Richie quickly turned his back to the approaching car, threw the pills into his mouth, and washed them down with soda. Then he ran. The policeman yelled after him, shouting his name to let Richie know that he was identified. But the barbiturates were moving through his system. He felt, he told Brick the next day, “as if I could fly.” When he did downs, Richie conceived that he could step outside himself and view himself as if he were another person. As he ran this day, he could see himself running. He was an impala, leaping great distances, leaving the cop far behind.
Another man had joined in the chase. By coincidence he was an off-duty policeman who saw the uniformed officer giving pursuit. The two doggedly chased Richie and watched as the red-haired youngster cleared a six-foot chain fence like a hurdler.
The off-duty policeman took the fence as well, but coming down he fell and fractured his kneecap. The other officer made the jump more cautiously. Ahead Richie ran with abandon. He began to laugh, his merriment at the fallen cop floating back on a spring breeze. Then Richie stumbled and pitched forward. A very angry officer pounced him, as the second hobbled up.
Driven home by the police, Richie was presented to George. No crime was suspected, the officer said, other than hitchhiking. But Richie had run. Twice! Flaunting all cries to stop and heed.
Sitting quietly, looking at the floor, Richie endured the scolding. George nodded in absolute agreement with everything the lawmen said. When left alone with his son, George asked Richie why he had run.
“Because I didn’t do anything,” he said. “When that first cop told me to sit in his car, I just got nervous and ran away.”
“If you didn’t do anything,” said George, “you shouldn’t get nervous. You must have looked suspicious or they wouldn’t have wanted to talk to you.”
“They’re pricks, all fuzz are pricks. They’re out to persecute kids.” Richie turned to go to his room.
George stopped him. Now he was irritated. He had obtained a special permit to serve as a free-lance security guard to bring more money to the house. Often he moonlighted, sometimes patrolling the parking lot at one of Carol’s charity affairs. He felt kinship with policemen. “There may come a day when you need a cop,” said George. “They’re here to protect you, not persecute you. Don’t ever forget it. This is a society of laws, and we must have police to enforce the laws.”
“What law is it that says a cop can bust a kid for doing nothing?”
“You weren’t busted. Now go to your room and get ready for dinner.”
The next day George was called by a caseworker from Family Court who was investigating the report on Richie. The officer had added the episode to Richie’s file. George said he was worried because Richie’s birthday was only nine days away. “Then he’ll be sixteen—and an adult under the law,” said George.
The caseworker appreciated George’s concern. He had just been talking to the high school to ascertain Richie’s academic record. The school reported that Richie was not an attendance problem, not a disciplinary problem, but his intellectual progress was disappointing. “He’s not doing anything close to what his aptitude shows he can do,” said the caseworker.
George said he knew that. He was Richie’s father. He saw Richie’s report card. Richie was failing three major subjects, doing poorly even in science, a subject he had always excelled in.
George could no more understand this development than he could fathom why Richie, in the midst of a backyard quarrel with his father over a task not done, suddenly picked up a pitchfork and flung it against the $400 above-ground swimming pool, puncturing its side.
In the instant before his fists clenched and anger flooded his face, George felt bewilderment. He wanted to cry out, “But the pool is yours, son! Don’t you understand I bought it for you?”
* Dr. Victoria Sears, a psychiatrist who had worked with youngsters at the Nassau County Drug Abuse Council since 1966, noticed something of alarm in the autumn of 1969.
“During those several weeks when marijuana was scarce, and expensive,” she says, “a lot of kids out here turned to amphetamines, barbiturates, and even heroin. These were solid middleclass youngsters, not delinquent blue-collar gang members. The fact of the matter is that a lot of addicts I am treating today, in 1972, date their use of harder drugs from Operation Intercept.”
