How not to be sober on drugs

by DOMINIC BELLENGER
The Heroin Trail by the staff and editors of Newsday (Souvenir Press £3.50)
The alarming increase of drug addiction in Britain — especially among the young — pales into insignificance in comparison with the American experience. The extent of addiction in the United States is so great that it can only be guessed at — there are no authoritative statistics, but the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs estimates 559,000 addicts in the country as a whole, half of them in New York.
This report — which won its compilers the Pullitzer Prize in 1974 — is .essentially an "indepth" journalistic expose, of the Sunday Times "Insight" variety, which traces the "junk" back to its sources.
It follows the poppy from Turkey (whose Afyon province is the main centre or primary production) through a complex channel of communication, via Germany and France, to New
'York; what it graphically calls the "ugly odyssey from blossom
to bloodstream." The alarming ly high profits made at each stage show how the drug traffic has become "the most profitable business in the world."
There is a striking inflation spiral, In Istanbul, morphine sells for some $350 a kilo, in Munich for $700 a kilo, in Marseilles for $1,100. Converted
to heroin, a kilo brings $240,000
on the streets of America. The search for greater profit and the craving of the heroin addict mutually feed what seems an incurable disease.
This investigation — lustrated with several photographs (many of them pictures of the "rogues' gallery" that make up the inner circle of the heroin trade) concludes with an editorial reprinted from Newsday of March 4, 1973, which calls for a less punitive attitude to drug control in the States (rather on the English model), as the most likely way to stern the fearsome tide.
However fascinating the report and however damaging the expose may be (or have been) to this ugly business, there is an inherent danger in this sort of "sensational" approach. That is the danger of romanticism. It would be tragic if this well-intentioned work were to give a misplaced glamour to "The French Connection" and all its works.
Perhaps a sober. analytical approach is the only real way to tackle such a tricky and controversial subject.