Any history of drugs, substance abuse, alcoholism, smoking, and the political, legal, and social issues surrounding these topics must include a long list of women and men who have had a significant impact on that history. Some individuals have conducted research on these substances; others have advocated for or against their use; still others have devoted their lives to developing prevention programs or methods of treatment; and many have been involved in the development of local, state, national, or international policy with respect to substance use and abuse. This chapter provides biographies of a number of individuals, with a review of their contribution to the history of substance abuse, as well as a brief biographical sketch of each person.
Much the same can be said for a host of organizations that have been created to deal with substance-related issues. Groups such as the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, and Alcoholics Anonymous have saved countless numbers of lives, as well as helping to shape local, state, and national policies on substance abuse issues. Brief sketches of some of these organizations are also included in this chapter.
Al-Anon was founded in 1951 by Lois W., wife of Bill W., founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, and Anne B. The organization grew rapidly and was incorporated in 1954 under the name of Al-Anon Family Group Headquarters, Inc. The purpose of the organization was to assist family members in dealing with the problems they faced as loved ones of alcoholics. A year later, the group published its first book, The Al-Anon Family Groups, A Guide for the Families of Problem Drinkers. In 1957, a similar support group was formed for and by the children of men and women with alcohol problems, a group that was given the name Alateen. A year later, the board of directors of Al-Anon decided to establish an Alateen Committee and in 1964, a special staff person was hired to work with Alateen groups. Today, Al-Anon sees itself as an organization not designed to give advice or to work toward changing people’s alcohol issues, but as an opportunity for those whose lives are affected by alcoholism to share their personal experiences with each other. It has outreach programs not only to spouses and children, but also to parents, grandparents, and siblings of alcoholics.
Al-Anon’s regular magazine is The Forum. Since its founding, the organization has produced more than 100 books and pamphlets on topics such as Discovering Choices (book); Dilemma of the Alcoholic Marriage (book); Hope for Today (book); One Day at a Time (book); Blueprint for Progress (book); Al-Anon/Alateen Service Manual (booklet); When I Got Busy, I Got Better (booklet); The Best of Public Outreach (booklet); “Al-Anon is for Men” (pamphlet); “Alcoholism: The Family Disease” (pamphlet); “So You Love an Alcoholic” (pamphlet); “The Twelve Steps and Tradition” (pamphlet); “Alateen Newcomer Packet” (kit); and “Courage to Change” (CD-ROM).
Alcoholics Anonymous was founded by two men attempting to deal with their alcoholism, William Griffith (“Bill”) Wilson and Robert Holbrook (“Bob”) Smith. The traditional date for the founding of the organization is set at June 10, 1935, the date on which Smith had his last drink. Although the organization keeps no formal records, it has estimated that, as of January 1, 2016, it had 1,262,542 members in 60,698 groups in the United States, and 50,555 groups overseas, with 705,850 members. The total number of groups worldwide was estimated at 117,748. The organization is very simple in concept, with no membership dues or requirements, other than the desire to quit drinking. It is perhaps best known for its twelve-step program for dealing with problems of alcoholism.
Among its more than 150 books, pamphlets, guides, and other materials are Alcoholics Anonymous (book); Experience, Strength, and Hope (book); Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions (book); As Bill Sees It (book); Living Sober (book); Young People and A.A. (book); “44 Questions” (pamphlet); “Do You Think You’re Different?” (pamphlet); “A.A. and the Armed Services” (pamphlet); “A Newcomer Asks” (pamphlet); “A.A. and the Gay/Lesbian Alcoholic” (pamphlet); and Box 459 (newsletter).
During the 1960s, Alpert was involved in research on psychoactive substances at Harvard University, along with his good friend and colleague Timothy Leary. He later spent time studying spiritualism in India and devoted the greatest part of his life to studying and teaching about this subject in the United States.
Richard Alpert was born on April 6, 1931, in Newton, Massachusetts. His father was a prominent attorney; president of the New York, New Haven, and Hartford railroad; and a founder of Brandeis University and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. Alpert received his BA from Tufts University, his MA in motivation psychology from Wesleyan University, and his PhD in human development from Stanford University. He then accepted a teaching and research post in the Department of Social Relations and the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University. While at Harvard, he met Timothy Leary, from whom he learned about the psychoactive effects of a number of substances. Between 1960 and 1961, Alpert and Leary began a series of experiments on psilocybin, using graduate students at their subjects. The direction of these experiments was sufficiently troubling to Harvard administrators that both men were dismissed from their academic positions. That move was of little concern to Alpert, who later said that he had already become disillusioned with academics as a “meaningless pursuit.”
In 1967, Alpert traveled to India, where he met his spiritual teacher, Neem Karoli Baba, and received his new name, Ram Dass, or “servant of God.” He has spent the rest of his life studying a variety of spiritualistic philosophies, including Hinduism, karma, yoga, and Sufism. He is probably best known today not for his early studies of psychoactive substances, but for his 1971 book, Be Here Now. His other publications include The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead (with Leary and Ralph Metzner); Doing Your Own Being (1973); The Only Dance There Is (1974); Journey of Awakening: A Mediator’s Guidebook (1978); Compassion in Action: Setting Out on the Path of Service (with Mirabai Bush; 1991); Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing and Dying (2000); Paths to God: Living The Bhagavad Gita (2004); Be Love Now (with Rameshwar Das; 2010); and Polishing the Mirror: How to Live from Your Spiritual Heart (with Rameshwar Das; 2013). In 1997, Alpert suffered a stroke that paralyzed the right side of his body and left him with Broca’s aphasia, a brain condition that makes speech difficult. Nonetheless, he continues to write, teach, and lecture, as his condition permits.
The American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) had its origins in the early 1950s, largely through the efforts of Dr. Ruth Fox, who initiated a series of meeting with fellow physicians interested in the research and clinical aspects of alcoholism and its treatment. In 1954, this group formalized its existence by creating the New York Medical Society on Alcoholism (NYMSA). The organization’s work was funded primarily by the U.S. Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration, predecessor of today’s Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). In 1967, NYMSA decided to extend its work nationwide and changed its name to the American Medical Society on Alcoholism (AMSA).
As interest in medical aspects of drug abuse and addiction grew in the 1970s, a second organization began operation in California, the California Society for the Treatment of Alcoholism and Other Drug Dependencies (CSTAODD), expanding traditional alcohol treatment programs to include those dependent on or addicted to drugs. Over time, the two groups at opposite ends of the country, AMSA and CSTAODD, began to collaborate with each other, eventually leading to their union in 1983 under AMSA’s name. In 1988, AMSA was accepted by the American Medical Association (AMA) as a national medical specialty society and adopted its present name of the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM). Today, the organization consists of more than 3,200 physicians and related health providers interested primarily in issues of substance abuse. It has state chapters in 36 states and the District of Columbia, along with regional chapters in northern New England and the Northwest that include states that do not have their own separate chapters.
The work carried out by ASAM can be divided into four major categories: education, advocacy, research and treatment, and practice support. The organization’s education component is designed to provide physicians and other health care workers with the most up-to-date information on basic issues in addiction treatment. In 2015, for example, ASAM offered a review course in addiction medicine and courses on buprenorphine treatment, state-of-the-art in addiction medicine, and opioid risk evaluation and mitigation strategies. The advocacy element in ASAM’s program is aimed at influencing state and federal policies involving substance abuse to reflect the organization’s goals and objectives. Some examples of the types of action it has taken include pushing for insurance coverage of mental health and addiction disorders, working for the repeal of alcoholism exclusions in insurance policies, expanding treatment for substance abuse among veterans, and regulating the sale of tobacco and alcohol to minors.
The research and treatment feature of ASAM’s work aims to provide health care providers with a wide range of informational materials on all aspects of addiction and substance abuse. Some of the materials it provides are a Common Threads Conference on Pain and Addiction; clinical updates from the International Association for the Study of Pain; a joint statement on pain and addiction from the American Pain Society, the American Academy of Pain Medicine, and the American Society of Addiction Medicine; and a variety of publications on prescription drug abuse from federal agencies. The area of practice support is designed to provide materials that will help addiction physicians and other providers with the best available information about best practices in the field of addiction medicine. These materials include guidelines and consensus documents, such as the National Practice Guideline for Medications for the Treatment of Opioid Use Disorder; “how to’s” and practice resources, such as the Drug Enforcement Administration document, “How to Prepare for a DEA Office Inspection”; standards and performance measures, such as the ASAM Standards of Care for the Addiction Specialist Physician Document; and “ASAM Criteria,” a comprehensive set of guidelines for placement, continued stay, and transfer/discharge of patients with addiction and co-occurring conditions.
ASAM produces and provides a wide variety of print and electronic publications for the addiction physician and health care worker, such as the books Principle of Addiction Medicine and The ASAM Essentials of Addiction Medicine; Journal of Addiction Medicine, the association’s official peer-reviewed journal; ASAMagazine, a publication containing news and commentary; and “ASAM Weekly,” an online publication intended for both members and nonmembers who are interested in issues of addiction medicine.
Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights (ANR) was founded in 1976 for the purpose of protecting nonsmokers from the hazards posed by secondhand cigarette smoke, to prevent young people from becoming addicted to tobacco products, and to act as a counterforce to the tobacco industry in efforts to reduce the use of tobacco products in the United States. The organization is primarily member-supported and works to support all types of regulation of secondhand smoke, including voluntary, legislative, and regulatory policies. It also works to support legislative and regulatory efforts to limit the influence of the tobacco industry in the development of national policies on smoking and tobacco use. ANR’s sister organization, the American Nonsmokers’ Rights Foundation, was founded in 1982 to develop programs for school-age youth on the importance of smoke-free spaces in American society. The organization publishes a quarterly newsletter, UPDATE!, and has available on its website numerous fact sheets on topics such as secondhand smoke; economic impact of secondhand smoke; ventilation; preemption by the tobacco industry; going smoke-free at home, work, and in the community; smoke-free travel; legal issues; and target populations.
Americans for Safe Access (ASA) calls itself the “largest national member-based organization of patients, medical professionals, scientists and concerned citizens promoting safe and legal access to cannabis for therapeutic use and research.” The organization has more than 30,000 members and chapters in 40 states. Founded in 2002, ASA lists a number of important accomplishments in its brief history, including organizing legal support for more than 30 individuals being accused of illegal marijuana use, conducting training tours on individual rights in the field of medical marijuana, organizing protest rallies against state and local actions against the medical uses of marijuana, filing suit against laws prohibiting the cultivation of marijuana for medical purposes, and working on the sponsorship of legislation to protect the rights of individuals who use marijuana for medical purposes.
