Drug addiction spreading

In the summer of 1886, one hundred years exactly before six American army helicopters and 160 troops would appear on a grim mission flying over the jungles of Bolivia – in 1886 then, a pharmacist in Atlanta, Georgia, put together a new and refreshing drink compounded of vegetable derivatives and a alkaloid derived from the leaves of a tall plant that grows wild in Bolivia. The plant is called coca, not to be confused with the cocoa plant.

So the drink was sold and called Coca-Cola. It was registered as a trademark in 1893. It quickly became a popular drink, especially among the teenagers who used the local drugstore or soda fountain as an informal social club. It was so popular that inevitably imitators appeared and cashed in on the original brand name by using either Coca or Cola in naming their products. The Coca-Cola Company started law suits to get a legal monopoly on the use of either word but it took 37 years – not until 1930 – before the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the, by then, common diminutive 'Coke' could be used only by the Coca-Cola Company. Alas, by then, also, Coke was being used generally for the variations. You might prohibit a company from using the word on a label or an advertisement, but no court on earth can limit the use of a spoken idiom.

Zipper, by the way, was coined by an American rubber company in 1913 for a slide fastener it invented for its overshoes. Other companies found other uses and, after innumerable law suits, the coiners of the name were allowed the exclusive use of the name on footwear, but by that time there was no other popular word to describe the thing itself, wherever it was used. The company gave up, one sorrowful agent saying or sighing, 'Zipper belongs to us all'.

One of the troubles that plagued the courts for so long in deciding to allow the exclusive use of the word Coke was that in the 1890s, the plant it described, coca, was the source of a white, crystalline alkaloid that had become among doctors a favourite local anaesthetic. That alkaloid is called cocaine. It was so used first in Vienna, two years before the Atlanta pharmacist used the leaves of the coca plant to make his stimulating, harmless drink. Am I saying that the original Coca-Cola contained cocaine? I am, but in microscopic amounts.

But once doctors started using cocaine freely as an anaesthetic, it came to the attention of large numbers of alert citizens that cocaine was also being used, here and there, by less civic types as an addictive drug. The popularity of the Sherlock Holmes stories didn't help. An aroused Congress passed a bill proclaiming cocaine to be an extremely dangerous drug. It was removed as an ingredient from the Cola drinks. It fell into disuse, so everybody believed, until, in the early 1920s, it came out from the evidence of several Hollywood scandals that cocaine addiction was, if not rampant, at least fairly common among movie stars. Two of them died of it.

Well, the alarm and the popular uproar died down. Forty years went by, by which time, in the early Sixties, the Beat generation appeared on the landscape – the western landscape first – and, by then, the target of high-minded citizens was marijuana among the young, and then acid, LSD, finally, throughout the Western world, among a smaller but more certainly doomed population of the young, heroin.

Not quite finally. For the past, I suppose, quarter-century, we've been hearing of daring or reckless addicts going along with speed, a heinous mixture of cocaine with heroin or morphine.

But in the past five or six years, this country has grown aware, with great reluctance, of the positive social plague of cocaine. Five or six years ago, we used to read, some of us to write, knowing if vague stories about the ring of multi-millionaire crooks in Colombia or Bolivia who were shipping cocaine into Miami and, by trans-shipment, into the big cities of the north. Out west they heard more about the transportation of cocaine by road or plane across the Mexican border into Los Angeles, for we assumed and for a time it seemed to be a fact that the use of cocaine had moved onward and upward from rock starts to the smartest parties in Hollywood and Beverly Hills. A scandal, indeed!

About two, three years ago, a very good friend of mine, a young man in his early thirties that I'd worked with on television, told me casually but with a strange seriousness that he would not be available for work or dinner or any other social engagement for the next three months. He was going off into a sort of retreat, he said, because he had started using the white powder at weekends on parties. He then mentioned to my astonishment that for the past 16 years, since he was 17, he'd been on drugs, on everything except heroin and cocaine.

