The Drugs They Carried

ED: If you’re just joining us, this is BackStory. Today, we’re devoting the hour to exploring Americans’ changing attitudes toward drugs. We’re going to focus now on one group associated with drug abuse throughout American history, military veterans. That goes all the way back to the Civil War, which spawned a generation of young men hooked on alcohol and morphine.

ED: But it was during a more recent war, when a lot of people started demanding that something be done about the problem of drug addicted veterans. And that war, of course, was Vietnam.

JEREMY KUZMAROV: There were some claims that upwards of 60 to 70% of soldiers were using drugs in Vietnam.

BRIAN: This is Jeremy Kuzmarov, an historian at the University of Tulsa.

JEREMY KUZMAROV: Some news articles were claiming that drugs were hindering the effectiveness of the armed forces, causing indiscipline in the army, even linking it to atrocities within the army.

MALE SPEAKER: Our army in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse. Where not near mutinous, the soldiers are dispirited and drug ridden.

MALE SPEAKER: If you’re going to get killed, you might as well be high while you’re getting killed. That’s how I felt.

JEREMY KUZMAROV: One piece reported that a group of Americans became so stoned on super-strength Vietnamese marijuana that they fired on their own helicopters, which supposedly struck back, killing these men.

ED: The fears began with marijuana, in the late ’60s. But by the ’70s, heroin was the bigger concern. With all these young men getting hooked on drugs overseas, there was a real fear about what would happen when they returned home.

JEREMY KUZMAROV: The inner cities were really starting to deteriorate in this period. And there was real concern that addicted soldiers would come home and really exacerbate urban problems gripping the country, including escalating crime rates and violence within the country.

BRIAN: In 1971, two congressman came out with a report that said 15% of all US troops in Vietnam were addicted to heroin. So on June 17–

RICHARD NIXON: Want to join me here? Why don’t you be seated, please, ladies and gentleman.

BRIAN: 1971, President Richard Nixon decided enough is enough.

RICHARD NIXON: America’s public enemy number one, in the United States, is drug abuse.

BRIAN: Nixon called for a new offensive on drugs, necessitated by the situation in Vietnam.

RICHARD NIXON: Which has brought to our attention the fact that a number of young Americans have become addicts as they serve abroad.

BRIAN: The problem, Nixon said, would not end with the war. So–

RICHARD NIXON: With regard to this offensive–

BRIAN: He started a new organization.

RICHARD NIXON: The new organization will be within the White House. Dr. Jaffe, who will be one of the briefers here today, will be the man directly responsible. He will report directly to me.

JEROME JAFFE: You know, I was not asked to run the program. I was told I would run the program by the President. I was recruited by ambush.

ED: Jerome Jaffe was a psychiatrist at the University of Chicago in the ’70s. He was a pioneer in the drug treatment world and was asked to consult with the White House on how to fix this problem of soldiers returning as addicts. The day before Nixon made the announcement, Jaffe thought he was consulting for a one or two day gig. But the President had other plans.

JEROME JAFFE: He was talking about his new program, the Special Action Office. And then I was sitting in a chair, on the periphery of the cabinet room, and he pointed to me, and he said, that man, Dr. Jaffe, is going to run the program.

BRIAN: Jaffe, Nixon, and others went to meet the press. That’s the announcement you just heard a minute ago. And from the pictures, you can kind of tell just how much Jaffe was caught off guard.

JEROME JAFFE: I hadn’t brought any clothes with me. And somebody went out to buy me a new shirt, which was too big. And so the pictures show me wearing an oversized shirt, talking to the White House press.

BRIAN: The hope was that you would grow into the job, Dr. Jaffe.

JEROME JAFFE: That or maybe everybody got fat working in Washington. I don’t know.

ED: Despite the media accounts and the report from the two congressman, Jaffe had his doubts about the extent of the problem. No serious testing had been done. So Jaffe developed a plan of attack.

