The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour

MR. MacNeil: Good evening. Leading the news this Labor Day Monday, two people were killed when a gunman sprayed Colombia's Medellin Airport with automatic fire, at least 125 people died and 1 survived a Cuban Airlines crash near Havana, National Guardsmen enforced an overnight curfew after riots and looting in Virginia Beach. We'll have details in our News Summary in a moment. After the News Summary, [Focus - Struggle to Survive] Special Business Correspondent Paul Solman reports on new trends in organized labor, next [Focus - Catastrophic Complaints] Correspondent Kwame Holman documents the growing concern of senior citizens at the cost of catastrophic health care, on the eve [Conversation - Talking Drugs] of Pres. Bush's major drug policy speech, Charlayne Hunter- Gault talks to Dr. David Musto of Yale on the history of drug abuse in America. We close with a new teaching tool for executives [Focus - Upward Bound], motivational training. NEWS SUMMARY

MR. MacNeil: Colombia's drug cartels apparently escalated their war with the Bogota government today. A gunman sprayed the airport at Medellin with automatic fire and a bomb was found on a Colombian airliner but was safely removed. We have a report narrated by Louise Bates of Worldwide Television News.

MS. BATES: Medellin Airport the scene of the latest attack blamed on the cocaine gangs. It was early in the morning when the gunman dressed into the soldier walked in to the terminal building and began firing at passengers waiting to fly to Bogota. He was shot dead by airport police, but not before he had taken the life of a Colombian businessman and wounded at least 12 other people. Earlier another bomb attack in Medellin itself damaged a complex housing several businesses. No one claimed responsibility for the attack, but again it's assumed to be the work of the drug cartels fighting what looks increasingly like a civil war against the government. No one was killed but five people were injured. The drug lords may not be losing the war yet, but they are losing some of their property. The army locked up this sports complex near Medellin suspected of belonging to one of the cartels, but the leaders of the cartels, themselves, remain at large bar one described as their accountant.

MR. MacNeil: In South Africa, police fired bullets, tear gas and water canons to break up a rally in Durbin protesting Wednesday's general elections which exclude blacks. About 2500 students at the multi-racial University of Natal took part. Ten people were injured when the crowd fled from the gunfire and tear gas. Also arrested today were anti-apartheid leaders Bishop Desmond Tutu and the Rev. Allan Boesak. Thousands of black workers and students were reported poised for a two day general strike beginning tomorrow to protest the exclusion of the black majority from the elections. A police statement said they were prepared to come down mercilessly and hard on anyone who wishes to disrupt the elections. A senior Iranian official said today that Pres. Bush had sent several letters to his government. Deputy Foreign Minister Ali Mohammad Basharati told the English language Tehran Times he believed the Bush administration was making greater efforts towards reconciliation than the Reagan administration. He repeated an earlier suggestion from Tehran that Western hostages in Lebanon could be freed if the U.S. released Iranian assets frozen 10 years ago. A White House statement said, "There has been no message sent by the President to the Iranian leadership." There were two airplane disasters in the last 24 hours. A Brazilian jetliner with 54 people aboard disappeared over the Amazon and is believed to have crashed and in Cuba, a Russian built airliner crashed in flames last night after it took off in a storm. We have a report from Cuba by Gram Bowd of Independent Television News.

MR. BOWD: The jet came down on houses less than a mile from the airport and immediately burst into flames. Unconfirmed reports say that at least 10 people were killed on the ground and scores of homes were destroyed. Many villagers were taken to hospital with serious burns. The plane, a Russian built Illution 62 of Cubana Airways was carrying 126 people, mostly Italian tourists on their way home. Miraculously one passenger did survive. Her condition is critical. Others could only be identified by their passports. Cuba's Pres. Castro visited the scene and later saw casualties in hospital. He's ordered an inquiry into the cause of the crash which came just after the jet took off in bad weather.

MR. MacNeil: Back in the U.S., the country celebrated Labor Day with parades, picnics, and for Pres. Bush a return to the White House. Mr. Bush flew back to Washington from his summer home in Kennebunkport. He said he is ready to go to work. The President is preparing to unveil his national drug strategy in a television address tomorrow evening, his first from the Oval Office. In New York, thousands marched up Fifth Avenue in the city's annual Labor Day parade. Several mayoral candidates were there as well as members of the striking phone workers union and striking pilots from Eastern Airlines. In Virginia Beach, police issued a curfew today after a weekend of clashes between police and black college students attending a fraternity festival. More than a hundred people were arrested and about two dozen were injured after the students rioted, throwing bottles and looting stores. The head of Virginia's NAACP accused police of overreacting to the violence. That's our News Summary. Now it's on to new trends in organized labor, the cost of catastrophic health care, looking back at other drug epidemics, and the controversy over a new use of motivational training. FOCUS - STRUGGLE TO SURVIVE

MR. MacNeil: First up tonight the tradition of the Labor Day Holiday prompts us to take a look at non-traditional labor union strategy. Today less than 17 percent of the work force is organized. That and a series of organizing and negotiating setbacks have forced some union leaders to take a new look at the old standby, the picket line. Special Business Correspondent Paul Solman has the details.

