Learning Cycles Affect Drug Use More Than Laws, Says UF Research

April 24, 1997

GAINESVILLE — The war on drugs wastes time and money in many ways because a boom-and-bust learning cycle shapes American drug infatuations more than get-tough policies, says a University of Florida researcher.

Cocaine, heroin and marijuana are all examples of drugs that, years after disappearing from popularity, re-emerge as “hip” and even novel because people forget the reasons the drugs fell out of favor in the first place, said Joseph Spillane, a UF criminologist and historian.

“This process of learning and forgetting is something we see over and over again in America’s drug experience,” he said. “The bad news for prohibitionists and advocates of the war on drugs is that drug use rises and declines only partly in response to anything the government does.”

For example, the use of marijuana, which had its heyday in the 1970s, abruptly began to increase in 1992 after declining every year since 1979, said Spillane, who currently is working on a book about the history of cocaine use in the United States.

“Many people in the late 80s and early 90s pointed to marijuana’s decline and said See, we got tough on marijuana with strong penalties for possession and distribution, and the use went down,’” he said. “Well, we’re still tough on marijuana and the use is going back up. And people are often surprised to learn that President Clinton is spending more on drug education than his predecessors, Reagan and Bush, ever did.”

With marijuana on a downswing for so long, young people eventually forgot the enthusiasm for being drug-free that made its use fall off years ago, Spillane said. “To this latest generation, marijuana suddenly reappeared as a new and exciting thing,” he said.

Heroin is the latest drug to see renewed interest, coming to be identified with a kind

of “cool, hipster culture” as it was in the late 40s and early 50s, when it was associated with bebop musicians, Spillane said.

“Not to say that it necessarily shows heroin in a positive light, but a movie like Pulp Fiction’ does portray people who use heroin as being on the edge,’ in a kind of interesting or exciting kind of way,” he said. “Part of what makes the John Travolta character so interesting is the fact that he’s using heroin.”

As more people use a certain drug, however, it’s novelty wears off, Spillane said. Heroin’s appeal, for example, diminished after people began to see junkies in the streets, he said.

One reason for heroin’s emergence as a fashionable drug today, as well as in the late 40s and early 50s, is that it replaced cocaine, whose use faded as more people became aware of its social and health costs, Spillane said.

Actually, people had to relearn these lessons about cocaine the hard way because they ignored Americans’ earlier experience with the drug, Spillane said. Legal in the United States before 1914 and even found in minute traces in Coca-Cola years ago, cocaine faded before its resurgence in the 70s.

“Because some cocaine users tend not to eat well or take care of themselves, they often get very emaciated,” he said. “We have these turn-of-the century accounts of shaking, shivering skeletal cocaine addicts. But when cocaine made a comeback in the 70s, we’d forgotten all that. People said the drug was harmless. In many ways, we knew more about cocaine in 1900 than we did in 1970.”

As with marijuana, the law had little effect in shaping public attitudes about cocaine earlier in the century, Spillane said. Cocaine use had already peaked by the time the drug was banned because people had seen enough of it, he said.

The same learning process most likely is responsible for the demise of the once-booming crack epidemic of the 1980s, Spillane said.

“Young people saw enough crack-damaged people a few years older than themselves running around that they became increasingly aware of the drug’s destructive effects,” he said. “So what we see in the U.S. today are crack users who, as a group, are actually getting older. They’re an aging population.”