legislation specifically directed at PCP will indeed in some fashion or other result in the reduction in the production of PCP and will result in less use of PCP in this country.

My question, however, or my comment is that something will come to replace it. The more expensive PCP becomes, the higher the premium for producing it, the more likely someone will come forth to make it.

If PCP becomes impossible to produce, sooner or later someone will come forth with another drug and who knows what that drug will be like and how much worse it might be.

It is almost as though we are dealing with a sort of Gresham's law, that bad drugs are drowning out the good ones. LSD of the 1960's, which we heard a lot about, is nothing to compare to PCP. I am not sure whether legislation will accomplish much more than perhaps eradication of the specific drug PCP, but I can tell you, I am convinced that something will step forward and take its place, and that that is the problem, that there is a basic demand for mood-altering substances in this country, and that demand cannot be legislated away, and that despite making one drug more scarce, another one will come and take its place.

What PCP demonstrates to us is that any drug which appears in the present unregulated market, where there is an enormous demand and a very small supply, can command a very high price, regardless of its effects, that the consumers of these drugs, as we heard from Mr. Rugenstein and his son, do not really care that much as to what the adverse effects of that drug are or what is in the drug. They will use it, because it will change the way they feel.

Essentially at the present time we have an enormous black market which is unregulated in this country, where it is possible to buy any number of illegal and illicit substances almost anywhere.

As long as that market exists, as long as the demand exists, as long as the distribution chain exists which permits anyone who comes up with a new drug that will do something to make people feel different, he has a ready market with a lot of money behind it, that drug will surface and we will have this problem again with another one. The problem is that the market is unregulated.

Mr. GILMAN. Dr. Minyard?

Dr. MINYARD. I totally agree. As soon as you put your finger in one hole in the dam, then another one is going to open up. I totally agree. Mr. GILMAN. Lieutenant Elkins?

Lieutenant ELKINS. I certainly agree with Dr. Luisada, we see it on the streets every day. When LSD dried up, they started using PCP. That doesn't mean we are going to discontinue enforcing the PCP regulations as best we can and hope we can get some control aimed at that particular drug so we can dry it up.

If we have to go to another drug after that, I guess we will have to go on. We don't have any idea what it might be; as Dr. Luisada says, it is anybody's guess. They are starting to use more dangerous drugs all of the time. But PCP is such a hazard in our communities, I think we have to move to exterminate it as quickly as we possibly can.

Mr. GILMAN. Let's go back to the root cause; 50 million marihuana users, 7 million PCP users, 400,000 to 500,000 heroin users. Why? Not to mention cocaine and the barbiturates, on down the line.

Dr. LUISADA. Those are illegal mood-altering substances, but you must include alcohol, too, which performs the same function.

Mr. GILMAN. Why are we becoming so dependent on all of these? Dr. LUISADA. I think the demand was always there. I think what has happened in the past half century, with the increasing control of these drugs, a black market has sprung forth to serve that demand. I am not sure what the precise issue is, but it seems to me if someone wants to approach this problem in a reasonable way, it would be to have a committee examine what present mood-altering drugs there are and to investigate those drugs, and to come up with a set of those drugs which might be available to satisfy that demand.

If that demand is satisfied to a significant degree, then perhaps the black market might disappear and perhaps the incentive to produce substances like this illicitly might dry up.

Mr. GILMAN. Doctor, you are not suggesting a solution to the demand, you are suggesting a drug maintenance program to satisfy the demand, but you are not suggesting any remedy to try to reduce the demand.

What this committee has been searching for is to try to find the root cause, to try to find some methods of reducing the demand, not to merely satisfy the demand.

Dr. LUISADA. I am sorry to disagree with you, but I don't believe that you can reduce that demand. I believe that that is an intrinsic fact in being a human being, of being people. I don't think you can legislate against human nature. And I think that that is what is being dealt with here.

Mr. GILMAN. But Doctor, isn't your conclusion based on the premise that this applies to all people, and yet we have only, fortunately, a small proportion of our population that is dependent upon the mindaltering substances.

Dr. LUISADA. I think the question is not so much an issue of dependence, as a question of occasional recreational and other uses. I think there is a large percentage of people in this country who are presently using any number of various mood-altering substances for that purpose. What we have seen here from the Crossroads program, what we have seen over at the Community Mental Health Center, is a small portion of that population, perhaps the sickest of them.

