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2 Contemp. Crises 1 (1978)

handle is hein.journals/crmlsc2 and id is 1 raw text is: Contemporary Cises, 2 (1978), pp. 1-26 © Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, Amsterdam. Printed in the Netherlands A PROPOSAL FOR A HEROIN MAINTENANCE EXPERIMENT IN NEW YORK CITY: THE LIMITS OF REFORM STRATEGY* CYRIL D. ROBINSON Sometime in May 1971, an unknown person leaked to the New York Times a proposal which sought to determine if a small number of heroin addicts in New York City could be maintained on heroin for a short period of time. The expressed purpose of the experimental project was not to maintain addicts on heroin as such, but rather to see if by the use of the addict's drug of choice, heroin, some addicts who had failed in the city's methadone maintenance program could be lured back into that program. At the time, such an effort seemed important to the city adminis- tration because it was thought that those who had dropped out of metha- done maintenance, then the city's main gun in the war against heroin addiction, constituted a large proportion of those who committed crimes, and addict-related crime was an important political concern. The printing by the New York Times of what appeared to many to be a back-door attempt to introduce heroin maintenance, pure and simple, was greeted with a wave of protest that ranged from political right to political left, from politicians as politically distant as President Nixon and Congress- man Rangel. All found themselves on the same side of the issue. A con- gressional ad hoc committee was formed for the sole purpose of introducing legislation that would prohibit heroin experiments; a mayoral committee was appointed to report on the proposal's feasibility; and a barrage of press releases was exchanged among the combatants, before the project, having lost its momentum, finally foundered in the experimental drug regulations of the Federal Food and Drug Administration. This paper will use the history of the heroin maintenance proposal to illustrate the limitations imposed on city decision makers (specifically the College of Human Development, Pennsylvania State University, PA, U.S.A. *An earlier version of this paper was presented at the November 1975 meetings of the American Society of Criminology. I wish to thank Fred Eisele, Kenneth Fox, Larry Gamm and Herman Schwendinger for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Research by Anne M. Francis, a former graduate student, was also useful.

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