Lori Leibovich

What would have happened to a hard-core heroin user who was arrested in New York City during Nixon’s term, as opposed to what would happen to that same user today?

Under Nixon, it was less likely that that person would be arrested. Today, arrest is the primary way that we deal with hard-core drug users. You get arrested, you are prosecuted, usually you’ll plea-bargain and if you have any prior offense, generally — at least in New York, and in most other states — you’ll go to prison for one or more years, depending on your record.

In the Nixon period, arrests were much less frequent. Instead, the cities and the government took a public-health approach to drug use … the idea was that treatment would be available to any addict who wanted it. That was Jaffe’s guiding principle and the one that the Nixon administration supported. They gave him hundreds of millions of dollars to set up treatment facilities, and basically anybody who got into trouble could show up at one of these and get help.

What was the role of law enforcement under Nixon?

The Nixon administration did use law enforcement, but the key was, addicts knew they could get help. Today, if a hard-core drug user is worried about arrest, if he’s got medical problems, if his wife or husband is threatening to throw him out because of his drug use, it’s often very hard to find appropriate care. There is not enough of it, and what is available often is not that good.

How has the political climate changed since the war on drugs began, and what other changes do you foresee?

I feel that the political climate is going to change and make drug reform more possible. Look at the medical marijuana initiatives around the country. Despite intense lobbying by the federal government, they are carrying in state after state. That to me is a sign that people are getting frustrated with the war on drugs. People are getting more upset over the explosion in the prison population, and how that is beginning to take money away from things like education. I think the Democrats are too afraid of being labeled soft on drugs. I think what we need is a moderate Republican, with good law-and-order credentials, to lead a reform effort.

Who?

The two people whom I look to as potential reformers are George W. Bush of Texas and George Pataki of New York. Both of them are moderate Republicans who have in fact made clear that they are tough on crime, and thus could make the big political effort. I basically feel — and I hate to say this — that we need a Nixon-type figure to undertake what would be extremely controversial.

So, what happened to all the treatment centers that were set up under Nixon?

During the 1970s, the network that Nixon and Jaffe set up remained largely intact, and most addicts who wanted help could get it. But in the late ’70s this extraordinary political movement developed called the Parents’ Movement. These were parents in places like Atlanta, Florida and Texas, who were terrified at the growing use of marijuana among young people. For young people to drink a beer was no big deal, but marijuana was something that they had no experience with. So they put together this extremely powerful political movement. Most of them had no political experience, but many of them were housewives who were extremely talented and energetic, and they found this outlet. They created this potent political movement which mushroomed all over the country and hundreds of these parent groups popped up. Then Nancy Reagan latched on to the anti-drug thing, and the parents became her foot soldiers in the “Just Say No” campaign.

Was Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign successful?

In my book I give the Parents’ Movement credit for the fact that, largely because of them, we have pretty good data on drug use from the late ’70s to the present. The peak year of marijuana use in this country was 1978-79. It began dropping even before Nancy Reagan got active, but then it dropped particularly sharply. I do think that her campaign had an effect on marijuana. The problem is that at the same time that they were bringing the marijuana problem under control, or bringing marijuana rates down, hard-core drug use shot way up.

Like crack?

Cocaine, but particularly crack, arrived in the mid-’80s, and the Reagan administration did nothing about it. Where I fault Nancy Reagan the most is that she went around the country preaching “Don’t use drugs,” while her husband was cutting all the funding for drug treatment programs. The people who really wanted to stop using did not have the opportunity to do so. Of course there were cultural changes taking place during that period, too. We became more conservative as a nation, so marijuana fell out of favor. I still hear a lot of people, more conservative people, say, “Oh, if only Nancy Reagan were back. She had commitment [to the issue].” Well, the government’s doing Nancy Reagan’s job now. The current drug czar, Barry McCaffrey, has a big media advertising campaign against drugs, pot in particular. But the ads don’t make a crucial distinction between marijuana and other drugs. Other drugs can be very devastating. I try to be very clear about that.

Have we had any success squelching drug trafficking abroad?

