New York Daily News
Finding a ship of hope in battle to beat drugs
By A. M. Rosenthal
Friday, November 29, 2002

I never asked his name or permission to use it. I am sorry about that, and ashamed.

I had left the decks of the Intrepid a few days ago full of admiration for the young men and women celebrating their graduation - not in seamanship, but in building their lives up from the gutter and drugs. One young man I talked with told me of his early drug-addicted life, hungry and scrounging - sometimes straight into jail. After a hard year and a half of the strict teaching of the work ethic by the therapeutic community called Phoenix House, he fought himself into freedom from pot and every other kind of poison. Now he walked with me, shoulders back and mind busy. I paid him a compliment. He accepted with a smile and said: "Now I am one of the lucky ones in life." 

I thought: What a gift of hope this young man is giving to himself and his family. I'll do a piece about him, a suitable gift for all readers at the holidays of Thanksgiving, Christmas and Chanukah, particularly for young people caught in the most difficult struggles of their lives. If they don't win now, many of them will spend the rest of their lives in the struggle.

But when I sat down at the computer, I realized with shame that though I admired him and complimented him, I had not troubled to ask his name. I doubt he cared, but I did.

The Intrepid served under the American flag in 1903 - first as a bomb-ketch taken from the Tripolitan pirates (nice, briny phrases). Then it became a steel-hulled torpedo ram, later remade as an aircraft carrier that saw action at Okinawa during World War II, and it served in every other war where the American flag flew until it was decommissioned.

Then somebody had just the right idea: Don't turn it into scrap, but dock it permanently on the Hudson River as the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum. It was meant to honor all American men and women who had fought for the U.S., and it does.

I was drawn to the Intrepid, which had been borrowed for the day, to see the graduation ceremony for students who had fought the narcotics around them and, most difficult, already in them. I think almost everybody on board must have had the same thought: Drugs do as much damage to America's forces as have its maritime enemies for so many decades.

It was not until I was a foreign correspondent in Asia that I saw children who had not even reached adolescence stabbing themselves with narcotics or smoking narcotics from a scrap of paper and prowling for victims with money so they could buy more of the poisons that already commanded their bodies and minds.

Back home, I understood this was a great danger to American life that I had not fully grasped before. Narcotics had become easily available. When I told one of my three sons that nobody had ever offered me narcotics on the street as they did him and his friends, he told me that all I had to do was get rid of my tie.

For years afterward, I wrote stories and columns about drugs and about the people with huge money who subsidize the legalization movement with thousands of books and articles and paid propaganda.

Leaving the Intrepid, I decided that we don't have to be polite to those who campaign for drug legalization. They are bad guys. The good guys, the anti-drug guys, are my friends, like Dr. Mitch Rosenthal, the head of and a co-founder of Phoenix House. His organization has created more than 150 programs for 5,000 students who every day build a drugless future for themselves.

The most lucid statement about the growing campaign to treat marijuana as medication comes from Dr. Herbert Kleber, professor of psychiatry and substance abuse at Columbia University. He says: "The American public too often is sold a bill of goods by a clever campaign funded by a small group of billionaires who have engaged in extraordinary advertising and political manipulation."

No, we don't have to be polite to the legalizers at holiday time - or any other time.