"Dear Mr. Campbell:

In regard to your editorial "The New Stone Age" dealing with campus-crime you discuss the issue from the aspect of "student immunity," a valid point. The problem also involves a matter of student quality. With the exception of the "meaty sciences" far too many snap courses are being offered by colleges these days, allowing the student too much free time. Full-time students should qualify at twenty credit hours per quarter not twelve. Entrance standards should be raised and part-time student enrollment minimized. Statistics seem to indicate that students engaged in the "meaty-sciences," or with heavy course loads, seldom take active part in campus crime; they just don't have the time. It's time the colleges began to scholastically cull the bums from student rolls.

In dealing with campus riots neither the objective, nor the method of achieving it, seem entirely clear. Apparently the idea is to forcefully evacuate the area without causing fatalities. As practice has proved, sending in a small number of men bearing firearms and tear gas in an attempt to vacate a thousand or more people from a large area is unrealistic, at least when the use of firearms is taboo. The effectiveness of tear gas is limited at best, dependent yet on the vagaries of the wind. Firearms and bayonets are for producing fatalities or, at the very least, serious injury. Using a firearm as a bluff tactic eventually leads to someone calling that bluff and hence a Kent State Syndrome. Clearly the conventional equipment, man power, and mode of operation presently being employed by the police and militia invites serious or fatal casualties on the one extreme or relative noneffectiveness on the other. For a noncasualty mass evacuation formula using limited man power a new and unique arsenal of equipment is needed. Until such equipment is provided militia and police should operate with limited objectives, i.e., making limited arrests, protecting firemen, evacuating buildings, et cetera.

Calling in the police, or militia, usually signifies that force and violence will be required to deal with the situation. Force and violence by nature are brutal, otherwise the terms must be re-defined. That law enforcers must carry firearms is obvious since the danger of armed resistance is always present. With some ingenuity and imagination directed toward the development of new equipment a noncasualty evacuation objective is feasible, at least in relative terms. For example, highly mobile armored fire trucks delivering, under pressure and at suitable range a water-base, oil-base, or sticky-base chemical solution with highly obnoxious, but relatively innocuous, qualities is a possibility, i.e., concentrated "rectal essences" of skatole, indole, or mercaptan type compounds, or some equally foul material. Electric stock prods—hot-shots—fashioned for double use as billy clubs would make effective close-order crowd movers as well as self-defense weapons. I don't claim to be a weapons expert and only propose these ideas to provoke thought in defense of my argument. If we can get to the Moon, we can certainly disperse a mob; strictly small potatoes with the right kind of equipment. Sure, there will be screams of BRUTALITY!, but force and violence are by nature brutal and after all, that's the name of the game.

Under the present mode of operation it would require at least matching the number of demonstrators with an equal number of troops since the situation essentially boils down to a hand-to-hand encounter. Since this is impractical, law enforcers must rely on the effectiveness of their equipment to augment their lack in man power. Clearly tear gas and rifle brandishing tactics are not the answer. Rioting is not new to society. The American noncasualty approach to handling riots is however, and will require new tactics. The only other alternative is to revert to the "Clear out or we start shooting!" method, effective, but necessarily deadly.

F. B. MAXSON

Rt. 2, Box 13-A

Rapid City, S. Dak. 57701

I am largely in agreement with you—but a small number of highly trained and highly disciplined police can disperse a large number of rioters nonlethally with present weapons such as the police baton. That depends on the great efficiency of men in a disciplined group over an undisciplined mob. There is much howling of "Brutality!" however—because the essential and violently hated fact is that that method works.

The basic rule here is "Any method that works is loathsome, inhuman, brutal, vicious because it defeats our intention to force compliance to our will!" Under that overriding consideration, such available methods as covering the mob with a harmless. nontoxic, noninjurious, nonirritant and nonstaining foam, is violently rejected (Demonstrated at parks or beaches, children love to play in a five-foot-deep, thirty-foot-across mass of the foam!) The foam stops a mob, because each individual suddenly finds himself optically and acoustically—it muffles sounds very powerfully—from all others; the mob is broken up instantly not by geometrical separation, but by communicative separation.

It's a new technique; it's effective. That automatically makes it doubly loathsome—and it isn't used.

Dear John:

During the last few months here in Vietnam, we have been made aware of a new and remarkably successful chemical-warfare tactic being employed against United States troops.

These last six months I have been working officially and unofficially within the Army's program, such as it is, for rehabilitation of heroin and barbiturate addicts. I won't speculate on the casual, once- or twice-a-month-use rate, but the percentage of persons known to be Physically addicted to heroin in some units in this area is as high as thirty-five per cent.

For as low as $1.50 a man at this base can purchase, from any of a large number of "friendly, helpful Local Nationals," a plastic vial one half inch in diameter, and slightly less than an inch in length, filled completely with a white crystalline powder. I have been told that lab analysis has shown about two to six percent by weight of various impurities. The remainder is heroin with traces of unconverted opium derivatives. Some of the persons we have treated have been introducing the contents of six of these vials into their bloodstreams per day. A person in the United States would have little chance of developing a habit on this scale—he would long since have died of quinine poisoning, embolism, or starvation—this in addition to the obvious logistical problem of obtaining $175 per day, or more.

I have been told, by sources not known for unusual reliability, that the Chinese, who used to channel a fairly good-sized amount of narcotic. States-ward through Singapore, Hong Kong, and other ports, have diverted most of the traffic to South Vietnam, and are forsaking monetary gain in favor of immediate effect, namely the disruption of military activities here, and the intensification of disorder in the United States as the men who have become addicted are returned to the States by normal rotation. Whether or not this is the intent, this is the effect.

To my untrained eye, most of the addicts we treat are between four and seven years old, emotionally.

One of the primary reasons given by them for their beginning drug use is boredom.

Only a very few of the addicts interviewed said that they had not watched television a great deal from their early childhood. These were generally from low-income homes.

Two persons interviewed who did not use drugs of any kind, including alcohol, stated that they had either not had a television available in early childhood, or were not allowed to watch it more than a few hours per week. Both came from families which stressed family recreation and individual initiative in entertainment: reading, hobbies, et cetera.

If something isn't done about this, in less than no time ...

I am twenty-four, a former heavy drug user—I never "graduated" to heroin, but that was a simple matter of availability—and now happily married to a medical records technician.

MICHAEL RATHBUN

This raises an interesting question of international law: What constitutes "biological" or "biochemical" warfare? Heroin is a lethal substance; the fact that fools voluntarily take the stuff does not alter that fact. The deaths due to heroin addiction in New York City one weekend exceeded the number of military deaths in Vietnam during that time—and while the young people are deeply, and sometimes violently, concerned about the war, drug use constitutes "doing their thing" apparently, and so no opposition appears.

The heroin sold in the United States has usually been "cut" with some other substance. Since heroin tastes bitter, the older technique of cutting with milk sugar, which tastes sweet, has been abandoned; now it's being cut with interesting things like quinine and other alkaloid drugs which are cheaply available, and also taste bitter.

As Stewart Alsop pointed out in Newsweek, heroin addiction is the proximate cause of most of the violent crime that is killing our cities.

Mr. Rathbun states the vials are about one half inch in diameter by a little less than an inch long; since the Chinese, like most of the world, use the metric system, I imagine they are actually 1 cm. in diameter by 2 cms. long. This quantity of pure-heroin equivalent would cost about $75 to $100 in our cities.