"An awful lot of people do it for either very little or no profit," one student said.

They sell enough marijuana or sopors to cover what they paid, then keep the remainder for their own use or for friends.

Appendix 27

[From the Citizen-Journal, May 23, 1973]

'PURE DOWNER' TELLS LIFE OF DRUG USE, ABUSE

(By David Drake)

Here is how one volunteer at the campus-area Drug Crisis Center classifies sopor

users:

"Special occasion people," "habitual weekend partiers" and those who take them regularly.

Here is how Columbus narcotics agents rank drugs in the campus area : marijuana, methaqualone, barbiturates and amphetamines, cocaine and related drugs, LSD, everything else.

Here is a person-male, white, 20 to 25 years old, as the police would saywho falls into the last category of sopor users and who has taken all the drug types listed above.

He said he started with LSD when he was 13.

He may be somewhat representative in that, while never an OSU student, he says he used to be a "campus freak."

When he was in high school, he said, he would come to Ohio State about 4 p.m. and stay until 11 p.m. or midnight.

"I used to know everybody who used to walk down the street, every freak you could know," he said.

"I won't come near the campus anymore.. too many narks."

He was interviewed after having recently drunk two beers, swallowed two sopors and injected three more.

(Methaqualone, like other drugs, can be "run up" by crushing the tablets and mixing the powder with water. You get higher faster that way.)

"I used to be a speed freak," he said. "Now I'm pure downer."

More than three years off speed, he said, "My body still moves." He changed over because he was losing weight, “getting unhealthy.”

"I couldn't think straight, I was imagining things. Somebody would tell me something to do and I would forget what to do.

"It's very hard to get sopors unless you know a good connection. If you know the connection, you can get sopors just like snapping your fingers," he said, snapping his fingers.

He knows a good connection, a friend who had 50,000 and is going to get another 100,000.

"If you buy a large quantity of sopors, you don't pay as much." He said 1,000 can be had for $135. "That's a good deal."

If a person asks much more than that, he said, he won't make a sale. "Unless he sells them to a junkie."

"It's good to have a large quantity, but other times it's risky cause you can get busted for it” he said.

"Me, if I do buy a large quantity, I'll hide it-wrap it up real good and then bury it. But I'll bury it where nobody can see me go out and unbury it."

How many downers has he taken in the last month? "About 500."
Favorite? "Anything I can get my hands on."

He says he prefers "reds", (barbiturates) but confesses he's also partial to sopors. When he was interviewed, he had 1,000 sopors and was looking for more. "I just dig doin' sopors, man."

In his drug-taking career, he has overdosed four times.

He insists, "I could stop right now. I don't have to take anything. I know definitely I don't have to. My mind controls the drug.

"Whenever I want to get stoned. . I go out and get stoned, messed up. When it's time for me to go to work, I'm straight.'

In spite of his self assurance he says, "I don't like people to do drugs. I know what it's like. I know what it can do to you.

"Every kid you see who's taking drugs needs help. Somewhere in his life, man, he doesn't know what to do."

The Drug Crisis Center has taken or referred to hospitals more than 200 drug overdoses a year.

In 1972, the volunteers there got about 13,500 calls. They came from people who took or were about to take too many pills, from suspicious parents, friends of overdose cases, potential suicides and places like the Darbydale Police Department, seeking drug information.

The volunteers became acquainted with a 9-year-old who attempted suicide, a young girl who eventually killed herself with oven cleaner, a 1-year-old boy whose parents gave him LSD, a young man who walked through the glass door there after a bad acid trip at a rock concert.

The center believes its "drug analysis and identification" function probably is abused by dealers seeking to know the purity of their wares before peddling them.

Wanda Rupe, the center's director, says, "I don't ask them where they get it . . . I don't care."

Neither do the center's staffers ask callers names. In fact, they try to stop them before they are given.

The center got its start in January, 1970, and moved from Neil-av to the present location at Chittenden-av and N. High-st that summer.

The center was the first in the city to treat heroin addicts with methadone, although that lasted only a few months.

