On the 17th June 1971 President Nixon, in a nation wide television broadcast, declared a national offensive to combat drug abuse among young Americans. An ominous background to this statement is the report that up to 60% of American servicemen in Vietnam had been involved in some form of drug-taking in 1970. The President's immediate measures took the form of a request to Congress for $155 million in support of the administration's anti-drug programme. At the same time he created a new Special Action Office for Drug Abuse, in the White House. This Office will consolidate drug abuse prevention efforts that were formerly scattered through nine Federal agencies.
The drug problem is not, of course confined to the United States. At the recent 40th General Assembly of Interpol in Ottawa the proceedings were dominated by the international drug threat. In NATO itself BAOR have taken early action to counter drug-taking among British troops on duty in Germany. In fact the Special Investigation Branch of the Corps of Military Police are planning to set up a drugs squad under the Provost Marshal to deal with the sharply increasing drug offences. The U.S. Seventh Army which is the mainstay of NATO's defence against the Soviet Union and its allies, has some 10-15% of men who take drugs on a regular basis. But the U.S. Army statistics show that 78% of these drug users had acquired the habit before coming to Germany. All USAREUR troops completing overseas tours of duty are given urine tests, and a programme of spot-checked urinalysis testing was introduced on November 1st 1971, by the USAREUR Drug and Discipline Division. These tests revealed no more that 1.5% of soldiers using hard drugs (as compared with 4.7% of heroin users in Vietnam), but the trend over the year indicated a disquieting increase in narcotic usage in USAREUR.
At the root of the problem lies the question of addiction and addictive drugs. The "hard" narcotic drugs morphine and heroin derived from opium constitute the gravest threat. These drugs are firmly established as addictive, and their continued use eventually destroys the addict. The dissemination of hemp, in the form of cannabis, marijuana, hashish or pot, has an important bearing on addiction. In fact cannabis in all its forms, although chemically unrelated to opium, is strictly regarded by the World Health Organization and other expert bodies as a drug of dependence which causes public health and social problems. The use of cannabis certainly creates the milieu in which hard drug addiction commences. In addition it must be recognized that cannabis causes temporary mental derangement in which perception is radically changed, and judgement and moral values are grossly distorted.
In attempting to set up legislative machinery to control the production and dissemination of drugs, the organizations concerned have to deal with the problems of licit as well as illicit trade. The licit commerce of opium drugs derives from their use in medicine as narcotics and pain-killers. This represents a comparatively small contribution to total world traffic. The licit world requirement of opium as a raw material for medical and scientific purposes is