's assistant, Jeffrey Donfeld. According to Donfeld, Krogh then asked him to prepare a
memorandum for the president which would provide "evidence of incompetency." Donfeld investigated and
found that Brown was a close friend of' Elliot Richardson's, and that Richardson would not be easily persuaded
to fire Brown to please the White House. Realizing that Richardson was not a man to be trifled with, the
president ordered the matter dropped. And by December, 1970, as Krogh and Donfeld watched in complete
frustration, Bertram Brown managed to gain effective control over an interagency study group which was
supposed to promulgate national goals for the war on drugs. Brown steered the group into recommending that
his agency, NIMH, take the lead in government efforts to reduce addiction. To counter these
recommendations, Krogh immediately set up another study group of experts not in the government.
The administration was also having problems with the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, which
through a number of its other agencies was funding treatment programs throughout the United States.
Secretary Richardson took the position that the criterion for allocating funds to programs should be the "size of
the local drug problem." Although this may have seemed like a rational way of allocating federal money to the
neediest areas, it would mean that New York City, which then had approximately half of the drug addicts in
the nation, and Chicago, which also had a large addiction problem, would receive most of the federal money.
In political terms, H. R. Haldeman pointed out, reaching two cities that were "Democratic strongholds" was
"unacceptable." Donfeld reminded Krogh of this consideration in a May 17, 1971, memorandum criticizing the
submission of drug-abuse "initiatives" from the Health, Education, and Welfare Department. In the section on
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Conflict of Interest: Egil Krogh's Version [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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