Drug Stories/Morris/1991

DRUG STORIES

Studies of users uncover some surprising statistics

By David Morris
St. Paul Pioneer Press

(printed in the Anchorage Daily News, May 12, 1991, p. J-9)

It's awhile since drugs made the front page. So let me bring you
up to date on recent findings about drug use that didn't make it to prime
time news.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse reported that the giant
utility Utah Power and Light, "spent $215 per employee per year less on
the drug abusers in health insurance benefits than on the control group."
Employees who tested positive for drugs at Georgia Power Company had a
higher promotion rate than the company average. Workers testing positive
only for marijuana exhibited absenteeism some 30 percent lower than
average.

Scientific American, after exhaustive research, found that the
studies usually cited to prove the dangers of drug use in the workplace
were either shoddy or ;mininterpreted. Astonishingly, the magazine could
identify only one study on workplace drug use that has passed through the
standard peer review process for scientific evaluation.
That one, published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine,
studied 180 hospital employees, 22 of whom had tested positive after being
hired. It found "no difference between drug-positive and drug-negative
employees" with respect to supervisor evaluatins or performance. Except
for one intriguing item: Eleven of the negatives had been fired during
their first year on lthe job, but none of the positives.

More recently the American Psychologist, a peer reviewed scientific
journal, reported on a 15-year study of San Francisco area children, by
researchers Jonathan Shedler and Jack Block of the University of California
at Berkeley.
Their report reveals that adolescents who occasionally use drugs
are healthier than both drug abusers and drug abstainers. Moreover, those
who abused drugs as teen-agers have distinct behavioral problems that were
identifiable years before their drug use began. Drug use is symptom, not a
cause.

Says Shedler, "The most effective drug prevention programs might
not deal with drugs at all."
In an interview published in the National Review, Andrew W. Thomson
Jr., professor of psychiatry at Dartmouth Medical School, discussed several
studies that found that drug use increases in groups under stress, but that
"the rate of addiction doesn't go up no matter what the degree of stress.
Most people can walk away from high drug use if their lives become more
normal."

The British journal New Scientist reports research that found the
majority of those who become dependent on cocaine return to moderate use or
total abstinence without treatment.
Finally, Florida State Universit;y conducted a study for the
Florida Legislature of 45,096 people arrested for drug possession in 1987.
Eight-eight percent had never been arrested for property crimes like
burglary.

What are we to conclude>
Relying on these and many other studies, the Washington-based Drug
Policy Foundation, a beacon of reason in a sea of hysteria, offers the
following framework. Stress causes drug use. The vast majority of those
who use drugs are casual users. Those who use drugs tend not to commit
other crimes. Drugs in the workplace are not a serious burden on
productivity.

Which isn't to say there is no problem. There is. But it's a
problem caused more by making drug use a crime than by the use itself.
"There is little argument that drug trafficking has played a
crucial role in spawning the rise of violent crime," the Washington Post
recently observed. Gangs have spread from a localized phenomenon to
nationally franchised businesses, financed by drug money and armed with
ever-higher caliber weaponry. We're fueling a level of violence rarely
seen before, a violence now spilling over into areas that don't involve
drugs.

We can't build new prisons fast enough to house all the drug users
we want to put in them. In some states, education budgets are declining to
guarantee sufficient money for jails. In oulr panic about drugs we are
willing to sacrifice not only our schools but our liberty. Forfeitures of
property by drug users is rising into the hundreds of millions of dollars,
and virtually all this revenue goes back into drug enfforcement, creating
an unhealthy symbiotic relationship between drug dealers and the police.
Last year, for the first time, military troops were used on marijuana
raids. Strip searches of high school students in Kanses and Missouri
elicit little protest, even when no drugs are found. Anderson County,
S.C., billboards announce "Need cash? Turn in a drug dealer." Informers
receive as muuch as 25 percent of the assets seized from drug raids.

Public pronouncements notwithstanding, the evidence is piling up
that the collateral damage from our war on drugs far exceeds the damage
from drug use itself.

David Morris, an author, lecturer and consultant, is a columnist
for the St. Paul Pioneer Press.


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