The Bell Curve:

The Pilot’s new columnist, Judge James Gray, recently offered up a pair of lucid, straightforward pieces on our drug problems and how to best deal with them. The second part, under the headline “How to win the war on illegal drugs,” included an invitation to readers to comment on the columns. I always find such invitations hard to turn down, whether or not I have any expertise in the subject. In this instance, I thought immediately about deferring to a good friend with international credentials, Dr. Joseph Pursch, who has never failed me in coming up with quotable opinions.

Joe Pursch is the psychiatrist who created the U.S. Navy’s alcohol treatment program that so well served Betty Ford and Billy Carter among a host of other public figures. He is now in private practice in Laguna Beach and sees patients and lectures at Sober Living by the Sea in Newport Beach when he isn’t carrying his message to meetings in distant countries.

So I called him, found him stateside and asked him to comment on Judge Gray’s thesis.

He immediately took issue with the headline, saying, “This is a war we can’t win and never will. We can’t stop people from doing what they know will help the misery they are feeling. We can simply put out ideas in ways that they will be listened to and hopefully acted on.”

What sort of ideas?

Pursch comes down foursquare with Gray’s emphasis on both education and treatment. “All addictions,” he said, “are the same in that they start as an experiment and slowly become a part of one’s life. It is essential to stop a victim before he becomes addicted and the family is terribly important because that’s where education starts.”

Although he acknowledges the economic and social advantages, Pursch is less affirmative about legalization, saying: “When prohibition was the law of the land, people didn’t stop drinking. And they didn’t stop when it was legalized again, either. The same thing would happen with other drugs. Once legalized, the people who use them would keep right on using drugs without the battle to get them. Nothing much would change.”

So what does he see as the best hope of preventing or halting drug addiction?