MR. SOLMAN: Here's the president of the AFL-CIO, Lane Kirkland, being arrested with the coal strikers in Virginia last month. It's a graphic example of labor as usual vs. business as usual. But most experts say good old-fashioned union confrontation just hasn't been working as well as it used to. In Maine, for example, workers struck the International Paper Company for 16 months. By the time these workers gave up the fight, they'd been replaced by a non- union work force, and this summer in Tennessee, the United Auto Workers were trounced in a very public effort to unionize the Japanese-owned Nissan plant. As the strategy of confrontation has fallen on hard times, some unions have been rethinking the basis us versus them approach. Behind the traditional expressions of solidarity such as the Labor Day Parade, some unions are breaking rank, exploring new strategies such as alliances with management. In Ohio, this strategy is paying off by stabilizing wages and increasing membership.

MR. SOLMAN: What are you doing here? Are you on strike?

CATHY OXDINE, Union Member: No. We're trying to get across to the public that it's a non-union store. And we want them to know that this company is not paying their employees enough to make a fair living.

MR. SOLMAN: Where do you work?

MS. OXDINE: I work across the street at the Finess Store for First National Supermarkets.

MR. SOLMAN: And how much do you make an hour?

MS. OXDINE: $10.50 an hour.

MR. SOLMAN: This woman would be lucky to make half that amount at the store where she's picketing today, the non-union Twin Value in Akron, Ohio. Non-union stores like this pose a serious threat to unionized grocery stores and to the workers they employ. So in Northeast Ohio, the two age old enemies, labor and management, have cut a deal against the threat to them both, non-union competition. The union stores agree to pay union wages so long as their workers agree to picket the low wage newcomers. When too many of its members are busy working, the union actually hires people to pound the pavement. Picketing here means more than just walking the line. It means calling every home in a non-union store's neighborhood. [Union Member Talking to Consumer]

MR. SOLMAN: The union pickets and tele-pickets both to preserve union jobs and the stores that provide them. It's an unusual alliance and it came right after heated negotiations between labor and management. Management's man was Lawyer Bob Duvin.

BOB DUVIN, Management Lawyer: We had what was called a small committee meeting, maybe four people on the union and three or four people on our side, and we were on our feet screaming at one another.

GEORGE HENNIGIN, United Food & Commercial Workers: And names get called and that sort of thing goes on. People's temper gets short and maybe gets lost. He can get my goat certainly and I think he can find his when I want it.

MR. DUVIN: And I was my feet and I said something back to him, and he took it, I think he took it personally and he said was that a physical threat and I said, I hadn't intended as one, but if that's where we're going, we might as well get on with it, and then wiser and cooler heads suggested we ought to go somewhere else with the discussion and we did, the meeting broke up at that time.

MR. SOLMAN: The altercation represented the old approach, but new times demanded new solutions. Things have been especially tough for labor in the rust belt. Lots of middle class manufacturing jobs have left town, probably for good, but a supermarket is a service company. Unlike textile or steel companies say, hospitals, universities and grocery stores can't just pick up and relocate to Mississippi or Malaysia. As a consequence, unions in the service sector can have more leverage over their employers.

MR. DUVIN: We are married, and we are essentially linked with this union, like it or not, married to this union like it or not, for the long-term foreseeable future, and we didn't learn how to live together and to strengthen our common interests, we were going to die together as has occurred in other cities very close-by, Pittsburgh and Detroit.

MR. HENNIGIN: We saw this in other cities. We weren't about to let it happen here, but it's very difficult to get someone to understand that the enemy here is not your employer, the enemy is who your employer has to compete with. Either you're going to drag their wages up or they're going to drag your wages down.

MR. SOLMAN: The problem was urgent. Many of the same non-union stores that had taken over in other Midwestern cities sensed that the Cleveland area was ripe for the picking. A quick look at the economics of the grocery industry shows you just how tough a business this is. Let's keep it simple and take a product that costs about a dollar, 9 Lives cat food. Now a good profit in groceries is 1 percent. That means a penny in profits for every dollar in sales. Of the remaining 99 percent in costs, about 15 percent goes to labor, that is, wages and benefits, the rest to the product itself, rent, utilities and the like. You can't control the cost of the product itself or rent or utilities, so you're left with labor. But remember, the profit margin is only 1 percent, so if you can trim the cost of labor by just a few percent, you can do wonders for your bottom line and increase your profits dramatically, or you can pass the savings on to consumers by lowering your prices for a while and taking business from the competition. To fight the cut throat competition, union and management have come up with a new version of solidarity forever.

MR. SOLMAN: How does it feel to be a prosperous management lawyer rooting for a picket line?

MR. DUVIN: It's not our usual position. But in protecting an industry like the supermarket industry, you adjust.

MR. SOLMAN: Does it strike you a little funny that you're working with management against other stores?

