Dr. Harold Voth - Opinions

Topekan Pressing for Tough Drug Stance

by Gene Smith The Topeka Capital-Journal Tuesday, February 20, 1996

Dr. Harold Voth says he will recommend investigations of pro-drug organizations when he talks to Lt. Gen. Barry McCaffrey, President Clinton’s newest drug czar, today in Washington, D.C.

“My main message is, if you soften drug policy you increase drug use,” the Topeka physician and national narcotics consultant said Monday. “If we don’t get aggressive and try to turn this situation around, totalitarianism is a potential end point for this thing, if it gets too far.”

Decriminalization is gaining increasing popularity in the United States, with even national political columnists embracing the idea that the whole “war” has been a dismal failure and should simply be abandoned, like Prohibition.

Voth disagrees. He considers drugs a major problem of our times.

“It cuts across crime, homelessness, across education,” he said. “It cuts into the very fabric of society, so if we don’t get ahead of it, it will affect all those areas. If you legalize drugs and increase drug use, all of us will be paying” through drastically heightened addiction, crime and all the evils in its train.

He said that “there are a number of groups doing lobbying and a lot of media manipulation. They’re pushing a general softening of drug policy, and I’d like to see them exposed. These are largely 501 (c) 3 (nonprofit, tax-exempt) organizations using tax money to soften drug policy. Many of the people who lead those organizations are regular drug users themselves.”

He mentioned half a dozen groups of which he wants to see probes, including several aimed chiefly at legalizing marijuana.

Meanwhile, he said he will urge the Army general - recently head of a major U.S. Military command - to “keep the pressure on” interdiction efforts.

Voth would like to see much wider more repetitive drug testing, including its use as a prerequisite for Medicaid treatment. He said testing “really should continue on a random basis. The military drastically reduced drug use through rigorous testing. I’d also like to see drug testing in students. It sounds extreme, but if you think it through, if we had any other kind of epidemic, we’d try to get ahead of it.”

Sidebar: Through out Debby Moore's decades of activitism if the press gave her thirty seconds, they gave Dr. Voth thrity seconds. Debby Moore was not surprised that her computer disappeared fourteen days later.

10 Jul 2000 "human thermal plume." detector is funnel-shaped collector above the heads of people who pass through and pause a few seconds, draw the human thermal plume, analyzed in an ion mobility spectrometer, a device measuring electrons, for the presence of explosive molecules. - detect smuggled money, narcotics, chemical or biological warfare agents, nuclear substances like uranium, or other hazardous material - skin flakes could provide samples of human DNA, patent number 6,073,499.