The Searchlight's Last Glare

As it filed its final report last week, the Senate Crime Investigating Committee issued a major new warning: if the U.S. does not do more than cluck with alarm at the spread of narcotics addiction, a whole generation of U.S. youth will face a terrifying danger. Just as big-time gangsters turned from bootlegging to gambling after repeal, the Senators predicted, the gamblers now feeling the heat of the committee's investigation will "unquestionably" turn to the tremendous profits of dope.

Attempting to cure addicts, the committee noted realistically, is a fearfully discouraging process. It involves "a painful and bewildering perplexity of treatment entailing difficult physical and psychological readjustment"; many a victim who has undergone treatment lapses into addiction again at the first temptation. The only real solution is to cut off drug supplies before innocents are victimized. Among the committee's recommendations:

P: Stiffer penalties for narcotics violators ("no penalty is too severe for a criminal of such character").

P: An increase in both federal and local agents assigned to narcotics work.

P: Cancellation of sailing papers for any seaman convicted of a narcotics violation.

P: A world-wide ban on the growing of the opium poppy.

As in its other three reports, the committee also touched on some broader aspects of crime in the U.S. It gave the back of its hand to Florida's Governor Fuller Warren (whose name "cropped up frequently in questionable connections"), and suggested--although in markedly milder terms than in earlier attacks--that William O'Dwyer had not always kept the best of company during his years as mayor of New York. The Senators urged a federal law legalizing wiretapping, and a privately financed national crime council for coordination of the fight against corruption and gangsterism on the local level.

Then, reflecting with pardonable equanimity that it had acted 33 "a powerful searchlight" on wrong doing during its 15 months of investigation, the committee members posed for some last photographs and went out of business.

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