You have to go back to the 1970s to find the last time that the United States had any real success in keeping heroin or cocaine out of the country. The drug traffickers have become so sophisticated and powerful that they have, in the last 20 years, shown themselves able to frustrate and counter every single tactic that the U.S. government has thrown at them. There is so much cocaine produced that there is a glut on the world market, and the supply in this country, as measured by the price, has remained at extremely high levels, despite our growing investment. I think it is a huge waste of our resources to keep up these efforts. I recently wrote an article in which I tried to show that for the cost of one customs surveillance plane, which is about $47 million, it would be possible to get rid of all the waiting lists for treatment in Washington, D.C.

You argue that Reagan made the crack epidemic worse than it had to be.

One cannot blame a government for the eruption of a drug epidemic. It has deep causes. What I fault the Reagan administration for is doing nothing to provide services to people caught up in the crack epidemic. There was ample warning that something terrible was developing. Treatment experts were going to the White House and telling them, “Cocaine is becoming cheaper, it’s going down the socioeconomic ladder, if it reaches the inner city, we are going to have a major crisis on our hands.” The Reagan people listened to this and completely ignored it. They did nothing to try to provide services, or make more treatment available, in anticipation of this, and … even after crack hit, they continued to refuse to provide relief to these treatment facilities, which were becoming so overwhelmed with addicts. I feel that as a result of that, the crack epidemic was much worse than it needed to have been.

When was the position “drug czar” created?

The first drug czar really was Jerry Jaffe, and to me, what was unique about him was that he was a public health expert. It is amazing to think that Richard Nixon, the great apostle of law and order, named a psychiatrist, who was an expert in the treatment of drug addictions, to this position. If you look at who our most recent drug czars have been, we’ve had four in the modern period: William Bennett, basically a political moralist; Bob Martinez, who was a defeated governor of Florida; Lee Brown, a police commissioner; and now Barry McCaffrey, a four-star general. Not one comes out of the public health arena; not one knows anything about treatment. I believe that this has affected their ability to address the real heart of our drug problem, which is providing more services to hard-core users. I argue in my book that the heart of our drug problem is the 4 million or so hard-core drug users of heroin, crack and cocaine.

What was it about Jaffe that impressed Nixon? He must have been a pretty compelling figure for Nixon to base his strategy on this one man’s program.

Nixon was such a complex politician. On the one hand, he had these very deep convictions about the best way to deal with a problem, like drugs, and his gut told him that cracking down, mass arrests, breaking the “French Connection” wasn’t the real way to go about it. But he had this pragmatic side as well, and during the 1968 campaign, he had promised to bring the crime rate down, because it had been going up for so many years.

Once in office, he realized he had to deliver on this. In 1972, it was going to be his reelection, so his pragmatic side came out, and he turned to his domestic policy staff and said, “I want you to find a way to bring the crime rate down.” And his domestic staff was very pragmatic as well; in particular, Egil “Bud” Krogh Jr., who eventually went to jail for the Watergate affair, was an extremely resourceful, hard-headed and pragmatic man who wanted to find the way to do this. Basically he undertook a search of who was doing the best work on drug treatment in the country and who was doing the best work with heroin addicts.

How did the Nixon administration deal with the incoming, international supply of drugs?

The Nixon Administration broke the French Connection, so drugs were more difficult to find. It was one of the few times in our history when the government successfully kept drugs from coming into the country. I’d say, we haven’t been successful on that in about 20 years.

Is there any indication that we will move, or are moving, toward a public-health approach to treating addicts?

No. In fact, if you look at what happened with Mayor [Rudy] Giuliani in New York, we have taken a step backward. The idea that the mayor of a large city could, in 1998, attack methadone, and say he wanted to eliminate it, shows that we are moving backwards, in some ways. However, I … hope that maybe [my book] can shake up a few people, make them think a little bit harder about what we’re doing.

“We figured she’s only 3, she’s not comprehending this,” says Jay. “But she was.”

Shannon’s grandmother, Myrna Yaskulka, was killed in the World Trade Center on 9/11. She worked as an executive secretary at Fred Alger Management, located on the 93rd floor of the north tower. Five years after her death, the Yaskulkas, like thousands of families who lost loved ones on Sept. 11, are still coping with the aftershocks.

