I love exposés on drug silliness, and Reason‘s Killer Drugs, offers up some good material on PCP (phencyclidine), the famous veterinary anesthetic turned street drug:
“Everything people used to say about marijuana is true of angel dust.” So claimed Robert DuPont, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, in 1977.
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Back in the 1920s and ’30s, police spoke just as confidently about a link between marijuana and violence. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics portrayed marijuana as “the killer drug,” giving men “the lust to kill, unreasonably and without motive.”
One of the first such reports came from a Texas police captain who claimed habitual marijuana users “become very violent, especially when they become angry, and will attack an officer even if a gun is drawn.” He added that they “seem to have no fear,” are “insensible to pain,” and display “abnormal strength,” so that “it will take several men to handle one man.”
This description is eerily similar to contemporary stories about PCP users, whose rage and superhuman strength are said to resemble those of the Incredible Hulk.
It seems that the police have quite a history of facing super-criminals “hopped up” on illegal drugs. When it wasn’t “reefer madness” that had southern sheriffs worried, it was “coked up Negroes” who could take a bullet to the heart and keep on coming. In the lab, these drugs don’t seem to demonstrate quite so much super-soldier potential:
In a 1988 review of 350 journal articles on PCP in humans, the psychiatrist Martin Brecher and his colleagues noted that high doses of PCP can produce “severe agitation and hyperactivity,” along with “cognitive disorganization, disorientation, hallucinations, and paranoia.” Combined with the drug’s anesthetic effect, which makes users less sensitive to pain and therefore harder to restrain, such acute reactions have contributed to PCP’s fearsome image.
Yet in their search of the literature, Brecher and his co-authors found only three documented cases in which people under the influence of PCP alone had committed acts of violence. They also noted that between 1959 and 1965, when PCP was tested as a human anesthetic, it was given to hundreds of patients, but “not a single case of violence was reported.”
Brecher and his colleagues concluded that “PCP does not live up to its reputation as a violence-inducing drug.” That does not mean PCP users are never violent. But when they are, their behavior cannot be understood as a straightforward effect of the drug.
If I may repeat an important point, when PCP was tested as a human anesthetic, it was given to hundreds of patients, but “not a single case of violence was reported.” And here’s the real point: drug crime isn’t because of drugs; it’s because of drug prohibition:
An analysis of New York City homicides committed in 1988 and identified as “crack-related” found that 85 percent grew out of black-market disputes. Only one homicide out of 118 involved a perpetrator who was high on crack.
Such findings put crime statistics in a different light. “In cases where we know or suspect a motive,” reports a D.C. police spokesman, “over one-third of the killings are drug-related.” If so, that is an indictment of the drug laws, not PCP. The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre could be called “alcohol-related,” but not because Al Capone’s thugs were drunk.