Quarantining Addicts

Drug addiction would seem to have little in common with smallpox. But according to Swedish Psychiatrist Nils Bejerot, the two scourges are remarkably similar. Though one is spread by example and one by a virus, both, he says, are contagious, epidemic diseases that can best be contained by quarantining their victims. To curb the spread of heroin and other hard-drug abuse, Bejerot proposes, the U.S. should establish compulsory, drug-free rehabilitation "villages" in secluded areas to keep addicts from infecting healthy nonusers.

Bejerot is a researcher in social medicine at Stockholm's Karolinska Institute and an expert on the drug epidemics that have occurred periodically in nations all over the world. In a New York Times interview last week, he insisted that contrary to popular belief, the role of pushers in epidemic addiction is secondary. It is primarily the users—especially new users—who spread drug abuse by persuading their friends to join them in their mindless pursuit of euphoric highs. Sometimes, Bejerot says, it is even possible to trace waves of addiction to particular carriers. In 1949, for example, he discovered that a small group of Stockholm bohemians was responsible for a surge of amphetamine use that eventually produced 12,000 new Swedish addicts. Similarly, eleven Norwegian drug users deported from Sweden in 1967 stimulated 100 new addiction cases in Norway when they returned home.

History shows that lenient methods of handling this kind of contagion are bound to fail, Bejerot says. In Sweden, for example, light penalties for drug offenders have done nothing to curb addiction. In Japan, on the other hand, authorities stamped out an amphetamine epidemic after World War II by instituting and enforcing a series of tough regulations: legal use of amphetamines was restricted to the treatment of just one disease (narcolepsy, which makes its victims fall asleep constantly); only one doctor per hospital was allowed to handle these drugs; and heavy prison sentences were imposed for possession and peddling—thus preventing both abusers and sellers from spreading their "disease."

While isolated detention villages are not precisely prisons, Bejerot admits that his proposed detention villages and his generally tough approach to drug control are highly controversial because they threaten the civil liberties of drug users. But he warns that popular outrage over escalating addiction and addiction-linked crime could lead to something even worse: repressive "semifascistic" measures that would affect not just addicts and criminals but large numbers of ordinary citizens.