Jay, 38, a former Target manager, has been unemployed since 2000 and suffers from clinical depression. Louise, 40, remains plagued by guilt because she was supposed to be standing in front of the towers, on her way to work, when the planes hit. Their daughter, Brianna, 13, is furious about the way her grandmother was killed. And Shannon, 8, still fights against the debilitating symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. When the sky turns dark, the way it did when the smoke filled it on Sept. 11, she is often paralyzed with panic.

The public tragedy has dredged up past family traumas while also creating new psychological wounds. Losing a loved one is always painful, but losing her under horrifying circumstances makes recovery so much more difficult. “Usually when grieving, you get to a point when you can reminisce and remember good times,” says Alan Steinberg, associate director of the National Center for Child Traumatic Stress at UCLA. “But if every time you think of them, your mind is drawn to the horrifying way they died, your positive memories are blocked.”

Yet Jay and Louise are determined to keep their positive memories of Myrna alive, and are doing everything in their power to help their daughters move through their grief. In 2003, they moved from Staten Island, N.Y., where Myrna and many friends and neighbors who perished in the towers had lived, to the middle-class town of Hazlet. They have taken advantage, individually and together, of the free therapeutic services available to 9/11 families. Jay and Louise strive to keep the girls from dwelling on the tragic day, but they have also instituted a family rule: No subject, not Osama bin Laden or Islam or their personal demons, is off limits. For the past five years, openness has been their chosen method of coping — and they’re banking on truth and honesty to help their daughters heal.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

On a recent scorching August afternoon, Jay is sitting on a leather couch in his dark and heavily air-conditioned living room. A bald, stocky man with a blond mustache and bright blue eyes, his posture is rigid from a chronic back condition, but he relaxes when he speaks about Myrna.

She was a “party animal,” he says, laughing and recounting his mother’s love of dancing and attending singles events. She was the girls’ “human Barbie doll” and let them paint her face with makeup and style her hair. A compulsive shopper, Myrna visited Century 21, the famous discount department store near the World Trade Center, every workday. After Myrna’s death, Louise found 200 pairs of sunglasses and an entire trunk of clothes, including glamorous evening gowns that still had the price tags on them, in her apartment.

Myrna’s remains were never recovered, so the Yaskulkas filled two urns with poems, mementos and a Century 21 bag. Her cemetery plot has a view of the Woodridge Mall in New Jersey. “She chose that spot because she wanted to face Bloomingdale’s,” Jay says, chuckling. Photographs of Myrna show a woman who looked dramatically younger than her 59 years, a woman who fancied rhinestone sunglasses, gold lamé raincoats and white faux-fur hats, like the one that sits atop a bust on an end table in the Yaskulkas’ living room, a tribute to its owner.

The Yaskulkas’ boxy ranch house sits on a quiet street, lined with similarly compact houses. On the Saturday I visit, they are holding a garage sale and their driveway is filled with old toys, tchotchkes and furniture. Neighbors and friends mingle on the lawn and kids splash in the backyard pool. Even though the Yaskulkas moved to Hazlet three and half years ago, they still haven’t fully unpacked; boxes are scattered around the house and the dining room table is covered in papers. In a corner of the small upstairs hallway stands a curio cabinet filled with 9/11 mementos: a star of David made from a steel beam from ground zero, a copy of the 9/11 Commission Report and a portrait of Myrna painted by Brianna.

Unlike other families who spent the first weeks after 9/11 waiting and praying for their loved ones to return, Jay says he knew immediately that his mother was dead. “My brothers and I — we always talked about the fact that there was a black cloud over our family,” he says. “I wanted to believe otherwise, but I knew.” The black cloud first formed in 1981, when Jay’s father, Stuart, was murdered in a botched robbery. “Three gunshots to the head for $60,” says Jay, who was 13 at the time. “Both my parents went to work and never came home.”