Although it is now investigating public funding, the center has existed on private contributions. It got its start with $1,000 donations from Battelle Memorial Institute and First Community Church.

(Battelle does drug analysis for the center.)

Dr. Robert Stevenson, former chairman of the center's board of directors, calls it a "liaison between the medical establishment and the street people." "It's flaky enough that it doesn't scare them," he said. "They sort of accept what we try to do for them for the most part."

"One of the reasons we have been able to stay in business as we have is that we haven't gotten too big, although there is certainly a lot of room for improvement."

The police don't pressure the volunteers for information and one narcotics policeman said recently, "If they do any good it's worth it."

The center tries hard to maintain its credibility with street people and all others who would call or come in.

On giving information to the police, Wanda Rupe says, "That's not my job." Nine years on downers, she admitted herself to a hospital to kick her habit. Most of those with whom the center deals are high school students and most of the calls are calls of identification.

"What is it?" is a common question, coming sometimes before, sometimes after, pills have been ingested.

Armed with experience and a Physician's Desk Reference with color pages of every pill imaginable, the center usually can tell them.

The Open Door Clinic differs from the Drug Crisis Center in several respects. In addition to drug work, the clinic at 237 E. 17th-av also offers pregnancy and VD counseling and testing.

Besides four full-time counselors, doctors and psychologists from Ohio State volunteer their time to the clinic.

The clinic has given extended treatment to those withdrawing from drugs. Although the clinic gets some private donations, it's primarily funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and the Franklin County Mental Health and Retardation Board.

Like the Drug Crisis Center, they see drug users, overdose cases, friends of overdose cases, and parents. Like the center, they can tell when a new supply of pills hit the streets by the calls they get.

Like the center, the clinic reports there are homemade sopors around on which "people are getting sick."

The clinic began in September 1970, and moved last October to the former fraternity house on E. 17th-av.

Since then, director Robert Wilson says he can recall a half dozen drug cases were sent to Upham Hall, the psychiatric unit of OSU hospitals.

APPENDIX 28

[From the Columbus Citizen-Journal, May 24, 1973]

MEDICAL PERSONNEL TELL DRUG CASE HORRORS

(By David Drake)

While the Drug Crisis Center near campus sends most of its customers to Riverside Hospital, University Hospital gets its share of overdose cases . . . about five just on sopors per month.

In one recent month, the summary included: "Male, 18, sopors . . . male, 23, drinking and took sopors . . . female, 21, possible sopors . . . female, 18, methaqualone... female, 25, Librium, Valium, sopors."

Harry Haluszka, an OSU medical student, said, "A lot of community hospitals, for various reasons, will send the patient away from their doors, send them to University."

Some of the worst cases go to Upham Hall, Ohio State's psychiatric hospital. One 17-year-old high school girl, was recently released from Upham Hall after three months' treatment for overdose of sopors.

Another high school student, an 18-year-old boy, recently spent time there after an overdose on alcohol, acid speed and barbiturates.

A doctor at Riverside Hospital says, "I don't think we see many-shall we say-competent drug users."

He also believes Ohio State students "know pretty well what they're doing . . . know what kind of reaction they're going to have."

An OSU nursing student about a year and a half ago had the misfortune to take drugs involuntarily-her boyfriend dropped a tablet of LSD into her Coke. "She would not come down . . . withdrew . . . would not speak . . . was almost catatonic," says the Drug Crisis Center volunteer who remembers her. She was admitted to Upham Hall.

The center says that LSD, while down from its peak of popularity in the 1960s, still is around in fair quantity. They got 14 calls just on LSD in one recent week. Riverside treated several LSD overdose cases earlier this year.

A doctor there says the law no longer requires hospitals to report overdose cases except suicide attempts to the police.

That probably has helped to bring in some patients who would otherwise have been afraid to seek treatment, he said.

Dr. H. Spencer Turner, head of the student health center at Ohio State, says personal data there is privileged "by law and ethics," but it is "a constant battle to get that message across.

