[Agency: Client: Raven's Hollow LTD Product:Title: 'Bridge From No Place' Code: Length: Date 1/31/84]
[Screen dark]
[Children singing:] London bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down.
London bridge is falling down, my fair lady.
London bridge is falling down...
[Recovering addict:] When Peggy and I moved into this house,
we thought it was just a normal house where people were using some acid, some grass.
Maybe some speed.
We found out that there was a lot of shooting up going on.
Some people were using heroin to the point that they couldn't trust each other anymore,
the work wasn't getting done.
We began to lie to each other.
But Peggy and I took a stand against hard narcotics.
We called a house meeting.
The house members agreed that we wouldn't have any more heroin or methedrine in the house.
Yet some people found these two drugs just too groovy to give up.
And it sort of destroyed the whole house.
[Children singing:] Now we build it up again, up again, up again.
Now we build it up again, my fair lady.
[The Distant Drummer]Now we build it up again, up again, up again.
Now we build it up again, my fair lady.
[Bridge from No Place] Now we build it up again, up again, up again.
Now we build it up again, my fair lady.
[Narrator:] A community is destroyed by heroin, but to most of us
a more important and meaningful institution is also being destroyed with alarming frequency.
The American home.
Narcotics and their relatives,
amphetamines and barbiturates, rip apart the fabric of family life at every social
and economic level.
The tragic aftermath fills hospitals, prisons, and rehabilitation centers across the country.
The entire question of drug use is vastly complex.
The drugs themselves are many and varied.
The precise information available to us when it does exist
is often cloaked in myth and controversy.
Drug users do not fit within any comfortable grouping.
They are young as well as old.
They are disadvantaged but often affluent.
[Drug User:] I, I do the hard narcotics for escape.
I do the, I do more interesting drugs, the psychedelic drugs for learning.
[Drug User 2:] It wasn't enough for me to smoke I needed something else.
[Drug User 3:] The drug scene in Vietnam, it's really a strange scene.
Um, it’s hard to describe, like drugs are very prevalent there.
They're all over the place.
You can get, umm, marijuana you can go out and pick it.
[Drug User 4:] I was um, a very nervous, uptight, lost little girl and uh, after I turned on,
I may not have found the answer to everything but at least you know,
it didn't seem of such immediate danger to me.
[Drug User:] Heroin is a, is a painkiller.
It kills all pain.
It kills mental, physical anguish. It kills anxiety.
It kills boredom.
It produces pleasure just based on the drug itself and nothing else.
[Drug User 2:] Got to the point where everything I did, everything I made I put into the habit.
[Drug User:] The problem is I'm in a drug culture.
[Narrator:] At one time it was considered unusual for anyone under the age of sixteen
to be experimenting with drugs.
But now it is not uncommon to see it among sixth graders.
And in one well-to-do school on the west coast, drug experiment is numbered
among seventy percent of the student population.
A house destroyed, but a house that can be rebuilt.
The man who stands at the center of the rebuilding operation and who shoulders much
of the nation's concern over drug abuse is Dr. Stanley F. Yolles.
[Dr. Yolles:] The aim of the national program is to rehabilitate the estimated one hundred thousand
narcotic addicts and the estimated half million persons in the United States
who regularly abuse non-narcotic drugs.
Because drug abuse and drug dependence is apparently the result of physical, psychological,
social, and other factors, the research supported by the National Institute of Mental Health,
or carried out directly by the National Institute of Mental Health, must range from basic studies on
the mechanisms of drug action, on the addicting qualities of new drugs and how they act
in the body,
to studies of social patterns of drug abuse as well as studies of new methods of treatment
and rehabilitation.
[Narrator:] Deep in the heart of Kentucky's bluegrass country is the town first and foremost
associated with the treatment of narcotic addicts.
Since the first prisoner patient was admitted in 1935, the federal hospital at Lexington and its
companion at Fort Worth, Texas have borne the brunt of caring for these little understood and often
feared and much maligned American dope addicts.
For decades these hospitals themselves have been maligned and misunderstood.
