your particular interest about the illicit drugs when it came my particular interest about the illicit drugs came when mainly in the mid 1980s in the mid 1980s the United States were experiencing a crack problem I put that in quotes because we thought we were experiencing crack problem just like you now think that your experience in a crack problem you're not but I was fooled into believing that we were experienced in a crack problem and so I wanted to offer whatever expertise I could to help solve the crack problem the solve crack addiction that's what that was my main sort of introduction in the late 1980s in the beginning of the 90s I started to work in a prison here in some parts a very large prison 7,000 inmates or more and when I arrived at there in 1989 cocaine by injection was the fashion in the in the prison so we had very high prevalence of HIV and hepatitis C we harvested blood of 1492 prisoners there and we found that 17. 3% were HIV positive and 60% where hepatitis C virus positive and then in 1992 crack invaded the prison and so the and and cocaine by injection disappeared completely completely we never found a syringe or needle anymore in the prison can you explain this phenomenon it's kind of simple I don't like needles and if I can get the same effect by smoking it I'm going to smoke I'm afraid of needles and I think a number of people are less likely to inject so I think that's the major thing if you're going to get the same facts a man said I would advise people to smoke and there was to connect consequence first on the the prevalence of HIV fall down in three years it came down to it around eight percent three or four years but the number of crack users increase it incredibly yeah I mean with injecting you have to have more of a specialty equipment right with smoking you can make anything into a pipe and so it's just convenience that's yeah if I'm in prison and I have access to the drug give me the crack I'd make sense you in prison I get it how do you separate the drug addiction from drug use yeah how do you separate drug addiction from drug use let's make it really simple the last three presidents of the United States all were drug users none were drug addicts they have contributed to the u. s.
society in important ways so the majority of drug users look like then and we have in medicine sets of criteria international classification of disorders has sets of criteria by which we decide whether someone is addicted whether based on the number of symptoms that they meet the dsm-5 in the u. s.
