The Enemy Within

By Roger Rosenblatt

. The deadliest enemies of nations are not their foreign foes; they always dwell within their own borders.

-- William James, 1911

Otherworldly pictures on TV: policemen stand before a table displaying sacks of white powder, like babies laid out in their christening dresses. Dissolve. A teenage mother sits with the back of her head to the camera and discusses her heroin addiction with Bryant Gumbel. Dissolve. Ronald Reagan grasps the lectern and vows to lick this scourge. Dissolve. A gray figure skulks in an alley and holds an odd contraption to his mouth. The voice-over cites statistics on the use of something called "crack," speaks of billions spent this year alone on illegal drugs, of the alarming rise of this, the terrifying appearance of that. Dissolve. Green fields in Colombia. Dissolve. Bolivia. John Belushi. Len Bias. Dissolve. Dissolve.

Not the world of Ozzie and Harriet but the world alongside it: a small world within a world where the population looks either sinister or dead and the language is jazz or chemistry. Set me straight, man? Got any splim? Red? Strawberry? I got the Rams, man. Don't give me no Rooster Brand. Officials warn of fentanyl and phenylalkylamines. It is all arcane.

Do criminals create the shadow planet, or does the shadow planet create them? Whatever. The planet thrives, where even Ozzie and Harriet's little boy, grown middle-aged and off camera, is said to have floated high on cocaine en route to dying. It is as if the American mind itself were divided between clarity and dreams, freedom and addiction.

The shadow world sits like the darker brother, locked hiding in his room all day, seeing God dance in the soaps. What goes on in that mind, in that room? To begin to know that might be a way to demystify the -- what? -- plague, curse, disease, tragedy, normality of drugs. The center of the wanting mind reaches toward and creates every element of the drug world. Is one supposed to lecture that mind, eradicate it, hate it, arrest it, weep for its plight?

The drug addict holds a peculiar place in society, not unlike the AIDS victim; the impulse to shun collides with the impulse to embrace. If the addict happens to be your colleague or your daughter, the confusion doubles; there are no impoverished minorities to pity or blame. You become a mote in history. For thousands of years, people have smoked, snorted, injected their way between paradise and self-murder, while the outer world has watched, scolded, legislated, not legislated, with barely the slightest comprehension of the act.

And how can this be happening in America? Or is the question rhetorical in the land of pioneers: How free can you be, Mr. Icarus?

Designating drugs a crisis now, the nation tears out its hair in public, calls out the Air Force, the border patrols, the Republicans, the Democrats. "War!" cry the city mayors. What does America mean to accomplish by this call to arms? The prosecution of criminals? The rescue of lives? A self- purgation -- all minds clean and alert again in a sweep?

Is it that drugs are an enemy in which all the other national enemies may be incorporated: sneak attacks by foreign powers, illegal immigration, poverty, violence, street crime, the lassitude of youth, unemployment, materialism, irresponsibility in the workplace? If that's the case, then drugs may be confused with any of these other enemies, and the most shortsighted policies could be enacted.

The war that is being called for is a civil war, to be fought in the schoolyard or kitchen, in which the casualties may range from a thug in Miami to the dearest of civil liberties; a wild war in the house. Yet the war is urgent and necessary. Suddenly the whole system feels poisoned by a world in which millions of one's countrymen eagerly dream themselves to death.