BILL LAYMON, Union Member: I guess I'm doing their job now really. What they ask us to do, you know. In fact, this morning, they said, well, you got to go get that Food for Less next and they're non-union. They're close to us, over in Kent.

MR. SOLMAN: And that was one of your managers talking?

MR. LAYMON: Right. That was my store manager talking me go give 'em heck, Bill.

MR. SOLMAN: Bill Laymon's manager is rooting hard for union success here at the Akron Twin Value because this non-union chain has already done some serious damage. It's put several union stores out of business and the union claims that the low wages paid here at Twin Value, around $4.50 an hour, will mean less money for the community as profits flow to the store owners, most of whom live far away.

MR. HENNIGIN: But how's that leave Cleveland and Akron and Canton and Youngstown? That leaves us about 14,000 decent paying jobs, they're poorer.

MR. SOLMAN: But don't consumers benefit from the lower prices? Not as much as they lose, says the union, when the jobs pay less.

MR. HENNIGIN: Those wages are taxed; they're taxed by the city; they're taxed by the state. Those jobs maintain our schools and our police and our parks and what you're telling me is that it's good business for somebody to come in here and take away the base on which all of that works? No, I'm afraid not.

MR. SOLMAN: So far the food workers' joint effort with management has met with success. They've signed new contracts with 35 stores in the area and they've increased union membership, reversing the national trend.

MR. DUVIN: And they've had some other successes where some non- union guys who were major irritations went out of business. So you know there are two ways to get a store, either organize it or turn it into a furniture store.

MR. SOLMAN: And they've done some of that?

MR. DUVIN: They've done some of that. We've got some new furniture stores and some new drugstores around here.

MR. SOLMAN: This looks like a new grocery store. It sounds like a grocery store. In fact, it's only missing one key ingredient, customers. The union is putting the squeeze on the Piggly Wiggly chain in Canton run by Tom Ivan.

TOM IVAN, Non Union Store Owner: We may lose some stores because of this. We may lose the entire thing. Our secured creditor's on us right now.

MR. SOLMAN: Are you actually in financial difficulty?

MR. IVAN: Absolutely.

MR. SOLMAN: The union has tried to organize Tom Ivan's stores for years, taking him to court for unfair labor practices, but he's proving more vulnerable to the new economic tactics. All five of his stores are being constantly picketed.

MR. IVAN: They're concentrating all their efforts to drive me out of business.

MR. SOLMAN: Why?

MR. IVAN: Why? Because then they could, with the victor they can divide up the spoils. They can divide up my business amongst the unionized, remaining unionized stores.

MR. SOLMAN: It seems like there are two ways to look at this. One to say this is a brilliant innovative move on the part of the union to coalesce with management against the common enemy, namely you. The other way to look at it is that it's a conspiracy. Which is it?

MR. IVAN: I think it's a conspiracy without question. I mean, why would they be permitted to incorporate my competitor to try to drive me out of business? That's just un-American, and that's why I have Roger King with me today because he's my attorney representing me in a class action lawsuit to prove that.

MR. SOLMAN: Roger, which is it, a brilliant, strategic move, or a conspiracy or maybe both?

ROGER KING, Lawyer: It's both, brilliant strategy that happens to be a violation of our nation's anti-trust laws, probably one of the most innovative strategies the union movement has come across in this country in a century. Lane Kirkland would be more effective out here on the picket line today than he would be getting arrested in Virginia, but as an employee representative, I submit they must follow the rules of the game.

MR. SOLMAN: George Hennigin argues that his tactics are legal, his strategy no different than what business is doing these days, that is restructuring itself in the face of new competition.

MR. HENNIGIN: Labor has succeeded as it has restructured itself along the same lines that industry has. When it goes some other directions, it's failed. If I'm trying to restructure this local union to fit what's going on in this situation, I'm doing exactly what should be done.

MR. SOLMAN: The union strategy here in Ohio is really part of a national trend. Facing cheap labor from abroad, the steel workers have been cooperating with the steel industry, the UAW with the auto makers. As labor paraded today in New York City, its members couldn't help but be aware of how badly its traditional tactics have failed this year, and that's why some in the union movement think there's so much riding on the new cooperative approach. FOCUS - CATASTROPHIC COMPLAINTS

MR. MacNeil: This week Congress returns from its August break. On its agenda will be a second look at catastrophic health insurance. Last year, Congress approved a plan to cover the medical bills of the critical ill elderly beyond current Medicare limits. They financed it by increasing deductions from the Social Security checks of middle and upper income taxpayers. Those deductions have set off a firestorm of criticism from many of the nation's 33 million seniors. Correspondent Kwame Holman has more.

MR. HOLMAN: Dan Rostenkowski is one of the most powerful members of the House of Representatives, but even the veteran chairman of the Ways & Means Committee found himself on the run in his own Northwest Chicago district from senior citizens angry about the Catastrophic Health Care Act.

REP. ROSTENKOWSKI: I don't think they understand what the government's trying to do for them; it's a problem. But it's always been a problem.

REPORTER: Do you sympathize with their anger?