They've often been cited as prime examples of how hopeless it is to treat,
much less cure an addict.
It is well to remember that when opened, these institutions were only a first step in society's
enlightened policy toward the drug addict.
While steel bars and grilled windows are necessary to enforce the punitive side of our judgment,
national conscience for the first time suggested research, treatment, rehabilitation.
Since 1967 many changes have taken place.
The bars and the grilles are being removed,
taking emphasis off the custodial aspects.
A hospital now called a clinical research center andadministered by the National Institute of Mental Health
has intensified its research into many approaches to rehabilitation.
One technique basic to many treatment methods is encouraging addicts to help addicts.
By working together, playing together, and just being together.
Within the same complex at Lexington is another center,
this one engaged in addiction research.
Its mission is to investigate the nature of the drugs themselves.
Our understanding of the scientific working of drugs, their physical effects on people,
what changes they cause in the body,
are questions for which we have few precise answers.
[Smoker:] Have another one? Sure.
Yeah why not? Government's paying for it.
[Dr. Yolles:] Patients from the clinical research center volunteer for a variety of tests
involving the actual intake of drugs.
To the outsider, these tests may appear meaningless
and from a conservative point of view immoral.
However, they bring us closer to a clearer understanding of the chemical relationship
between body and the agent.
Whether the agent is marijuana, a marijuana cigarette, a synthetic drug, or one of the opiates.
Highly sophisticated equipment measures the concentration of drug molecules within the body.
This enables the researcher to compare what he sees in human behavior with what the instrument
reveals the drug is doing to the body's organs, tissues, and chemistry.
Through experiments such as these, the addiction center has racked up an impressive record
in unmasking supposedly non-addicting pharmaceuticals.
The center demonstrated the addictive nature of the barbiturate, certain tranquilizers...
even performed pioneering work in the understanding of alcoholism.
While Lexington's outpost in the wilderness of drug research was amassing information on the addict
and on the drug, little else... little else in the country was being done.
During the forties and the fifties more and more people fell victim,
not only to heroin but to a host of synthetics.
While long used as a means of temporary escape from the ghetto, marijuana in 1963 became
one of the symbols of the youth and revolution.
Our criminal statutes became harsher, penalties stiffer, there was virtually no difference in the eyes
of the law between selling a deck of heroin on a street corner or selling marijuana
in a college dorm.
But in the 1960s, there were also signs of progress in both the understanding of the addict's problem
and in the law.
[Mr. Bazelon:] Our narcotics laws have created a web, in which the addict's need for money
leads to crimes.
Crimes which reinforces the punitive enforcement of the narcotics law and thus drives the addict
deeper and deeper into secretiveness and fear.
[Narrator:] California started a civil commitment program,
the first state to do so.
Even though high fences and barbed wire were constant reminders that inmates were still
prisoners, the accent was not on punishment, rather treatment.
Aside from early federal programs at Lexington and Fort Worth, it was the first time a public
institution was used to treat addicts, instead of just confining them.
New York 1962. The Metcalf-Volker Act allowed many of the state's addicts to elect a hospital treatment
instead of a prison sentence.
The 1964 enactment of the first major federal law designed to realistically appraise the addict's
problem and restore him to his community.
The Narcotic Addict Rehabilitation Act of 1966 allows the defendant in certain criminal cases
to elect treatment instead of punishment,
Including an extensive program of aftercare under the supervision of the Surgeon General.
Synanon, first established in Santa Monica, is perhaps the most publicized
of the self-help private approaches.
Rehabilitated addicts like Don Parker have carried on with the Synanon philosophy in other cities.
From California to New York to Chicago.
Each establishing his own therapeutic community.
[Mr. Parker:] Residential therapeutic community, if I may explain it for a moment,
Is a 24 hour a day living-working situation in which people go through
all kinds of emotional changes.
Drug addiction of course is not a physical problem.
It's an emotional problem and that’s what we approach.
[Narrator:] These communities, the addict is first taken off drugs.
Either cold turkey or by gradual medicated withdrawal.
He then starts the long, humbling process of living shoulder-to-shoulder with other addicts.