Just as there might be several, over 100 million people in this country using alcohol, the number of alcoholics is a small portion of those. It is the alcoholics who are the dependent ones. But the vast majority of people in this country use alcohol occasionally without suffering any serious side effects or aftereffects.

It is that sort of demand that exists for this type of drug as well. And I don't believe that it can be stopped by legislation. I think it will continue. And the unregulated market that exists today simply means that anybody who comes up with any substance which will in any fashion change a person's way of feeling has a carte blanche to market that and had a ready market at his disposal and has a chance to make a huge profit.

Mr. GILMAN. Doctor, we are not going to argue with you about the ability to legislate away the demand. But, again, we are still trying to seek out what the causes are, and what we can do about alleviating some of that demand, or reducing the demand.

Dr. Minyard, do you have any thoughts on this?

Dr. MINYARD. I, of course, disagree with my learned colleague. I think one of the root causes of drug abuse in this country today is the permissive attitudes of some of our lawmakers and legislators and leaders, who stand up on television and say that it is not OK to smoke marihuana, but we are not going to punish you too much if you do smoke it.

I think when young tender minds, 14 to 15 years old, see people who are allegedly in command of our country saying that, then down deep they are going to say oh, it is OK for me to smoke pot, or it is OK for me to drink alcohol, or OK for me to smoke cigarettes.

So I really believe one of the root causes of drug abuse in this country today is people in command, so to speak, who have lightened the laws on drug abuse and who have lessened the penalties.

In my own State, I am sad to say, my State legislature has just approved the use of marihuana for treating glaucoma patients and patients with long-term chemotherapy and cancer. I think that is going to open up tremendous doors in my State for more people to use drugs. I am talking about 14- and 15-year-old children, who, after all, that is who we are talking about today.

So I do think you can start the ball rolling in another way by being a little stricter, and a little less permissive in the actions that come out of this committee and that are recommended to the entire Congress, so that our young people today will see that, hey, it is not OK to get loaded on anything in between school. And it is not OK to get loaded on anything when you come home from school, and it is not OK to get loaded on anything at night rather than study.

Mr. GILMAN. Lieutenant Elkins, do you have some comments you would like to make?

Lieutenant ELKINS. I certainly agree that we are a little too permissive in allowing things to go on that we know are probably not right, but we don't take the proper steps to stop them.

I do, though, feel that if the proper legislation is developed, then we can eliminate the supply of PCP appreciably on the street. It is a synthetic drug, it is not marihuana, it doesn't grow along the river banks, it has to be made, the chemicals have to be purchased or stolen. It is much easier now to purchase chemicals to produce PCP than it was to purchase chemicals to produce LSD, when I used to work the LSD cases. There is no restriction on most of the chemicals used. There has got to be, if we are going to eliminate what we call the bucket labs in the back of vans, making PCP and distributing it on the street as fast as they can make it, if this is possible. I know the chemicals are used for other things, there has to be some control placed on them if we really want to get to the heart of the PCP problem. It is easily made, easily accessible, and the chemicals are readily available, if you have the money.

Mr. GILMAN. Chief Counsel Nellis.

Mr. NELLIS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Dr. Minyard, we have talked to a number of medical examiners as we have progressed in our investigation, and have found a wide variety of views as to cause of death and as to how to determine cause of death.

Do you automatically test for PCP in all bizarre cases where there is violence involved?

Dr. MINYARD. We are now, as of the first of April. As many as our budget allows us to. As I said, you have to use a complicated machine; that test costs between $75 and $150.

Mr. NELLIS. Yes, I heard what you said, but you are doing it as long as your budget permits?

Dr. MINYARD. Yes.

Mr. NELLIS. In that connection, how many deaths have you attributed to PCP?

Dr. MINYARD. In 4 months-we started April 1, and we have 4 deaths we have attributed to PCP, and we have about 10 we have not been able to run on the machine. So we have not proven those. But we have four, one a month for 4 months.

Mr. NELLIS. That is an area that I would like this committee to make a recommendation to the medical examiners and coroners on throughout the country, that as much as their budgets will allow, for them to test all violent deaths for PCP.