REP. ROSTENKOWSKI: No, I don't think they understand what's going on.

MR. HOLMAN: What some members of Congress find hard to understand is how a bill that passed both Houses of Congress so overwhelmingly just a year ago is so controversial now. It seemed like something seniors wanted, free medical care after a $500 deductible for so- called catastrophic illnesses that require long hospital stays, payment of doctor bills in excess of $1370 a year and half of all prescription drug costs after a $600 deductible. But even before catastrophic health insurance became law, members of Congress warned that the financing scheme for it might not sit well with senior citizens.

CONGRESSMAN: I am concerned too that the legislation we are considering, HR2470, will extract a high price for the elderly in terms of a tax increase and yet it will not address severe problems facing the elderly in terms of health care, namely the financing of nursing home care.

MR. HOLMAN: Such predictions of problems came true. These letters to Congress are from senior citizens who were angry when they saw deductions being taken out of their Social Security checks to pay for catastrophic health insurance and senior citizens didn't stop at writing letters. August is the time of year when Congress shuts down and members get to go home to talk to constituents. During this August recess, questions about catastrophic health care coverage for senior citizens have dominated town meetings across the country. But here in New Mexico, where senior citizens make up a large portion of the population, members of Congress don't bother to wait for those questions.

BILL RICHARDSON: What everybody is talking to me, especially senior citizens, is the catastrophic bill. Basically senior citizens are saying that it's a catastrophe, that it's a disaster.

MR. HOLMAN: Bill Richardson is a House Democratic from New Mexico. Last week at this early morning meeting in the small town of Bernilio, one of many sessions Richardson held during the recess. He acknowledged the new catastrophic health care law has become a political liability.

REP. RICHARDSON: There's a real firestorm of protest on the catastrophic bill. We're either going to do one of two things. One we will repeal the whole bill, which I hope we do, or two, we secondly, we will basically change the numbers and spread the burden.

SENIOR CITIZEN: When you are saying you favor the repeal, believe me, we all favor the repeal of this disastrous law. It's got to go.

MR. HOLMAN: What is the basis for this strong negative reaction among people to this law that's already in effect?

REP. BILL RICHARDSON, [D] New Mexico: The basis of opposition is that I think we've made a drastic mistake and what we've done is middle class senior citizens are paying through the nose. What we've done is I think created a situation where those that can least afford to pay, those that are moving up to their senior years, all of a sudden are taking huge bites out of their taxes, and they're mad.

MR. HOLMAN: What angered seniors is that some of them are paying more than others for the new catastrophic coverage. 40 percent of the cost of the program is being spread among all seniors in the form of a $4 monthly premium deducted from their Social Security checks. The premium rises to $8 by 1993. But the remaining 60 percent of the cost will be raised through a new tax on middle and upper income seniors, the higher their income, the higher their tax. By 1993, that surtax would top out at $1050 for each senior at the highest income level.

REP. RICHARDSON: At first I thought that you had a bunch of wealthy seniors that don't like taxes period complaining. But then when I saw native Americans, my Indian population, my Hispanic community that I know is middle class or poor, and coming to me and saying that they can't afford this, that this is of no benefit to them, then I knew that we'd made a terrible mistake.

MR. HOLMAN: Estimates show that fewer than 10 percent of senior citizens will ever use all the benefits provided in the catastrophic care law. The idea behind the legislation was to protect those few from becoming financially ruined by a long-term illness.

SEN. PETE DOMENICI, [R] New Mexico: The idea was to expand Medicare to cover the catastrophe with insurance and everybody would pay something into the Medicare fund to take care of those that had that kind of disaster. Now what has happened since then is almost unbelievable in my opinion. What happened as this bill went through to Congress, we took those two things and before it got finished in Congress, a number of other things were happened.

MR. HOLMAN: New Mexico Sen. Pete Domenici also spent the August recess responding to complaints about the catastrophic health care law. Here in the Town of Galen, 30 miles South of Albuquerque, Domenici heard a common theme among middle income seniors, they are already covered.

SENIOR CITIZEN: I had a triple bypass. It cost me over $40,000, my private insurance took care of it, and I didn't get one penny from Medicare. And that's the reason why I can't understand why I'm going to be soaked, as the law reads now, $22.50 per $150 taxes, federal taxes.

MR. HOLMAN: Domenici told these seniors he supports scaling back the catastrophic coverage by eliminating benefits for skilled nursing home care, prescription drugs, and other coverage that inflated the cost of the program. Domenici said those changes would eliminate the need for the surtax.

SEN. DOMENICI: I myself have written to thousands of senior citizens and my answers back from most of them, overwhelming, is that they don't want all of that coverage.

MR. HOLMAN: At a plus retirement complex in Santa Fe, Sen. Domenici told affluent senior citizens how the idea of catastrophic health insurance got started.

SEN. DOMENICI: About a year before Ronald Reagan left the Presidency, he had received a lot of complaints from senior citizens. In fact, he showed us some where a senior had written a letter and the letter was about a disaster called catastrophic illness and somehow it got stuck in his mind and so he asked people to look into catastrophic coverage for senior citizens.

