From: "Pierce Turboe" <[p--er--e] at [home.net]>
Newsgroups: talk.politics.drugs
Subject: DEA Study-- "Winner's Use Drugs"
Date: 26 Sep 1997 16:17:09 GMT

Pubdate: Sat, 20 Sep 1997

     WASHINGTON, DC--In a surprise announcement with wide-ranging
implications for U.S. narcotics policy, Drug Enforcement Administration
director Thomas Constantine acknowledged Monday that some
winners "may occasionally" use drugs.

     "Apparently," said Constantine, addressing reporters at Justice
Department headquarters, "contrary to the DEA's long-standing conviction,
drug use may not be limited solely to the domain of losers. It appears that
some successful Americans have experimented with illegal narcotics, as
well."

     The announcement was the result of a comprehensive three-year DEA
study of more than 40,000 U.S. winners, including thousands of successful
business executives, doctors, lawyers, scientists and
civic leaders. The study, originally designed by the DEA to help shed light
on the qualities shared by winners that make them resistant to drugs,
instead revealed that over 71 percent of winners had at one time or another
experimented with controlled substances.

     Constantine said that it remains unclear why winners, who enjoy
successful, productive careers and feelings of love and acceptance from
their families, would choose to engage in drug use.

     "Time and time again, DEA tests have shown that no feeling you could
get from drugs could be better than the great feeling you get from being a
winner," Constantine said. "Why a heart surgeon, an architect or a
straight-A student would use drugs when his senses are already enormously
heightened by the 'high' that comes from being a winner is beyond me."

     Making drug use by winners all the more puzzling, Constantine said, is
the fact that winners are more than strong enough to resist the peer
pressure associated with drug use, do not need to get high to
escape from a terrible life, and do not associate with the sort of people
most likely to use drugs--namely, losers.

     DEA scientists said it also remains unclear how drug-using winners
have  managed to avoid addiction and the many well-known destructive
side-effects of controlled substances.

     "Winners seem to have an unknown quality that enables them to use
drugs and keep on winning," DEA head researcher and narcotics expert Howard
Tobin said. "It goes against everything we know about drugs, but many of
the drug-taking winners we studied did not, in fact, become losers. They
did not lose control of their lives, nor did they lose their  loved ones,
their jobs, their homes, or their physical or mental well-being. There is
clearly something at work here that we still do not understand."

     Tobin cited the five-time Super Bowl champion Dallas Cowboys as a good
example of winners who achieved greatness while engaging in frequent
recreational drug use. "In 1993 and 1994, the Cowboys clearly were winners,
trouncing the Buffalo Bills--a team with no drug-users on its roster, mind
you--in two straight Super Bowls by a combined score of 82 to 30," Tobin
said. "It's puzzling, to say the least."

     One winner, Cupertino, CA, neurosurgeon Richard Frankel, a devoted
family man and casual marijuana smoker, said that the DEA should not
necessarily be surprised. "I find that a little pot every now and then
really helps me relax," he said. "When you consider that marijuana is less
addictive and less harmful than both nicotine and alcohol, it shouldn't be
all that surprising that I, like so many of my esteemed and accomplished
colleagues, choose to smoke up occasionally."

     As a result of the study, the DEA has been forced to change many of
its anti-drug awareness campaigns. On Tuesday, the agency ordered the
recall of more than 150,000 U.S. video arcade games displaying anti-drug
messages, including 27,000 Mortal Kombat II and N.A.R.C. units, which will
be reprogrammed with an altered on-screen message from former FBI director
William Sessions, "Very Few Winners Use Drugs."