Drugs and War
ABC News' investigative team, led by Brian Ross, worked with six graduate journalism students to discover whether troops returning home after serving in Iraq are facing the same battles with drug addiction as soldiers did when they came back from Vietnam. For their series, "Coming Home: Soldiers and Drugs," the students traveled across the country from Fort Carson in Colorado to Fort Bragg in North Carolina to examine the accuracy of the Army's assurances that drug abuse among ex-combatants isn't growing. Their findings:
Many of this country's bravest men and women who volunteered to defend America in a time of war have come home wounded -- physically and mentally -- and are turning to illicit drugs as they adjust to normal life, according to soldiers, health experts and advocates.
The five stories in the series are filled with heart-breaking accounts of soldiers slipping into addiction after experiencing the traumas of war. Kate McCarthy from Columbia University, Donnie Forti from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Angela Hill from City University of New York, Mansi Mehan from Harvard University, David Schneider from the University of Missouri-Columbia and Robert Lewis from the University of California at Berkeley worked with Ross and his team on the stories. The nonprofit Carnegie Corporation sponsored the project, which comes with photos and videos that juxtapose the soldiers' experiences in Iraq with their troubles back home. http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/2020/