Lawrence Kolb was an American physician. He was a pioneer in drug addiction research.
Background
Lawrence Kolb was born on February 20, 1881 in Galesville, Maryland, United States. He was one of fifteen children of Caroline Kirchner and of John Kolb, a store clerk at the time of Lawrence's birth and later the store owner. The family name is pronounced "Cobb. " Lawrence did not get along well with his father, who was stern, dictatorial, and generally disapproving of whatever his children wanted.
Education
In 1904, without any formal education beyond grammar school, he was admitted to the medical school of the University of Maryland, from which he received his Doctor of Medicine in 1908, third in his class. His father had not wanted him to study medicine, and had been openly convinced that Kolb would fail in the attempt. It was an older brother, who later became one of two steamboat captains in the family, who suggested that Lawrence become a physician. Moreover this brother financed Lawrence's medical education with a $1, 200 loan. While in medical school, Lawrence boarded with another brother in Baltimore.
Career
After a year of internship at University Hospital, Baltimore, Kolb joined the U. S. Public Health Service as assistant surgeon in 1909. He was promoted to passed assistant surgeon in 1913, surgeon in 1921, and senior surgeon in 1930.
Kolb's first assignment in the Public Health Service was the Marine Hospital in Baltimore, but a few months later he was reassigned to Reedy Island Station in the Delaware River as a quarantine officer. From 1914 to 1919, he diagnosed mental disorders among the immigrants at Ellis Island in New York City. While at Ellis Island, he spent a year of postdoctoral study at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, an organization later headed by his son.
In 1919, Kolb was transferred to Waukesha, to supervise the remodeling of an old hotel into a hospital that would specialize in battle fatigue and other mental trauma from World War I. There he began his fifty-year study of drug addiction, even though this facility housed only a few addicts.
In 1923, he went to the National Institutes of Health (then called the National Hygienic Laboratory) in Washington, D. C. , to conduct extensive research on drug addiction, including animal experiments with opiates and cocaine, as well as studies of the demographics of addiction, its relation to crime, its effects on personality and intelligence, and its potential for treatment. He visited, counseled, and interviewed nonincarcerated addicts from Maine to Alabama. Among his published conclusions was that opium and morphine caused less personal and social harm than alcohol.
From 1928 to 1931, Kolb lived in Dublin, Ireland, where his children attended Trinity College. During this period he served at U. S. consulates throughout Europe, examining the mental health of possible immigrants, investigating the effects of their environment on their intelligence-test scores, and scrutinizing various methods of measuring intelligence. He was especially critical of Stanford Binet tests. After returning from Europe and spending a brief time in Washington, D. C. , Kolb was assigned in 1932 to establish the U. S. Department of Justice Hospital for Defective Delinquents in Springfield. Two years later he opened the Public Health Service Hospital for drug addicts in Lexington, and was its superintendent for four years. This hospital, Kolb's brainchild, included a full-fledged addiction research center staffed by psychiatrists, chemists, pharmacologists, and other medical personnel. In 1938, he was back in Washington, D. C. , now as assistant surgeon general, heading the Division of Mental Hygiene. By that time Kolb had left. When he retired from the Public Health Service in 1944, Kolb settled in California, where he served as medical consultant to the State Department of Corrections, then as medical deputy director of the Department of Mental Hygiene. Retiring from state service at the age of seventy, Kolb accepted an invitation to reorganize the mental-health facility at the Norristown, State Hospital, where he was assistant superintendent from July 1951 to December 1952.
After 1959 he worked occasionally for the Public Health Service as special consultant on mental health. In 1962, at the age of eighty-one, Kolb published his ground-breaking work, Drug Addiction: A Medical Problem. In it he argued against the idea that addiction causes crime, and for the thesis that addicts would likely be productive citizens, as they typically were in the nineteenth century, if the law would just leave them alone. Citing the British adage "Opium soothes, alcohol maddens, " Kolb contended that alcohol impairs judgment, whereas opiates do not. Even though his research led him to believe that drug addicts and alcoholics alike were generally unstable people who had mental problems before they became addicted, he held firmly that opiates ought to be legalized and readily available, even more so than alcohol, not only because they cause less social damage than alcohol but also because, in some cases, opiates may help a person to become a productive member of society.
Kolb distinguished marijuana from the opiates on the ground that, like alcohol, it causes users to commit crimes. Yet he considered marijuana better than alcohol because it does not seem to be physically addictive. Above all, Kolb argued that drug addicts were not criminals, that they would commit fewer crimes than the nonaddicted population if they did not have to fight the law in order to procure drugs, and that their social difficulties should be addressed by physicians rather than by the courts. His view that addicts should be treated rather than jailed was based on his belief that mental disorders are chemical rather than psychological, and thus beyond the individual control of the sufferer. Kolb's views on this subject proved, as he predicted, less controversial in Europe than in America.
Connections
In 1910, Kolb married Lillian Coleman; they had three children. Their oldest child, Lawrence Coleman Kolb, became a well-known psychiatrist.