Now I knew that after he graduated from his American university, he'd gone to Oxford for a couple of years and I said, 'Didn't you find that your habit was seriously frustrated when you went to Oxford?' I ought to say he was an excellent student, verging on the brilliant. 'Absolutely not!' he said. In Oxford and in several provincial cities he'd visited on holidays and in Geneva, in Paris, in Rome, it took no more than 48 hours to make a connection to buy the stuff, to meet regular users among students and other young people, to attend parties at which its use was routine.

Apparently nothing serious happened to him physically during his regular use of marijuana, acid, even sometimes speed, but he'd drawn the line at heroin or cocaine, both of which were also readily available. It was back in the States that, not at a wild party, but at the end of an editorial conference of a very reputable magazine he was employed by, he was first offered cocaine. It was a regular offering at the get-together which follows the always tense business of putting a magazine to bed.

Only he and a girl employee eventually turned the stuff down but before he grew scared, he told me there were even cosy dinners with two, three friends, no more, in which the menu consisted of wine and a plate with two or three packets of cocaine. He soon found that the weekend indulgence was not enough. He woke up thinking not of the magazine or a jog or the news of the day, but how to get to the white stuff. The high, the euphoria, of cocaine is very short-lived. Came the time when he found himself, as the addicts say, chasing the high, wanting to banish the following mild depression with more cocaine at increasingly shorter intervals.

Then he heard about this rehabilitation centre. He went there, took the cure and for the past two years has been, as they say, 'clean', which means not only that he doesn't use cocaine or any other drug, but that he's pledged to stay permanently off any other kind of drug, including hard liquor, wine, beer. The therapists at these retreats or clinics have found that once you're hooked on cocaine, any other drug, alcohol especially, can weaken your resistance. The danger you have to watch out for is called 'cross' addiction.

So it's a quite different new life that my friend is living – a life in which he has discovered, to his delight, that the best high you can enjoy is life itself, uncluttered and unnumbed by cocaine.

He's spent much of his time lately talking to schools, to high-school students in particular, in prosperous or comfortable neighbourhoods. For a time, like the rest of us, he thought that cocaine was a habit exclusive to rock stars, Harlem delinquents, swinging movie and television people. He found out that among the young, the most chronic addicts were children of the comfortable, the most outwardly respectable middle-class.

And here comes in the American passion for statistics which is sometimes comical but, in all serious matters, more and more jolts us with the brutal reminder that life is very rarely what we like to imagine it to be. The Drug Enforcement Administration, an independent agency of government has recently reported that drug addiction, most especially cocaine addiction, has penetrated and spread throughout the whole of American society. We used to say to ourselves in self-congratulation – I'm relieved to think that I don't travel in such circles.

Well, the circle embraces practically every known social and economic group. One-third of all American high-school graduates have tried cocaine. Wall Street, young prosperous yuppies, the staffs of magazines, the fortunate, we suppose, children of the country-club set, of course the rock scene, moviedom and, most dramatically publicised lately, professional baseball and football players who are now in a conflict with the commissioners over the constitutionality of being made to take drug tests, especially since the sudden death of a golden boy, a 22-year-old basketball wizard who had his first take of cocaine of great purity, went into convulsions and died.

At another time, I hope to go into the work of the Drug Enforcement Agency and its recent aerial raid – with the Pentagon's assistance – on the jungles of Bolivia to burn the cocaine labs in a province which is the heart of the drug country. Unfortunately, somebody in government, in the Pentagon or the State Department or wherever, leaked the word of the coming raid a week before it happened and the raid was a bust.

Meanwhile, 21 federal agencies and units of the army, navy, air force, marines and coastguard are mobilised to try and stop the northward flow by road, by boat, by air, of processed cocaine worth something on the street like $28 billion a year, five times the amount coming in only four years ago.

Of course, the more that comes in, the cheaper it costs and the demand is there. The great social problem is how to check or weaken the demand. So far, the best that has been done is a national campaign started by Mrs Reagan to instruct schoolchildren about drug abuse and to teach them to chant and believe in a slogan that says, 'Say no to drugs!'

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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