* In a 1972 magazine article called “The Suburban Hustlers,” writer Jack Shepherd interviewed a teen-age drug salesman who lived not far from Richie Diener. The quotes he elicited from the youngster were chilling: “When I first started getting high in Freeport, there were maybe 15 people in town who also got high. It was really a new thing. Now, in all these towns everybody’s getting high. It’s all over. Seven years ago [in 1965] out here, it was like the real suburbs. Kids were still into surfing and beer drinking. Drugs were unheard of. In fact, kids who used drugs were put down by other kids: ‘Ah, he’s a junkie.’
“Now, it’s the opposite. Kids say, ‘Don’t worry about him; he’s cool, he’s got good connections.’ It’s the complete reverse. Now kids say, ‘Ah, he don’t get high. Don’t hang around him. He’s lame. He don’t know what’s happening.’
“Everythings inside out. The suburbs are the city now.”
Chapter Ten
It would have been difficult to live in the United States in the years from 1964 to 1972 and not possess a considerable storehouse of information concerning that cursed, celebrated trinity of drugs—marijuana, heroin, and LSD. Not only did they become magazine covers and newspaper series and sermons and political issues and thundering speeches in the halls of Congress and presidential declarations and tens of thousands of educational brochures multiplied by tens of millions of warning words scattered like propaganda leaflets into every school of the land; they also became song lyrics and theatrical plots and the axis on which works of literature turned. The film industry made so many drug movies—most of them commercial failures—that the subject finally became anathema. Surely any parent worth the bronzed baby shoes atop the television set could recite the symptoms and certain doom of youthful drug-taking as quickly as rattling off the seven signs of cancer.
But somehow the barbiturate story did not get around. Rather like a tumor growing quietly and unnoticed in the leg bone while doctors worked on something else at the neck, barbiturate use and abuse multiplied in the late 1960s and early 1970s until the malignancy metastasized throughout the body of America. “There are supposed to be 500,000 heroin addicts in this country,” says a Nassau County narcotics officer. “Then there have to be a million barb freaks.” A Los Angeles psychiatrist, testifying before a Senate committee, reported in 1972 that barbiturates were the number-one drug problem among the young of his county, surpassing marijuana, heroin, and LSD. He predicted that 1972 would be “the year of the Barb.”
“Why is this so?” asked this psychiatrist, Dr. Sidney Cohen, chief of UCLA’s Center for Study of Mind-Altering Drugs and among the nation’s more sophisticated minds in the field of youth and pills. He was testifying before Senator Birch Bayh’s Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, which held hearings on barbiturates in late 1971 and early 1972. “For the youngster, barbiturates are a more reliable ‘high’ and less detectable than marijuana. They are less strenuous than LSD, less ‘freaky’ than amphetamines [speed], less expensive than heroin.
“A schoolboy can ‘drop a red’ and spend the day in a dreamy, floating state of awareness untroubled by reality. It is drunkenness without the odor of alcohol. It is escape for the price of one’s lunch money.”
Other testimony before the Bayh subcommittee (which, incidentally, did not get as much press attention as the senator had hoped) revealed so many startling statistics, so many gothic tales of insanity, death, horror, and sorrow that by simply reading statements and Q. and A.’s at random one began to fantasize a drugged young America, lulled by a bellyful of sleeping pills, blissfully “down” save for those irksome streaks of violence before euphoria wrapped its cloak around.
> Throw a dart at the map of America and almost anywhere it struck, there seemed to be a barbiturate crisis:
—A survey of one middle-class suburban community in Southern California concluded that 40 percent of a fourth grade was using barbiturates. Fourth graders, need it be pointed out, are usually around ten years old.
—In New York State barbiturates were being used in 1971 by 1.5 million workers, with more than 350,000 of these suspected of being addicted. Among the group 17 percent obtained their pills without prescription. Or, putting it another way, 83 percent got them legally!
—In Stamford, Connecticut, population 108,000, police seized one shipment of 92,000 illegal secobarbital capsules.
—Nationwide, arrests for barbiturate possession among minors jumped almost 1,000 percent from 1967 to 1972.
—In Fresno, California, police seized 760,000 illegal barbiturate pills in 1970, enough to supply 4.5 doses for every man, woman, and child in the city.