It’s the senseless and violent death of his father — and the fact that his family kept silent about it — that make Jay and Louise fiercely determined to talk with their daughters about their grandmother’s death, if the kids want to. “I don’t want them to keep it inside like I did,” Jay says. “As a kid, I tried to keep busy. I tried not to think about my father and I had a lot of anger.”

Shortly after 9/11, Jay attended community meetings in Staten Island, but they soon began to bother him. The auditoriums were filled with children who had lost parents, and yet no one was talking to, or about, them. At one meeting, Jay rose to address the parents in the crowd. “I said, ‘Kids understand more than we think they do,’” and then he told them about his experience as a fatherless 13-year-old. “I said, ‘I’m not a psychologist, but I can tell you what it’s like.’” He shared with them the fact that as a grown man he cried at his wedding, at the birth of his children, and each year on his father’s birthday. While trauma settles and recedes over time, on certain occasions it rises to the surface. “The pain never goes away,” Jay says he told the parents. “Even for children — especially for children.”

“If you as an adult can’t understand how something like 9/11 could happen,” Jay says, “how will you explain it to a child?”

Yet Jay and Louise have made it a priority to explain as much as possible to their daughters. “If my kids ask, I tell them,” says Louise. “I don’t lie. My parents used to say, ‘If you’re smart enough to ask, you’re smart enough to understand the truth.’” When Brianna asked why someone wanted to kill her grandmother, Louise explained to her that “they didn’t kill Grandma, they killed Americans, they targeted the heart of America. That helped her make sense of it,” Louise says.

“The girls need to know what’s going on because they’ll get bits and pieces and hear things the wrong way otherwise,” Jay says. “We think this is the best. Are we right? You never know. That’s the tricky part of parenting.”

As I sit and talk with Jay and Louise, Shannon and Brianna walk in and out of the room, sometimes pausing to hear their mother’s or father’s words. Jay talks matter-of-factly about his depression and the medication he needs to take to treat it. Louise weeps openly and speaks of the sometimes strained relationship she had with Myrna, how difficult it can be at times to live with a depressed husband, and the survivor’s guilt she still suffers from. She tells me that when she was 9 years old, her mother had two massive strokes that left her unable to care for herself. “I became her caretaker with my dad and a health aide,” says Louise, who has three younger siblings. “I grew up with my mom sick, cooking, cleaning, taking care of the [younger] kids. That was my training for this. That was God’s way of preparing me.”

Louise tells me that a week ago she “broke down” and started crying uncontrollably. “Even though it’s been five years, it’s still so crisp,” she says of 9/11. At the time, Louise was an associate at Citibank, located a few blocks from the World Trade Center. She decided to drive to work on Sept. 11 so she could get home in time to vote — it was Election Day — and attend Brianna’s back-to-school night. When she emerged from the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel she heard the roar of the second tower falling and sat in her car while the world turned gray around her. Had she taken the bus as usual, she would have been steps away from the towers when the planes hit. “I sat in the car and called to Myrna, ‘Where are you? Where are you’” Louise says. Myrna, who always shopped at Century 21 before work, decided to get to the office early on Sept. 11. “Why did I do what I did, and why did she do what she did?” Louise asks. “We both did something unexpected and she died and I lived.”

To Jay and Louise, Shannon’s wounds sometimes seem the deepest. “She’s afraid of gloom,” Louise says of her youngest daughter. “Rain triggers disaster to her because rain means lightning, thunder, darkness.” For months after 9/11, Shannon carried around a tiny guitar and belted out “God Bless America” on the front porch of her Staten Island house and at the local mall. She constantly peppered her parents with questions. “Why did those men kill Grandma Myrna?” “When they finish cleaning up ground zero will grandma come home?”

Although the images she saw on television on Sept. 11 were fleeting, they lodged in Shannon’s consciousness. Sitting on an ottoman in the living room, Louise, crying quietly, ticks off the symptoms that dog Shannon. If Shannon wakes up and it’s raining outside, she often won’t go to school, preferring to hide in the safety of her bed. She can become so panicked by the weather, or the smell of smoke, that she’ll vomit or even run a fever. “All of this started after 9/11,” Louise says.

