Evening star., 1951-10-07
Narcotics Traffic.
Threat to Youth Held Exaggerated,
But Washington Is q Danger Spot
By John Gerrity


A dreaded bugaboo-the fear of
youngsters addiction to illicit drugs
which has plagued many an Ameri-
can home. ran smack into some we'll
marShalled truths this week. And it
very nearly collapsed.
Ever since the Kefauver committee
explored and exposed the illegal mar
cot1cs traffic as an awful aspect of
nationally organized crime. wide
spread notion has developed that the
youth Of the Nation is in grave
danger Of becoming a drug -riddled
shambles. Augmenting this concept
Of threatened blight, were the
findings of similar investigations
conducted by individual States and
cities.
Louisiana, for example. and cities
like Los Angeles and New York, their
community consciences throughly
aroused, boldly embarked on critical
self examinations. The results,
usually portrayed in unevaluated and
uncorrelated statistics, presented a
spectacle just short of horrifying.
In the meantime, well-meanine,
public-spirited newspapers and mag
azines, television and radio pro-
grams leaped at the disclosures,
alerting the public to vice rampant.
Indeed, so we'll alerted did the
public become that parents lived in
secret dread that their offspring
might momentarily fall prey to the
dope peddler.
Danger Seems Exaggerated
The seeds of fear were well
planted and firmly rooted. Perhaps
too well and too firmly. The danger
of national degeneracy through
drugs seems, in short. to have been
exaggerated.
This is not intended to demean
the worthwhile objectives of the
Kefauver committee and compar-
able groups. Nor is it to discard
lightly the facts about illicit mar
cotics trade, which, if allowed to go
unnoticed and uncontrolled, could
in time produce a national disaster.
If, however-as the Bureau of
Narcotics, Public Health Service,
American Medical Association and
Pure Food and Drug Administration
expressed it this week-the same
facts and statistics are put in proper
perspective, much of the gloom can
be dispelled. Hope of reasonably
early eradication of the evil would
supplant despair. Rather than fret
ting and worrying over their chill
dren's future, parents could con-
fidently expect them to grow up.
uncontaminated by drugs.
Some of the facts adding up to
this belief are:
/. Despite recent increase in the
number of arrests of addicts and
peddlers, the national addiction rate
is so per cent less than it was
generation ago.
g. The greatest incidence of juve-
nile addiction Is among those juve-
niles regarded by criminologists and
sociologists as delinquents, not among
high school and college students as
enormously supposed.
Fewer Droftee Addicts
8. In World War II only one en-
liStee or draftee out of every 10000
was rejected as a drug addict; in
World War I, the rate was one out
of 1900.
4. Contrary to the popular miscon-
ception of hundreds of thousands
of dope f1ends," there are in the en-
tire Nation today only about $4,000
addicts, 10000 of whom are juveniles.
S, The known increase in drug ad-
diction is not Nationwide. but is
confined mainly to eight major
cities-Washington, New York, Bal
timore. Philadelphia. Detroit. Chi
cago, New Orleans and st. Louis.
s. If drug traficking and addiction
could be eliminated in these eight
cities. the illicit drug problem. from
a national aspect, would be fairly
we'll licked.
Neither better nor worse than her
sister sinners, Washington points up
the difficulties common to all Ad-
diction and peddling is by no means
city-Wide. It is confined mainly to
congeSted areas like the second pre-
cinct, which lies in the Northwest
) between K street and street, Second
to Fifteenth streets.
From the aspect of police control,
Washington may suffer even more
than the other major offenders.
Washington's Metropolitan narcotics
squad. according to Chief of Detec-
tives Robert v. Murray. has only six
regular detectives. This tiny squad
is reinforced by a limited staff of
so-called undercover men and by
occasional help from the Federal
Narcotics Bureau.
Perhaps the biggest hole in the
control dixie" lies in the illogical
leniency the District and Municipal
Courts have shown toward convicted
peddlers and addicts. AS Boyd M.
Martin. an area supervisor for the
Narcotics Bureau, pointed out last
Tuesday, a major emigration of dope
peddlers from Baltimore to Wash