Narcotics police, not able to get tips from hospitals and treatment centers, sometimes are also actively sabotaged.

Their likenesses, they say, have appeared in the local underground presssort of a know-your-local-narc campaign.

One Columbus narcotics sergeant, seated in an office decorated with a variety of confiscated drug paraphernalia, said the department's 20 agents are the best in the state, Academy Award-caliber actors.

He is complimentary also of the craftiness of their prey. If an agent is spotted on N. High-st at 18th-av, for example, word will get to 13th-av even before he does.

Sometimes agents wait for someone to slip up and tip his hand, like a local mail carrier-drug importer not long ago.

He got a job as a postman, the police said, but was off work the day one supply came and his substitute delivered the package-hashish-to the uninvolved and much-surprised addressee.

Indeed, the fear of a bust seems to be the only thing prohibiting some from partaking.

One young woman, for example, said of marijuana: "So long as it is illegal, it is my only deterrent. Somebody legalizes it and I'll be the first person in line at the store. Love the stuff!"

Marijuana still is illegal and there is a move in Washington to reclassify and limit the distribution of methaqualone, a close runner-up to grass in popularity. Dr. Robert Stevenson, a psychiatrist, says: "The damn drug isn't that good anyway."

He says too much methaqualone is being manufactured and he would "like to see its classification upgraded."

The Methaqualone Control Act of 1973, introduced in a U.S. Senate subcommittee in March, would do that. The measure would put methaqualone in the same class with codeine, cocaine, morphine and amphetamines.

Parke, Davis and Co., makers of Parest, one of five brands of methaqualone, told the committee it "will not oppose any scheduling determined to be necessary."

Not all methaqualone makers are taking the move to reclassify their products sitting down.

Representatives of Arnar-Stone and Roror, who make Sopor and Quaalude, respectively, had to be subpenaed to appear before Indiana Sen. Birch Bayh's subcommittee.

John Rector, deputy chief counsel for Bayh's subcommittee, told the CitizenJournal Roror filed a formal objection last week to the reclassification effort with the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.

He described the company's attitude at the Senate hearings as "flippant." Stevenson feels there is a need to "wake people up to what's going on." Some, however, refuse to be awakened.

A Bureau of Drug Abuse spokesman tells of a pharmacist in a small town near here whose drug education efforts resulted in council's declaring there is no drug problem. . . through a formal resolution.

Stevenson says scare tactics in drug education won't work. He recalls a service buddy who, after viewing a film on the horrors of VD, said, "I didn't think about a girl for 10 minutes after I saw that movie."

Stevenson, who talks at area schools and civic organizations, blames television for much of the drug abuse.

He said he once asked a class of youngsters to name all the drugs they had seen advertised on television. "We stopped when they got to 45."

Parents, he says, are often unwitting suppliers via their medicine cabinets. The drug center's Wanda Rupe says, "Some parents I'd like to nail to the wall."

Jack Papin, who founded the center, says drug education programs fail because the educators haven't kept up.

And there is a lot of misinformation, or as one person said, "There are a lot of great drug stories."

Robert Wilson, head of the Open Door Clinic, says, "A lot of people are realizing there's a lot of drug use that is not necessarily problem use."

This allows public attention to turn to more serious problems, he says, like the abuse of alcohol.

(Jack Papin says, "If alcohol had been invented yesterday, it would be banned today.")

A doctor at Riverside Hospital, believes methaqualone is just a "passing fancy."

"Drugs work on the good old law of supply and demand," says one observer. In the case of methaqualone, the abundant supply may have helped create the demand, or so the critics of the drugs say.

Stevenson says there are enough barbiturates on the market "for every man, woman and child in the United States to get high for three weeks." Nearly everyone is willing to theorize on why people take drugs.

Jack Papin: "Looking for the Holy Grail . . . something to terminate their boredom leading marginal existences."

Doper previously interviewed: "It's the people, how they act. If people would treat other people like a human being, I don't think people would do drugs." Is it necessary?

"I don't think we need that many chemicals to feel good and be happy," Stevenson says.