SPECIAL ACTION OFFICE FOR DRUG ABUSE PREVENTION TUESDAY, OCTOBER 26, 1971 HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, SUBCOMMITTEE ON PUBLIC HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENT, Washington, D.C. The subcommittee met at 10 a.m., pursuant to notice, in room 2322, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Paul G. Rogers (chairman) presiding. Mr. ROGERS. The subcommittee will come to order, please. We are continuing hearings on legislation to establish a Special Action Office of Drug Abuse Prevention and also looking at public health hospitals. Our first witness this morning is one of our distinguished colleagues, Hon. Jim Wright, a Member of Congress from Texas. Congressman Wright has followed the situation at Fort Worth very closely and we are very anxious to hear from him and the recent report that he is ready to present to the committee. We welcome you to the committee and will be glad to receive your report at this time. If you have anyone you would like to join you at the table we would be glad to have him. STATEMENT OF HON. JIM WRIGHT, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF TEXAS; ACCOMPANIED BY ROBERT G. LAWRENCE, SHERMAN S. WILLSE, SALVATORE J. D'AMICO, AND WILLIAM O. NOLEN, INVESTIGATORS FOR THE PUBLIC WORKS COMMITTEE, SUBCOMMITTEE ON INVESTIGATIONS AND OVERSIGHT Mr. WRIGHT. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. There are present in the committee room four members of the professional investigative staff of the Subcommittee on Public Works Investigations and oversight who, at my direction and upon your request, Mr. Chairman, did conduct a study and an investigation in the field following the closing of the Fort Worth facility by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare on October 8. Those investigators who did extensive traveling and interviewing are Mr. Robert Lawrence, Mr. Sherman Willse, Mr. Sal D'Amico and Mr. William Nolen, all four of whom are here in case the committee should want to inquire of them. I think it is possible for me to summarize their findings in that they made the report directly to me and I then transferred it over to you. Actually, Mr. Chairman, I should say first of all that I am very grateful for the opportunity to come and make this report to this subcommittee. Beyond that I am deeply appreciative of the continuing interest of this subcommittee as has been manifest throughout the year in the future of the Fort Worth facility. Earlier this year I believe it was six members of the subcommittee who visited Fort Worth and held hearings there in the clinical research center. That group included not only the chairman but Mr. Satterfield, Mr. Kyros, Mr. Preyer, and Mr. Symington, and I believe it was the clear consensus of the group who held those hearings that the facility should stay open. Mr. HASTINGS. Excuse me, if the gentleman will yield? In addition to that list, the only Republican, last but not least, I was there, too. Mr. WRIGHT. Mr. Hastings, I was trying to mention those not present in the room today who were there and certainly do recall your being in our city and with great appreciation acknowledge your attentiveness to the importance of this problem. I believe Mr. Roy was also present. Actually it may be a fait accompli that that facility has been transferred to the Bureau of Prisons. I have nothing against the Bureau of Prisons, most certainly. If the facility is no longer to be used by the National Institute of Mental Health or by the Public Health Service, then surely it ought to be used for the most beneficial possible purpose. If it is not to be used as it has been used in the past, then it is far preferable that the Bureau of Prisons should make use of it than that it be dropped from the facilities available to drug patients. But I would like to address myself to the action of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in so summarily closing this facility on October 8 at the very time when a House-Senate conference had its future under active consideration. To me that abrupt termination. of the facility and the abrupt release of the 94 patients then in the facility constituted an act of almost incredible bad faith with the Congress. That is the first thing I want to say. It was obvious to the Department that the Congress has been interested in this facility. I think it should have been obvious to the Department that the Congress wanted it to remain open. Two years ago a Senate committee conducted similar investigations when the center's closure was being contemplated, and the Department decided in deference to the wishes of the Senate that it be kept open. This year, under the direction and leadership of the distinguished chairman, Mr. Rogers, the House acted on two occasions in overwhelming fashion to express its desire that the facility be continued as a treatment facility for patients committed under the Narcotics Addict Rehabilitation Act of 1966. We did this in an amendment to an appropriation bill—an unusual procedure on the floor of the House. We did it again in the passage by an overwhelming vote of, I think, 370 to four, in passing the resolution which called upon the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to keep open all Public Health Service hospitals, expressly including those at Fort Worth. Tex., and Lexington, Ky. While this discussion was proceeding in the ference with the Senate on that resolution, on the morning of FriOctober 8, officials in the Department of Health. Education, and re suddenly, abruptly end summarily terminated the facility and www.vm instructed those in charge to release all the patients and send them home by nightfall. Now, these were patients committed under the NARA Act; some of them were committed in lieu of prosecution. None of these patients had completed his course of treatment. None of them, according to the doctors treating them, was ready to be released. None of them had been under treatment for more than 4 months, and it has been a general rule of thumb that a 6 month inpatient treatment was the minimum. Notwithstanding this, they were released in what I regarded to be an act of bad faith with the