On its web page, ASA has separate sections with specialized information about medical marijuana for medical patients, legal professionals, medical professionals, policy makers, and producers and providers. The website also provides news stories on recent events in the field of medical marijuana.
Anslinger was appointed the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics when it was established in 1930. He held that office for 32 years, one of the longest tenures of any federal official in modern history. He was consistently a strong advocate for severe penalties against the manufacture, distribution, sale, and use of certain drugs, especially marijuana.
Harry Jacob Anslinger was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania, on May 20, 1892, to Robert J. and Rosa Christiana Fladt Anslinger, immigrants from Switzerland and Germany, respectively. Upon completing high school, Anslinger attended the Altoona Business College before taking a job with the Pennsylvania Railroad. He received a leave of absence from the railway that allowed him to matriculate at Pennsylvania State College (now Pennsylvania State University), where he received his two-year associate degree in engineering and business management. From 1917 to 1928, Anslinger worked for a number of private and governmental agencies on problems of illegal drug use, a job that took him to a number of countries around the world. He has been credited with helping to shape drug policies both in the United States and in the foreign countries where he worked or consulted.
In 1929, Anslinger was appointed assistant commissioner in the United States Bureau of Prohibition, a position he held only briefly before being selected as the first commissioner of the newly created Federal Bureau of Narcotics in 1930. He assumed that post at a time when state and federal officials were debating the need (or lack of need) for regulations of hemp and marijuana. Both hemp and marijuana are obtained from plants in the genus Cannabis, the former with many important industrial applications, and the latter used as a recreational and medicinal drug. Historians have discussed the motivations that may have driven Anslinger’s attitudes about the subject, but his actions eventually demonstrated a very strong opposition to the growing, processing, distribution, and use of all products of the cannabis plant. He was instrumental in formulating federal policies and laws against such use that developed during the 1930s.
Anslinger remained in his post until 1970, staying on even after his 70th birthday until a replacement was found. He then served two more years as U.S. representative to the United Nations Narcotic Convention. By the end of his tenure with the convention, he was blind and suffered from both angina and an enlarged prostate. He died in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, on November 14, 1975, of heart failure.
The Association for Medical Education and Research in Substance Abuse (AMERSA) has more than 300 physician members from a number of specialty areas, along with nurses, social workers, psychologists, pharmacologists, dentists, and other professionals. The organization was founded in 1976 by members of the Career Teachers Program, which was then funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and the National Institute on Drug Abuse for the purpose of developing faculty members with special training in the area of substance abuse. Members of AMERSA have developed, implemented, and evaluated curricula, educational programs, and faculty development programs and clinical and research measures for substance abuse services and professional education, and have conducted research related to substance abuse education, clinical service, and prevention. AMERSA sponsors an annual conference on substance abuse education, provides a speakers’ bureau on the topic, and currently has a task force on physician education in the field of substance abuse. The organization publishes a quarterly peer-reviewed journal, Substance Abuse, and a regular newsletter, About AMERSA.
Bill W. was cofounder with Dr. Bob of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), an organization devoted to helping alcoholics attain sobriety. He had his last alcoholic drink on December 11, 1934, shortly after cofounding AA, and maintained his sobriety ever after that time.
Bill W. is the name preferred by William Griffith Wilson because it reflects and emphasizes the anonymity that AA asks of and offers to its members as they fight their battle against alcohol addiction. He was born on November 26, 1895, in East Dorset, Vermont, to Gilman Barrows Wilson, a womanizer and heavy drinker, and Emily Griffith Wilson, a strong-willed and abusive mother. His father abandoned the family in 1905, and his mother decided to do the same, choosing to study for a career in osteopathic medicine. Bill W. then became the ward of his maternal grandparents, with whom he spent the rest of his childhood.
After graduating from high school, Bill entered Norwich University, but remained there for only a short time, partly because of his shyness and lack of social skills, and partly because of his own misconduct and that of other classmates. It was during these years that he had his first drink, before rapidly becoming an alcoholic with many “lost weekends” in his life. He eventually was readmitted to Norwich, from which he graduated with a degree in electric engineering in 1917. He then served as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army, a time during which his drinking became even more of a problem. When he returned at the end of the war, he took a job in the insurance department of the New York Central Railroad, while attending the Brooklyn Law School at night. He earned his law degree in 1920, but is said to have been too drunk to pick up his diploma.
Over the next decade, Bill worked as a field investigator for a number of financial firms, traveling over most of the United States to complete his assignments. Eventually, his drinking problem became so severe that he was unable to hold a job and he was admitted to the Charles B. Towns Hospital for Drug and Alcohol Addictions in New York City. Bill experienced his first, short-lived recovery in 1934 when he met an old drinking friend, Ebby Thacher, and learned that he (Thacher) had become sober largely through the efforts of an evangelical Christian organization known as the Oxford Group. Bill’s own efforts to achieve a similar result failed, however, and he was returned to the Towns Hospital a second time. Finally, in May 1935, on a business trip to Akron, Ohio, Bill met another alcoholic who was going through struggles similar to his own, Robert Holbrook Smith (“Dr. Bob”), with whom he developed plans for a new group to help themselves and other alcoholics like themselves. That organization eventually grew to become the largest and most successful group for the treatment of alcoholism in the world. Bill spent the rest of his life serving in one role or another in AA. In 2009, Time magazine named Bill one of the 100 most important people of the twentieth century.
Bill was a heavy smoker throughout his life and developed emphysema in the 1960s, a condition from which he eventually died on January 24, 1971, while en route for treatment in Miami, Florida.
Boggs was a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representative from Louisiana’s Second Congressional District from 1947 to 1973. He was majority whip of the House from 1962 to 1971 and House Majority Leader from 1971 to 1973. In the years following the end of World War II, Boggs was one of the leading spokespersons for a more rigorous approach to sentencing for drug-related crimes. His position on the topic reflected that of many legislators, law enforcement officers, and members of the general public who believed that the use of illegal drugs had begun to skyrocket after the end of the war, and that some judges were treating the “drug epidemic” much too casually with overly generous fines and prison sentences. In 1951, Boggs submitted a bill to the Congress that dramatically increased the penalties for drug use and drug trafficking and, for the first time in U.S. history, applied those penalties equally to both narcotic drugs and marijuana. It also imposed mandatory sentencing for individuals convicted of drug-related crimes more than once. In 1956, Boggs also sponsored the Narcotic Control Act, which increased penalties even further.
Thomas Hale Boggs, Sr., was born on February 15, 1914, in Long Beach, Mississippi. He attended public and parochial schools in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, before matriculating at Tulane University, in New Orleans, from which he received his bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1934 and his law degree in 1937. He established his own law practice in New Orleans, but soon became interested in politics. He ran for the U.S. House of Representatives from the Second District of Louisiana in 1941 and was elected, but failed to receive his party’s nomination for the same post a year later. He then returned to his law practice in New Orleans before enlisting in the U.S. Naval Reserve in November 1943, after which he was assigned to the Potomac River Naval Command. He was discharged from the service in January 1946, ran for Congress again, and was once more elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. He served in that body until October 16, 1972, when he was lost on a flight from Anchorage to Juneau, Alaska, working for the campaign of Rep. Nick Begich. Neither the wreckage of the plane itself nor any of its passengers were ever found, and Boggs was declared legally dead on January 3, 1973, to allow the election of his successor, who, it turned out, was his wife, Lindy Boggs. Mrs. Boggs was then reelected eight more times, serving in the House until 1991.
The Center for Lawful Access and Abuse Deterrence (CLAAD) was founded in 2009 “to prevent prescription drug fraud, diversion, misuse, and abuse while advancing consumer access to high-quality health care.” Funding for the organization is provided by a coalition of about a dozen commercial members (pharmaceutical companies) such as Allergan, Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals, Millennium Laboratories, Purdue Pharmaceuticals, and Zogenix. In addition to its commercial members, the organization includes a number of governmental and non-profit organizations, including the Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies, Allies in Recovery, American Pharmacists Association, American Society for Pain Management Nursing, American Society of Addiction Medicine, American Society of Anesthesiologists, Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America, Drug Free America Foundation, Healthcare Distribution Management Association, International Nurses Society on Addictions, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, National Alliance for Model State Drug Laws, National Association of Attorneys General, National District Attorneys Association, National Family Partnership, National Governors Association, National Sheriffs’ Association, Northeastern University, and the 15th Judicial Circuit of Florida.
CLAAD activities fall into three major categories: policy leadership, information and analysis, and coalition building. Policy leadership involves the development of laws, regulations, and other provisions that ensure that efforts to prevent the abuse and misuse of prescription drugs are effective without impeding the access of individuals to the medication they need for dealing with their own real medical problems. Some examples of actions taken within this context include the preparation of a document titled “Abuse-Deterrent Formulations: Transitioning the Pharmaceutical Market To Improve Patient and Public Health and Safety,” which discusses the pros and cons of various ways of developing alternative drug formulations to achieve both drug safety and efficacy; federal legislative recommendations, a form of draft legislation that, “if enacted, would effectively reduce prescription drug abuse,” and that was presented to majority and minority staffs of the U.S. Senate Health, Labor, Education, and Pensions Committee in 2014; proposed draft legislation offered to the state of Florida as an aid for dealing with its prescription drug abuse problems; and letters to various federal and state legislators and agencies on specific bills under consideration at both levels for ways of preventing prescription drug abuse. CLAAD has also made presentations or attended dozens of meetings at which prescription drug abuse was being considered, such as the 25th annual meeting of the National Association of Drug Diversion Investigators, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Public Meeting on the Development and Regulation of Abuse-Deterrent Opioid Medications, the Partnership for Safe Medicines Interchange, the Generation Rx University Conference, the National Rx Drug Abuse Summit, and the National Sheriffs’ Association 2014 Winter Conference. All policy decisions and positions made by CLAAD are required to be approved by at least 80 percent of non-profit members of the organization.
Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America (CADCA) was founded in 1992 on the suggestion of Jim Burke, then chair of the President’s Drug Advisory Council, as a possible mechanism for dealing with the growing problem of substance abuse throughout the United States. Today, CADCA claims to be “the premier membership organization representing those working to make their communities safe, healthy and drug-free.” It works with more than 5,000 local communities to prevent tobacco use among youth, underage drinking of alcohol, and the use of illicit drugs. The coalition carries out its work in cooperation with about 30 partners from government, nonprofit organizations, the business world, and international associations and organizations. Some of those partners are the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Drug Enforcement Administration; and Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Justice, Labor, and State; National Institute on Drug Abuse; international drug prevention groups, such as FEBRAE (Brazil), MENTOR and SURGIR (Colombia), FUNDASALVA (El Salvador), SECCATID (Guatemala), ANCOD (Honduras), CEDRO and CRESER (Peru), and SANCA AND TASC (South Africa); the American College of Pediatrics; National Association of Counties; National Sheriffs Association; Students against Destructive Decisions; Consumer Healthcare Products Association; DIRECTV; Krispy Kreme; M&T Bank; the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; and Xerox.
CADCA offers seven types of core services to communities: public policy and advocacy, training and technical assistance, research dissemination and evaluation, special events and conferences, communications, international programs, and youth programs. In the area of policy and advocacy, the group works with its partners to promote legislation and rulemaking that promotes drug prevention efforts that it supports. Recently, it has encouraged members and the general public to write letters to members of the U.S. Congress in support of four pieces of legislation, the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act; Drug-Free Communities Program; Preventing Abuse of Cough Treatments Act; and Sober Truth on Preventing Underage Drinking Act. The CADCA training program has resulted in the training of more than 13,000 individuals from over 900 coalition members and over 150 coalition graduates from the organization’s year-long National Coalition Academy. The coalition has also conducted more than 1,200 technical assistance sessions for its member coalitions. In addition to the National Coalition Academy, CADCA holds three other major training sessions, the Mid-Year Training Institute, National Leadership Forum, and National Youth Leadership Initiative.
Some of the organization’s priority efforts are organized into ongoing events, programs, and campaigns on very specific topics. Some of the recent topics have been 17th Annual Drug-Free Kids Campaign Awards Dinner, Annual Survey of Coalitions, Drug-Free Kids Campaign, GOT OUTCOMES!, National Medicine Abuse Awareness Month, Tobacco Initiatives, and VetCorps. In connection with its efforts related to prescription drug abuse, CADCA has produced the “Prevent Rx Abuse” toolkit. The toolkit consists of four elements, the most basic of which is Prevention Strategies, seven methods of prevention that make use of access to information, enhancement of skills, provision of support, changes in access and barriers, changes in consequences, changes in physical design, and modification and change in policies. (Additional detailed information about the toolkit is available online at http://www.preventrxabuse.org/.)
The CADCA website is a rich source of reference materials on virtually every aspect of alcohol and drug prevention. These materials can be accessed by way of an interactive index at http://www.cadca.org/resources.
The primary element of the CADCA research function is the organization’s Annual Survey of Coalitions, which attempts to identify coalitions around the country and learn more about what they are doing to address substance abuse problems in their communities. One result of the survey is the selection of a handful of local coalitions that have been most successful in achieving position outcomes in their communities. These results are published in a publication called GOT OUTCOMES!
In 2005, CADCA began to expand its work to others parts of the world and has since that date helped to establish 130 community anti-drug coalitions in 22 countries, including most of Central and South America, the Cape Verde Islands, Italy, Senegal, South Africa, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Iraq, and the Philippines. The organization offers essentially the same training, research, resource, and other services provided to domestic coalitions.
A useful overview of the structure and work of the coalition is available in its “Handbook for Community Anti-Drug Coalitions,” which can be accessed online at http://www.cadca.org/sites/default/files/files/coalitionhandbook102013.pdf.
De Quincey was an English author best known for his autobiographical work, Confessions of an Opium Eater. He also wrote a number of other works, including novels, essays, critical reviews, and additional autobiographical sketches.
Thomas De Quincey was born on August 15, 1785, in Manchester, England. After his father died in 1796, De Quincey’s mother moved the family to Bath, where he was enrolled in King Edward’s School. He was an outstanding scholar, able to read Greek and compose poems in the language as a teenager. His home life was difficult, however, and he ran away to Wales at the age of 17, with the blessings and minimal financial support of his mother and uncle. Eventually he found his way to London, where he nearly died of starvation and survived only because of the kindness of a 15-year-old prostitute whom we now know of only as “Anne of Oxford Street.”
In 1804, he was found by friends in London and returned to his family, who arranged for him to enroll at Worcester College, Oxford. It was at Oxford that he first took opium, in the form of laudanum, for a painful and persistent toothache. He soon became addicted to the drug, an addiction that persisted to a greater or lesser degree for the rest of his life. He describes his years of addiction in Confessions, as well as its effects on his life and writing and his efforts to overcome his addiction. From time to time, he was able to withdraw from use of the drug but, a point noted by some of his biographers, the quantity and quality of his literary work suffered significantly during these periods of abstinence.
In 1816, De Quincey married Margaret Simpson, who was eventually to bear him eight children. She has been described as the “anchor” in his life, and, after her death in 1837, De Quincey’s use of opium increased significantly. De Quincey survived for most of his life after about 1820, partially through the financial support of his family and partially through his own literary efforts. In the early 1820s, he moved to London, where he worked as a novelist, essayist, translator, reporter, and critic. Publication of Confessions in 1821 essentially made his career as a writer, although he never again produced a work with such wide popularity. In addition to his opium addiction, De Quincey spent most of his life battling financial problems, and he was convicted and imprisoned on five occasions for nonpayment of his debts.
Biographers have noted De Quincey’s substantial influence on later writers and artists, including Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Nikolai Gogol, Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs, and Hector Berlioz, whose Symphonie Fantastique is reputedly loosely based on Confessions. The most recent collection of De Quincey’s works was published in 21 volumes between 2000 and 2003. De Quincey died in Glasgow on December 8, 1859.
The Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) was created in July 2000 as a result of the merger of the Lindesmith Center and the Drug Policy Foundation. The Lindesmith Center, in turn, had been formed in 1994 as a think tank for the consideration of alternatives to existing policies and practices for dealing with drug issues, while the Drug Policy Foundation had been established in 1987, an organization established to work for drug reform, largely through the provision of grants to advance further studies on drug policies. The DPA now claims to be “the world’s leading drug policy reform organization of people who believe the war on drugs is doing more harm than good.” The organization currently claims to have nearly 30,000 members, with an additional 70,000 individuals receiving its online e-newsletter and action alerts.
DPA organizes its work under the rubric of about a half dozen major issues: Reforming Marijuana Laws, Fighting Injustice, Reducing Drug Harm, Protecting Youth, Defending Personal Liberty, and Making Economic Sense. Each of these general topics is further divided into more specific issues. The Reforming Marijuana Laws topic, for example, covers issues such as developing a legal regulatory market for marijuana, helping individuals who have been arrested for marijuana possession, and providing information about the potential health and social effects of marijuana use. The topic of Protecting Youth is further divided into efforts to deal with drug testing in schools and zero-tolerance policy in some school districts, as well as providing information and materials on “reality-based” drug education. The Making Economic Sense topic deals in more detail with subjects such as problems of supply and demand for marijuana, the problem of drug prohibition and violence, and the economic benefits of legalizing and taxing the sale of marijuana.
An important part of the DPA efforts on behalf of marijuana issue is a series of Action Alerts, through which members and friends of the association are encouraged to contact legislators, administrative officials, and other stakeholders about specific issues of concern to the organization. During 2012, for example, the DPA sponsored Action Alerts on protection of medical marijuana patients directed to members of the U.S. Senate, a campaign to influence President Barack Obama to work harder to protection of medical marijuana patients, efforts to lobby members of the U.S. Congress to end criminalization of marijuana use and possession, and a campaign to encourage Congress to reduce federal sending on the enforcement of existing marijuana laws.
The DPA publishes a number of reports, fact sheets, and other print and electronic materials on the topic of marijuana legalization. Members receive the tri-annual newsletter The Ally, which provides information on the organization’s current activities and successes. Other publications include Safety First: A Reality-Based Approach to Teens and Drugs, a tool designed to help parents evaluate and discuss strategies for protecting teenagers from drug abuse; Crime and Punishment in New Jersey: The Criminal Code and Public Opinion on Sentencing, a report on the legal status of marijuana in that state; Drug Courts Are Not the Answer: Toward a Health-Centered Approach to Drug Use, an analysis of existing laws on marijuana possession; Overdose: A National Crisis Taking Root in Texas, a report on the growing number of overdose deaths in that state and the United States; Arresting Latinos for Marijuana in California: Possession Arrests in 33 Cities, 2006–08, a report on the special risk faced by Latinos in California for marijuana offenses; and Healing a Broken System: Veterans Battling Addiction and Incarceration, dealing with the special problems of marijuana use faced by veterans returning from service in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The DPA also provides an excellent resource dealing with drug facts on its website. Some of the topics covered on this page include fundamental facts about marijuana and other drugs, some new solutions for dealing with the nation’s drug problems, the relevance of federal and state drug laws for individuals, a summary of individual rights in connection with existing drug laws, statistical information about the nation’s war on drugs, and drug laws around the world.
The concept of an all-European agency to deal with the growing problem of substance abuse on the continent was first proposed by French president Georges Pompidou in the late 1960s. That idea languished for about two decades before it was raised once more in 1989 by French president François Mitterrand. Mitterrand suggested a seven-step program that would involve establishing a common method for analyzing drug addiction in the European states; harmonizing national policies for substance abuse; strengthening controls and improving cooperation among states; finding ways of implementing the 1988 UN Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances; coordinating policies and practices between producing and consuming countries; developing a common policy dealing with drug-related money laundering; and designating a single individual in each country responsible for anti-drug actions within that country.
Mitterrand’s suggestion led to a series of actions within the European Community that eventually resulted in 1993 in the creation of the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) under Council Regulation (EEC) no. 302/93. The general administrative structure was established the following year, consisting of an Executive Director, a Management Board, and a Scientific Committee. The Management Board is the primary decision-making body for EMCDDA. It meets at least once a year and is composed of one representative from each member state of the European Union, two representatives from the European Commission, and two representatives from the European Parliament. The board adopts an annual work program and a three-year work program that guides the organization’s day-to-day operations. The three-year program is developed with input from a wide variety of sources, including the general public (through the organization’s website). The 2013–2015 program focused on topics such as data collection, analysis and quality assurance; monitoring and understanding drug use and problems: key indicators and epidemiology; monitoring demand reduction responses to drug-related problems; monitoring drug supply and supply reduction interventions; monitoring new trends and developments and assessing the risks of new substances; improving Europe’s capacity to monitor and evaluate policies; and communicating the EMCDDA’s findings to external audiences.
