Beyond Drugs

296 Pages·1975·4.024 MB·English

by  Stanley Einstein (Auth.)

Books by Stanley Einstein
The Use and Misuse of Drugs:
A Social Dilemma
Methadone Treatment
Student Drug Surveys
Beyond Drugs
STANLEY EINSTEIN, Ph. D.
Executive Director
Institute for the Study of Drug Misuse
New York City
PERGAMON PRESS INC.
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Copyright © 1975 Pergamon Press Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Einstein, Stanley.
Beyond drugs.
Bibliography: p.
1. Drug abuse. 2. Drugs. 3. Drug abuse-
Treatment. I. Title. [DNLM: 1. Drug abuse-
Popular works. 2. Drugs—Popular works. WM270
E35b 1974]
HV5801.E42 362.2'9 73-7940
ISBN 0-08-017767-0
ISBN 0-08-017768-9 (pbk.)
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without prior permission of Pergamon Press Inc.
Second printing, 1978
Printed in the United States of America
One of the most widely read books of all times is The Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire written in 1788 by Edward Gibbon. It sets forth five basic reasons
why that great civilization withered and died. These were:
1. the undermining of the dignity and sanctity of the home, which is the basis for
human society;
2. higher and higher taxes, the spending of public money for free bread and cir-
cuses for the people;
3. the mad craze for pleasure, sports becoming every year more exciting, more
brutal, and more immoral;
4. the building of great armaments when the real enemy was within—the decay of
individual responsibilities;
5. the decay of religion, faith fading into mere form, losing touch with life, losing
power to guide people.
Preface
My involvement in the area of the nonmedical use of drugs was a
happenstance. My continued involvement is a conscious effort. It raises
problems for me as a therapist, teacher, lecturer, researcher, writer, and
journalist for the following reasons: It doesn't deserve to be a separate
field as it presently is; our concerns and energies would be better utilized
if we mobilized them for the exciting challenge of coming to terms with
living; my own biases, public health ones, are not necessarily more useful,
in a predictive sense, than any other bias.
By training and inclination, my interest is going beyond drugs. Hence
the title of the book. I owe much to my colleagues who stimulated my
thinking about various aspects of man's drug-oriented behavior, to my
students who constantly challenged me, and to my patients and research
subjects who allowed me into their lives. In a strange way, I owe a lot to
the "drug-abuse" empire builders and parochialists who upset and
angered me enough to get me to sit and write a new book in a field that has
become habituated if not addicted to information dissemination.
My personal indebtedness is to Rosalind Stein and Linda Bartolo, who
typed the various versions of the manuscript, and to Lywanda Thompson
for gathering the material on drugs and songs.
To my wife Sarah, daughter Tammy, son Josh, and father and mother-in-
law, Abe and Fanny, thank you for your patience, understanding, and
caring during the many hours that my writing took me away from active
family life.
Stanley Einstein
vii
The Author
Stanley Einstein, Ph. D., is Executive Director of the Institute for the Study
of Drug Misuse in New York City which he founded in 1963. He has been
Associate Director, Division of Drug Abuse, and Associate Professor of
Public Health and Psychiatry at the College of Medicine and Dentistry of
New Jersey at Newark, 1969-1973; Executive Director, New York Council
on Alcoholism, Inc., 1967-1969; and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at
the New York Medical College, 1963-1967. He is also the Editor and
Founder of the International Journal of the Addictions Drug Forum, and
Altered States of Consciousness, was an Abstract Editor for the journal
Excerpta Criminological Founder and Co-Editor of a monograph series
entitled The Non-Medical Use of Drugs, and was also a journalist of a
series of articles in the Newark News and the Star Ledger entitled Drug
Forum, from 1971-1973.
He has organized and lectured at numerous workshops and symposiums
on the topic of drug abuse, has been a consultant to the medical
departments of many large corporations—the New York Telephone
Company, General Motors Company, and Mobil Oil Company among
them. Dr. Einstein is the author or co-author of over 50 drug-related articles
that have appeared in scholarly journals since 1963 as well as of three
previous books.