—In Nassau County, New York, District Attorney William Cahn, whose jurisdiction includes East Meadow, observed: “For the past ten years we in law enforcement have noted the steady increase in the availability of these pills on the streets and the dramatic upsurge in their use among our young people. No longer is there just a steady rise. Our communities are literally flooded and the trends of barbiturate abuse have reached epidemic proportions.”
—In Los Angeles in 1970, 971 people died from barbiturate causes, almost four times as many deaths as those related to heroin. Many, of course, were suicides. But many others were not. Also in Los Angeles in 1970, more than 6 million illegal barbiturate doses were seized by police.
—In numerous American cities barbiturates were either the principal cause or a contributing factor in an estimated one-third of major traffic accidents. “It is impossible to tell how many innocent people are killed in car wrecks by kids driving around with their heads full of sleeping pills,” said one officer. “But there would have to be thousands.”
—In Little Rock a federal district attorney reported alarming increases in the number of youngsters who inject, rather than swallow, barbiturates into their veins—causing not only a faster “rush,” but a coincidental number of gangrene and amputation cases. The pattern was noticed elsewhere in the country.
—In Santa Fe, New Mexico, with a population of only 40,000 people, less than East Meadow, there was one death from drug causes every three days in 1971, more from barbiturates than heroin. The youngest death in Santa Fe that year was a baby who, thirty days after its delivery from a barbiturate-addicted mother, went into violent convulsions and died.
Barbiturate is the family name given to drugs whose ingredients include barbituric acid and whose purpose is to depress the central nervous system. This family has two branches, sedative-hypnotics and tranquilizers. A close relative is alcohol, the most widely abused depressant of all. Indeed, it is difficult to distinguish between a drunk and a barbiturate addict because both behave in the same manner. “Barb heads are the sloppiest freaks I encounter,” says one caseworker in a Nassau County drug clinic. “They’re always bumping into things, crashing their cars, falling down on the sidewalk, getting into fights. Same as mean old drunks.”
In the sedative-hypnotic branch, there are many valid, historic medical uses for barbiturates, ranging from the long-duration types such as phenobarbital, often administered in the treatment of convulsive disorders and high blood pressure, to ultra-short-acting ones such as thiopental, which are used by doctors as intravenous anesthetics of brief duration.
The branch of the barbiturate family most favored on the street is the kind known as short- or intermediate-acting. The three most popular in this group, their trade names as familiar as breakfast cereals to a good percentage of America’s young, are secobarbital, which Eli Lilly & Co. manufactures under the brand name Seconal; pentobarbital, which Abbott makes under the brand name Nembutal; and amobarbital, which Lilly puts out under the name Amytal.
Here, then, was one reason why the barbiturate story did not crackle across the public conscience so rapidly in recent years as did the tales of other drugs. Barbiturates are not grown like marijuana on the sunny mountain slopes of Mexico and brought across the Rio Grande; neither are they born in the opium poppy of Turkey and shipped to clandestine laboratories in Marseilles or Beirut for conversion to heroin and put in the false bottoms of suitcases to slip past customs in New York; nor are they cooked up by a college chemistry dropout in a Haight-Ashbury kitchen.
Barbiturates rarely have sinister parentage. They are, in fact, usually pure, carefully produced products of great American industry. They are enormous profit items for distinguished pharmaceutical houses. They account for 20 percent of all prescriptions written in the United States in 1971. They are supposed to be obtained only by doctor’s prescription, sold only by pharmacists, kept under lock and key until dispensed.
But somewhere, somehow, something went awry because in 1970 the drug houses of America, according to President Nixon in a speech before the AMA, churned out five billion barbiturate pills. Of these almost half, enough to put the entire country to sleep forever, were unaccounted for and were presumably distributed on the street.
An angry man named Eugene Gallegos testified on May 3, 1972, before the Bayh committee. He introduced himself as an attorney from Santa Fe. As a director of that city’s St. Vincent’s Hospital, and of El Vicio, a drug treatment and rehabilitation center, he possessed sophisticated firsthand knowledge of barbiturate use among the young.