The Scientific Committee consists of 15 members appointed by the Management Board for the purpose of advising the board on scientific issues related to substance abuse. The first meeting of the Management Board was held in April 1994 at its Lisbon headquarters, where its administrative offices remain until today. Much of the work of EMCDDA takes place within eight units of the Scientific Committee. The eight units focus on prevalence, consequences and data management; supply reduction and new trends; interventions, best practice and scientific partners; policy, evaluation, and content coordination; Reitox and international cooperation; and communication; information and communication technology; and administration. Reitox is the name given to a network of human and computer links among the 27 nations that make up the EMCDDA operation.
The EMCDDA website is one of the richest resources available on nearly every aspect of substance abuse issues in the world. It contains information on a wide variety of topics, such as health consequences (deaths and mortality, infectious diseases, treatment demand, and viral hepatitis); prevalence and epidemiology (general population surveys, drug trends in youth, problem drug use, key indicators, and wastewater analysis); best practice (prevention, treatment, harm reduction, standards and guidelines), Exchange on Drug Demand Reduction Action, and Evaluation Instruments Bank; drug profiles (amphetamine, barbiturates, benzodiazepines, BZP and other piperazines, cannabis, cocaine and crack, fentanyl, hallucinogenic mushrooms, heroin, khat, LSD, MDMA, methamphetamine, Salvia divinorum, synthetic cannabinoids and 'Spice,’ synthetic cathinones, synthetic cocaine derivatives, and volatile substances); health and social interventions (harm reduction, prevention of drug use, social reintegration, and treatment of drug use); policy and law (EU policy and law, laws, and public expenditure); new drugs and trends (action on new drugs); supply and supply reduction (interventions against drug supply, interventions against diversion of chemical precursors, interventions against money laundering activities, supply reduction, markets, and crime and supply reduction indicators); resources by drug (cannabis thematic page, cocaine and crack thematic page, and opioids and heroin thematic page); drugs and society (crime, driving, social exclusion, women and gender issues, and young people); and science and research (addiction medicine, neuroscience, and research in Europe).
Over the decades, the EMCDDA has produced a plethora of publications on virtually every imaginable aspect of substance abuse, including http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/attachements.cfm/att_136906_EN_TDAB11001ENN_FINAL_Web.pdf; “European Drug Report (2016)”; European Drug Markets Report (2016)”; “Drug Use, Impaired Driving, and Traffic Accidents”; “Hepatitis C among Drug Users in Europe”; “New Psychoactive Substances in 2015”; “Drug Related Infectious Diseases in Europe”; “Health Responses to New Psychoactive Substances”; “A Cannabis Reader”; and “Harm Reduction: Evidence, Impacts, and Challenges.”
Harm Reduction Coalition (HRC) was founded in 1993 by a group of drug users, advocates, and needle exchange providers. The organization’s goal is to challenge the persistent stigma on users of illegal substances and to work for reform of national, state, and local drug laws. HRC accepts as a reality that substance abuse is and always will be a part of human society, and that rather than working to completely eliminate this problem, governments should work to reduce the harm produced by substance abuse. The organization conducts most of its work through about a dozen specific programs, including the California Syringe Access Project, which promotes efforts to expand syringe exchange programs in the state; opiate overdose prevention projects, which provides educational programs in shelters, jails, treatment programs, and other facilities designed to serve substance abusers; Harm Reduction Training Institute, which offers training programs in Oakland and New York City for professionals and volunteers who work with substance abusers; and the Brick Rebuilding Project, which focuses on educating at-risk youth about the risks and dangers of substance abuse. HRC publishes a quarterly journal, Harm Reduction Communication, as well as a variety of brochures, booklets, pamphlets, videos, and posters in English and Spanish, such as “H Is for Heroin,” “Hepatitis ABC,” “Overdose: Prevention and Survival,” “HRC Hepatitis C Reader,” “9 Tips for Treating Hepatitis C in Current and Former Substance Users,” and “To Do No Harm.”
Harrison is probably best known today as author of the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914, an act that was passed, somewhat ironically, only after Harrison himself had left office. The act did not specifically prohibit any illegal substance, but it provided for the registration and taxation of “all persons who produce, import, manufacture, compound, deal in, dispense, sell, distribute, or give away opium or coca leaves, their salts, derivatives, or preparations, and for other purposes.” Law enforcement officers and the courts immediately began to interpret the law as restricting physicians from writing prescriptions for the nonmedical use of opiates, and they began arresting, prosecuting, and convicting individuals for such activities. To a significant extent, then, the Harrison Act marked the beginning of a national campaign against the use of certain substances for other than medical uses.
Francis Burton Harrison was born in New York City on December 18, 1873, to Burton Harrison, an attorney and private secretary to Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States, and Constance Cary Harrison, a novelist and social activist. He attended the Cutler School in New York City, and Yale University, from which he received his BA in 1895. He then earned his LLB at New York Law School in 1897. Harrison was elected to the U.S. Congress from New York’s 13th District, but resigned after one term to run (unsuccessfully) for lieutenant governor of New York.
After a brief hiatus in the private practice of law, he ran for Congress again in 1907, this time from New York’s 20th district, and was elected. He served for three terms in Congress before accepting an appointment as governor general of the Philippine Islands, where he remained until 1921. Following his service in the Philippines, Harrison essentially retired from public life, spending extended periods of time in Scotland and Spain. He returned to the Philippines on a number of occasions, however, as consultant and advisor, especially when the islands were granted their independence in 1934. Harrison was married six times, with five of those marriages ending in divorce. He died in Flemington, New Jersey, on November 21, 1957.
Hofmann discovered the psychedelic compound lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and experienced its hallucinogenic effects in 1943. He later studied chemicals present in so-called magic mushrooms also responsible for hallucinogenic effects and synthesized the most important of these, psilocybin.
Albert Hofmann was born in Baden, Switzerland, on January 11, 1906, to Adolf Hofmann, a toolmaker, and Elisabeth Schenk Hofmann. He attended Zürich University, from which he received his bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 1929 and his doctorate in the same subject in 1930. He then accepted an appointment as research chemist at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, a company with which he remained for the rest of his professional career.
The event in Hofmann’s life for which he is best known and that has now been recounted endlessly occurred on April 16, 1943. At the time, Hofmann was involved in a long-term study of some naturally occurring psychedelic plants, including the fungus ergot and the herb squill. He was working in particular with a chemical found in a number of these plants, known in German as Lysergsäure-diethylamid, and in English as lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). In particular, he was studying LSD-25, that is, the 25th preparation of the substance. During his research, Hofmann spilled a small amount of LSD-25 on his hands and, before long, began to feel mentally disoriented. After a period of time, he found he could no longer continue working and jumped on his bicycle to ride home. That bicycle ride, as Hofmann has recounted the event on a number of occasions, was such a bizarre experience that he thought for some time that he had perhaps lost his mind. After about six hours of “extremely stimulated imagination … a dreamlike state … and an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors” (as he later described the experience), Hofmann returned to normal, but with a desire to learn more about the compound he had discovered.
Much of Hofmann’s career was devoted to further studies of LSD and other psychedelic compounds, research that was supported and encouraged by Sandoz because of its potential for application in the treatment of psychological disorders. In 1962, for example, Hofmann and his wife traveled to Mexico to collect the psychoactive herb Ska Maria Pastora (Salvia divinorum) for study and analysis. He also identified the most important active agent in another psychedelic plant, the Mexican morning glory (Rivea corymbosa), a close relative of LSD, lysergic acid amide.
Hofmann retired from Sandoz in 1971 but continued a career of writing, public speaking, and participation in a variety of professional organizations. Perhaps his most popular book is his own account of his research on LSD and its psychedelic effects, LSD: My Problem Child (1980). Hofmann died on April 29, 2008, in the village of Burg im Leimental, near Basel, Switzerland, at the age of 102.
Hon Lik (also Han Li) is a pharmacist and inventor, known internationally as the inventor of the modern electronic cigarette. He pursued the concept of a tobacco-free cigarette in the early twenty-first century partly over concerns of his own high levels of smoking (two packs a day) and partly because of his own father’s fate, death from lung cancer arising out of his addiction to cigarette smoking also. Hon decided that there had to be a technical means for enjoying the pleasures of tobacco smoking without actually burning tobacco and producing the host of harmful components it contains. By 2004 he had developed such a device and applied for a patent for an “electronic atomization cigarette.” The device works by vaporizing a solution that contains nicotine and other components in a small cartridge. The user then inhales the vapor produced (a process that has come to be called vaping) to enjoy the stimulus provided by nicotine along with artificial flavors and aromas that have been added to the cartridge solution. Hon eventually received Chinese, European, and U.S. patents for this device.
Hon and others founded the Ruyan company in China to market his invention, which, at first, was a huge success (it being the only company in China to manufacture such a device). Before long, however, Ruyan’s business began to decline, a trend that Hon later attributed to resistance by Chinese tobacco and cigarette firms that worried about competition from the e-cigarette. Eventually Ruyan’s sales fell from a near-monopoly of the Chinese market to about 5percent. Throughout all his travails, Hon has remained optimistic. “From the day my invention worked,” Hon told a reporter from the French newspaper Libération in 2013, “where I could satisfy my nicotine without ruining my health, I realized that I opened a great debate. For my invention is a turning point for the hundreds of millions of smokers and for the future of the global tobacco industry” (in translation). Rights to the electronic cigarette are now owned by the British firm of Imperial Tobacco, although Hon has yet to see any royalties from sales of the product.
Hon Lik was born on September 26, 1951, in Shenyang, Liaoning, China. He attended the Liaoning College of Traditional Chinese Medicine, where he majored in pharmacy. After graduation, he joined the Liaoning Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine, where he focused on the study of the ginseng plant, a popular aphrodisiac. As a result of this line of research, Hon was able to found his own company, Chenlong Baoling Longevity Ginseng products, to patent and sell his discoveries. In 1990, he was also appointed vice-superintendent for technology development at the Liaoning Academy. In order to commercialize his invention of the e-cigarette, Hon founded the Golden Dragon company in 2005, where he served as chief executive officer until 2013. He then was appointed head of the Chinese Research and Development team of Fontem Ventures, a division of Imperial Tobacco focusing on the development and sales of electronic cigarettes.
