The Addicted: Profile of a Young Addict, Part 2

[Music] having been so long familiar with the areas that it's sold in and i would be could be los angeles or detroit or pretty near anywhere i suppose i would just look for a certain neighborhood an area of that neighborhood you can feel it when you're there that was a drug addict talking this is one of the neighborhoods he was talking about in a moment we will watch an addict attempt to buy heroin here if he will be arrested for we are watching together with the police space unit base unit to remain on scene we'll tell you when activity picks up this is a drug addict on his way to make a purchase of heroin without his knowledge he's under police observation from a nearby truck base unit base your thought over there is a subject on the scene now his description is as follows he's male white about five foot six approximately 150 pounds he is fairly thin in his bill he's wearing a bronish jacket a light pair of trousers a gray hat straw hat turned down all the way around do you read me over do not leave your location as yet be in readiness do not leave your location as yet the conversation is still going on between the to tell you when they leave over they have the action the lesson is starting that's it you've picked up a cat space units are auto the subjects have split subjects have slipped all right otto slowly stop to cruise up the block he's going to turn he is going to turn east on yale street all right come up otto come up order and come let's go order let's go stations to order let's go water come out since the end of world war ii drug addiction in the united states has been on the rise according to the federal bureau of narcotics there are 60 000 addicts today some other estimates have run considerably higher no one really knows but we are dealing with a hidden population most of whose members remain underground unless they are arrested and sent to prison for more than 40 years now the use of narcotics except for strictly medical purposes has been illegal and the user of drugs has been a criminal almost by definition because the addict has lived in the shadows for so long because he has been intimately linked with crime and also because for many years the subject of narcotic addiction itself was considered unsuitable for general discussion an image of the addict is arisen that can be summed up by the words dope fiend how accurate is this image one way of finding out is by meeting a few addicts and letting them speak for themselves these are some of the people you will see during the next few minutes as we present excerpts from a number of filmed interviews all of them have been addicts for at least five years and all have served time and present the interviewer is a psychiatric social worker how long are you in prison carol um this time i was here for a year and a and a half how about the first few days out of prison are you afraid of getting hooked again sure not not really getting hooked right away but just starting again and we just there's no snapping until you get caught again and um it i don't know if you could just meet people easily or if there were places that you could go to or people that you could talk to without having to account you know for time and things like that it would be a little easier how have you been managing financially since you were released seven weeks ago well i started working uh two days after i came home and it was just uh as a vacation replacement very nice job and i liked it and i thought i would be there permanently and my father died and i had to give up the job and uh i've done you know a few days and i've had some friends who have helped me were there any other ways you might have gotten money uh well yes that i could have stolen well started hustling boosting you did that in the past yeah how come you didn't do it this time well i wasn't using snow i wasn't you know desperate i'm not that kind of desperate did that enter your mind uh at this of course it's like uh starting over again and then i can't do that unless i get high but um then that would really be the beginning you know i can only do one with the other have you ever boosted or prostituted when you weren't using drugs no no the entire life of an addict revolves around the pursuit and consumption of drugs he is rarely able to work and in any event most jobs will not pay enough to support his habit which may range anywhere from ten to a hundred dollars a day some addicts were undoubtedly criminals even before using drugs but no matter what his previous background sooner or later the addict probably will end up obtaining his money illegally the amounts involved are considerable jimmy how long have you been addicted to drugs well that'll be about 10 years about 10 years may i ask uh how much your habit cost daily on the average about 30 dollars a day and did you work alone well uh when i was posting shoplifting i had a partner i worked with we used to go to stores together and uh more or less a team you know we'd go to a store and uh there were certain things he had to do with certain things i had it doing was he a drug addict too oh yeah sure did he have a habit uh as severe as yours well though at that time uh our habits lent us about 30 a day of peace in other words between the two of you for drugs alone you needed about 60 a day yeah uh how much would you actually have to steal from department stores list by store price to net yourself 60 a day oh anyways from 180 around 200 