Narcotics research, rehabilitation, and treatment. Hearings, Ninety ...

615because I agree with them, as long as we have significant numbers ofpeople who in this very affluent society find it necessary to escape fromits realities, that should tell us something about, I think, some verybasic defects in our culture and our society.Obviously, we are not going to turn those things around overnight.I think they have been a long time in the making and those of us whoare not addicted to drugs, perhaps we bear our share of the responsibility,our generation, for getting ourselves into this drug culture andthis very unfortunate situation. But meanwhile, back at the ranch, soto speak, we have to, as I indicated, move on all these fronts.Let nie just say that the thing I think you are primarily interestedin is tlie relation of drug abuse to general crime. My seat-of-the-pantsopinion on that is that the drug abuse problem is strongly related toa significant portion of the street crime. As I have heard some of thosefrom Xew York say, it also accounts for some of the more vicioustype of crime, the more spontaneous type of crime, the type of crimethat is more difficult to detect law enforcementwise because it is notmotivated by people who know one another and so forth. And again,the most atrocious types of crime. I have heard figures of 30 or 40percent.There is a New Jersey study that I just saw for the first timeseveral days ago that indicates only about 10 percent of those arrestedover a given sample period in New Jersey committed other crimesbecause of the drug addiction. I frankly find that very difficult tobelieve, I think it has to be higher than that and there have beensome less formal studies made in Detroit, Wayne County, whichindicates that it goes up as high as 40 percent. But it is enough,anyway, whatever it is.i think we have to be ready to accept the fact that stricter enforcement,which we are starting to get now—I know in our communitywe are—is also going to raise the price of heroin and is going to causea more harried crime-committing spree by those who feed the drugaddicts, which would indicate that we should be all the more readyto treat those who are addicted.Now, even though I do not suggest tliat methadone obviously is theanswer, that is the kind of approach that o-ot us into the drug culture inthe first place, an easy way out ; nevertheless, we have a fire on ourhaiids and we have to use what we have. We have to use methadone becauseit does give some immediate relief to the social problem as wellas to the person addicted.There has been some reference to the drug war in Detroit, Mr.Chairman, and it has been reported nationally. In my statement I saythings like "running territoi-ial war."' I have to be honest with you andsay the gist of my comments now, after this statement was preparedand sent up to you, is I have tailored my feelings on that after talkingwith some of the police intelligence people in Michigan, that it is notreally a territorial war: so says the best thinking right now. It isreally a question of crimes being committed within the drug community,the so-called ripoff. where one drug pusher robs another becausethey know where each other is and they know they are veryvulnerable, they cannot go to the police. So in that, it is something likethe organizational battles that took place in the 1920's in traditionalorganized crime, to establish the disciplines. If that is the case, that is