Huffman is best known for having developed a group of synthetic compounds that produce physiological effects similar to those caused by Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the principal psychoactive component of marijuana. These synthetic cannabinoids are chemical analogs of THC; that is, they have the same basic structure as THC, but differ in groups that have been substituted on the basic molecule. The compounds are known by abbreviations such as JWH-007, JWH-081, and JWH-398, where the “JWH” part of the name are Huffman’s own initials. Huffman spent a significant portion of his academic career working on the development of these compounds, which are used primarily for two research purposes. First, they can be used to obtain additional information about cannabinoid receptors in the endocannabinoid system. (The endocannabinoid system is a collection of fatty acid derivatives that occur in animal bodies and the receptor sites to which they bond. The endocannabinoid system is implicated in a number of fundamental physiological responses, such as appetite, pain-sensation, mood, and memory.) Scientists now know that cannabinoids produce their psychoactive effects by attaching to receptor sites in the brain and peripheral nervous system, setting off a chain of chemical reactions. What they know relatively little about is the chemical structure of those receptors. The chemical structure of Huffman’s synthetic cannabinoids can be used to solve that problem by finding out which compounds (and therefore which structures) activate receptor sites, thereby elucidating the three-dimensional structure of the receptor sites. The second purpose of the research, arising out of these discoveries, is the development of new pharmaceuticals that can produce cannabis-like physical effects, such as increasing one’s appetite, reducing nausea, and treating glaucoma.
Huffman’s research has been enormously useful in providing researchers with a better understanding of the way the endocannabinoid system works. But that research has also gained a level of notoriety among the general public because of its use in developing new types of psychoactive drugs used for recreational purposes. These drugs are incorrectly known as synthetic cannabis when, in fact, they often consist of a mixture of traditional herbs with mild mood-altering properties (such as Canavalia maritima, Nymphaea caerulea, and Scutellaria nana) coated with one or more of Huffman’s synthetic cannabinoids. The resulting product may have psychoactive effects more than a hundred times greater than that of THC. They are sold under a variety of names, including Spice, K2, Chronic Spice, Spice Gold, Spice Silver, Stinger, Yucatan Fire, Skunk, Pulse, and Black Mamba. When they first became available to the general public, they were legal because they contained no THC or other banned substance. Over time, however, a number of states in the United States and countries around the world have banned products of this kind.
Huffman himself has spoken out strongly about the risks involved in using synthetic cannabinoids as recreational drugs. The compounds were prepared, he points out, for research purpose, and little is known about their general effects on the body. Indeed, public health officials have reported emergency room visits as a result of using Spice, K2, and its analogs, a fact responsible for most of the bans now being adopted. The problem is that most of the now-illegal compounds are still generally available on the Internet.
John William Huffman was born in Evanston, Illinois, on July 21, 1932. He attended Northwestern University, which granted his BS in chemistry in 1954. He then continued his studies at Harvard University, where he earned his AM and his PhD in chemistry in 1956 and 1957, respectively. At Harvard, he studied under probably the century’s greatest synthetic organic chemist, Robert B. Woodward. Huffman’s first job was as assistant professor of chemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He left Georgia Tech in 1960 to take a position at Clemson University as assistant professor of chemistry. Over time, he rose to the position of associate professor and then, in 1967, full professor at Clemson. He remained at Clemson until his retirement in 2005. He then continued to work at the university as research professor until he took full retirement in 2011. He also spent one a year as visiting professor of chemistry at Colorado State University in 1982. During his career, Huffman published more than 100 papers in peer-reviewed journals.
Among the honors and awards granted to Huffman have been a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Career Development Award for 1965–1970, a Senior Scientist Award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Clemson University Alumni Association Award for Outstanding Research Accomplishments, and Raphael Mechoulam Annual Award in Cannabinoid Research.
In June 2011, Huffman talked with ABC News about the dangers of synthetic cannabinoids as recreational drugs. It would make more sense, he said, to legalize the use of marijuana, which has been thoroughly studied and whose effects are now well known. “The scientific evidence is,” he explained, “that it’s not a particularly dangerous drug,” and, in any case, it is much less dangerous than the poorly understood and potentially highly risky synthetic cannabinoids.
Huxley is probably best known as the author of the novel Brave New World, which describes a world in which the state takes control of every aspect of a person’s individual life. He is perhaps somewhat less well known among the general public as an enthusiastic advocate of the use of psychedelic drugs, arguing that all of the world’s great beliefs arise out of hallucinogenic experiences of their founders and early disciples.
Aldous Leonard Huxley was born in Godalming, Surrey, England, on July 26, 1894. The Huxley family was then one of the most famous in Great Britain. Huxley’s brother, Julian, was an eminent biologist; his father was a successful author; and his grandfather, T. H. Huxley, had been a great defender of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, earning himself the accolade of “Darwin’s Bulldog.” After an early period of home schooling, Huxley attended the Hillside School before enrolling at Eton College. In 1911, he developed a case of keratitis punctata, an eye condition that left him essentially blind for more than two years and which, incidentally, disqualified him for service in World War I. When he recovered, Huxley enrolled at Balliol College, Oxford, from which he graduated in 1916.
After leaving Oxford, Huxley taught briefly at Eton and worked for a short time at a chemical plant in Billingham, but he was not very successful or happy in either job. It gradually became clear that his real career was in the arts, specifically, as a writer. He produced his first book of poems in 1916 (Burning Wheels), his first book of short stories in 1920 (Limbo), and his first novel in 1921 (Chrome Yellow). He was eventually to produce many more novels, books of poetry, travel writings, essays, short story collections, magazine articles, biographies, and plays.
Huxley may have been introduced to psychedelic drugs as early as 1930, although his first real experimentation dates to the 1950s. He is said to have taken his first dose of mescaline in 1950 and his first dose of LSD in 1953, after which he became a firm advocate of psychedelics as a key to out-of-body experiences that could be of enormous value to a person. He described and discussed these experiences in his collection of essays, Doors of Perception (1954), which was named after a book by William Blake and which served as an inspiration for the name of a rock band of the time, The Doors. He is said to have been a favorite writer of many hippies of the 1960s and a spiritual guide for other researchers in psychedelic substances, including Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. Huxley is said to have requested an intramuscular injection of LSD on his deathbed, a believer in the psychedelic experience to the very end. He died in Los Angeles on November 22, 1963, which was also the date on which John F. Kennedy was assassinated and C. S. Lewis died.
The International Council on Alcohol and Addictions is one of the oldest—if not the oldest—international nongovernmental organizations devoted to issues of alcoholism and substance abuse. It was organized in 1907 during the 11th International Conference against Alcoholism in Stockholm, Sweden. It was originally called the International Bureau against Alcoholism, and was formed because attendees at the conference realized that there was a need for a formal, ongoing, international resource of reliable information about the dangers of alcoholism. In 1964, the organization changed its name to the International Council on Alcohol and Alcoholism (ICAA), and four years later, it changed its name again, this time to recognize its interest in issues of substance abuse and addiction, to the International Council on Alcohol and Addictions. The ICAA’s main activity is its annual international conference, at which a wide variety of papers and sessions on alcohol and substance abuse are offered. It also offers training sessions for specialists working in the field. The council is also joint sponsor with the German Archive for Temperance and Abstinence Literature of the Archer Tongue Collection for cultural studies on alcohol, currently located at the University of Applied Sciences Magdeburg–Stendal, at Magdeburg, Germany.
Koop served as U.S. surgeon general under President Ronald Reagan from 1982 to 1989. During his tenure, he was a vigorous advocate for a number of public health programs, perhaps the best known of which was his campaign against smoking.
Charles Everett Koop was born in Brooklyn, New York, on October 14, 1916. He earned his BA from Dartmouth College in 1937 and his MD from Cornell Medical College in 1941. He then took a position at the University of Pennsylvania, where he held a number of posts over the next 35 years, including surgeon-in-chief at the university’s Children’s Hospital (1948–1981) and professor of pediatric surgery (1959–1989). In 1981, President Reagan asked Koop to become deputy assistant secretary for health in the U.S. Public Health Service, with the understanding that he would be eventually be promoted to surgeon general, a promise that was kept in January 1982. Koop remained in that position until almost the end of Reagan’s second term of office, leaving his post in October 1989.
Koop’s term of service as surgeon general was marked by aggressive campaigns on a number of public health fronts, smoking perhaps being the most notable. His first public action as surgeon general, in fact, was to issue a report, Report on Smoking and Health, that summarized the association between smoking and cancer of the lung, oral cavity, larynx, esophagus, stomach, bladder, pancreas, and kidneys. He used that report as the basis for a national program that he called the Campaign for a Smoke-Free America by the Year 2000. As an integral part of the campaign, Koop called for legislation requiring very specific notices about the health effects of smoking on all cigarette packages, legislation that was adopted by the U.S. Congress in 1984. In spite of pressure from tobacco-state legislators, Koop continued his antismoking crusade throughout his term of office. In 1986, he issued an important report on the effects of secondhand smoke, The Health Consequences of Involuntary Smoking, which demonstrated that secondhand smoke was not simply an inconvenience, but a quantifiable health risk.
After leaving federal service, Koop became president of the National Safe Kids Campaign, a post he held until 2003. He also accepted an offer to return to Dartmouth College, where he served as Elizabeth DeCamp McInerny Professor of Surgery at Dartmouth Medical School and senior scholar at the C. Everett Koop Institute at Dartmouth College. He continued to write and speak on a variety of medical and health topics, and was the author of more than 200 books and articles of such topics. Koop died on February 25, 2013, in Hanover, New Hampshire.
In his New York Times obituary, Leary was remembered as the man who “effectively introduced many Americans to the psychedelic 1960s.” He is perhaps best remembered for having coined the phrase “turn on, tune in, drop out.”
Timothy Francis Leary was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on October 22, 1920. After graduating from Springfield Classical High School, he entered the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he spent two years. He then transferred to the University of Alabama, where he also remained only briefly. He is reputed to have had disciplinary problems at both institutions, and did not receive his bachelor’s degree (in psychology) from Alabama until 1943. During World War II he served in the Medical Corps. After completing his studies at Alabama, he studied for his master’s degree at Washington State University, which he received in 1946, and then continued with his doctoral studies at the University of California at Berkeley, which awarded him his PhD in psychology in 1950. Over the next decade, Leary followed a somewhat traditional academic pathway, serving as assistant professor at Berkeley from 1950 to 1955, director of psychiatric research at the Kaiser Family Foundation, in Menlo Park, California, from 1955 to 1958, and lecturer in psychology at Harvard University from 1958 to 1963.