MR. HOLMAN: But when catastrophic health care became law last year, seniors found out they alone would pay for it. That troubles many of the affluent seniors here who also will pay the highest rates to fund the program.

MR. HOLMAN: Have you thought about what that's going to mean for you specifically in terms of what you may have to give up?

HELEN KLUVER, Retired Person: Well, no. It's just in a general all over, probably a little so-called luxury items or maybe a trip.

MR. HOLMAN: What about the concept of more affluent seniors, seniors with more resources, paying for the bulk of the program?

JOHN DAVIS, Retired Person: I think that they need to pay a good deal more than people who can't, who can't afford to pay for it, sure, whatever is the fair portion of their income, but I do also think that younger people, working people, should pay something into that health insurance program also so that groundwork is being laid for their own retirement and own insurance needs.

SEN. PETE DOMENICI, [R] New Mexico: Well, I don't think we should do that. Frankly, I think we have to convince seniors that the general population is now paying a substantial portion of Medicare, and if we're going to expand some specific coverage, we clearly have to ask seniors to pay for that coverage as an added premium. In this case it's just perceived as being too much and too much coverage.

SEN. DOMENICI: [Addressing Group of Seniors] We have another fifteen or twenty minutes, thirty minutes. I'd be pleased to get some ideas, and then you can hear from me in the next three or four weeks as we move the law through Congress. Yes, sir.

SENIOR: My name is Hein. I'm vice president of the AARP chapter in --

MR. HOLMAN: At New Mexico's annual conference on aging held in the mountains near Santa Fe, seniors had more questions for Sen. Domenici, questions about the benefits of the catastrophic health care bill, questions about the costs, and questions about who was to blame.

SENIOR: If you could encourage your peers to be a little more open and especially the executive branch of the federal government to start telling the public a little more of what the real costs were.

MR. HOLMAN: Outside the meeting room, seniors were also blaming other seniors for backing catastrophic health care legislation that many now say is flawed.

DEWEY LANGSTON, Retired Person: It's my feeling and others that the Congress of the United States was not given full factual information on the mood of this segment of society and I think there were segments of this bill that was never brought to their attention, through ignorance, we didn't know. I think Congress was somewhat led down. The right questions were not asked by people who should have been there asking the questions.

MR. HOLMAN: Lovola Burgess is a national vice president of a group that did ask the questions. Her powerful American Association of Retired Persons lobbied heavily for the original catastrophic bill.

LOVOLA BURGESS, AARP: We certainly have taken some raps on it. I would have to say that's very very true. I think they're very unfair raps, because we were always interested in the benefits. We tried to get our people to see that they were needed and as far as leading Congress down, you know, we don't pass laws, however, I am surprised at the outcry, and I'm still not sure whether its a majority or whether it's a very vocal minority, people who are fussing. We do know that some people already are using those benefits.

MR. HOLMAN: Sen. Domenici made an attempt to determine majority opinion among these seniors.

SEN. DOMENICI: How many want to leave it just like it is, with the surtax and all the coverage in it? Five, okay. How many would like to repeal it all? Well, I tried that and it looks about 18, okay. How many would like to modify it so that it's a fixed rate of somewhere between four and ten and has the coverage that we described here today, doesn't have the drugs and a few of the other things, but the other basic coverage, how many would like it that way?

MR. HOLMAN: If the lack of consensus here is any indication, Congress, when it returns to work this week, has a difficult task in deciding what to do about catastrophic health insurance.

MR. MacNeil: Still to come, drug epidemics of the past and the controversy over motivational training. CONVERSATION - TALKING DRUGS

MR. MacNeil: Our next focus is on drugs. Tomorrow Pres. Bush will outline his administration's drug policy. Tonight Charlayne Hunter-Gault talks to a man who believes policy makers can learn from the parallels between today's drug epidemic and an earlier one at the beginning of this century. He is Dr. David Musto, a Yale University psychiatrist, historian, and author.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Do you have any particular insight into what it is in the American psyche that makes us such a drug prone society?

DR. DAVID MUSTO, Yale University: If you look over the cycles of American enthusiasm or fear let's say of alcohol or these other drugs, there is a sense that a drug is either seen as being so wonderful, everybody should use it, and, therefore, you wonder why people aren't using it, or drugs are seen as so bad nobody can use it, and you're extremely anger and fearful if anybody uses it, and it's this moving from one point of view to the other which is sort of this cyclical pattern in American history and you could say that it's related to American idealism. That is we want to find out what is the right thing and once we find it out, that is the message, and that is the message probably not only for us but for all other countries and so on. When cocaine came in about 1885, it was widely distributed in drugstores, mail order catalogs. It was considered the all American tonic. It was recommended for everybody from baseball players to mountain climbers.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: For what purpose?

DR. MUSTO: More energy, to cheer you up and give you more energy. It seemed like it was the ideal tonic. It was put into Coca-Cola about 1887, and it was in Coca-Cola until about 1900, when they took out the cocaine, and then they added additional caffeine in Coca-Cola. No one thought there was anything wrong with cocaine when it initially came in, and we had experts assuring us it didn't have any negative side effects and you couldn't get addicted.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: When did all that change?

