DRUGS and THUGS:

In 1990 Jonathan Shedler and Jack Block, two psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, were attacked as traitors in the war on drugs after they reported that "problem drug use is a symptom, not a cause, of personal and social maladjustment." But three years later, the results of a government-funded study lend support to that conclusion.

Describing a careful longitudinal study of 101 subjects in the May 1990 issue of American Psychologist, Shedler and Block wrote: "Adolescents who had engaged in some drug experimentation were the best-adjusted in the sample. Adolescents who used drugs frequently were maladjusted, showing a distinct personality syndrome marked by interpersonal alienation, poor impulse control, and manifest emotional distress. Adolescents who, by age 18, had never experimented with any drug were relatively anxious, emotionally constricted and lacking in social skills."

These differences showed up early in childhood and seemed to be related to the way the kids were raised. Shedler and Block concluded that "the meaning of drug use can be understood only in the context of an individual's personality structure and developmental history."

That assessment now appears to be respectable. The My/June issue of NIDA Notes. the newsletter of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, reports on a recent study of 51 male teenagers in a Denver drug-abuse treatment program, all of whom had engaged in misbehavior such as stealing, truancy, fighting, arson, property destruction, cruelty to people or animals, lying, and running away. Seventy seven percent of them said had started using drugs regularly one to 13 years after they began misbehaving.

"The majority engaged in these behaviors both while they were intoxicated and when they were not, and for reasons related and not related to drugs," said McGill University psychiatrist Mark Zoccolillo, coauthor of the study. " The antisocial behaviors not only begin before the substance abuse but continue to occur independently of the substance abuse." He concluded that early antisocial behaviors is a fore-runner of both drug abuse and crime, "challenging the assumption that drug use causes crime." - Jacob Sullivan

SAFER SEX

After unsuccessful attempts to stamp out prostitution, two California cities are looking at the merits of decriminalization.

Last year, the San Diego City Council, at the instigation of Council Member John Hartley, appointed a task force to study how best to combat prostitution. After a year of talking with the community residents and experts (puttanieri [ndr]:-))), the task force is ready to make its recommendations, but Hartley and the rest of the City Council may be surprised by the results.

"If anything, I went into this project thinking, 'We've got to jail them and get tougher,' " says Dale Durbin, chairman of the San Diego Citywide Prostitution Task Force. Although the task force has not made a final decision on its recommendations, he expects one of them to be that the city appoint a new task force to look into decriminalization.

Durbin notes that the criminal status of prostitution may be responsible for putting sex workers on the street. And he says San Diego's law-enforcement resources are squandered on prostitution while crimes against people and property go unaddressed.

For some of the same reasons, San Francisco is creating a task force that will consider decriminalization as one possible policy for dealing with prostitution. "Prostitutes can be arrested twice in the same night," says Jean Paul Semahah, chief aide for City Supervisor Terence Halinan, who proposed the task force to consider decriminalization but does not favor any one policy.

After decriminalization, Semahah says, prostitutes would no longer have to work on the street, where they offend tourists and drive away business. He also argues that decriminalization would improve the safety of prostitutes, noting that the "illegal nature of the activity creates an atmosphere that attracts other types of crime." -

- Jacob Kramer -