The turning point in Leary’s life came in August 1960, when he first consumed psilocybin mushrooms on a visit to Cuernavaca, Mexico. He later said that, as a result of this experience, he “learned more about … (his) brain and its possibilities … (and) more about psychology in the five hours after taking these mushrooms than … (he) had in the preceding fifteen years of studying doing research in psychology.” For the rest of his life, Leary devoted his energies to learning more about psychedelic substances and spreading the word about his discoveries to the world.
After his return from Mexico in 1960, Leary decided to incorporate his new passion into his research and teaching at Harvard. Along with his colleague, Richard Alpert, Leary enlisted prison inmates and graduate students in a series of experiments using psychedelic substances to determine how they might be used in the treatment of psychological and psychiatric disorders. The university was somewhat less than enthusiastic about Leary’s research and out-of-classroom activities, and it eventually terminated his contract on May 6, 1963, for failing to show up for his scheduled classes. Harvard also terminated Alpert at about the same time for providing psychedelic substances to an undergraduate in an off-campus setting.
After leaving Harvard, Leary and Alpert moved to an estate furnished to them by a wealthy admirer at Millbrook, New York. Although planned as a research institute, the facility soon became better known as a “hippie hangout” where all types of drugs were used. Over the next two decades, Leary fell afoul of the law a number of times, sometimes spending time in prison, and, on occasion, having to flee the country to escape prosecution and further imprisonment. During the last two decades of his life, Leary spent his time writing and lecturing. He was the author of nearly three dozen books, including Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality; Jail Notes; Design for Dying; Flashbacks: An Autobiography; The Politics of Ecstasy; High Priest; Confessions of a Hope Fiend; and Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out. Leary died in Los Angeles at the age of 75 on May 31, 1996.
Loewi was a German physician and pharmacologist who discovered that nerve messages are transmitted between neurons by means of specific chemicals, now known as neurotransmitters. Loewi gave to the first of the chemicals of this type that he discovered the name Vagusstoff (“vagus material”). The substance was later shown to be acetylcholine, one of the most important of all neurotransmitters. An understanding of the function of neurotransmitters is absolutely fundamental to an interpretation of the way drugs work in the human body. For his work on neurotransmitters, Loewi was awarded a share of the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Otto Loewi was born at Frankfurt-am-Main on June 3, 1873. He attended the University of Strasbourg, from which he received his medical degree in 1896. He then worked for a period of time at University College in London, the University of Vienna, and the University of Graz (Austria), where he remained for nearly three decades. It was at Graz that Loewi conducted the work on neurotransmitters for which he is best known.
Like many prominent Jewish scientists of the time, Loewi was increasingly at professional and personal risk as the Nazi party came to power in Germany and, later, Austria. In fact, he was the only Jewish professor hired at Graz between 1903 and the end of World War II. On the evening of March 11, 1938, Loewi and two sons were arrested by Nazi authorities and were allowed to leave the country only under the condition that they give up all of their personal property and possessions. Loewi moved to Belgium, where he served as professor of pharmacology for one year at the University of Brussels. He then moved on to the University of Leeds in England, before accepting an appointment in 1940 as professor of pharmacology at New York University (NYU). He served at NYU until 1955, when he retired. Loewi died in New York City on December 25, 1961.
Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) was founded in 1980 by Irving, Texas, resident Candace (“Candy”) Lightner after her 13-year-old daughter was killed in a hit-and-run accident by a man who already had previously been convicted of drunk driving. The organization went through a period of internal debate in the mid-1980s over the question as to whether drunk driving or the consumption of alcohol itself was the core issue with which it was concerned. At that point, in 1984, the organization changed its name from Mothers Against Drunk Drivers to Mothers Against Drunk Driving to reflect its broader concerns. (In disagreement with this revised view, Lightner resigned from the organization she had founded.) Over the years, MADD has sponsored a number of campaigns to reduce drunk driving, including an effort to change the drinking age to 21 in all states, a recommendation for widespread use of random roadblocks to catch drinking drivers, and the creation of a victim/survivor help line. Its current emphasis is on a Campaign to Eliminate Drunk Driving that consists of four basic elements: high-visibility law enforcement, ignition interlocks for convicted drunk drivers, advanced automotive technologies to prevent drunk driving, and expanded grassroots support for the organization and its programs.
The National Coalition against Prescription Drug Abuse (NCAPDA) was founded in June 2010 following the death of Joseph John (Joey) Rovero, III, the son of April and Joseph Rovero. Rovero was a student at Arizona State University when he died from a lethal combination of alcohol and prescription medications, provided by prescription from Dr. Hsiu-Ying “Lisa” Teng, of Rowland Heights, California. Teng was later charged with second-degree murder in the deaths of Rovero and two other students, Vu Nguyen and Steven Ogle. Today, April Rovero serves as CEO of NCAPDA and Joseph Rovero is the organization’s treasurer.
NCAPDA is a 501(c)3 non-profit volunteer organization whose purpose it is to create nationwide awareness about the dangers of prescription drug misuse and abuse. It has developed partnership with a number of other institutions and organizations, including schools, colleges, community organizations, medical associations, law enforcement agencies, and other groups interested in the prescription drug abuse problem. Among NCAPDA’s current partners are the Discovery Counseling Center of San Ramon Valley, SRV Community Against Substance Abuse, Teen Esteem, the Troy and Alana Pack Foundation, and the Sacramento Youth Drug and Alcohol Coalition. One of the organization’s primary goals is to work for policy changes and new state and federal laws designed to combat the current prescription drug abuse epidemic.
The primary activities of NCAPDA are speaking engagements, panel discussions, and roundtable discussions conducted at a variety of venues to increase awareness of the prescription drug abuse problem and its prevention. Some examples of the programs offered include the showing of two documentary films, “Out of Reach” and “Behind the Orange Curtain” about prescription drug abuse; presentation of the original play, “Pharming,” on the topic; lectures on “Overdosed America,” “Adolescent Subcultures and Current Drug Trends”; prescription drug take-back days at local police stations; candlelight vigils held in memory of those lost to prescription drug problems; and Addiction by Prescription panel discussions. These presentations are made at a wide variety of venues, including local middle and high schools, service clubs, governmental offices, social clubs, restaurants and bars, and police stations.
The NCAPDA website has a number of useful resources for those interested in the prescription drug abuse problem, some designed specifically for parents, and others specifically for young adults. In addition to background information on potentially dangerous drugs and the nature of drug addiction, the Resources section of the website provides a number of valuable links to other sources of information and a collection of downloadable files on the topic of prescription drug abuse. The Stories section of the website also offers essays relating to the personal experiences of individuals who have lost relatives and friends to prescription drug causes and an option for adding one’s own story to the collection.
The National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, Inc. (NCADD) was founded in 1944 by Marty Mann, the first woman who is said to have achieved sustained sobriety through the Alcoholics Anonymous program. Inspired by the work of reformer Dorothea Dix, who had developed a breakthrough program in mental health care, Mann wondered if she could create a similar program for alcoholics, like herself. She was able to obtain a modest grant from the Yale University Center of Alcohol Studies to establish such an organization, which she called the National Committee for Education on Alcoholism (NCEA). Over the years, the organization evolved into a variety of formats, eventually becoming the National Council on Alcoholism and, in 1990, adding “and Drug Dependence” to its name, to reflect an emphasis that had been added to the organization’s mission three years earlier.
Mann created the NCEA on three simple principles, which continue to guide the organization’s work today:
In its literature today, NCADD points out that it was formed at a time when the public perception of alcoholism and drug dependence was very different, one in which the attitude was one of “let[ting] the existing population of alcoholics and addicts die off and prevent the creation of future alcoholics and addicts by legally prohibiting the sale of alcohol and legally controlling the distribution of opium, morphine and cocaine.” Mann’s approach, of course, was entirely different from that view, and it is one that continues to inspire the organization today.
The mission of the NCADD focuses on a half-dozen major themes, the most important of which is the message to alcoholics and drug addicts to “get help,” an offer that is fleshed out by the organization with a number of specific suggestions for dealing with one’s addiction. Additional themes focus on becoming educated about the nature of alcohol and drugs, with special recommendations for parents, youth, friends and family, and those in recovery. The organization’s website contains a very useful section on prescription drug abuse, which talks about the types of drugs most commonly abused and their characteristic features and effects, the nature of the problem for various age groups, methods of prevention and treatment, and useful resources on the topic.
The National Inhalant Prevention Coalition (NIPC) was founded in 1992 by Synergies, a nonprofit corporation based in Austin, Texas. The organization began two years earlier as a statewide program called Texas Prevention Partnership, as an effort to educate school children in Texas about the dangers of inhalant abuse. Today, NIPC is operated by a branch of Synergies in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Currently, the organization sponsors the National Inhalants & Poisons Awareness Week during the third week in March to better educate students and the general public about the dangers of using inhalants for the purpose of recreation. The NIPC also provides on its website an array of information about the medical, social, economic, and other risks of using inhalants.
The origins of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) date to 1935 when the U.S. Public Health Service established a research facility on drug abuse in Lexington, Kentucky. In 1948, that facility was officially renamed the Addiction Research Center. Research on drug abuse was facilitated in the site of the original facility, called “Narco,” which was adjacent to a prison that held drug offenders and was run cooperatively with the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The federal government’s interest in drug abuse was expanded in 1971 when President Richard M. Nixon established the Special Action Office of Drug Abuse Prevention within the White Office. A year later, the Special Action Office initiated two programs, the Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) and the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (NHSDA), both of which continue today. DAWN is a public health surveillance system that monitors emergency department drug-related admissions. It is now a part of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). NHSDA is now known as the National Survey on Drug Use and Health and is also located in SAMHSA. Its function is to provide national- and state-level data on the use of illegal drugs, tobacco, alcohol, and mental health to researchers and the general public.
The NIDA itself was created by the act of Congress in 1974 for the purpose of promoting research, treatment, prevention, training, services, and data collection on the nature and extent of drug abuse. In general, the activities of the NIDA can be classified into one of two major categories: the conduct and support of research on a variety of issues related to drug abuse and dissemination of this information both for the purposes of future research and to improve programs of prevention and treatment of drug abuse, as well as to inform decisions by state, local, and the federal government on drug abuse policies and practices. The agency’s organizational charts reflect the way in which these activities are organized. Three of the main NIDA offices deal with extramural affairs (funding of outside research), science policy and communications, and management. The agency also consists of a number of divisions that deal with intramural research (research within the agency); basic neuroscience and behavioral research; clinical research and behavioral research; epidemiology, services, and prevention research; and pharmacotherapies and medical consequences of drug abuse. Special programs, working groups, consortia, and interest groups focus on more specific topics, such as HIV/AIDS; childhood and adolescence issues; community epidemiology; women and sex/gender differences; nicotine and tobacco; neurosciences; and genetic issues.