DR. MUSTO: About ten or fifteen years after the introduction of cocaine, the casualties started to mount up. People noticed that someone got into cocaine, they couldn't get out of it. They took more and more of it. It caused paranoid delusions. It caused violence in some instances, ruined families or careers, and that sort of thing. It took a while before this became evident, and cocaine made a very unusual transformation in American society. I don't know of anything else that has ever done it quite as much, and that is it moved from being the most wonderful drug there ever was to being the most fearful drug there was, and by 1900, 1905, and so on, cocaine became the most feared drug in America. In fact, by 1910, the President of the United States sent a report to Congress saying the cocaine habit was the most terrible drug habit that had ever hit the United States and something had to be done about.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: So what happened? Why is it that we have an epidemic all over again?

DR. MUSTO: Society which earlier had permitted it in various ways closed down, there was enormous peer pressure against cocaine, and, therefore, cocaine came down to an extremely low level in the United States. It took a while. It took maybe 20 years or so, but it was finally eliminated. But there's something that happens when a drug epidemic declines, and that's why I think it somehow sets us up for another one, at least in the United States, it seems to me. We are so angry at the drugs, the drug users, so fearful of them, that when they finally seem to decline, we adopt three policies, that is, extreme punishment, exaggeration or silence about these substances. Give you an example, punishment kept going up. As drug use went down in the '30s, '40s and '50s, punishment went up, so while the violation of the Harrison Narcotics Act in 1920 was a relatively straightforward prison term, by 1955, we had the death penalty for giving anyone under 18 heroin, and that was a federal death penalty, so one of the first things we did, we tried to make sure it never happened again by raising punishments, second thing we did was to rely on silence. All schools had mandatory teaching about the dangers of narcotics by about 1930 and I'm talking about every state in the United States. It was remarkable, but once things seemed to get better, the interest in the educational programs declined and also we become to think that if we tell people about drugs, we arouse their curiosity, so it's best not to say anything about them. Then the last thing we did was we relied upon gross exaggeration in case people did bring up the drugs. Now when I interviewed Commissioner Harry Anslinger who was the commissioner, he was our drug czar, if we ever had a drug czar, it was Commissioner Anslinger from 1930 to 1962, and I interviewed him at some length before his death and so on and he said it was their purpose like when describing marijuana to make it sound so awful, so horrible that no one would even try it once, that you wouldn't rouse interest in experimentation, so you had these three ways in which we tried to keep a drug epidemic from ever recurring. The result is in the 1960s, people who grew up in the 1960s knew nothing about drugs whatsoever, and when they found out that some drugs, say marijuana, if they smoked marijuana, they didn't go insane instantly or drop dead or something like this, the government lost all of its credibility with regards to all of its comments on drugs. So one of the reasons we had a revival of drugs again in our time was that we essentially had completely wiped out of our minds the previous drug epidemic and what we had learned from it.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: What lessons can be learned from our past mistakes or our past appropriate policies?

DR. MUSTO: There is a real question to what extent explaining what happened in sort of an intellectual way will cause people not to use drugs, and I recognize that, but I think there are some lessons from history that are even more important. Just a few weeks ago there was an article about heroin being used with cocaine to take the edge off anxiety caused by cocaine as if this was something new or a burgeoning problem but actually the use of heroin with cocaine as a speed ball was known for at least 60 years. One of the problems of the problems with the media that's built in I suppose is that every so often they can completely change the reporters that are covering something so they have very little institutional memory, so there's sort of a lack of any historical perspective, because the problem always seems right now. It has no history and you can see the entire problem by just walking out on the street and looking at it, and that isn't the case at all. There is a real history to this. There are larger trends that are involved, and if you're not aware of it, you're constantly surprised by what you think are new events.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Is this one of the things that you would also encourage Bennett on, to look at the historical trend?

DR. MUSTO: Oh, yes. I think that from the larger political and statesmanlike prospect, one has to be very aware of these trends and the dangers of going too far in a direction which is popular at that time but can have very negative national consequences down the road. When we become intolerant towards drugs, there's almost no limit to our anger and intolerance. The intolerance can become very great and it tends to look for scapegoats or symbolic reasons why we have drug troubles, and in this decline phase, the 1920s, '30s, and '40s, we had, for example, a very close linking and popular mind in America between cocaine use and blacks in the South. The cocaine peak which caused violence and delusions and that sort of thing happened to come at the time of lynching and disenfranchisement of blacks in the South and so on and it was a very common explanation, whether you looked in the New York Times or you listen to the hearings in the Harrison Act, that we've got to go after cocaine because it's causing all of this violence in the South. In other words, cocaine became a chemical reason for repression and disenfranchisement and so on, although there are other studies to indicate that there is no more use among blacks than among whites, it became sort of a cliche that it was a black drug. So we often have in our country an association between a drug and a feared ethnic minority.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Do you think that's happening now?

