To legalize or not to legalize? the question of marijuana’s safety, its impacts on society and its potential as a government revenue source has probably never been so hotly debated in the mainstream of public opinion. We’ve been waging war on the drug trade for decades, and what has it gotten us? Prisons full of drug users and street-corner dealers, an ever-increasing enforcement bill that cuts deeply into other services, and a murderous drug cartel to the south that threatens to turn Mexico into a full-blown narco state. Today, even “respectable” people feel the burden of those hard truths.
Dr. David E. Smith certainly does. And, as a person uniquely and intimately qualified to talk about the social, medical and spiritual ramifications of illicit drugs’ widespread use, his is a worthwhile voice.
Smith is a physician. He’s a toxicologist. He’s a philanthropist. He’s a nonprofit executive. He’s a stoner — well, a reformed stoner who can tell portions of his life story against a backdrop of firsthand dope-smoking and LSD-dropping experiences.
And, wouldn’t you know it — Dave Smith is one of ours, a Bakersfield native with a deadly (but retired) 20-foot jump shot and fond memories of a certain ’47 Chevy from his days at East High School.
Smith graduated from Bakersfield College in 1958, got his undergraduate degree from UC Berkeley in 1960 and then obtained his M.D., along with an M.S. in pharmacology, from UC San Francisco in 1964. he interned at San Francisco General Hospital for almost three years and for much of that time was chief of the alcohol and drug screening unit. And, simultaneously, he himself was a raging alcoholic. in fact, for a time, Smith enjoyed a full range of intoxicants and hallucinogens. how could he have achieved so much as a young man while indulging in such behavior? Timing.
“Fortunately, interest in that lifestyle hit me after I already had my skills (as a doctor),” Smith said.
But on Jan. 1, 1966, he resolved to stop drinking, and by the time the Summer of Love descended on San Francisco in 1967, Smith had also extricated himself from the grip of that era’s signature vice, LSD. he would happily stick to marijuana.
Part of his motivation for (mostly) sobering up was the abundant evidence of the drug scene’s distressful consequences: Smith had grown increasingly alarmed by what he saw on the streets of San Francisco. he saw teens and twentysomethings, many of them far from home, in search of the freedom and beauty portrayed in the breezy psychedelic rock music of the day, reduced to homeless addicts. if you’re going to San Francisco / Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair. in countless cases, what young people found instead of freedom and beauty was the devastation of exploitation, mental illness and, most frightening, overdose.
“It was the era of Ken Kesey and ‘The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,’ the Merry Pranksters,” said Smith, who is now 72. “They were all taking LSD, and bad trips were a regular thing.”
Others were disturbed by the psychosocial carnage as well. Robert Conrich, the son of a San Francisco architect, approached Smith, then 27, about the possibility of addressing the city’s growing public health crisis by opening a privately financed free medical clinic, with Smith as medical director. Smith, having heard about the successes of a free clinic that opened in Los Angeles in the wake of the 1965 Watts riots, agreed it was a worthy undertaking, and on June 7, 1967, in an office formerly occupied by a dentist, they opened the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic.
“It came to be called the Hippie Clinic,” Smith said. “I practiced without an income and without malpractice insurance from 1967 to 1972, but we saved the city of San Francisco millions of dollars because these were people who would have gone into the emergency room without our intervention. we had all kinds of people, including vets coming back from Vietnam. we were detoxing 100 addicts a day.”
They were also breaking new ground in the field of addiction medicine. “We were suddenly defining the treatment protocols,” said Smith, who went on to write textbooks on the subject, founded the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs and served as president of the American Society of Addiction Medicine.
But in those early years, the clinic eked out an existence with volunteer workers, community good will and benefit events — mostly rock concerts.
For a time, the DEA didn’t know what to make of the clinic. “They weren’t sure what we were up to at first,” Smith said. “I had my picture in the DEA offices in San Francisco (as a person to monitor). we had to take steps to make sure there was no dealing in the lobby. we put up a sign on a door — everybody says they remember that door — ‘No dealing! that can close the clinic.’” Eventually, the government decided the clinic was a good thing, not a detriment to society, and the first federal grants started coming in 1972.