Congress. I made the statement last week that it seemed to me that these victims of narcotics were being used as pawns in a power play to present the Congress with a fait accompli on a subject that we had under consideration at the time. That may have been unwarranted language. What I really meant to say and what I would like to say today is that I think the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare has been blind and deaf to the wishes of Congress, that it has not given weight to the wishes of Congress, and that it has actually been misled in some of the factual situations surrounding this center. For example, a letter written on October 5 to Hon. Harley Staggers, chairman of the full Committee of Interstate and Foreign Commerce, and signed jointly by Secretary Richardson and Attorney General Mitchell, contains numerous inaccuracies. I shall not labor this in detail, but on page 2 of that letter, in which an appeal is being made to Chairman Staggers to drop the insistence of the House that the facility be kept open, it refers to the facility as having "an inpatient capacity of 200." Now, if the rest of the matter contained in this letter signed by two Cabinet Officers is as inaccurate as that, the letter itself should stand as only a partial statement of fact. The truth is that the center doesn't have an inpatient capacity of 200. It has a comfortable capacity for 750, and on occasion in periods of stress during World War II has treated as many as 1,100 patients at one time. The staff of my investigating subcommittee has prepared a memorandum commenting upon various statements contained in this letter and I should like, with the committee's permission, to submit a copy of the letter and a copy of the memorandum of comments for the record. Mr. ROGERS. Without objection the material will appear in the record following your statement (see pp. 1373-1382). Mr. WRIGHT. The second thing I should like to say with respect to that abrupt termination is that not only was it an act of bad faith with the Congress; it was, I think, an act of disregard for the welfare of those patients. On Friday morning, October 22, Miss Candy Leinweber of the Fort Worth Star Telegram wrote a story which is the result of an interview she had with Michael White, a spokesman for NIMH drug abuse programs. Mr. White took issue with some of my conclusions, or the conclusions rather of the investigators who had gone down and made these inquiries. I shall not labor the record with each of the points but, essentially what I want to say is that according to this news account. the NIMH spokesman said that the closing of the Fort Worth center-and here it is referred to as a 500-bed hospital-meant the discharged patients are now in the "aftercare" phase of drug addiction treatment and, therefore, they will not be treated as inpatients. This was in response to my pointing out as a result of the inquiry that there exist only 15 beds in the Tulane Community Center in New Orleans for drug victims. Twelve of these beds were occupied and 13 patients were returned to New Orleans without adequate treatment. I discovered, as a result of our investigations, that one of those patients from Fort Worth was reported to be back on the streets pushing hard drugs. He had been a drug pusher before. Now, the reply of the NIMH spokesman was that they "did not know anything about the so-called nefarious traffic the Congressman referred to." It seems to me if they had gone down there and been sufficiently concerned to interview the patients themselves, they could have discovered the very things that the investigating staff discovered. Those three patients sent back, for instance to Anchorage, Alaska, have no inpatient treatment facility that they can report to, any closer than Portland, Oreg. It seems to me that is quite a difficult burden to place upon them. I have copies of letters that were written at an undisclosed date, presumably prior to or about the first of August, to certain judges who have been in the practice of commiting patients to the Fort Worth facility, in which the Department is advising them to commit no more patients to Fort Worth in that it will be closed. One written to Hon. Richard E. Robinson, the chief judge at Omaha, Nebr., says that the development of NARA community contract agencies to provide inpatient treatment will enable us at a later date at a later date "to designate an inpatient treatment facility either in or closer to Nebraska." This indicates to me that as of that date, presumably around the first of August, there were no inpatient treatment facilities anywhere in Nebraska. I have only a few of these carbon copies of letters that were sent out. I believe that similar letters were sent to all courts west of the Mississippi River which had been regularly committing patients under the NARA provisions and I should like to offer these for the record similarly. Mr. ROGERS. Without objection they will be made a part of the record following your statement (see pp. 1373–1382). Mr. WRIGHT. Only one other thing, Mr. Chairman, that I do think ought to be said. Regardless of the future of the Fort Worth facility, whatever happens there, I do believe that is something the committee seriously wants to consider, as to whether the people who are charged with the drug abuse program for the administration are on the right track in their conclusion that there is no place for a big hospital which treats a person in a setting far removed from his home. Obviously they have developed a theory in which unquestionably they must believe to the effect that the best form of treatment is going to be treatment in small community-based facilities, principally on an outpatient basis. Now, I am not a penologist and I don't make any claims to know a great deal about drug treatment. I am certainly not a professional in that regard. However, I have been exposed to a great deal of it simply by reason of the fact that I represent the Fort Worth district and have been close to the operations of the Forth Worth Clinical Research Center, formerly the Public Health Service Hospital, and have met and talked with a great many patients and a great many others who |