Heroin: A "Plaything"?

It has long been believed that experimentation with heroin is an irrevocable act that leads eventually to addiction and the criminal acts necessary to support the expensive habit. Thus it has also been assumed that the tens of thousands of U.S. servicemen who used the drug in Viet Nam have returned home as addicts, increasing the proportions of what was already a national heroin epidemic. But last week the Defense Department released a study that seemed to undermine these assumptions.

The study asserts that narcotics dependence among returned veterans is no higher than it is among those who did not serve. In a finding that is bound to raise eyebrows among drug experts, the report also implies that heroin addiction, far from being incurable, is a habit that many people simply outgrow.

The Pentagon's conclusions are the result of a study by Dr. Lee Robins, of Washington University's department of sociology. Several years ago she found that many convicts who had once been addicts had given up drugs on their own. To determine whether G.I. drug users did the same, she obtained a $400,000 grant from the President's Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention to study the drug problem among veterans.

Last May Dr. Robins obtained a list of the 13,240 G.I.s who had returned to the U.S. in September 1971 during the height of the heroin crisis in Viet Nam. She selected a random sample of 470 names and added another 495 names from a list of soldiers found in tests to have used drugs. Her assistants then conducted more than 900 interviews and obtained urine samples for evidence of drug usage. Their findings were such welcome news to the Pentagon that it embraced the study after learning the preliminary results. Of all the returnees interviewed, only 1.3% were still addicted to narcotics. Based on that percentage, the Pentagon estimates that only 4,000 of the 300,000 Army enlisted men who served in Viet Nam between 1970 and 1972 are now addicted.

The report also notes that many of those who used narcotics in Viet Nam stopped as soon as they left; of those who continue to use drugs after their return, most insist that they are not addicted. Says Dr. Robins, who seems too casual about the use of a dangerously addictive drug: "Some of our data suggest heroin can be used as a plaything. Some people use it just a little bit."

The apparent discrepancy between Dr. Robins' conclusion and the experience of drug experts in ghettos may be partially explained by another of her findings: of the heroin users in Viet Nam, only 8% injected the drug. The others smoked or sniffed it. But drug usage among returned veterans could still be a bigger problem than the report indicates. Even Dr. Robins admits that "it may be too soon to be completely confident that the risk of serious addiction is as small as it now appears."

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