After revealing his city’s unpleasant barbiturate statistics—a drug-related death every three days, 40,000 illegal pills flooding Santa Fe every few weeks—attorney Gallegos laid blame at some powerful doorsteps:
In my judgment, it would make little sense to concentrate efforts toward the arrest of the disorganized “nickel and dime” dealers in secobarbital, those who are addicts or users themselves. We have staggering rates of unemployment … in Santa Fe and throughout New Mexico, and the supply of potential dealers necessarily is a large one.
I believe we should identify and stop the major suppliers of, and profiteers from, the illicit barbiturate traffic. As an initial step in confronting the problem, we should identify those who profit most from black-market sale of barbiturates. In my judgment, those profiting most … are not Turkish farmers, corrupt communist politicians, or the Mafia.
On the contrary, those profiting … are an otherwise respected, successful, powerful group—the American pharmaceutical corporations who simply must know what they are doing, and know the ugly consequences of their over-production.
From my contacts, I am advised that it is all too easy for pharmaceutical manufacturers to overproduce vastly the legitimate market for barbiturates, and to “dump” their excess production into the hands of irresponsible drug buyers outside the U.S. Questionable pharmaceutical operators in Mexico evidently have played this role vis-à-vis the Southwest, purchasing great supplies of barbiturates “legally” from American manufacturers, and then routing them back into the Southwest black market through Juárez and El Paso, and Tijuana and Los Angeles.
As indicated, I am not moved by the familiar protests of either innocence or unawareness by spokesmen for the pharmaceutical industry.…
I also am not moved by the laxity shown by the U.S. Justice Department in giving the black-market barbiturate problem sufficient recognition and priority, in informing the public, and in providing leadership in seeking solutions. In my opinion, this implies the potency of that industry’s political contributors and lobbyists.
Narcotics officers on both federal and state levels would have agreed with attorney Gallegos on several of his points. That the pharmaceutical houses are powerful in Washington is undeniable. Not only are they generous contributors to campaign war chests, their lobby ranks in prestige and influence right alongside the gun and labor interests. That a substantial percentage of United States-manufactured barbiturates are shipped to buyers outside th
e country who in turn smuggle them back into America for street sale is also well known. Mexico has been a popular way station for American pills, because it has far less stringent laws relating to regular purchase of drugs.
The drug corporations sent their presidents and counsels to Washington for testimony before the Bayh committee and each predictably insisted that their security regulations rivaled those of a missile site. Many stated that, alarmed at illegal barbiturate traffic, they were no longer exporting barbiturates to foreign countries and that their domestic policing of the pills was being tightened in every sector. Well and good. But, significantly, most opposed Senator Bayh’s bill that would put barbiturates under Schedule II of the Controlled Substances Act, moving them up a notch from the less severe Schedule III. Under Schedule II, which controls such drugs as opium, morphine, codeine, and the family of amphetamines popularly called “ups,” production and distribution of barbiturates would come under strict federal guidelines. These range from forcing drug manufacturers and wholesalers to keep such products in self-locking safes and vaults to insisting that doctors prescribe them only in writing and prohibiting refillable prescriptions. One drug-house president complained to the Bayh committee that if barbiturates were moved up to Schedule II, his company would have to construct the required security vaults and consequently raise prices—hinting darkly that the legitimate patient in need of barbiturates would have to pay the piper. Senator Bayh expressed no sympathy.
In the barbiturate matter, attention must be paid to America’s doctors. As skilled as they are, as technologically rich as they are, they overprescribe sleeping pills. A recent survey of New England doctors asked the question: “Do you think other doctors overprescribe barbiturates?” Two-thirds answered yes, they thought other doctors certainly did. A staff physician at New York Hospital commented, “Anybody who walks into his doctor’s office, in fact it doesn’t even have to be his own doctor, it can be most any doctor, and says he has insomnia and is under tension or is facing a job crisis and must get some rest, presto! He’ll have a prescription for secobarbital as fast as the doctor can write it. You can even ask the doctor to make it refillable.”
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