The clinic became closely identified with San Francisco’s rock music scene and Smith became friends with bill Graham, the impresario who brought fame to the Fillmore Auditorium as a ’60s concert venue and, with the help of Apple’s Steve Wozniak, helped create Mountain View’s Shoreline Amphitheatre. Graham was probably the first to hire medical personnel for his larger shows — and he preferred the staff of the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic for his Bay Area concerts.
The connection was a great benefit to the clinic, whose supporters over the years have included Janis Joplin, Creedence Clearwater Revival, George Harrison, Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Carlos Santana, even Buck Owens. All played benefit concerts.
But Graham himself wasn’t particularly interested in the more unpleasant details of the drug scene. Overdose cases were bummers, and Graham didn’t want to witness bummers, especially if he sensed he might have been, by virtue of the culture he had helped nurture, tangentially responsible.
“I asked him once: ‘Do you want to come down and see us treating an overdose?’ No, he didn’t want to see a bad acid trip,” Smith said.
Graham died in a helicopter crash in 1991 — 20 years ago this week, in fact — having lined up, just minutes before, the headliner act for a benefit concert to help the victims of the devastating fires in the Oakland/Berkeley hills.
There’d been a lot of alcoholism in Smith’s family and he knew he was predisposed. he eventually beat it, though not without some pain. he took LSD for the last time in late 1966 or early 1967, but quitting marijuana was another matter. he found himself sneaking out of the house to smoke. then, one day, sometime in the early 1980s, Smith realized just how ridiculous his habit had become. “I had been stuck in the 1960s,” Smith said, “and it was time to grow up. Quitting it was a spiritual thing, but it was also important to me from a professional and academic point of view.”
His years in the clinic, and as a willing participant in the drug culture, leads him to the conclusion that nothing beats sobriety — even marijuana. “Marijuana,” he said, “gets in the way of spiritual recovery.”
Neither side of the legalization debate, he says, has been honest or willing to make rational concessions.
“I grew up in the ‘Refer Madness’ era, when there were liars on the enforcement side,” he said. “Now there are liars on the legalization side. when I was smoking it, I was on the wrong side, and now that I’m sober, I’m on the wrong side again.”
Smith says he could endorse some form of legalization only in one scenario. “I’ve talked with proponents of legalizing marijuana and all they talk about is the money, the profits, the tax revenue potential,” Smith said. “I tell them, ‘But there will be consequences. if you agree to put all of the revenue in education and treatment, I could agree to it.’ But they won’t (agree) because they say that would be like admitting that there’s something wrong with marijuana.” And there is, Smith maintains.
Smith isn’t buying the argument for medical marijuana, either — at least not the way it’s prescribed and distributed today. “Medical marijuana is a farce, just a cover for people who want to score,” he said. “Getting a medical marijuana card is about as hard as getting a Blockbuster (Video) membership.”
We’ve botched the war on drugs, Smith says, but he does believe in one strategy: drug court, which gives users the chance to size up their lives. “It’s when you realize you don’t want to lie, cheat and steal that you finally take the steps you need to take to live again.”
Smith married Millicent Buxton, who he’d met at the clinic, in 1977. at the time she was a recovering heroin addict; now, Smith said, “she is an esteemed old timer in Narcotics Anonymous.” They have four children and three grandchildren.
Today, the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic is in the midst of change: last July, it merged with the much-larger Walden House, another S.F. nonprofit social service agency. Dr. Vitka Eisen, CEO of the new Haight Ashbury Free Clinics-Walden House, is a former heroin addict who owes her sobriety, in part, to Smith and the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic’s detox program.
The combined organization, which has an operating budget of $60 million, has 2,000 employees plus hundreds of volunteers who deal with 40,000 unique patient visits a year and 1 million annual patient visits throughout the state. “Everything,” Smith said, “from skinned knees to full-blown heroin addiction.”
It takes considerable passion to devote a lifetime to such a daunting cause. Smith says he managed by hewing close to a belief he’s had all of his professional life: “Health is a right, not a privilege,” he said. “Addiction is a disease, and addicts have a right to treatment.” Maybe he says those words with such conviction because, as a former user, he knows just how close he came to losing everything. “Part of it had to be God’s will,” he said. “I could have been killed. Lots of stuff happened, bad stuff. now look at me: now I’m just an old grandfather, hanging on.”
Robert Price is the editorial page editor for the Bakersfield Californian. Contact him at rprice@bakersfield.com.