200 a day yeah because uh we'd get a third of uh the value of uh the merchandise otherwise this is about fourteen hundred dollars a week since he used drugs every day yeah although the department stores are closed on sundays uh this is about seventy thousand dollars a year yeah and in ten years it's very close to three quarters of a million dollars sounds like a lot but you figure it like that it is a senate investigating committee has reported that narcotic addiction and the illicit drug trafficking account for one quarter of all the nation's crime and for one half of the crime in our major cities these are largely petty crimes crimes against property rather than against person whatever else he may be and do the addict does not conform to the popular notion of the dope fiend violence sex crimes murder these are not consistent either with his personality or with the chemical effect of the drug itself as it spreads through his body after an injection you are at ease the last thing you want to do is get up out of the chair you're in so certainly you would not entertain anything that resembled anything of the violence that's attributed to us uh i myself one thing i'll do violently when it comes to drug is run either away from the police or to a connection or to a place where i can use it that's the height of violence uh to hurt people to inflict any sort of injury on anyone other than closest to us by depriving them of something they need materially is about the extent of it we we do hurt people we punish them by punishing ourselves but uh no mr violence is a myth do you sometimes fall asleep after taking a shot it's one of the goals it's not asleep actually it's what we call on the nod which is sort of uh somewhat comatose state where we are that would be it that would be the height that we could reach or the depth take your choice uh you know we do this to rid ourselves of all activity spiritually physiological every other way so what would be the purpose of using drugs were to make us stimulated quite the country we are depressed and that's what we seek from the point of view of society then would you feel that alcohol for example which is quite legal is more dangerous than heroin and then speaking of violence and crimes now uh i don't want to uh cast any stones but i would say that the alcoholic is or put an alcoholic in the car and he's got a 3 000 pound weapon all the drug addict wants to do is get in the corner somewhere he don't want to even be involved with anyone once he gets that shot he is out of the way so to speak he is disposed of it's the same thing it's like taking a formula it's like just living in a crib and when you wake up you have your bottle and go back to sleep and then maybe an hour or two you'd play which would be the equivalent of going out or going to a flick or something like that and then more formula and some more sleep it's just being just like a baby in a crib it's not doing anything but just uh sleeping and uh gratifying yourself medically agree that heroin the drug used by an overwhelming majority of addicts is a sedative and that addicts themselves are mostly passive people seeking an escape from anxiety and from the problems of living they're representatives of all social and economic groups in the addict population however the majority of addicts at least of those known to the authorities are the products of poverty and of the urban slum one reason is that narcotics are more readily available in these areas it was a lot of stuff around and then uh you got to figure in a neighborhood like that a lot of drug addicts live around there because there's a lot of furnished rooms you know cheap apartments and the fellas that are from the neighborhood a lot of them will sell stuff you know to make money and not there's always a lot of junk around the neighborhood like that that's possibly why a lot of these young kids are hooked you know or fool around with stuff because it's very easy to get no problem availability is one element but equally important is the fact that slum conditions create stress making their populations more vulnerable to the appeal of a chemical escape family life i guess it was the best that they could give me but that was very little it was no real family life and am i coming up was left pretty much up to me i was left to drift in the streets and do everything the fellas in the street did who are your heroes when you're a teenager they were the guys around who had cars always had money to spend never had to work might what they did they may have taken numbers or something like that maybe they were selling the reefers i had the after-hour joints and things like that to me that was a big deal and you grew up wanting the same thing when you want a cadillac you want to own a house but you're not adequately prepared to do it in the right way so maybe you start writing numbers because nobody's gonna have any regard for your lack of education if you have money in other words and uh so as soon as you get those things well that makes you a respectable person in the community you can associate with anybody and you can feel just as good as they feel that's what more or less i think changed me to just well just got tired of just being discussed making 45 50 a week seeing fellows out there who weren't as intelligent i was and i mean illiterate fellows coming up from the south or from the west or where they came from and they're making 150 they're making two hundred dollars a week and they just had