“She’ll start crying out of nowhere,” adds Brianna, who is curled up on the couch a few feet from her mother. “She says, ‘I want to live forever.’” Shannon’s fears sometimes hinder the family’s activities. A few weeks ago, the Yaskulkas were enjoying a Saturday afternoon at a car show when the wind began to blow and the sky began to darken. Immediately the family packed up and left. “If it rains, we leave as a family, together,” says Louise. “Our family and friends accept it.”

Shannon has been in and out of counseling for five years. She has made progress with some psychologists, but not with others. Last year, after seeing a young therapist-in-training who worked in conjunction with her schoolteachers, Shannon was able to overcome her fear of going to school for several months. Louise says Shannon has coped well with a recent spate of East Coast thunderstorms, but she’s concerned about what worries the coming school year might trigger.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Brianna’s reaction to her grandmother’s death has taken a different turn than her sister’s. Rather than becoming consumed by fear, she has focused her feelings outward, railing against President Bush, the media, and anyone who dares to tell her they’re sorry that her grandmother died. With her dirty blond hair in a messy ponytail, black bra straps peaking from underneath a white tank top, and a diamond stud glittering in her nose, she looks more like 18 than 13.

“I hate when people say, ‘I’m sorry,’” Brianna tells me. “I tell them, ‘Why? You didn’t do anything!’” She also hates — hates!– President Bush. “Because of his stupidity, my grandmother is dead,” she tells me.

“If Brianna sees Bush on the news, she says, ‘He knew this was going to happen,’” Jay adds. “She really tenses up at the news and I can’t blame her. I’m mad too. Why are we going after Saddam? I’m confused too.”

Brianna expresses similar rage over the ubiquitous media representations of 9/11, whether it’s TV coverage of the foiled terror plot in Britain, previews for Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center” or the flurry of images — some as innocuous as billowing American flags, some as wrenching as the buckling towers — that have been blanketing the media in the lead-up to the fifth anniversary.

“I threw my remote at the TV when I saw a commercial for [the Oliver Stone movie],” Brianna tells me from her perch on the couch. “A movie is supposed to be entertaining. [Movies like that] give more information to people than they need to know or want to know. And for those who lost people, it brings back the tragedy. But there is no way to stay away from reminders — on the news, radio, TV, now a movie. Enough!”

Psychologists say many victims — particularly children and teenagers — want to rid themselves of the 9/11 badge. “No matter how well a kid is doing in every other regard — and I’ve seen children be so incredibly emotionally mature about their relationship with their dead parents — they always feel like a 9/11 kid,” says Marylene Cloitre, a research psychologist, who has worked with hundreds of children who lost parents on 9/11 in her role as director of the Institute for Trauma and Stress at New York University’s Child Study Center. “Many of them look forward to college for the opportunity to be free of that ID. And that ID has been tough to shake because of what 9/11 has meant to the city and country.”

But Brianna in some ways has embraced her association with the attacks. She is happy to talk to the media and when she meets new people, she immediately tells them about the way her grandmother was killed. On the first day of school she informed her history teacher that she will not attend lessons on 9/11. (“I don’t need to learn about it,” she tells me. “I lived it.”) Brianna insists that her family attend anniversary ceremonies at ground zero, and the girls go to an overnight camp every summer for 9/11 kids. Indeed, experts and parents talk about how therapeutic it is for 9/11 kids to be around each other. Losing their loved ones at the same moment, in the same way, creates an indelible bond.

Brianna and Shannon attend Camp Better Days, a one-week overnight camp for children who lost loved ones on Sept. 11. “You can’t escape the world, but you can at camp,” says Brianna, who excitedly tells me about all of the activities — movies under the stars, 1980s night — that she gets to do at Better Days. “At camp I feel good because everyone there has been through the same thing.” Shannon, who needs her mother to stay with her until she falls asleep when she is at home, has been attending camp for four years. It is the one place where she feels independent — even safe.

As Louise, Jay and I continue to talk, with the girls hovering nearby, Jay says he tries to provide as much fun and escape for Brianna and Shannon as possible, taking them fishing, to amusement parks, on bike rides. “Kids shouldn’t endure any type of pain,” he says. “I don’t try to distract them, but why should they be thinking about bin Laden or what Bush is saying? I don’t think they need to be involved with that.”

