For men shall be … lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God.
—II Tim. 3:2, 4
3876 High Costs To Society
The cost of drug abuse to society in terms of crime, medical treatment, custodial care and loss of work amount to $10.3 billion a year. Heroin addiction accounts for over $6 billion of the total.
In addition, tobacco use costs society $6.7 billion a year, and alcoholism costs $32 billion annually.
3877 Drugs In The U. S. Military
It is estimated that there are about 83,000 men in the armed services using heroin or opium, and a minimum of 600,000 who smoke marijuana. Investigators are often told that from 30 percent to as high as 80 percent of military personnel are involved in drug use.
—Christian Victory
3878 High Schoolers’ Trips
Of the 17 million high school students in America, over 2 million use dope in some form. Survey shows that 20–30% of all students have experimented with drugs, and ¼ of these say that they take dope on a regular basis.
Half of the high school students in many affluent suburbs have used marijuana. Hundreds of students have died on bad trips of LSD or other hard drugs. The minds and bodies of thousands are warped and marred by drugs. At a hippie party in a western city, a young college student under the influence of LSD grabbed a live kitten and ate it raw.
—Homer Duncan
3879 Collegians’ Use Of Drugs
Almost one-third of students on American college campuses have tried marijuana and one-seventh use it regularly. These findings were made public in Washington, D.C., before the Congress by the National Institute of Mental Health. One of the major points of the survey is that there has been substantial increase in the use of the drug among college students.
—Christian Victory
3880 Survey Of Harlem
A house-to-house survey of a 40-block area of Harlem, New York, revealed 18,000 hard drug addicts, including 2,000 children between the ages of 7 and 15. And 90 percent of those children lived by themselves without the presence of an adult in their immediate environment.
3881 Largest Pot Ever Seized
Miami (AP)—Forty tons of a marijuana, valued at $24 million, were discovered on an island near Freeport, Bahamas, by federal agents on a search-and-rescue mission in August 16, 1975.
It was believed to be the biggest marijuana seizure ever.
The marijuana was found on deep water key, about 15 miles southeast of Freeport, by agents searching the area for a downed helicopter. The search for the helicopter was called off, officials said.
The pot had been pressed into bricks and was stacked eight feet high in burlap and plastic bags, agent said. They placed a value of $24 million on the dope.
3882 Most Valuable Narcotics Catch
While the largest narcotics haul happened in 1975, the most valuable haul ever occurred in 1972 when 937 lbs. of pure heroin were seized aboard a shrimp boat at Marseilles, France. The shipment was worth $106 million retail.
3883 Nosing Out Secrets
A news item:
Charlie and his partner, Rebel, hold jobs with the United States Customs Service. Both are German Shepherds whose job it is to sniff out the illicit weeds being smuggled throught customs in Chicago.
The two evidently like their jobs and are good at them. Charlie, a 20-month-old black and tan dog, will attack a package containing marijuana like a puppy pouncing on a hidden bone.
He sniffed each package as it came by him on conveyor belt, but when things got too slow and he had to sniff the same packages a second time, he began to lose interest. So he stuck his head in a bin of packages to smell out what was there. Still nothing.
Then a postal worker brought a package and put it under some others.
When Charlie caught a whiff of it, he pounced, knocking other packages out of the way.
“It’s only a test package,” explained Lynch, 23, who spent four years as a dog handler in the Air Force. “If one of the dogs doesn’t find anything for a while, we throw in a package with marijuana or hashish to keep up his interest and give him a sense of accomplishment.”
The same qualities that make good sentry and attack dogs—large size, loyalty to one person, high degree of concentration on the job—are the qualities that make good detectors of marijuana and hashish.
All Charlie or Rebel needs is a faint whiff, and he has it. To keep their scent sharp, Lynch works each dog only about 45 minutes at a time putting the other dog to work.
Once the dogs find a package, it is opened by Customs agents to confirm the presence of marijuana or hashish. The package then is retied and sent on to its destination. Sometimes an arrest will be made when the package is accepted, and sometimes several packages will be allowed to go through before an arrest is made if agents suspect several persons are involved.
3884 Right To Drugs In Private
Alaska’s Supreme Court has ruled that citizens have a constitutional right to possess marijuana for personal use in their homes (but not in public). It is thus the first state—and one of the few places on earth—where pot may be smoked legally. Ironically, the ruling did not reverse the conviction of the man who brought the case. He was using the stuff in his car.
3885 Threat To Western Civilization
A federal drug expert has issued a warning. Unless the staggering rate of drug abuse is checked, “Western civilization as we know it will cease in three decades.”
This is the warning issued at the Institute on Drug Dependence and Abuse sponsored by the College of Saint Elizabeth, Convent Station, N. J. “We have a brain drain in this country, but it is not alcoholism, or other exploitations—it is primarily drug abuse,” said Michael J. Costello, a special agent in the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, Department of Justice.
“What will happen to this country when drug-addicted youths assume the jobs of teachers, lawyers, clergymen, doctors, and others?” the federal agent asked.
3886 Death In Magazine’s Print
Dissolve any two pages of this magazine in methyl alcohol, a feature in Caper magazine suggested, and drink the mixture. The ink used to print the magazine was claimed to contain a powerful hallucinogen similar in effect to LSD.
The Food and Drug Administration promptly issued a warning that those who followed the suggestion would probably end up blind or dead. Methyl alcohol is a deadly poison, even when used in small quantities.
About 150,000 copies of the magazine were recalled.
