Richie

by Thomas Thompson

  There is a saying that medical students have fun with, one that seems to fit in here. “If a doctor had to depend upon sick people for patients,” the saying goes, “he’d starve.”

  The American Medical Association sent its representative to Washington for testimony before the Bayh committee. He was Dr. Henry Brill, a proper, carefully spoken physician whose credentials included being a director of Pilgrim State Hospital on Long Island, New York, and a member of the AMA’s Committee on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence.

  Dr. Brill agreed that “drug abuse and drug dependency in this country represent a serious and growing problem … of such proportion as to represent a major public health problem.”

  But his succeeding remarks were frankly astonishing to those who would seek at least to slow down the flood of downs washing across America. Dr. Brill pointed out that barbiturates have a wide number of legitimate medical uses and that many patients require them. That remark goes without contention. He went on to say, however, that if the federal government placed such medication under the more stringent Schedule II, such action might not be a good idea.

  “To add to the present restrictions on barbiturates so as to reduce medical overuse would be a disservice to patients who need them,” said the man from the AMA. “Not only would it be more difficult to prescribe and administer such drugs in the treatment of numerous illnesses and disease, it would inevitably raise the costs of hospital care in direct proportion to the additional record-keeping and reporting that would be required of these institutions, where so great a proportion of sedatives are used in therapy.”

  This AMA statement should be dissected more carefully than a freshman medical student’s cadaver. Does any doctor or hospital encounter difficulty in prescribing and administering a drug such as Demerol, a pain-killer, which is on Sechedule II? Or even Dexedrine, a stimulant, also under the same strict housekeeping rules? As to the warning that charges would rise, this is a familiar bugaboo that the AMA has thrown up before. In opposing Medicare, they warned that additional paper work forced on doctors would drive up charges to the patient. Costs have indeed gone up, but rare is the doctor who, deep in his heart, now opposes Medicare. Most have been enriched by the federal program.

  Dr. Brill further aroused the Bayh committee with this comment:

  “Although we have no substantiating data, it is our impression that physical dependence is far less frequent with barbiturates than with heroin or other opiates, even among persons who take barbiturates chronically for medical reasons.”

  The jury is not yet in on exactly how addicting barbiturates can become, but there is little disagreement that physical and psychological dependence on barbiturates can be more severe than addiction to heroin. And that withdrawal from barbiturates is a trip more hellish and potentially fatal than any a heroin addict ever took. Even under hospital supervision, the barbiturate addict undergoes an excruciating journey of purge. Dr. Burton Angrist of Bellevue Hospital in New York has guided patients on such. On day one, the patient suffers tremors, shakes, a splitting headache not unlike a walloping hangover. On day two, there are generalized seizures. The central nervous system has become so depressed by the barbiturates that when it is suddenly deprived, it bursts through with a sort of cruption. On day three, hallucinations often appear. The patient hears people planning to kill him and he screams out his fear. Dr. Angrist once sat for hours comforting a patient who was being ravaged by an imaginary killer, an assassin who was whispering, “I’m going to hurt you and torture you and kill you.” On day four, confusion, anxiety, apprehension rack the patient. There are auditory-visual hallucinations. He sees enormous bugs creeping across his body. He becomes incoherent. But he is nearing the end now of withdrawal. If he does not suddenly spike a fever of 108 that can cook his brain and send him into fatal convulsions, he will complete the course. “I know of little in medicine that compares to this,” says Dr. Angrist. “It is sheer horror.”

  Dr. Brill, the AMA spokesman, also discounted testimony from district attorneys and narcotics officers who had told the Bayh committee of enormous seizures of illegal barbiturates in communities all over America. “The claim that billions of doses of barbiturates are diverted annually into the black market for street use, however,” said Dr. Brill, “has never, to our knowledge, been documented.”

  Maybe not billions. When numbers become astronomical, there is always room for error. But as long ago as 1967 the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs reported that 117,558,000 dosage units of barbiturates were “unaccounted for.” And the pharmaceutical industry, in 1971, manufactured 1,052,386 pounds of barbiturates, according to the BNDD. Of these, said its director, John E. Ingersoll, 73,000 pounds were exported, 130,000 pounds used in manufacture of rocket fuels, and more than 250,000 pounds, to use in industry catch-all phrase, were “consumed in wastage and additions to inventories.” How much was wasted, exactly what “wasted” means, and how much was added to inventories would be interesting disclosures, because a quarter of a million pounds of barbiturates is enough to make around two billion doses of sleeping pills.

  Dr. Brill’s position, one in which he has a large number of well-meaning allies, is that no amount of fright statistics, warnings, scary stories, and even tougher laws will do much to alter the attitude of the American young toward drug-taking. In the last half of 1960, when the glare of publicity and public attention was focused on the drug culture, its members multiplied in biblical proportions. What might help things more, claim all the Dr. Brills of the land, are massive educational programs for society as a whole, a turning around of the Madison Avenue pill ethic in which television commercials demonstrate a hundred times a day how to ease most any human torment by easy-to-purchase, easy-to-use, quick-acting potions, and—paramountly—studies into why youngsters pop pills.

