Mom Is the Villain

Determined to discover why they were having so little success helping young drug addicts to kick the habit, Social Worker Herbert Barish and Presbyterian Minister Edward Brown began playing detective on the streets of Manhattan's Lower East Side. After 18 months, they are satisfied that they have found the villain: she is that pillar of American culture known to every American boy as Mom.

An Epidemic. Barish and Brown got onto Mom's trail because the tranquilizers being handed out at Brown's East Side Narcotics Center were not helping addicts to fight the seething anxieties of withdrawal. The two men soon learned that the once potent medicine had not suddenly gone sour; the addicts' mothers were either not giving their boys enough of the tranquilizers or were flushing the pills right down the toilet.

After that, the clergyman and the social worker collected evidence that suggested an epidemic of momism in lower Manhattan. They found one mother who kept her son on the needle (and tied to her apron strings) by developing ear infections so that she needed him for a nurse whenever he made plans to hospitalize himself. Another woman bailed her boy out of jail while he was waiting to enter a hospital for addicts because she could not bear to have him wash his own underwear. Some mothers even encouraged their sons' habits by giving them $5 for a $1.50 haircut, or $15 for a $5 shirt, knowing that the money would go for a fix.

A Tough Campaigner. What motivated the women to be so destructive? Most of them, said Social Worker Barish, fitted a neurotic pattern. They were "suffering, protective and interfering." Usually their husbands had left them, and so great was their need for their sons' love that they managed to ignore the boys' addiction to heroin. "The mother," explained Clergyman Brown, "has a vested interest in perpetuating the addiction, as it gratifies her need for a dependent son."

All this suggests that narcotics workers are face-to-face with a second monkey on the addict's back. Sorrowfully, Brown admits to being stumped on the problem of prying Mom loose. He tried group therapy to get the mothers interested in their sons' problems, admits it was "a disaster--all they did was feel sorry for themselves." Now he is campaigning to have the sons leave home, but he finds Mom just as tough a campaigner. A few weeks ago, one mother searched through more than 50 rooming houses on Manhattan's 14th Street until she turned up her addict-son and talked him into coming home with her.

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