The direction of NIDA activities over the period 2016–2020 has been laid out in the agency’s Strategic Plan, published in December 2015. That report describes in detail the elements of the agency’s four-pronged program over the coming five years: identifying the biological, environmental, behavioral, and social causes and consequences of drug use and addiction across the lifespan; developing new and improved strategies to prevent drug use and its consequences; developing new and improved treatments to help people with substance use disorders achieve and maintain a meaningful and sustained recovery; and increasing the public health impact of NIDA research and programs. This publication is available online at https://www.drugabuse.gov/sites/default/files/nida_2016strategicplan_032316.pdf.
The NIDA budget has remained relatively constant over the first decade of the twenty-first century. It rose slightly from 2011 ($1,048,776) to 2012 ($1,052,114) to 2013 ($1,054,001), with also a relatively constant number of full-time employee equivalents (386, 386, and 382, respectively). About 90 percent of that budget goes for extramural research ($902,696 in 2013), with the largest fraction of that designated for basic and clinical neuroscience and behavior research ($478,902).
As indicated previously, dissemination of information is a major focus of the work carried out by the NIDA. Its publications include educational curricula, facts sheets, guidelines and manuals, journals, administrative and legal documents, posters, presentations, promotional materials, and reports. These publications can be reviewed on the agency’s website at http://www.drugabuse.gov/publications by audience (students, teachers, parents, researchers, and health and medical professionals), by drug of abuse (e.g., alcohol, amphetamines, club drugs, LSD, marijuana, and steroids), by drug topic (such as addiction science, comorbidity, criminal justice, drugged driving, medical consequences, and relapse and recovery), by series (among which are Addiction Science and Clinical Practice, Brain Power, DrugFacts, Mind over Matter, and Research Reports), and by type.
The NIDA website also provides links to a number of resources for additional information about the subject of drug abuse and about the agency itself, including sections on NIDA in the News, NIDA Notes, meetings and events related to drug abuse topics, news releases, podcasts of NIDA-related programs, and electronic newsletters. The website is also available in Spanish.
During his short life, Niemann made two important discoveries. The first was the active ingredient in coca leaves responsible for their psychoactive properties, a compound that he named cocaine. The second was a powerful gas produced by reacting ethylene (C2H4) with sulfur dichloride (SCl2). The product became known as mustard gas, a chemical agent used widely during World War I.
During the late 1850s, Niemann was studying for his doctoral degree in chemistry at the University of Göttingen under the great chemist Friedrich Wöhler. For some years, Wöhler had been interested in the chemical composition of coca leaves brought back to Germany from South America, but had been unable to find the active ingredient for the plant’s extraordinary psychoactive properties. When he received a shipment of fresh leaves in 1859, he assigned to Niemann the task of analyzing the natural product. Niemann responded successfully to this assignment, extracting from the leaves a white powder that he described as having a bitter taste (like other alkaloids, of which this compound was an example), promoting the flow of saliva, and having a numbing effect on the tongue. Niemann gave the name cocaine to the new substance, a combination of the plant name from which it came (“coca”) and the traditional suffix used by chemists for all alkaloids (“-ine”).
Niemann’s research on cocaine earned him his PhD from Göttingen in 1860. In the same year, Niemann described his research on mustard gas (chemically, 1,1’-thiobis[2-chloroethane]; also known as sulfur mustard). He said that the gas caused terrible burns that festered for a long period of time and were very painful. Following his research on mustard gas, Niemann’s health deteriorated rapidly, and he returned to his home in Goslar, Germany, where he died on January 19, 1861, at the age of 26. Although some uncertainty surrounds the circumstances of his death, some historians believe that his exposure to mustard gas may have been a contributing factor. Two years after his death, a colleague at Göttingen, Wilhelm Lossen, determined the chemical formula for cocaine.
NORML is one of the relatively few organizations much better known by its acronym than by its full and official name, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. The group was formed in 1970 with an original grant of $5,000 from the Playboy Foundation. Founder of the organization was Keith Stroup, an attorney and a strong advocate of the legalization of marijuana, the cause for which NORML has worked for more than 45 years. Stroup served as executive director of the organization until 1979, a period during which 11 states decriminalized the use of marijuana and other states significantly reduced penalties for its use. NORML currently claims to have 135 chapters throughout the country and a legal staff of more than 500 attorneys to assist with the writing of legislation and legal action on behalf of its primary mission, the decriminalization of marijuana use nationwide. In addition to providing information about marijuana and its legalization to the general public, the organization lobbies state and federal legislators, sponsors an annual national conference, and has spawned a nonprofit foundation, the NORML Foundation, which is committed to educating the general public about marijuana and its legalization. NORML’s website is an excellent source of information on a wide range of topics, including background information on cannabis itself, state laws, and general legal information, along with an extensive collection of books, pamphlets, articles, and other resources on marijuana.
The Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) was established in 1988 as one provision of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988. It is the primary agency in the executive department for developing and executing policy on the use and abuse of illegal drugs in the United States. It is responsible for developing the National Drug Control Strategy, which outlines national policy on drug control, establishes a budget for this effort, and coordinates the work of federal, state, and local authorities in the fight against substance abuse. The office uses a three-pronged attack on drug abuse that focuses on prevention, treatment, and interdiction of drug sources.
The ONDCP has issued more than 1,000 pamphlets, brochures, reports, and other publications dealing with virtually every aspect of the substance abuse problem in the United States and other parts of the world, such as “2007 National Money Laundering Strategy”; “ADAM [Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring] II Report Fact Sheet 2008”; “Afghanistan Opium Winter Rapid Assessment Survey 2008”; “The DASIS [Drug and Alcohol Services Information System] Report: Adolescent Admissions Reporting Inhalants, 2006”; “The NSDUH [National Survey on Drug Use and Health] Report: Risk & Protective Factors for Substance Use among American Indian or Alaska Native Youths”; and “The War on Meth in Indian Country.”
Parker was the last chief of the Quahadi Comanche Indian tribe and a leading proponent of the melding of Christian and Native American Church movements, in which peyote is incorporated into traditional forms of worship. His most famous commentary is probably his comment that “The White Man goes into his church and talks about Jesus. The Indian goes into his Tipi and talks with Jesus.”
The details of Quanah Parker’s birth, as well as some other aspects of his life, are somewhat unclear. He is thought to have been born in the mid-1840s somewhere in the present state of Oklahoma. He himself claimed to have been born on Elk Creek, south of the Wichita Mountains, although other places have also been mentioned as a probable birthplace. His parents were Comanche warrior Noconie, (also known by the Indian name of Tah-con-ne-ah-pe-ah and called Peta Nocona by the whites) and Cynthia Ann Parker (later given the Indian name of Nadua, or “the found”), who had been captured by the Comanche during a raid on Fort Parker in Texas.
Parker apparently grew up in a traditional Native American community, replete with tribal customs. After his father was killed in 1860, Parker took shelter with a subgroup of the Comanches, the Quahadi tribe. Over time, he grew in respect and responsibility within the tribe and became its leader. From the mid-1860s to the mid-1870s, Parker fought against surrender to or assimilation by whites who were committed to taking over Native American lands and property. He eventually lost that fight at the battle of Adobe Walls, and was resigned to retiring to the reservation to which his tribe had been assigned.
Parker’s connection with peyote is reputed to stem from 1884, when he fell very ill from an infection. Although he had, by then, become thoroughly absorbed by white culture, the medicines available to him from white practitioners were of no use. Only when he was provided with a concoction of peyote did he recover. The experience proved to be life-changing for him, convincing him of the value of native traditions (and native drugs) even in the modern world of the reservation. He spent much of the rest of his life in developing and promoting the National American Indian church movement, which incorporates elements of both white Christianity and traditional Native American beliefs and practices. Largely through his efforts, the modern Native American church still includes the use of peyote in its rituals.
The Partnership for Drug-Free Kids was formed in 1986 with a grant provided by the American Association of Advertising Agencies. The organization was originally known as the Partnership for a Drug-Free America and changed its name to its current title in 2010. The original plan for the organization was to conduct a three-year effort to deal with the growing problem of substance abuse and addiction in the United States by way of an aggressive and sophisticated advertising campaign. At the end of that three-year period, however, a decision was made to continue the program. Perhaps the most famous element of the Partnership advertising program was its now-famous “fried egg” ad, which showed an egg before and during frying with the message “This is your brain; This is your brain on drugs.” The centerpiece of the Partnership’s current efforts is a website, drugfree.org, which attempts to translate the latest and most reliable information produced by research into tips and suggestions for teenagers about the risks posed by substance abuse. The organization also operates a number of specific educational campaigns, such as the Parent Campaign; Check Yourself, for teenagers; Get Help for Drug Problems; RX/OTC Abuse; Meth; Inhalants; Cough Medicine Abuse; and Steroids. Detailed information about all of these programs is available on the organization’s website. Much of the organization’s work is carried out through four major theme programs: the Parent Support Network, which offers assistance to parents who are interested in or concerned about teenage substance abuse; Medicine Abuse Project, which focuses specifically on problems association with prescription drug abuse; Youth Programming, which concentrates on efforts to prevent teenagers from starting on substance abuse activities; and Public Education Campaigns, which direct efforts to broader programs for educating the general public about substance abuse issues in the United States.
While still a young pharmacist’s apprentice, Sertürner isolated the psychoactive agent morphine from the opium plant. His accomplishment is especially important because not only was it the first such agent extracted from opium, but also it was the first alkaloid obtained from any plant. Sertürner named his new discovery after the Greek god of dreams, Morpheus, for its powerful analgesic and sedative properties.
Friedrich Wilhelm Adam Ferdinand Sertürner was born in Neuhaus, Prussia, on June 19, 1783. His parents were in service to Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, who was also his godfather. When both his father and the prince died in 1794, he was left without means of support and, therefore, was apprenticed to a court apothecary by the name of Cramer. One of the topics in which he became interested in his new job was the chemical composition of opium, a plant that had long been known for its powerful analgesic and sedative properties. By 1803, he had extracted from opium seeds a white crystalline powder clearly responsible for the pharmacological properties of the plant. He named the new substance morphine and proceeded to test its properties, first on stray animals available at the castle, and later on his friends and himself. His friends soon withdrew from the experiments because, while pleasurable enough in its initial moderate doses, the compound ultimately caused unpleasant physical effects, including nausea and vomiting. Sertürner continued, however, to test the drug on himself, unaware of its ultimate addictive properties.