  Valuable all, such suggestions. But to wait for them might be as tiring as to wait for Consciousness III to green America. A more immediate step would seem to be (1) stop making so many barbiturates, and (2) better police those that are made.

  As for Richie Diener, who lived in East Meadow, not too far from Dr. Brill’s own hospital, Pilgrim, just a few downs a week were sufficient. Here there can be no dispute whatsoever. He rarely had trouble getting them. If he could find the money, he could find the downs.

  Chapter Eleven

  Rarely did the Diener family take summer vacations, for the simple reason that whatever extra money was available usually went for items like the backyard swimming pool or a new animal or piece of scuba equipment for the two boys. But when Richie was sixteen, he and his little brother and George and Carol spent a summer fortnight in North Carolina, where Mr. and Mrs. Ring had moved in retirement. During the stay, Richie was well-mannered and polite, and he gave no hint to his maternal grandparents that there was trouble at home in East Meadow.

  On an early-evening stroll with Richie in some fields near his home, Ring gestured idly toward a weed patch. “That’s some sort of locoweed,” he said to his grandson, knowing of his interest in nature. “Farmers try to keep the cows from eating it because they act crazy.”

  “Is that right?” said Richie, busily making mental notes as to the exact location of the weed patch. That night he returned and harvested what he had quickly recognized as prime marijuana, already in flower, six feet tall, and ripe for drying and smoking.

  When he returned to East Meadow, the stash of grass turning from green to grayish brown in his suitcase, Richie could hardly wait to telephone around with news of his incredible fortune. Right away he dialed Sheila, his more or less steady girl friend at the time. Sheila, who lived with her divorced mother in a neighboring village, was two years younger than Richie and would date him for almost four years. She planned to be a nurse if she could get through high school, for her grades were as poor as Richie’s. Less than five feet tall, she had delicate features and enormous black eyes, “twice as big as they should be,” she always told Richie, “so they see twice as much as anybody
else.”

  Sheila listened appreciatively to Richie’s tale of the North Carolina discovery. His words were slurred as he spun it out.

  “Are you stoned now?” she said.

  “Can’t you tell?” he answered, making his voice dance like a violin string breaking.

  “On what?” she said.

  “On Grandpa’s grass. I told you.”

  “Just make sure it’s grass and nothing else,” said Sheila.

  “Don’t start on me.”

  Sheila often worried about Richie’s infatuation with downs and usually slipped it into their marathon telephone conversations each time they connected. Before the North Carolina vacation, she had threatened never to go out with him again if he did not renounce his pills. No puritan, Sheila smoked pot occasionally, but had grown both sick and frightened the few times she experimented with the pills Richie offered. “I can stop anytime I want to,” Richie had answered in response to her warning. “In fact, I’ll stop tonight.…” He giggled. “Because I don’t have any.” But a night or two later, taking Sheila to a rock concert, Richie popped reds again and fell asleep in the middle of the show, a considerable accomplishment in light of the decibel level.

  On the way home, Sheila had repeated a position Richie was weary of. “I don’t mind grass,” she said. “In fact, I dig it now and then. But pills are a scary scene.”

  “Look,” Richie said. “I do downs when they’re around. You don’t get hooked on downs, a person can’t become a pill freak when he does them as little as I do. I’ll never stick a needle in my arm, that should give you some consolation.”

  When he talked on the telephone, as he did the night he returned from North Carolina, Richie usually began his conversation in the kitchen, where the Diener phone was fixed to the wall. Then he would take the extension cord and move as far as it would go, either to the doorway of his room, or to the top stair of the basement, keeping his voice as confidential as possible. But Carol, working in the kitchen only a few feet away, could not help but hear snatches of conversation.

  She heard Richie’s brag about the North Carolina marijuana, and the next day, despite Richie’s insistence that she stay out of his room, she went into the paneled chamber of black light and dangling colored balls. She found a large plastic bag of what she could now recognize as marijuana. Into the garbage it went, Carol burying it at the bottom of the bag under eggshells and coffee grounds.

  To forestall a confrontation between her son and her husband when the loss was discovered, Carol told Richie that she had found the bag and thrown it out.

  “But it’s mine!” said Richie.

  “It’s against the law,” said Carol. From the start of this marijuana business more than a year ago when the call came from Camp Red Cloud Lake, she had left the warnings and the lectures up to George. Not only did she dislike having to discipline her son, she reasoned that with one parent taking a hard line, it was better for the other to keep the flame turned down as low as possible to prevent the kettle from boiling over.

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Richie, a comment he invariably used when the subject came up. Carol was weary of it, so weary that she almost flared at her son.

  “Of course I worry about it;” she said sharply. “I worry about it because I love you.”

  Richie cleared his throat by coughing several times. He spit phlegm into a tissue. The coughing was another sound Carol was growing accustomed to, and she suspected it was from his smoking pot. “Clamming,” the kids called it. When four or five youngsters were in Richie’s room and all started coughing at once, it sounded like a tuberculosis ward. Here was something a mother could safely challenge, a threat to her boy’s good health.