People who have made it.
People who have little sympathy with members who refuse to be honest with themselves.
[Former Addict:] Why don't you be honest with him?
You boil and you can't even talk calmly, you'll explode every time you talk.
You're all emotional and you sit there, you're boiling inside, you've been boiling your whole life.
And you sit here and you [?] other people. You've got a cop out.
Are you afraid of him?
[Narrator:] These are the residents of New York's Daytop Village.
A private, therapeutic community supported by federal, state, and municipal funds.
Graduates of Daytop master far more than their past craving for drugs.
They learn a new lifestyle centered around helping others,
bettering their communities.
When he returns to the street the Daytop graduate will be a force for action in his old neighborhood.
Even if it’s only rallying people to clean up their block.
Some of Daytop's byproducts are surprising and they're exciting.
This is the stage of an off-Broadway theatre where Daytop residents tell their story
behind the footlights to capacity audiences and to critical acclaim.
[The performers each scream out their feelings.]
Rehabilitation during 1960 saw a decade of experimentation.
Trial and error approaches that sought and sometimes found cures through group therapy,
through computers, and through the test tube.
In Chicago, a young father of two children hopelessly addicted to heroin forced to steal
to support his habit opens a door to possible hope.
This is the methadone maintenance approach.
Still in the experimental stage, methadone, a synthetic opiate, is administered in fruit juice
as a substitute for heroin, and at the same time satisfy the junkies need for drugs and like heroin,
methadone is also addictive but spares the user the harmful effects.
The program's chief sponsor is Dr. Vincent Dole at New York's Rockefeller University.
[Dr. Dole:] So we estimate, conservatively I think, that every patient that we treat
saves the community 40 thousand dollars a year,
in goods that are not stolen, in neighborhoods that are not spoiled,
and families that are not abandoned.
[Narrator:] Methadone maintenance, as many other treatments and approaches, has its critics.
[Mr. Parker:] There's no way that, in my opinion that a person who is drugged,
and a person on methadone is drugged, can really take a look at himself.
[Narrator:] Most methadone proponents consider it irrelevant whether a patient ever comes
off the drug.
The important point they make is that addicts are rapidly returning to society
and are able to cope with responsibility.
The cost? An inexpensive, clinically administered glass of orange juice on the way to work.
Another chemical approach to keeping an addict off hard drugs is cyclazocine.
Cyclazocine is a narcotic antagonist, blocking the effects of heroin as it tries to act upon
the central nervous system.
There are other approaches. Neighborhood centers like Exodus house in New York's teeming
slums concentrate help during the period when it's needed most, during aftercare.
As in other valid treatment approaches, ex-addicts who have begun to remake their lives
work closely with the residents helping them through each day, rising on time, reporting to work,
relearning the simple day to day lifestyles the rest of us take so much for granted.
In time many of them will be eased back into their communities,
stronger perhaps for their experience.
Aftercare is one of the most important phases of restoring the former addict to a useful life.
The counselors know the patient, they know his daily routine, and they are wary of pitfalls.
[Counselor:] You may have an argument with your wife, you might go to work in the morning
and all of a sudden where you used to handle 25 cartons a day, the boss gives you 30 cartons,
and this is another excuse, see this is an excuse to go,
"I gotta handle 30 cartons so I'm gonna go out and shoot dope."
Uh, you can be free from drugs for five, six, seven months and all of a sudden you want to
reward yourself, you know like, "Wow, I've been clean now for six months, you know, I'm doing great.
Now I'm making money.
I got money in the bank. My wife loves me. My kids love me.
Let me go out and get high."
You know? And this happens.
So these are the things you have to be aware of, but the point that I want to bring out is that
if you do use, don't be afraid to come by, you know, and tell us.
Because that's what we're there for.
[Narrator:] Treatment programs are important but even of more importance is prevention.
Ten years ago, drug use among the young was concentrated in the ghetto.
We thought at that time that eliminating the slums would eliminate that aspect of the drug problem.
Well, the answer's not so simple.
