Last Wednesday actor Robert Downey Jr. pleaded innocent to charges of drug possession and being under the influence of a controlled substance during Thanksgiving weekend in Palm Springs, California. An anonymous phone tip had led police on November 25 to Downey’s room at a resort where he was found with cocaine and diazepam. For possessing both substances Downey could face up to 6 years in prison.
Downey’s struggle with drug addiction is anything but new. His run-ins with the law began on June 23, 1996, when he was stopped for speeding and police found cocaine and heroin in his vehicle. A month later neighbors were shocked to come home one day and find Downey inside their house, passed out on their child’s bed. Three days after that he was arrested for leaving a drug rehab center. In August 1999 he was sentenced to three years in California State Prison for missing drug tests that were a condition of his probation. He was released August 2, 2000, on $5,000 bail by a California court for showing promising progress in drug rehab. His most recent arrest comes a little less than four months since his August release.
Downey, who won an Oscar nomination for his work in the 1992 film Chaplin, was in the middle of a promising comeback. Not only did he land a recurring role on the popular comedy Ally McBeal, he was also set to star in a January 2001 Los Angeles stage run of Shakespeare’s Hamlet directed by Mel Gibson. Actor Merv Griffin, the owner of the resort where Downey was arrested, has thrown his support to the young actor to keep him from being returned to prison.
Griffin has Downey’s best interest at heart. Incarceration, where Downey can be raped and beaten by actual criminals, is inhumane and has totally failed to wean Downey from his drug addiction. Downey complained to a bail bondsman after his most recent arrest that he had been working 16- and 18-hour days on Ally McBeal and had been under a lot of pressure. This suggests that Downey is having problems managing stress and that treatment and counseling is what he really needs instead of further incarceration. But given the current system, it seems unlikely that he’ll avoid more prison time.
The Downey arrest, dismaying as it is, comes amid other disturbing stories in the news about drug use. It seems that a booming market in drugs has broken out among 8-year-olds on America’s playgrounds. New York correspondent James Bone of The Times of London reported on November 28 that American public schools have mass-drugged children with Ritalin since the early 1990s to the point where use of the drug has jumped an astonishing 7 times to a total of 2 million users. Accompanying the spread of Ritalin through American public schools has been the development of a huge illegal market in the drug among the jungle-gym set.
The Ritalin pills, known to kids as "smarties," are traded for Pokemon cards, Britney Spears CDs, Beanie Babies, or cash. The cash price ranges from $2-$20 a pill. Users take the pills and crush them either for snorting or injection and describe their pharmacological effect as equivalent to anything from a strong caffeine jolt to a subdued cocaine-type high.
Supply to this market comes from children who are prescribed the drug but don’t take it, preferring to sell their pills. A third of school children prescribed Ritalin in Wisconsin and Minnesota were offered money for their pills. Two children prescribed Ritalin in Chicago had to change schools after being viciously harassed by other children for not illegally selling their pills. The Drug Enforcement Administration has found that as much as 50% of teens in drug rehab centers in Indiana, South Carolina, and Wisconsin have used Ritalin to get high.
As if this wasn’t bad enough news for the Drug Warriors, a survey released by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America (PDFA) on November 27 shows that although teens are using less marijuana, the use of the synthetic hallucinogen Ecstasy has more than doubled in 5 years. A closer look at the study reveals that the rosy picture PDFA paints about the marijuana trend is no more than spin. About 33% of respondents had used marijuana in the past year as opposed to 36% three years ago. About 21% had used the drug in the previous month as opposed to 24% three years ago.
This three-year decline is not, contrary to PDFA spin, indicative of any long-sustaining trend, especially given the survey’s 1.5 percentage point margin of error. PDFA also tries to minimize the Ecstasy trend as a temporary "trial-use" fad like earlier trial-use fads involving cocaine, LSD, and heroin.
All this admission does is highlight the fact that the War on Drugs, by selectively focusing on some substances to the exclusion of myriad others, has unwittingly created a revolving and dangerous black-market smorgasbord of choices, none of which would likely be very attractive to potential users in its absence.
"Huffers" buy spray paint and paint thinner from hardware stores and inhale the toxic fumes, which can induce cardiac arrest. "Ravers," along with Ecstasy, buy nitrous-oxide containers and empty the contents into balloons for quick inhalation. These "whip-its" have caused some users to suffer blackouts and irreversible brain damage.
High schoolers buy bottles of Robitussin from drugstores and get "buzzed" by quickly gulping down the contents. More natural types comb fields and forests for mushrooms and jimsonweed. The mushrooms and jimson seeds are soaked in water to make hallucinogenic teas. Many deaths have occurred from poisonous concoctions produced when the wrong plants have been selected or the teas improperly made.
The doctor’s office has been an increasingly popular place for procuring recreational drugs. One man in my town used to be pulled over by police for his erratic driving on the road. When police found marijuana and heroine in his vehicle, he was quickly arrested and taken to jail. It was only after a couple of these episodes that the man smartened up. Faking a back injury and "horrible pain," he now receives regular prescriptions and liberal refills of oxy- and hydrocodone from his doctor.
These legal narcotics more than do the job for this man in terms of producing a high. Nowadays, when police pull him over and see his prescription bottles, they respectfully tell him to "please be more careful" and send him on his way. To see the blatant inconsistency of our "drug" laws, change the pill bottles to beer bottles and put a whiff of alcohol on the man’s breath and the man gets arrested. Letting him float along in a hydrocodone-induced stupor is apparently okay. Apparently some downers are more politically incorrect than others.
I’ve never abused one of these substances and I think the people mentioned above probably have some pretty shallow lives. But I also think that a nation which turns 8-year-olds into playground Ritalin dealers has no moral authority to continue incarcerating Robert Downey, Jr.
Incarceration is a particularly brutal punishment for a man introduced to drugs at age 12 by his own father. When he ends up passed out in other people’s homes, he should be held accountable. But when he, like millions of other non-violent drug offenders, neither trespasses on others’ property nor otherwise infringes on others’ rights, and wants to continue using drugs, then he should be reminded of the consequences and allowed to proceed at his own risk. By some reports, he has already been warned enough about the risks of his behavior by his friends.
Conservatives such as William Bennett and Cal Thomas who believe that, given enough money, they can win the War on Drugs must be resisted every bit as much as the liberals who believe they can win the War on Poverty by throwing seemingly limitless amounts of money at the poor. They can’t even keep recreational drugs out of maximum-security prisons. Bennett and Thomas’s desire to turn the entire US into one large "drug-free" prison will fail. It will only further empower the wiretapping, voyeuristic class of federal predators attenuating our civil liberties while doing nothing to help nonviolent substance abusers such as Downey.
December 30, 2000
Dale Steinreich, PhD, is a consulting economist. He is also a regular contributor to AgainstTheCrowd.com.