Introduction
[Puritanism is] "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy."
H. L. Mencken
By the time you begin reading this book, you will have, in all likelihood,
been to some meetings about drugs, watched numerous TV documen-
taries and newscasts, been the victim of hysteria-producing films, and
read articles and editorials in your local paper and in almost every popular
magazine. In other words, this book is reaching a person who is sur-
rounded by "the drug scene" and may already be sick and tired of drugs.
So why another book? The answer to that is as complex as the contem-
porary American drug situation itself, with both rational and irrational
elements.
The (hopefully) more rational reasons include:
1. offering useful insights to those concerned about the increasing drug
problem which has either not been presented before or has not been
presented clearly enough;
2. challenging a variety of drug-abuse myths and untested assumptions
which continue to get many people into trouble;
3. serving as a catalyst which may cut through much of the hopelessness
and despair experienced by both young and old concerning drug abuse;
4. offering some alternatives in place of the usual simplistic black and
white reactions to a whole spectrum of colorful private and public be-
havior;
5. offering some guidelines and criteria that may prove personally useful
in evaluating the consequences of dependence upon specific treatment,
educational, preventional, and detectional techniques and programs;
6. pointing out the various roles that the use and misuse of all kinds of
drugs have and continue to have in our daily lives;
7. challenging the reader to weigh the nondrug alternatives that already
exist in his own life or are within reach;
ix
x Beyond Drugs
8. challenging those who feel most concerned about defining their own
roles in the strengthening and/or weakening of the contemporary pat-
tern of turning to drugs rather than to people to meet all sorts of
legitimate and illegitimate needs.
Some of what you will read may upset or anger you. It's meant to!
When traditional views are challenged, when some of our clearly
dangerous—as well as silly—behavior is focused on, we often get angry
and defensive. But better to be upset and angry at an author you may
never meet than to continue what may be destructive behavior in relation-
ships that have great meaning for you.
Some of what you will read may frustrate you. The book is meant to do
that as well. Not only is it frustrating to turn to some authority in a society
which prides itself on not turning to others (the pioneer image), but when
no step-by-step blueprint is offered, you may feel that you have been
taken. It is not the intention of this book to insult you. It is my intention to
take a reader sufficiently concerned about drug abuse to read this book on
a trip through contemporary life with drug abuse as a model, and to point
out the general terrain and the possible dead ends. Getting stuck and
getting lost will only be temporary incidents. As with many a well-planned
trip, we each come with our own gear, our own needs, our own censoring
mechanisms, and we may be doing ourselves a disservice by assuming
that the meaning and consequences of such a venture can best be experi-
enced only during the venture. Both the passing of time and what we do
with whatever occurs in time are the crucial elements affecting any per-
sonal venture. Developing personally appropriate reactions to drug abuse
is no different.
While the intention of this book is to focus on teen-age drug use, it is
obvious that we must have an appreciation of adult drug use and the
problems of growing up to better comprehend why the traditional sweets,
alcoholic beverages, tobacco products, and sexual outlets apparently do
not satiate the growing youngster.
Many of us do not comprehend the present drug scene because we feel
it is alien to our values and way of life, and also because we feel that what
was good enough for us should be good enough for the present genera-
tion. The term most often used to describe this is the generation gap.
While the words are new, surely the concept isn't. The father of that
prehistoric man who left the tree for a cave was certainly at a loss to
understand this change in style of living. He was also most likely at a
disadvantage in that he didn't know the word sick, so he couldn't blame
Introduction xi
the change on sickness, or perhaps feel guilty. It's hard for me to imagine
him lying on a bed of rocks questioning where he went wrong.
In all likelihood, this is the major contemporary reason for the sale of
so much material about drug abuse. Parents feel guilty about their chil-
dren's actual drug use or frightened and anxious about potential drug use.