DR. MUSTO: Very easy for this to happen now because I think what we're heading toward is a two-tiered drug problem in the United States. We're having, the middle class I think is declining in its drug use, because drug use so powerfully affects and impacts on paying your mortgage, graduating from high school, keeping your job, having your family together and all these sorts of things.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Middle class things.

DR. MUSTO: Middle class things which are important and they're future-oriented and drug use interferes with this, so you have a growing antagonism towards the use of drugs, and a declining demand in the middle class, which is what happens, the most dramatic thing that happened in the first epidemic too. But then if you go to the inner-city where in most instances you don't have the education, the job opportunities, the future orientation, many of the reasons the middle class drops drugs don't exist and drug use can continue on. When we become intolerant toward drugs, we become very intolerant, very angry, we want to punish. It's the most natural kind of thing and so arguments to improve education or job opportunities in the inner-city, it's very likely that the middle class will say why should we do these things, we're not sure they're going to work, it's a lot of money, and there are a bunch of drug users. What we should have are more prisons, arrest more people and so on, and show them that they cannot use drugs, whereas, anyone who's worked in this area knows that in the inner- city you have the most brave and the most dedicated fighters against drugs in the entire United States, and these are the people that should be helped and supported in their attempts to get their hallways back and the playgrounds, but in this anger and intolerance towards drugs, the American middle class may not see any distinctions, it's all inner-city.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: What advice would you give Drug Control Director Bennett?

DR. MUSTO: I would say that my chief advice, first advice, to Mr. Bennett would be to recognize that the politically satisfying statements that he could make to reinforce the hatred and the anger in drugs is a double edged sword and that you have to be very careful that you don't simply mobilize all this energy to create a two tier drug problem which is going to in the long run be very damaging to our nation and to the inner-city to begin with. The other problem that Mr. Bennett has is that he really doesn't have much power except by persuasion and I think it's going to be very dependent on whether Mr. Bush backs up Bennett in these battles with various government departments. With regard to the supply side, in the long run, the most optimistic thing about supply, dealing with the supply of drugs is the diminution in the cold war, because you can't find three countries who are more anti-drug in their official actions than the United States, China, and the Soviet Union, and if the United States, China, and the Soviet Union are in complete agreement on some policy, it would seem to me that it has enormous international pressure. Nobody has anybody else to play off these things, whereas, during the cold war you have had small companies where they could raise opium or whatever and they've been able to play off us against them and them against us and have a sort of a safety area to grow products, but if the cold war ends and we cooperate on this, those places are going to be in a lot of trouble, because they'll have nobody to turn to when we go after them, let's say.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Well, Dr. Musto, thank you very much.

DR. MUSTO: You're welcome. FOCUS - UPWARD BOUND

MR. MacNeil: Finally tonight motivational training. Many American companies have begun enrolling their employees in so- called confidence building and leadership training seminars. For many, they've been useful, but other workers have filed lawsuits challenging their employer's right to put them through sometimes physically and psychologically demanding courses. Lee Hochberg of public station KCTS in Seattle reports.

LEE HOCHBERG: Forty-one year old Linda Powell is about to do something terrifying. She's deathly afraid of heights but she's climbing up a pole 20 feet high. There's a little platform on top of the pole about the size of a frisbee. What Linda has to do is somehow get up and stand atop the frisbee, then teetering 20 feet in the air turn all the way around, and then leap through the air to try to grab a trapeze dangling about eight feet away. Linda is not a circus performer. She works at the University of Michigan Business School. She's here in the mountains of Southern California to participate in a rigorous weeklong seminar given by a motivational training company called Sportsmind.

CHRIS MAJER, President, Sportsmind Corp.: The fundamental goal all of our programs work to achieve is to give people not the idea but the actual experience of what it is to achieve more than they ever dreamed possible, to actually go beyond what they thought their limits were.

MR. HOCHBERG: The hope is that this will turn participants into more confident people and thus more productive employees. American management has latched on to motivational training like never before, spending $6 billion on it last year and enrolling millions of employees in the various courses. Some of the courses are classroom-based sessions in positive thinking. Others are very physical. Many critics suggest that whatever the style, the courses hurt more than they help.

SPOKESMAN: It's pure fraud. It has no impact. It's a pure waste of money.

RICHARD OFSHE, University of California, Berkeley: I've seen lotsof examples of people becoming psychotic, becoming enormously distressed, some people suiciding. I believe in direct response to these massively intrusive programs.

