Proclamation 4164—Drug Abuse Prevention Week

Ordinary modes of expression scarcely do justice to outrage. The enormous human tragedy of drug abuse gives pause to our customary gesture of setting aside seven days a year for intensified concern with this or that social problem. More than a problem, narcotics and dangerous drugs are a grave emergency threatening each and all of us.

Drug Abuse Prevention Week, therefore, is but one more occasion to redouble our war against this enemy, to take stock of large victories won in a short time, identify areas of continuing concern and target more resources on them.

The first lesson America has had to learn is that drug abuse prevention, all abstractions aside, is a matter of saving lives: our children's, our neighbors', our own, our Nation's. Heroin addicts, as many as half a million of them, need all the help we can give them; so do countless others who abuse pills of every sort, hallucinogens and marijuana.

That help is now on the way. The glamorization of drugs has been halted. The full power of government has been mobilized to provide rehabilitation and treatment, to enforce the laws, to pinch off opium and other drug sources all over the world. Medical research has been stepped up. Our schools, our churches, and our communications media are pushing preventive educational campaigns.

With national heroin shortages now developing, with more and more addicts seeking treatment, and with the steady resurgence of those moral and spiritual strengths which are a people's ultimate defense against drug abuse, we can find good reason to be hopeful for the future. But even one person addicted or led into drug abuse is one too many, and we shall not have discharged our humane duty until all are rescued from this plague. In this spirit let us press forward.

Now, Therefore, I, Richard Nixon, President of the United States of America, do hereby designate the week beginning October 15, 1972, as the third annual Drug Abuse Prevention Week.

I call upon officials at every level of government, upon educators, medical professionals, and communicators, upon the business community and the civic groups of our Nation, upon the churches and the clergy, and upon all who bear the special trusts of parenthood and care of the young, to rededicate themselves during this week to the total banishment of drug abuse from American life.

I urge every American to commit himself wholeheartedly, beginning now, to this supremely important humanitarian cause.

In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand this seventh day of October, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred seventy-two, and of the Independence of the United States of America the one hundred ninety-seventh.

RICHARD NIXON