Sertürner was awarded his apothecary license in 1806 and established his own pharmacy in the Prussian town of Einbeck. In addition to operating his business, he continued to study the chemical and pharmacological properties of morphine for a number of years. His work drew little attention from professional scientists, however, and he eventually turned his attention to other topics, including the development of improved firearms and ammunition. During the last few years of his life, he became increasingly depressed about his failure to interest the scientific community in his research on opium. He withdrew into his own world and turned to morphine for comfort against his disillusionment with what he saw as the failure of his life. He did receive some comfort in 1831 when he was awarded a Montyon Prize by the Académie Française, sometimes described as the forerunner of the Nobel Prizes, with its cash award of 2,000 francs. By the time of his death in Hamelin, Prussia, on February 20, 1841, however, the scientific world in general had still not appreciated the enormous significance of his research on morphine.
Shulgin was arguably the best known and most highly regarded advocates of so-called designer drugs within the scientific community. He is thought to have synthesized and tested more than 200 psychoactive compounds in his life, and wrote a number of important books and articles on the properties and potential benefits of such substances.
Alexander Shulgin, widely known as “Sasha,” was born in Berkeley, California, on June 17, 1925. He graduated from high school at the age of 16 and received a full scholarship to Harvard University. His tenure at Harvard was cut short, however, with the beginning of World War II, during which he served with the U.S. Navy in both the North Atlantic and the Pacific campaigns. After the war, he returned to Berkeley, where he eventually earned his BA in chemistry at the University of California in 1949 and his PhD in biochemistry at 1954. He completed his postdoctoral studies at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) in pharmacology and psychiatry. After working for a year at the BioRad Laboratories company, he took a position with Dow Chemical, where he was a research scientist from 1955 to 1961 and senior research chemist from 1961 to 1966.
Shulgin’s most significant accomplishment at Dow was to develop a pesticide known as physostigmine, a substance that was to become one of Dow’s best-selling products. In appreciation of Shulgin’s work, Dow provided him with a laboratory of his own where he was allowed to work on projects that were of special interest to him. One of those projects turned out to be the synthesis and study of psychedelic compounds. Shulgin later reported that his interest in psychedelics was prompted by his first experience in taking mescaline in 1960. As a result of that experience, he told an interviewer from Playboy magazine in 2004, he had found his “learning path,” the direction he wanted the rest of his career to go.
In 1965, Shulgin decided to leave Dow in order to enter medical school at UCSF. He left that program after only two years, however, to pursue his interest in psychedelics. That decision posed a problem for both Shulgin and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the federal agency responsible for control of illegal drug use in the United States. Although its primary function is to discourage the development and use of illegal drugs, the DEA apparently saw some benefit in Shulgin’s work, and they agreed to a special dispensation that allowed him to synthesize and study a number of otherwise illegal substances. That relationship eventually worked out well for both partners, as it permitted Shulgin to pursue the studies in which he was most interested and provided the DEA with invaluable information on substances about which it might otherwise have little or no information. In 1988, for example, he wrote Controlled Substances: Chemical & Legal Guide to Federal Drug Laws, a book that has become a standard reference for DEA employees.
Shulgin’s special relationship with the DEA ended in 1994 when the agency raided his Berkeley laboratory and withdrew his license to conduct research on illegal substances, claiming that he had failed to keep proper records. Some observers believe, however, that the agency’s actions were prompted by a book that Shulgin and his wife Ann had written a few years earlier, PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story. (The PiHKAL of the title stands for “phenethylamines I have known and loved.”) The Shulgins later wrote a second book about another group of psychedelic substances, TiHKAL: The Continuation. In this case, the title word TiHKAL stands for “tryptamines I have known and loved.” Another of Shulgin’s books, The Simple Plant Isoquinolines (2002; with Wendy E. Perry), is somewhat more technically oriented. In 2008, his first two laboratory books were scanned and placed online.
During the last years of his life, Shulgin suffered from a variety of medical problems, including cardiac issues, a stroke, dementia, and liver cancer. He died at his home in Lafayette, California, on June 2, 2014.
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) was created in 1992 during the reorganization of the federal government’s agencies responsible for mental health services. It assumed most of the responsibilities of the Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration, which was disbanded in the reorganization. The organization is charged with developing and supporting programs that improve the quality and availability of prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation for abusers of both legal and illegal drugs. Its work is divided among four major divisions, the Center for Mental Health Service, Center for Substance Abuse Prevention, Center for Substance Abuse Treatment, and Office of Applied Studies. Some of the programs the agency has recently funded include conferences for the dissemination of new knowledge about substance abuse, campus suicide prevention programs, community mental health services programs for children and their parents, jail diversion and trauma recovery programs (with special preference for veterans), supportive housing services, drug-free community programs, offender reentry programs, and state and community prevention programs.
SAMHSA has available a wealth of publications on all aspects of substance abuse, including reports such as Characteristics of Substance Abuse Treatment Facilities Offering Acupuncture and Treatment for Substance Abuse and Depression among Adults by Race/Ethnicity; Fiscal Year 2008 Annual SYNAR Reports: Youth Tobacco Sales; SAMHSA Newsletter; informational brochures, pamphlets, flyers, and posters, such as those in the “Tips for Teens” series (about marijuana, methamphetamines, inhalants, heroin, steroids, club drugs, etc.) as well as “Keeping Your Teens Drug-Free: A Family Guide,” “Get the Facts on Drugs,” and “Good Mental Health Is Ageless.”
Substance Abuse Librarians and Information Specialists (SALIS) was formed in 1978 with the assistance of the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. SALIS merged with its Canadian counterpart, Librarians and Information Specialists in Addictions, in 1986. The organization’s goals are to disseminate accurate information about the use and misuse of drugs; to provide a communications network for specialists working in the field of alcohol, tobacco, and other drug use and abuse; to serve as an advocate for members on issues of common interest; and to support programs for professional development. SALIS sponsors an annual national convention and provides a small number of scholarships for students in the field. The organization’s main publications include SALIS News, a quarterly newsletter; ATOD Serials Database, an online database; How to Organize and Operate an ATOD Information Center: A Guide, an instruction manual; New Books List, an online database; and Alcohol, Tobacco and Other Drug Databases, online databases.
Terry was the ninth surgeon general of the United States. He was appointed to the office by President John F. Kennedy, and he served through Kennedy’s incomplete first term in office and the first year of Lyndon B. Johnson’s first term. He is probably best known today for the first report issued by the U.S. Public Health Service on the health effects of smoking, Smoking and Health: Report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General, released in 1964. Among the many findings in that report, some of the most outstanding were that the mortality rate was 70 percent higher for smokers than for nonsmokers of a comparable age, that moderate smokers were 9 to 10 times more likely (and heavy smokers 20 times more likely) to develop cancer than nonsmokers, and that health risks rose and fell consistently with increases and decreases, respectively, in the amount of smoking.
Luther Leonidas Terry was born in Red Level, Alabama, on September 15, 1911, to James Edward and Lula M. (Durham) Terry. He attended Birmingham Southern College, from which he received his BA degree in 1931, and the Tulane Medical School, which awarded his MD in 1935. Terry completed his internship at the Hillman Hospital in Birmingham and his residency at City Hospitals in Cleveland. In 1938, he served an additional internship in pathology at Washington University, in St. Louis. In 1940, he accepted an appointment as instructor at the University of Texas, Galveston, where he remained for four years. He then moved to the Johns Hopkins University Medical School in Baltimore, while also holding an appointment at the Public Health Service Hospital in Baltimore. In 1950, he accepted an appointment as chief of General Medicine and Experimental Therapeutics at the National Heart Institute in Bethesda in 1950. The position was, at first, a part-time appointment, but it became a full-time post three years later when his division was transferred to the newly established National Institutes of Health Clinical Center. In 1958, Terry was appointed assistant director of the National Heart Institute and, three years later, became surgeon general of the United States.
Shortly after assuming his post as surgeon general, Terry appointed a committee to study the health effects of smoking. His action was motivated to a large extent by a similar study that had just been completed and announced by the Royal College of Physicians in Great Britain, in which strong evidence for somewhat dramatic health effects as a result of smoking had been reported. Terry decided that a similar report for the United States was needed, although it would almost certainly be controversial and economically risky. The final report, issued on January 11, 1964, summarized the findings of more than 7,000 scientific articles and the expert testimony of more than 130 witnesses before Terry’s committee.
After his retirement as surgeon general in 1965, Terry took a post as vice president for medical affairs and professor of medicine and community medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He maintained his affiliation with Pennsylvania until 1982, and then accepted a position as corporate vice president for medical affairs and, later, as consultant to ARA Services, Inc. Terry died in Philadelphia on April 29, 1985.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) was established in 1997 through the merger of the United Nations Drug Control Programme and the Centre for International Crime Prevention. The agency’s mission is to assist member states in their battles against illegal substance abuse, crime, and terrorism. The three primary components of UNODC’s work are providing technical assistance to member states in dealing with drug abuse, crime, and terrorism; conducting research to collect up-to-date information on these topics; and assisting member states in the ratification and implementation of various regional and international treaties dealing with drug use and crime. The agency currently conducts four major campaigns dealing with illegal substance abuse and crime: World Drug Day, International Anti-Corruption Day, World AIDS Day, and the Blue Heart Campaign against human trafficking. Much of the agency’s work is carried out through two commissions. The Commission on Narcotic Drugs is the primary policy-making agency for the United Nations in the area of illegal substance abuse. The Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice provides the United Nations with guidance on policies and practices in these two fields.
Arguably the organization’s most important single publication is the World Drug Report, an annual survey of the status of substance abuse throughout the world. UNODC also produces periodic reports on the status of drug abuse and crime worldwide, such as United Nations Surveys on Crime Trends and the Operations of Criminal Justice Systems and International Homicide Statistics. Its regular publications include the journal Bulletin on Narcotics, a popular magazine, Perspectives, an annual report of the agency’s activities in the preceding year, and reports on a variety of specific topics, such as “Addiction Crime and Insurgency” (the threat posed by opium from Afghanistan), “Colombia Coca Survey,” “Handbook for Parliamentarians on Combating Trafficking in Persons,” “Handbook on Prisoners with Special Needs,” and “HIV and AIDS in Places of Detention.”
Tess Nishida, a pain pharmacist at the University of Washington, holds a vial of Naloxone, which can be used to block the potentially fatal effects of an opioid overdose, at an outpatient pharmacy at the university on October 7, 2016. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)