a lot the slum dweller in a large city where wealth is visible but opportunities are limited where there's a great gulf between desire and attainment life can be discouraging particularly if he's a member of a minority group what is like knowing that uh you're being discriminated against well you you feel as if you're powerless to do anything about it i mean you can strike that physically but and if you try to go about it in an intelligent manner it's still not accepted because you sit down and you interview me and you'll say yes fine fine and uh and you shake my hand and then you say well i'll get in touch with you you see me and if i i accuse you if i'm not like you but if i think that uh you being discriminatory i uh you look at me as if i'm foolish there's no discrimination you tell me yes maybe a white boy walk right behind me with maybe less qualification than i do and he'll be accepted for the job and things like that you can't reconcile you see now what can you do about it yeah that's that seems to me like the connection between situations and drug addiction is is that you're faced with things that you can't do anything about and this seems to believe you well well like you were talking about uh this color thing this lack of education this lack of money all these things it seem like at the time possibly there's nothing you can do about them and uh for that reason drugs do seem to soothe things anywhere at least make you better prepared to accept them you can accept them in a better vein psychiatrists psychologists sociologists all look upon drug addiction as a symptom of disease of individual maladjustment and of social and economic disorder yet our attitude has been to treat the problem as if it were primarily a moral one a vice from which the addict can be broken if he is dealt with severely enough perhaps the clearest indication of this is the example of the addict who wants to stop using drugs to withdraw even if only temporarily in the two federal narcotics hospitals the process of readjusting the addict's body to being without drugs is accomplished under medical supervision and is relatively painless but in the addict's home community treatment facilities are almost non-existent if he wants to kick his habit the chances are he will have to apply for admission not to a hospital but to a prison [Music] here he will go through the same procedure that he would if he were charged with a crime his name will be entered on the police record turn your pockets inside out bend over did you have your last job and we'll be searched photographed [Music] and fingerprinted and then he will be placed in a set or if he is lucky in a ward to undergo [Music] [Music] withdrawals this is the manhattan house of attention four men commonly known as the tombs this is a 12th floor where the self-committed drug addicts are kept in the city of new york we have no other facilities for self-committed drug addicts this is our infirmary it's quite limited we have no doctors or nurses here at night it's strictly cold turkey [Music] [Music] oh [Music] you ain't never been a drug addict i went through to withdrawal symptoms of cold taking and you don't know what it's like i've been using drugs for eight years and kicked 12 different habits that's even hard for me to put it into words for the first day it isn't too bad because you still have a shot in your system from the day before but going into the second and third day when you get about 72 hours and a real fun start you get the sweats you can't lay still you're puking you can't keep water on your stomach you can't keep nothing down you're just in complete misery it's hard to explain and uh you feel like you just want to try yourself i don't want to kill yourself people have already done that too one friend of mine hung himself another friend cut his wrist it's a bad thing going through with you also this commissioner of correction of the city of new york and prior to that i was judged in the criminal court for some 20 years as a consequence i am familiar with the problem of drug addiction not only in new york but all over the country drug addicts consume a great deal of the energies and facilities of the courts and prisons in new york alone a little under half of the male sentenced prisoners have a history of addiction and more than half of the women the addict who leaves an institution is not in an enviable position he's probably penniless most employers will not hire him most social agencies will not handle him most doctors will not treat him his family may reject him and most respectable people will misunderstand him fear him and despise him it is hardly surprising that he keeps returning to the one place where he finds acceptance and an easy solution to his problems drugs in spite of over 40 years of increasingly punitive measures we're confronted today with a costly problem and a growing one a great many solutions have been proposed ranging the permanent confinement of addicts to the legalization of drugs my own belief is that there's no single magical answer we're hardly at the point where we can think of the end what is needed first is a beginning as simple a thing as the creation of a climate of opinion that will encourage knowledge and research that will enable us to accept addiction as a medical social problem and a health problem not simply as a criminal problem and that will permit us to view the addict himself not as the current stereotype dope fiend but as a sick and cold human being you