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relatives, or welfare programs). As Krogh readily admitted, the government had no empirical basis for
estimating the proportion of addicts who supported themselves through theft. If all the projected 559,000
addicts committed two or three burglaries a day, as President Nixon postulated, they would have to commit at
least 365 million burglaries a year. This sum would be two hundred times more than all the burglaries
committed in 1971 in America. (Nixon's speech writers apparently borrowed this particular hyperbole from the
rhetoric of Governor Rockefeller in New York State.)
In computing the costs of addiction to the rest of society, the administration's sharp departure from reality
proceeded from the myth of the vampire-addict that had been developed almost a half century before by
Captain Hobson. So long as it was assumed that all heroin users were ultimately transformed into fiends who
were driven by their insatiable appetite for the drug to commit any crime or take any risk to obtain enough
money to satisfy their habit, it followed that the total cost of their crimes could be computed simply by
multiplying the cost of their drug consumption by the number of addicts. Although such a model of addict
behavior became an integral part of television dramas depicting themes of' drugs and crime (partly owing to
the efforts of the Nixon administration), such dramatic stereotypes grossly oversimplified the behavior of most
heroin users. For example. a study prepared for the State of New York by the Hudson Institute on "The
Economics of Heroin Distribution" concluded that 39 percent of those classified as addicts were either "joy
poppers," "intermittent users," "apprentices," or addicts with otherwise "small habits." Less than one quarter of
those classified as addicts used more than $25 a day worth of heroin and were considered to have "large
habits." Moreover, the assumption that heroin users cannot work at legitimate jobs is questionable. Findings of
the United States Army in Vietnam showed that hundreds of thousands of soldiers were able to perform their
normal duties while using heroin (which is why the problem was not detected for three years). To be sure, a
large number of addicts are engaged in illegal occupations, but even addicts engaged in theft tend to avoid the
more risky crimes of robbery, mugging, and other crimes against persons. Instead they tend to concentrate on
such low-risk crimes as shoplifting, boosting (that is, stealing from parked trucks), or burglarizing abandoned
buildings. In a study of sixty-five active heroin users in New York City, Heather L. Ruth found that less than
10 percent of her sample ever engaged in robbery or mugging. Presumably, the reason why criminal addicts
avoid high-risk crimes against persons is not that they have higher morals than other criminals but that the
costs of being imprisoned and denied-their drug are higher than for nonaddicted criminals. Since from the
available data there is no way of knowing what proportion of heroin users support themselves through regular
or part-time work, welfare, or dependence on other persons, any crime nexus or calculation of the amount of
crime that addicts commit must be ultimately problematic.
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The Crime Nexus
The White House staff itself had little confidence in the huge crime numbers that were being supplied to the
press through briefing officers in the various agencies. For instance, a 1970 Domestic Council staff report in
Egli Krogh's file explains, "The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that addicts in the United States
commit up to five billion dollars worth of crime in the country." Krogh's staff estimated that in fact the figure
was "closer to one billion dollars," but explained that "the high figure of the National Institute of Mental
Health can be attributed to their desire to evidence need for treatment programs, thereby aggrandizing their
territory." In other words, Krogh and his staff presumed that the multibillion-dollar numbers attached to drug
crimes were simply a product of bureaucracy's attempting to excite the public. Nor was the Domestic Council
staff unaware of the fragile nature of the connection between heroin and crime. On March 19, 1971, the
Domestic Council decision paper, "Narcotic Addiction and Drug Abuse Program," drawn up by Krogh and
Donfeld, stated, "Even if all drug abuse were eradicated, there might not be a dramatic drop in crime statistics
on a national level, since much crime is not related to drug abuse."
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Private Knowledge
Agency of Fear
Opiates and Political Power in America
By Edward Jay Epstein
Chapter 23 - Private Knowledge
While the Nixon administration was operating on the public front to inject fear-provoking stereotypes of
incurable addicts into primetime television, to disseminate authoritative-sounding statistics suggesting that
there was an uncontrollable heroin epidemic sweeping the nation-,-and to inform journalists about the
$18-billion crime wave being conducted in America by new hordes of addicts, on the private front it was
receiving information from its own agencies which did not fit the picture of imminent national peril, and this
information was kept private. As early as December, 1970, an interagency committee on narcotics and drug
abuse composed of representatives from the Department of Defense, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous
Drugs, the Department of Labor, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Office of Economic
Opportunity, the Veterans Administration. and the National Institute of Mental Health reported to the
Domestic Council that "in terms of the size of the problem. for example compared to the problems of
alcoholism, mental illness. automobile injuries and fatalities, the problem of drug abuse is relatively small." It
further cautioned:
Hasty and ill-considered policies may not only be ineffective, but they may generate different types of
casualties and adverse consequences of the medical, social, and legal nature, such as loss of respect for the
law, extensive arrest records [for youthful violations] ... and accidental death and levels of dependence hitherto
unknown as a result, of leaks in widely dispersed or poorly conceived methadone maintenance programs.
Since there were then more than 9 million alcoholics compared to fewer than 100,000 known narcotics addicts,
the White House strategists agreed that the problem could not be presented simply in terms of a menace to
public health. A Domestic Council staff report on national drug programs was prepared in December, 1970,
with the assistance of the National Institute of Mental Health and other government agencies involved in
drug-abuse evaluation. It noted:
Alcoholism, though a much greater public health and safety problem than other forms of drug abuse, is not
perceived in the public and political minds as a great social and moral evil.... If the misuse of all drugs-illicit
drugs as well as alcohol and tobacco-was discussed in only medical and public health terms, the problem of
drug abuse would not take on inflated importance requiring an undeserved federal response for political
purposes.
This report further observed, "If the misuse of drugs is viewed with proper perspective, it is not in actuality a
paramount national problem.... However, because of the political significance of the Problem, visible,
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