MR. HOCHBERG: Motivational training is not new. In the 1960s and '70s, so-called T groups and encounter sessions tried to teach employees how to get the most of their abilities. Now many of America's Fortune 500 companies have employees in motivational training as have governmental agencies like the CIA and Social Security Administration. General Motors attributes a dramatic increase in the quality of GM products to motivational training. NASA, which put some employees through a course after the Challenger disaster, claims 80 percent of them felt it helped personally and professionally, and the Ore/Ida food products company says it documented $1 1/2 million in increased productivity after its employees went through motivational training. There have been some highly visible failures as well. Seattle's dormath professional baseball team, the Mariners, went through motivational training but still have never had a winning season, and in California, the phone company spent $50 million to put its employees through a training program that the State Public Utilities Commission said wasted time, caused fear, intimidation and mistrust among employees and decreased productivity. Seattle- based Sportsmind operates on the premise that people who tackle their fears on high rope acrobatic courses can take their new found confidence back to the work place. Its clients include the U.S. Army, AT&T, and Weyerhaueser, and on this day, employees from the Nike Corporation, American Airlines, and Tandem Computers. Linda Powell, afraid of heights, cautiously approaches the exercise called the high beam. The ladder is 40 feet tall. Up top is a log stretching from this tree to another one. Linda's job is to climb up to that log and walk across it.

MR. MAJER: It is scary up there. It doesn't matter how many times you've done it. It's still scary up there. They've got a safety harness on and yet the harness is designed so that all the ropes and everything are behind them and they can't really feel it, so they're engineered to bring out some of those primal fears in people and yet at the same time, as you see, they're absolutely physically safe. [Instructor and Linda Talking]

LINDA POWELL, Motivational Training Participant: I guess the thing that I would remember is that if I choose to do something I'm going to do it and that if I'm afraid, it doesn't mean that I still can't choose to do something and do it. And that makes a big difference because the fear isn't the stopping point.

MR. HOCHBERG: The high wire acrobatics go on all day. Nelson Farris, a Nike Corporation vice president, is one of several managers testing the program to see if Nike should enroll all of its employees at about $1500 per employee. Nelson returned to the ground to share his feat with the day's other champion. The question as this week in this mountains came to an end was how many of these people still felt like champions Monday morning when they went back to work. Many critics say that very few of them do.

PETER DRUCKER, Management Consultant: What the hell has motivation got to do with performance? We have no studies that show any difference in performance according to motivation. That's pure speculation.

MR. HOCHBERG: Peter Drucker has been one of America's top management consultants for 40 years and has watched the increasing popularity of motivational training.

MR. DRUCKER: In most cases, it leaves lasting scars, and that woman is never going to forget it and never going to forgive it, and she's going to come down from that rope and vomit for three hours and she is not going to be motivated except to find another job. Drucker is one of many analysts who say motivational training is a fad. He says some American employees are being pressured by their bosses to attend the sessions and that's an infringement on employee rights.

MR. DRUCKER: It's both immoral and illegal. It's immoral because the employment contract does not give you a right to ask for anything but performance. What business does the employer have to try to change an employee's personality?

MR. HOCHBERG: From what you've seen, are employers forcing employees to go through these programs?

MR. DRUCKER: No, you are not -- if you don't show up, they don't send the cops to put handcuffs on you and drag you but the next performance review you're being told that you are not cooperative.

MR. HOCHBERG: So there is pressure?

MR. DRUCKER: This is very heavy pressure.

MR. HOCHBERG: Nelson Farris has returned from the Sportsmind training program in Southern California to the Nike corporate offices in Portland, Oregon. Nike, once the leader in the sports shoe business, lately has been taking a beating from the Reebok Company and Farris concludes putting everybody else at Nike through the training he's just gone through will help the company.

NELSON FARRIS, Nike Corporation: I think every employee should go through it, not just some people. I think everybody should go through it because there's something to learn here.

MR. HOCHBERG: What if one of your employees doesn't want to go?

MR. FARRIS: If they don't want to do that, I think they'll have the choice not to do that, but they'll be the odd man out.

MR. HOCHBERG: Would that affect their status at work?

MR. FARRIS: I think so. I mean, people would say if nine out of ten in a group go and the one guy doesn't go, I can see the hurting effect. People get together and put a little heat on the person that didn't show up. And so for us to explore ways to get people to open up their minds and deal with the process of change, that's what we're looking for.

MR. HOCHBERG: Is that any of your business, to make employees change?

MR. FARRIS: I think so. I think that the success of this company and the future of this company depends upon having a core of employees who understand that things don't remain the same, that in order to survive and keep the company going, whether we're here or not, is the most important thing.

MR. HOCHBERG: Experts say the phenomenon won't go away until the ultimate demotivator occurs, a large lawsuit slapped against an employer or a motivational trainer.

MR. DRUCKER: Somebody will sue and will get the jury to give him $5 million damages for psychic pain and that's when employers will learn this is not within their right. RECAP

MR. MacNeil: Again the main stories today, Colombian drug cartels apparently stepped up their war against the government, a gunman sprayed Medellin Airport with automatic fire. Two people died in the incident, and a bomb was found but safely removed from a Colombian airliner. At least 125 people were killed, but one survived last night's Cuban airlines crash near Havana. In South Africa, police fired bullets and tear gas to break up a student rally to protest the exclusion of blacks from Wednesday's general election, and police arrested anti-apartheid leaders Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Rev. Allan Boesak. That's the Newshour tonight. We'll be back tomorrow night. I'm Robert MacNeil. Good night.