—Stanley C. Baldwin
3887 A Baby Affected
A baby was born with four fingers on one hand and six on the other. The head and back were misshapen. There were holes in the walls between the chambers of the heart. There were defects in the bone structure. Kidneys, lungs, liver, digestive tract were abnormal. Both parents were healthy and the only reason found was that the chromosomes had become abnormal because the mother took LSD three times and the father had taken it twice.
—News and Notes
3888 Inhaling Aerosol Fumes
A practice that is far more serious—the inhaling of fumes from aerosol cans—is becoming a fatal fad. Youngsters seeking a high spray the mist into a bag or other container and breathe deeply. About four deaths a month were in the early 1970’s recorded, according to the Food and Drug Administration. The gas propellants (usually fluorocarbons) in hundreds of different kinds of household sprays can kill quickly. They are carried by the blood from the lungs to the heart, where they interrupt normal cardiac rhythm.
—Time
3889 The Aural High
Swallowing, sniffing, smoking and injecting are the prevalent ways of using drugs. One youngster has accidentally explored another method—packing her ear. The aural high was reported in a whimsical letter to the New England Journal of Medicine by Dr. Thomas E. Piemme of the George Washington University School of Medicine.
Identified only as a “young lady of 18,” the unwitting pioneer was undressing for a nude dip in the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool during an anti-war demonstration. She solved the problem of how to protect half a gram of hashish by depositing it in her left ear. How to extract the wad became another problem; amateur efforts pushed the dampened hash deeper into the external auditory canal.
She had to go to the George Washington University Hospital emergency room, where the staff performed what Piemme terms a “hashishectomy.” Though the girl claimed not to have smoked either hash or marijuana that day, she said that she felt high. She also showed signs of being so. The probable explanation is that the ear canal’s epithelium absorbed some of the active ingredient in the splashed hash.
3890 Spiders Go Haywire
In research, guinea pigs, rats, mice and monkeys are the most common animals used in experiments. But in North Carolina’s Department of Mental Health, Dr. Peter N. Witt has settled on using spiders. He noticed how intricately symmetrical the spider’s wheel- like webs are, and this led him to choose the creature. Any disturbance of the spider’s nervous or muscular system would be revealed in the webs it spun. So he raised swarms of the gray and brown creatures, then he set his spiders tripping on drugs, sipped from a syringe in dilute solution.
Amphetamines are stimulants which cause humans to become hyperactive, hallucinatory and disoriented. When used on spiders, they make all the assessments in building a web—but then fail to make the correct actions. Dr. Witt says, “They see where the last strand was placed and they know where the next one should go, but they weave it in the wrong place.” Thus, amphetamine webs are highly irregular. Those webs which are woven under the influence of tranquilizers are usually regular in pattern but considerably smaller than normal. Those spun under the influence of barbiturates tend to be smaller and widely erratic. Other research experiments were made with mescaline and psilocybin and they affected the spider’s muscles and brain.
—Christian Victory
3891 Medical Student’s Experiment Brought Death
A twenty-four-year-old medical student died in Philadelphia when he decided to try LSD once. Mark Prager had spent a summer working in a Baltimore hospital with mental patients who were under the influence of LSD. He told his wife he wanted to feel the same effects as his patients. An autopsy named the cause of death as the “adverse effect to an illegal drug … LSD.”
It would seem that this was a case of “good guy” dying tragically by means of an almost freak reaction. Many “bad guys” take LSD repeatedly and never die from it. But that’s the way it is. Some people seem to get away with almost anything while others get nailed the first time they step out of line.
—Gospel Herald
3892 A Loser Either Way
News Media carried two lessons for losers in a single week. In Wisconsin, Joseph Huber was arrested for selling “tea” (marijuana) to a student. Huber beat the charge easily when the stuff was shown to be plain drinking tea. But his victory was short lived: the law convicted him of defrauding the other student.
3893 Prescription Was Too Legible!
A man walked into a Yonkers pharmacy and handed the druggist a doctor’s prescription for a narcotic. The druggist took one look, asked the customer to return in the afternoon, then phoned the doctor. It turned out that the man had visited the doctor’s office the day before. When his request for narcotics was refused, he stole a pad of prescription blanks and, after studying a book on the subject, forged the prescription.
What had aroused the druggist’s suspicions? “That prescription,” said the druggist, “was too legible to have been written by a doctor.”
—Saturday Evening Post
3894 Thalidomide Victims Compensated
Tokyo (AP)—The families of 63 thalidomide babies signed an agreement under which the government and a pharmaceutical firm are to pay a total of more than 6,000 million yen ($20 million) as compensation for the birth of an estimated 939 deformed babies to thalidomide users in Japan.
The compromise agreement brought an end to a dispute which began nine years ago when the plaintiffs filed a joint lawsuit against the Health and Welfare Ministry and Dai-Nippon Pharmaceutical Co. of Japan which sold thalidomide, a German-made tranquilizing drug.
3895 Linkletter’s Daughter
One of the tragic events of the last 1960’s was what happened to Art Linkletter’s daughter Diane. She had experimented with taking LSD, her father said, and had confided to him that the whole thing was ridiculous. Frightened by the experience and by the “bum trips” of friends, she vowed never to try LSD again. But hallucinations kept recurring until, depressed and afraid she was losing her mind, she leaped from her apartment to her death.
3896 Epigram On Narcotics
• Father to mother: “At least this report card proves he isn’t taking any mind-expanding drugs.”
—Reamer Keller
See also: Alcoholism ; Cigarettes.