Drug abuse, including heroin and a wide range of synthetics has sprung up
among the children of upper middle class families as well.
Here, affluence is a lifestyle and the pressures and anxieties of the ghetto are unknown.
But perhaps there are anxieties in the suburbs.
Anxieties of a different nature.
[Recovering Addict:] It’s like a fortress to protect this all-white community of 40 thousand people
who live in one of three models of housing of total cultural starvation.
It’s not fortresses, it’s like a prison of, of, of uptight shallow people.
And the, and the, and the only food for their brain that they get is television and booze and adultery.
And the only, everyone has money. There is no identity in money.
You can only say I have more money or less money and that’s no identity, that’s just quantity.
The only thing you can do with money is buy mass-produced products.
And everyone has mass-produced products.
Detroit makes five million cars, all the same.
[Narrator:] The tragedy is, that youth, in rejecting our values,
too often uses more than rhetoric to express dissatisfaction.
[Police Officer:] Was driving north on Larabie, at an excessive rate of speed of 60 miles an hour.
I pulled his car over and asked him to produce his driver's license and he had none.
I immediately arrested him and searched him and on his person I found a bag of white powder
that has since been analyzed by the crime laboratory.
[Judge:] Mr. Sotherns, did you hear what your lawyer just said?
[Mr. Sotherns:] Yes, I did.
[Judge:] And do you stll know [?] plea of guilty,
this court is going to sentence you to three to seven years in a state penitentiary?
[Mr. Sotherns:] Yes, sir, I do.
[Judge:] It is so.
[Narrator:] Another hippie convicted on a narcotic charge.
Why should we be concerned?
Why? Because in a few years those under 25 will make up one half of our population.
Marijuana among college kids is only one drug and one population group, but it serves to illustrate
that our interest as a nation has been more than somewhat hypocritical.
[Joseph Oteri:] It seems as though the college kids, the middle class kids in this country,
suddenly discovered marijuana in the mid-sixties, the early sixties.
And uh, up until that time marijuana was used almost exclusively by Negroes, Puerto Ricans,
and jazz musicians and you know, who gave a damn about them.
So that we could have all kinds of repressive laws and nobody would, would bother with these people
or even look at the laws.
But all at once, Mrs. Murphy's kid from the suburbs who was attending a prominent university
gets busted for marijuana.
And I can tell you from personal experience, I've had medical students, law students,
kids going to scientific institutions on national science grants.
I've had all kinds of people who have been arrested for marijuana violations.
And when this happens, suddenly our society starts to become aware of a problem, so-called.
[Narrator:] The entire question of drug use is vastly complex.
Cutting across the boundaries of the law, medicine, and society's attitudes.
The source of the problem is a simple flower.
A hardy plant.
Beautiful in their natural habitat as they are dangerous,
often lethal when abused by man in his environment.
After 60 centuries of abuse, society's attitude is only now beginning to change.
Beginning to bring enlightenment to our understanding of drugs and why people use them.
They're beginning also to realize the fact there is no single bridge
that will return the addict to society.
There are many drug-takers and each takes his journey to nowhere
for numerous and complex reasons.
Bringing them back home will require many bridges,
many different approaches,
each designed to reach one segment of the drug-dependent society.
Whether solutions are found in a maintenance approach, a therapeutic community,
a narcotic antagonist,
one thing is certain...
We, we must continue to build bridges back into society.
As many bridges as possible.
Let’s call them "Bridges from No Place."
[An Airile Production]
[Executive Producer Murdock Head M.D.]
[Narrator Rod Steiger]
[Producer Frank Kavanaugh]
[Director of Photography Charles E. Francis]
[Director William Templeton, Writer Don Peterson]
[Photographed by Charles Strathman, Edited by James E. Carpenter]
[Music and Effects by E. Robert Velazco, Sound Recording by Clifton Settler, William Wilder]
[Special Consultant Alfred M. Freedman M.D.]
[Produced By George Washington University, The Department of Medical and Public Affairs]
[In Cooperation with The National Institute of Mental Health]
[And The District of Columbia Medical Society and The American Academy of General Practice]