Held to answer

Whenever my younger brother is asked if he has ever smoked, his standard reply is, “I smoked a pack a day until I turned 18.”

Our parents were addicted to nicotine, a habit my brother and I were forced to endure. I learned something early on from my parents’ addiction: If you never start a bad habit, you won’t have to try and quit.

I’ve never had a drug problem. However, I am surrounded by people who do.

One of my cousins lost his 16-year-old daughter to drugs. Another cousin’s son is all over the mug shot Websites for various crimes related to his meth addiction. In some mug shots, he grins insanely; in others, he looks haunted. One of my nieces tested positive for drugs when her baby was born.

Drug abuse is as common as cancer. Just as everybody knows somebody who has had cancer, we all know someone who has a drug problem. The difference is that while some cancers are lifestyle-related, almost all drug addictions are self-inflicted.

Not surprisingly, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, one of the most recession-proof businesses is the substance-abuse industry.

What would former Gov. Tom McCall think if he had known that his son, Sam, would represent the future as much as his famed environmental movement.

In Oregon, the media recently finished a month-long celebration of McCall, who would’ve turned 100 in March. McCall was ahead of his time in the 1960’s and 70’s when he advocated for such things as the Bottle Bill, the Willamette River cleanup and slow-growth planning.

Lost amid all those victories was a defeat that now seems more of a bellwether: McCall’s son was a drug addict.

“He took every kind of drug he could find, favoring stolen prescription drugs sold on the street,” writes Brent Walth in “Fire at Eden’s Gate,” a biography of McCall.

Walth’s description of Sam’s addiction and his parents’ reaction will sound familiar to many families now. McCall couldn’t understand why Sam fell into drug use and couldn’t shake the habit. The governor and his wife, Audrey, fought to protect Sam – even after he committed a series of crimes. Audrey thought the world was ganging up on her son. McCall blamed the doctors who gave Sam a prescription for pain killers when he was 14.

Walth’s chapter, “Mother and Son” is especially revealing. When you read it, you almost want to yell at the parents, “Don’t do that! You’re making it worse!”

As Walth notes, “Though police often arrested Sam for various petty crimes, he was never booked and reports were never written.”

Back then it was because Sam was the governor’s son.

These days it’s not uncommon for petty, drug-addicted criminals to be sent on their way. Bookings can be almost meaningless. They merely record the inconsequential slaps on the wrist should the offender finally work his way up to something more serious.

In Walth’s book, Sam comes across as a narcissist who wanted more attention from his father and resented the success of his brother. Eventually, thousands of dollars were spent sending Sam to the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. He talked his way out of that. Later, there were stays at Dammasch State Hospital in Oregon, where he escaped several times. Finally, Sam entered a methadone program.

Several years after McCall left office, Walth describes how 17 years of coddling Sam left Tom and Audrey with a 34-year-old son dependent on them. By then, McCall was working as a commentator at a television station. One day his co-workers noticed that he was especially distressed. He explained that he had awakened in the night and found his son unconscious from an overdose.

In a stunning passage, Walth describes how McCall told his co-workers that he regretted waking up. If he hadn’t, his son might have died, “and all of this might be over now.”

What would McCall do with the drug mess we now have? He might be bold and practical.

In 1970, while his son was fighting addiction, McCall endorsed the Vortex festival to draw Vietnam War protesters away from Portland and out to a state park where drugs and rock music would be plentiful – and law enforcement officers would be ordered to look the other way.

With Vortex McCall saw how drugs could be useful, and with his son he saw how they could be abused.

In the right context, would McCall see some wisdom in allowing illegal drugs that have known benefits – even cocaine and heroin – to be medically prescribed (like marijuana is now)?

As a trade-off, criminals who steal, rob and assault would no longer be allowed to lean on their drug addiction as an excuse for their crimes. Burglars, car thieves, muggers would be treated like burglars, car thieves and muggers. Whatever drugs they test positive for would be irrelevant.

Oregon’s current governor, John Kitzhaber, doesn’t want to learn from McCall’s experience. Kitzhaber believes that spending more on drug counseling services is a better crime-fighting tool than prison. Not surprisingly, the substance-abuse industrial complex likes the idea.

Our culture loves drugs, and no amount of tax revenue is going to change that. Drug use is gladly tolerated – even celebrated – in the entertainment world.

Public attitudes about drugs will continue to evolve and change – just as they did with cigarette smoking. It was only a few decades ago that cigarette-smoking was allowed in most American work places and restaurants and bars.

Eventually drug use will be seen as something you do in certain personal spaces, but you don’t bring the abuse into public. Eventually, the same people who condemn the “prison-industrial complex” will notice the money being made by the “substance-abuse industrial complex.”

Perhaps because of what’s called “Oregon politeness” (actually an aversion to unpleasantness), the recent Tom McCall retrospectives skirted the fate of Sam McCall. Here’s what happened to the governor’s son after more than 20 years of “help” with his drug problem:

On Easter Sunday morning in 1990, Audrey McCall found her now 40-year-old son passed out in a hallway of the family home. She left for several hours.

“When she returned, he was dead. She told police that she regularly found him passed out and could not move him without help,” wrote Mike Thoele in The Register-Guard.

Out in Sam’s car, police found a 17-year-old boy suffering from a drug overdose. The youth was said to have been Sam’s companion for the past three days. Sam had worked on staff at some of the institutions where he had been a patient over the years.

Tom McCall died seven years earlier.

He left a legacy of getting tough on environmental polluters, but he broke weak on drug pollution.

– Pamela Fitzsimmons

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