  “You’re coughing too much,” said Carol. “How can you smoke this stuff when you constantly scream at me about getting lung cancer from cigarettes?”

  It was true. On the family trip to North Carolina, Richie had fussed every time Carol lit a cigarette. Demanding that the windows be kept open so he could breathe fresh air, Richie kept up a running lecture on the perils of tobacco.

  Somehow, however, he drew a line between two different kinds of smoke. “Pot’s different, that’s why,” Richie answered his mother.

  Carol shook her head. It made no sense to her. “Maybe I could understand it if you’d only tell me why. Why do you smoke marijuana? What does it do for you?”

  How could you expect to understand, said Richie’s wordless glance. Carol would not accept his silence, no matter how it was decorated. She stood on the steps of his room, waiting for a reply.

  “Because,” Richie began, then, turning away so that his words were almost lost, “because it helps me talk to girls.” Carol was touched by the confession. She doubted if this was the principal reason, but there was surely a particle of truth there. Once she had seen a book in his room entitled How to Talk to Girls.

  When George came home, Carol told him of what she had done and of her conversation with Richie. Instantly he tensed and started for the boy’s room. “Wait,” said Carol. “Bring it up at dinner, gently.”

  When the meal was over, George sent Russell, the younger son, out to play. Richie rose as well, but his father stopped him. “Sit down,” he said. “Your mother told me what she found in your room. I think we’d better talk about it.”

  Richie stood behind a dining-room chair, drumming his fingers on its back. He gave the impression of being inside a soundproof chamber, that no words were going to reach him.

  “There are a few things I want you to know about your marijuana,” began George. “The first is this: it’s against the law. I don’t care if it’s good or bad or if it helps you talk to girls or makes you sing and dance. Dammit, it’s illegal! In this state, it’s a felony to possess and use marijuana. You are past sixteen now, and you are an adult in the eyes of the law. You get arrested with this stuff, and you get a permanent criminal record. Then you can’t become a doctor or a herpetologist or anything that requires a security check. Not even a cab driver can have a record. You certainly couldn’t become a forest ranger, because they check those guys out good to get a federal job.”

  George hoped he would touch a nerve here. Several times in recent months he had tried to rekindle his son’s interest in the outdoors. During one such conversation, George had spoken with deep conviction of his own unfulfilled desire to work as a ranger. Richie had seemed interested—so much so that George initiated the idea often. Rangers are set up for life, he said, “If I knew at your age what I know now,” George had said, “I’d become a forest ranger. These people make a comfortable living and they have a beautiful life. Very little pressure, out in the woods all the time. Usually the housing is free. You work for the government so the job is secure as long as you want it. And, who knows, the woods might not even be around too much longer unless kids your age try to protect them.” Richie had seemed impressed by George’s suggestion, enough anyway to tell his sophomore counselor at East Meadow High that he wanted to study conservation in college and was headed toward a career with the National Park Service. But that idea had flared and died and Richie did not respond when his father tried to resurrect it this dinner hour.

  George nonetheless warmed to his lecture. Point two. “And, even more important, you may be affecting your mind.”

  Richie looked up incredulously. “There’s nothing wrong with it. Can’t you read?”

  “The verdict isn’t in,” said George, his voice rising. “I’ve read enough articles by prominent doctors to say that it can affect your brain. It’s possible.”

  Richie shook his head in disbelief. He turned from the table.

  “I haven’t given you permission to leave,” snapped George. “I’ll tell you when I’m finished talking to you.”

  With a sigh of impatience, Richie stopped.

  “Has it ever occurred to you,” George went on, “that those places which have an open policy of marijuana, like Africa and the Middle East—well, just look at them. The people ha
ve no incentive, no ambitions, the countries make no progress. Isn’t there a lesson to be learned here?”

  For an instant, George thought he had gotten through, that he had scored a point. Richie seemed to be interested in this line of reasoning. But if he was, he only put the charge away in his head and returned to drumming the tattoo on the chair back. His face did the talking. Are you finished?

  George, weary, nodded. Richie left the room.

  That night, just before they went to sleep, Carol held her husband’s hand tightly. She could feel the tightness in him. Ever the peacemaker, she spoke softly. “I still think it’s just a phase he’s going through,” she said. “He’s experimenting with marijuana because the other kids are, and if we don’t make a fuss over it, maybe he’ll get tired of it.”

  “I hope you’re right,” said George. He was silent a long time. Then, just when Carol thought he had fallen asleep, he spoke quietly, almost to himself: “I just don’t understand why it’s happening here. To us.”

  There is a widely held theory among those who work with drugs and the young, as either police or therapists or doctors or educators, that the drug process is a cyclical one, faddish in fact, with great waves of favor for one particular substance moving across the country, only to be displaced in a year or two by a new one. East Meadow, like any community its size existing in the shadow of a great city, followed the course with predictability.

  Marijuana came first, in late 1963 and early 1964. History will note that two disparate events occurred during this period, and it is interesting to speculate if either or both were midwives to the birth of the grass culture. One was the assassination of John Kennedy, surely a President of the young. The second was the emergence of the Beatles and Bob Dylan as their troubadours, commentators, and prophets.