Progress Report of an Ad Hoc Panel on Drug Abuse. - [SCARCE REPORT FROM THE WHITE HOUSE CONFERENCE, 1962-63]

Washington, The White House, 1962. Lex8vo. Typewritten manuscript with blue wrappers. Leaves stapled in left margin. A bit of sunning, mostly to wrappers. 59 pp. Original White House Report on a various number of different drugs and their effect, usage and addictability. The report was created by the request of President John F. Kennedy and was meant to support the President's Advisory Commission on Narcotics and Drug Abuse."Public concern over the problem of drug abuse, which had been relatively dormant during the 1940s and 1950s, flared again during the 1960s. The intensification of national concern resulted in increasing pressure for federal initiatives in the area. In response to this development, a White House Conference on Narcotics and Drug Abuse was convened in 1962, which resulted in the establishment of the President's Advisory Commission on Narcotics and Drug Abuse on January 15, 1963." (Abadinsky. Drug use and abuse, p 65.)"The President released a document entitled "Progress Report" [The present report] which had been produced by eight doctors (three M.D.'s, four Ph.D.'s, and one who held both degrees) designated as an Ad Hoc Panel on Drug Abuse to confer with the White House Science Advisor and give advice on what should be done. The members of this panel could not be faulted for their collective eminence, but none of them had theretofore been closely identified with drug-abuse problems, so their findings were developed from what might be termed a slightly fresh viewpoint. They started from the hypothesis that nearly all compulsive drug abusers could be rehabilitated, by which they meant withdrawn from drugs and re-established in society, since they found drug abuse was inevitably a manifestation of some underlying psychological or physiological disorder.Accordingly they rejected proposals for imposing long prison sentences on drug offenders, on the one hand, and for placing addicts on any kind of maintenance regime, on the other. Instead they urged lengthy and extensive parole supervision in all cases, following the pattern that had been developed (not surprisingly) in California." (King, The Drug Hang Up, p. 232).The report drew several conclusions regarding why people use drugs, one of them being: "Growth of "long-hair" and beatnik cults which experiment with the use of psychotic drugs to achieve group cohesiveness and personal nirvana." (p. 14).…