326 



haven't seen the documents, and I don't know that anybody on the 

 committee have seen the documents. 



Have you seen the documents, Mr. Chairman? 



Mr. Waxman. If you will yield to me, I would like to know if Mr. 

 Califano has these documents. 



Mr. Califano. I do not have these documents. 



Mr. Waxman. So you are being told to not talk about some docu- 

 ments you don't have by some court in Kentucky, and you get a let- 

 ter from a lawyer saying don't talk about anything that has to do 

 with anything that has to do with these documents, which means 

 even though you have read it in the New York Times, you are not 

 allowed to talk about it. Isn't that what is really going on? 



Mr. Califano. Also, in terms of intimidating, we are a small, 

 not-for-profit research, and we do demonstrations for drugs to try 

 and find out ways to help young kids stay off of drugs. We do re- 

 search. We are about to try a research program for prisoners. We 

 are a very small not-for-profit operation affiliated with Columbia 

 University, and when that kind of a letter and that kind of an 

 order comes, I can't tell you how that shook up people at the Cen- 

 ter on Addiction and Substance Abuse. These are young research- 

 ers. These are people who have devoted their life to fighting sub- 

 stance abuse, to trying to find out how to help this country fight 

 it, and then some heavy lawyer — heavy law firm comes in and 

 says, "By God, you can't testify, and if you do, we are going to go 

 after your organization or you." That is what this says. 



Mr. McMillan. I will reclaim my time. You brought up this 

 issue, I didn't bring it up. I haven't seen the documents. You seem 

 to think these documents contain information that, had you had it 

 some years ago, you would have acted differently, and I think that 

 is a question that we need to raise questions about. 



The gentleman from Virginia has very appropriately brought up 

 information that you had access to a long time ago that perhaps 

 would have enabled you to take action or your administration to 

 take an action that it didn't take. So I think what is in those docu- 

 ments may be of interest to us or what is in any other documents 

 that may have been available to the public or to the Secretary of 

 HEW at various — or the Surgeon Generals at various points in 

 time. 



Are we on the 5-minute rule today? 



Mr. Waxman. We are taking turn turns of equal time. It has 

 been over 5 minutes. Do you want to take another minute? 



Mr. McMillan. Well, I will see what I can do. 



I haven't had a chance. I would really like to be able to get into 

 your study more in more detail, but it was marked for release, I 

 think, today at 10 a.m. Apparently some people got it yesterday. 

 Apparently the press got it before 10 a.m. this morning, and it 

 makes a number of assertions in there that I think really should 

 be examined fully in terms of their import. It is important to deter- 

 mine to what degree substances contribute to death. But I think it 

 is very important that we do that with sufficient detail so that we 

 can really tell the difference. 



As I understand it, a very high proportion of causes of death are 

 attributed to substance abuse, and — what is the reciprocal of that? 

 What is it normal to die of? 