Mr. GILMAN. What sort of a machine is needed?

Dr. MINYARD. It is a mass spec machine. It costs like $100,000. We have a gas chromatograph machine in our office, a $5,000 or $6,000 machine. But the mass spec machine is needed to detect the minute amounts, because if you use any other type of thin-layer chromatography, or the gas chromatograph, you will not pick up a very minute amount of PCP. And it only takes a minute amount.

Mr. NELLIS. One of the difficulties with that, Mr. Chairman, is, as I said earlier, we have talked to a number of medical examiners, and they are not always doctors, sometimes they are justices of the peace, or poor specimens like myself, lawyers, trying to do a job of determining the cause of death.

Obviously in those cases if they see a body with several bullet holes in it, they are not going to bother to test for PCP, even if they knew how.

The reason for this question, however, Dr. Minyard, is this: Is there any doubt in your mind that if the general public knew how treacherous this drug was in terms of causing death or being the proximate cause of a violent death, that that would have some bearing on possible use?

Dr. MINYARD. Definitely; I think if the general public were aware, which the news media has done a grand job, as we heard in the testimony this morning, but I think if the general public were more aware of the devastation that PCP causes, we could get probably more input to get more money out to do more research and to do more treatment, which I think is much needed.

Mr. NELLIS. What sort of treatment do you visualize being available for PCP users? I asked that question of Operation Crossroads, because I was not aware of any medical treatment for it.

Dr. MINYARD. NO.

Mr. NELLIS. I should also ask Dr. Luisada that question.

Dr. MINYARD. I don't know of any antidote, No. 1, and I don't think there is any specific treatment. I think continuous washing out of the

stomach, acidifying the urine and just watching them for a week or so is about it.

Dr. LUISADA. At the present time there are several people working on attempts to try and improve the rate at which we can help the victims of PCP get better. What we are using right now is really dependent upon the behavior and the problem as presented by the patient. Those who are extremely psychotic and violent, you generally find that isolating them in a blank room and treating them both with tranquilizers and with urine acidification, which you heard about before, helps things quite a bit. Those who have overdoses, of course, whose behavior is not so much out of control that we can't deal with them, we treat with acidification.

I have a patient like this in the hospital right this minute, who is presently being washed out with ammonium chloride.

Mr. NELLIS. In the 100 or so deaths that you have seen, Dr. Luisada, I believe I gathered that from your testimony

Dr. LUISADA. No, we have been dealing mainly with live patients. Dr. Minyard deals with the dead ones.

Mr. NELLIS. I understand that. You are not a coroner. But have you had that many fatalities in the hospital as a result of PCP use?

Dr. LUISADA. We have not seen any fatalities in the hospital. As has been explained earlier, particularly emphasized by Senator Bentsen, the danger is what the people who take PCP do while they are under its influence. It is not PCP. While it was being developed as an anesthetic, it was extensively tested in animals, before it was given to humans, for evidence of any sort of toxicity and as a result it is fairly nontoxic by itself to the basic body chemistry.

However, what it does to people's minds, to their behavior is what is different. And that is apparently what differentiates us from the monkeys who are beautifully tranquilized by it, which is what led to the name that they originally gave PCP, Sernyl. It was only when it was tried in humans that they found this.

Mr. NELLIS. I wanted to get this straight. The amount of PCP ingested by the human being will not have any appreciable effect on his health? It is the behavior that that ingestion causes which creates the violence and turmoil and difficulty, is that correct?

Dr. LUISADA. That is correct.

Mr. NELLIS. Whether you smoke 1 cigarette or 10, unless you reacted violently, the ingestion of the substance itself would not be harmful to the body?

Dr. LUISADA. I wouldn't go so far as to say 10 cigarettes. I think at an adequate dose level, any drug can be toxic.

Mr. NELLIS. Can be poisonous?

Dr. LUISADA. Yes; salt could be; if you ate two pounds of salt, you would die.

Mr. NELLIS. Doctor, let's not philosophize. How much PCP taken on a given day would be toxic to the human body?

Dr. LUISADA. I don't think that those-I am not that familiar with those particular figures, Mr. Nellis. But I think that certainly perhaps 10 times or 15 times the usual dose would probably put someone in a coma and without medical intervention, they might die of convulsions or of respiratory arrest.