In almost all cases, the parent feels inadequate to cope with "the drug
problem," easily overlooking that for better or worse he has already faced
a multitude of other guilt and anxiety-provoking problems during his
child's development.
Youngsters often buy much of the drug-abuse material to be on top of
new "facts," check out various issues, and to be prepared for the newest
lecture that they will surely receive from some adult who bought the same
piece of new material.
The unfortunate thing is that the new drug facts rarely serve to bring
people together. Rather, the different meanings imputed to the same
material become the newest ammunition to use during that phase
called adolescence by what often appear to be enemies living in the same
household.
Most parents understand that adolescence is the only time which
American society permits active experimentation and testing to go on.
From birth through the primary grades, growing up focuses on the attain-
ment of basic language, motor and intellectual skills against a background
of national, religious, ethnic, and family rites and rituals. During this
period, the growing child's role is fairly clearly spelled out.
During late adolescence and early adulthood, his roles and behavior are
again clearly spelled out. He is expected to utilize the primitive skills of
childhood, which were tested and refined during adolescence, in the
marketplace, the halls of academe, the armed services, or the various
institutions we have developed for those citizens we deem to be
failures.
Thus, most parents are prepared for how they will react to traditionally
accepted types of adolescent testing or rebellion. What is often forgotten
or overlooked is that a traditional form of rebellion is neither good nor
bad; it is just traditional. In the second place, many, if not most, of our
traditions are being sorely tested today. Lastly, and perhaps of most im-
portance, whatever the particular parental attitude to an adolescent's
tests—whether it be strict, tolerant, or ambivalent—it may not prove as
helpful as expected if a real crisis arises. Drug abuse, as it is currently de-
fined, is experienced as being exactly such a crisis. The increasing number
of teen-agers experimenting with and frequently using a variety of drugs,
xii Beyond Drugs
whose parents actually know them instead of just reading about them, has
been both mystifying and frightening to parents.
Adolescents' failure to understand the reaction of the adult population
to their actual or pretended drug use derives from the same factor that is
upsetting the adults. Although both youngsters and adults exhibit an
excessive concern and interest in drugs and the drug scene, drug-oriented
living is part of the fabric of daily life for the young, whereas it is
perceived as being only a fad or style for the adult. When you grow up
driving on the right side of the road, you generally don't question it, and it
becomes part of your life style. When you are confronted with driving on
the left side, you begin to question it and may perceive it in ways that are
out of proportion to what it deserves.
Coupled to this difference in life styles is the fact that drug abuse has
become a general smoke screen for both old and young to avoid dealing
with some of the issues that seriously affect their daily lives and over
which they feel they have little control.
When all of the major institutions of life are now once again being
challenged—formal education, traditional patterns of marriage, communi-
cation, economics, theology, the arts, the actual extension of life, patterns
of normal physical and mental health, the geography of the universe, pat-
terns of warfare and nationalism, the level of noise, and the availability of
space for privacy—drug abuse may seem to many to be a problem which
is sufficiently circumscribed to focus on. It is the new straw man of our
era. Unfortunately, using drug abuse as a smoke screen will in no way
help us to deal appropriately with the issues mentioned above, nor with
the many serious consequences of drug abuse itself. This smoke-screen
approach will either tend to increase the many myths and bits of misinfor-
mation about the consequences and reasons for drug abuse that are al-
ready prevalent or will make it excessively difficult to distinguish between
myth and reality in this field.
Exploiting the drug issues will not help us understand:
1. What are the real dangers of drug use and misuse?
2. Do only certain people become drug abusers?
3. Are there chemical solutions to people's problems?
4. Is the law, whether it is more punitive or less punitive, able to
decrease significantly the present pattern of drug abuse?
5. Is taking drugs for other than medically approved reasons a sign of
psychological illness?
6. If one assumes that drug abuse is indicative of psychological illness,
can every drug abuser profit from the available kinds of treatment?