JEROME JAFFE: A urine testing program. We test people, at the time they’re about to leave, and those who are still using opiates, still positive for opiates, particularly heroin, I assumed, would be invited to stay longer in Vietnam, while we detoxified them and then transferred them to the United States for treatment. It was called Operation Golden Flow.

BRIAN: Operation Golden Flow, get it? At any rate, the program was big, and it was complicated. There were 1,000 soldiers leaving Vietnam every day. And remember, the thought was that 15% of them were addicted to heroin.

After a couple of weeks of testing and retesting, they were satisfied that they had a good sample. And what they found was very surprising. Again, historian Jeremy Kuzmarov.

JEREMY KUZMAROV: The numbers were much lower than a lot of the media reports. They found that approximately 5% tested positive with heroin in there urine system.

JEROME JAFFE: So the 5% was a lot lower than the 15%.

BRIAN: How do you explain that?

JEROME JAFFE: Well, some people who had been using, but not dependent, stopped using. There were some people, even who were dependent, who would probably stop using for three or four days, which is often sufficient to come up with a negative.

And so once the word got out– and it got out very, very quickly– that you don’t get on the plane to leave Vietnam if you have heroin in your urine.

JEREMY KUZMAROV: If they knew the test was coming, they would quit and clean out their system. It showed that heroin was perhaps less of an addictive drug than many had thought, because soldiers could stop on a whim.

JEROME JAFFE: This was a major conclusion that, if you have a consequence that is immediate and absolutely predictable, it can be far more likely to affect behavior than one which is far more severe but remote and less certain.

ED: So the soldiers could kick the drugs for the test, but could they stay clean? To answer this, a psychiatrist named Lee Robins did a follow up study of veterans a year after they returned home. Of the vets who had originally tested positive for heroin, back in Vietnam–

JEREMY KUZMAROV: Only 1.3% of those samples were drug dependent and less than 1% addicted to opiates.

JEROME JAFFE: Nobody believed it. I mean it was so contrary to all of our beliefs. People thought Lee was twisting the data, making up the data, distorting it.

BRIAN: In the first year back, only 5% of veterans even used drugs again, compared to a relapse rate of 65% for non-military addicts. They found that soldiers who were psychologically addicted to heroin, under the stress of combat and where heroin was so cheap and plentiful, didn’t necessarily stay addicted when that stress disappeared. Coming home seemed to be a game changer.

JEROME JAFFE: So the major legacy was, we can’t just continue to treat this as a group of people who are predatory, miscreants, and lawbreakers, and we’ll just lock them all up. People get better. There is recovery.

BRIAN: A lot of people were afraid that bringing drug addicted veterans back home would make things worse, for the veterans, for the cities, for everyone. But what studies found was just the opposite. Coming back home was actually part of the cure.

ED: Thanks to Jerome Jaffe, who currently works with the University of Maryland and the Friends Research Institute in Baltimore.

BRIAN: And to Jeremy Kuzmarov, at the University of Tulsa. His book is called The Myth of the Addicted Army.

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BRIAN: And that, my friends, is all the time we have for today. Now it’s your turn to tell us what you think. You can find us at backstoryradio.org.

PETER: We’ll be back again next week. In the meantime, don’t be a stranger.

ED: Today’s episode of BackStory was produced by Jess Engebretson, Chioki Iansen, Eric Mennel, and Allison Quantz. Jamal Millner is our technical director. Our senior producer is Tony Field. And our executive producer is Andrew Wyndham.

BRIAN: Special thanks today to Dessa Bergen-Cico, David Cortright, Curtis Mares, Adam Rathge, and the Points blog of the Alcohol and Drug History society.

PETER: Major support for BackStory is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the University of Virginia, Weinstein Properties, the W. L. Lyons Brown, Jr. Charitable Foundation, an anonymous donor, and the History Channel. History made every day.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Peter Onuf and Brian Balogh are professors in the University of Virginia’s Corcoran Department of History. Ed Ayers is President and Professor of History at the University of Richmond. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

[MUSIC PLAYING – THE INK SPOTS, “THAT CAT IS HIGH”]