The Yaskulkas are no longer in family therapy, deciding instead to work together to try to solve their problems and transcend the anguish of the last five years. “Our therapy now is talking to each other,” says Jay. “We have each other.”

Invariably, when the subject of 9/11 surfaces, he strives to keep the focus on his mother. To his family, Sept. 11 is entirely personal. “I know people whose life is 9/11 stuff, but I couldn’t do that,” he says. “We don’t talk about it so much as something that happened to thousands of people. We talk about her.” And all the things they love about her. Jay wears a silver cuff memorial bracelet with Myrna’s name engraved on it, his way of keeping her memory alive. On Myrna’s birthday, for three years after her death, the girls baked a cake and sang “Happy Birthday.” They bought helium balloons and attached notes to them to send up to heaven. “By doing things like that, we accentuate the positive,” says Louise. “Did 9/11 rob them of some of their childhood? Yes. But I don’t want them to take life as gloom and doom. They have a lifetime to worry about the crises in the world.”

New York Times Magazine: Antagonistic interviewer Deborah Solomon accuses Bitch co-editor Andi Zeisler and other feminists born in the ’70s of being “trapped in a pop-culture bubble.” Zeisler more than holds her own.

Los Angeles Times: Brace yourself before reading this chilling profile of “Girls Gone Wild” founder Joe Francis, in which he violently simulates an attack on a female reporter, then calls her editor to complain about what a cunt she is.

More Los Angeles Times: The California Labor Federation votes to oppose Proposition 85, which would direct doctors to notify the parents of minors seeking abortions.

Detroit Free Press: Reports of boys molested by women are on the rise.

But the single most significant reason these men remain unattached is “because the pool of women in their social circles — those without college degrees — has shrunk,” according to the Times. “And the dwindling pool of women in this category often look for a mate with more education and hence better financial prospects.” As Shenia Rudolph, 42, from the Bronx said succinctly, “Men don’t marry because women like myself don’t need to rely on them.”

Broadsheet reader Sandra Miller notes the difference in tone between the Times article and, say, the widely debunked “a single 40-year-old white woman is more likely to be killed by a terrorist” article that ran in Newsweek in 1986. “The tone of the [New York Times] article was distinctly different from pieces in days past featuring lower rates of marriage by women — no terrorist statistics were trotted out. No whiff of desperation. The guys were portrayed as keeping busy, self-actualized, and more or less happy and content with their lives while hoping for the right gal to someday come along,” writes Miller. “No mention of women abandoning these men for younger, more beautiful specimens. No interviews by women that concretize the notion that these men have no hope to marry because life has passed them by, and they were too busy focused on the wrong things while they were most marriageable and now they only have the booby prize of lifelong, Cliff Claven bachelorhood to look forward to.”

Anyone else notice that?

While FFL probably won’t be canvassing Broadsheet readers for said ideas, let’s hash some out anyway just for fun. The group claims they want to use the site to keep the memory of Susan B. Anthony alive” and “renew interest in the early American feminists.” In what ways could they do that?

And here’s another question I’ve been thinking about: If like me, you’re entirely skeptical of a feminist organization that doesn’t support the right to abortion, are there ways that women on both sides of the abortion debate can and should come together to champion other causes that are important to women?

Women post to the site accusing men of everything from serious crimes such as sleeping with young girls to minor annoyances like spending too much time playing video games. A recent post is typical of the kind of trash talking that goes on: “At first, I thought he was my great legionary in shining leather but he turned out to be just a manwhore, sticking his turgid manmeat in any cavernous hole he can find. All he ever does is get drunk and pass out on my stairs.” (The site does offer accused men the opportunity to respond to their critics).

Some legal bloggers are debating whether Joseph and her site are protected by the Communications Decency Act, which, according to People, “exempts Web masters from responsibility for displaying others’ comments.” But there are also some tricky ethical considerations. One blogger called the site “deplorable” and thinks it should be shut down immediately, while other people might argue that it is a great service for women, in the vein of Holla Back NYC.

What do you think?