Pop Drugs: The High as a Way of Life

You raise up your head

And you ask, Is this where it is?

And somebody points to you

And says, It's his,

And you say, What's mine?

And somebody else says, Well, what is?,

And you say, Oh, my God,

Am I here all alone?

But something is happening

And you don't know what it is,

Do you, Mr. Jones?

--Bob Dylan, Ballad of a Thin Man

HE does not. The straight middle-class American breadwinner, secure and affluent beyond the dreams of his grandparents or most of his contemporaries elsewhere in the world, Mr. Jones of Dylan's mocking lyric, finds himself in a world more surreal than a moonscape. He looks behind, and realizes that his children are not following. At a frightening distance, in their own arcane pastures of the mind, the young strip and ululate and make love to the accompaniment of manic cacophonies. Even in the Joneses' own backyard, thrusting up between the roses and the hollyhocks, a sharp eye may spot a weed growing--the telltale spikes of Cannabis saliva. Otherwise known as Indian hemp, a hardy botanic cousin to the fig, the hop and the nettle, it provides the marijuana that is troubling and changing a culture.

It used to be that "better living through chemistry" was just another advertising slogan; now it is a sly joke to the young and a grievous worry to their parents. In their quest for sensory experience, an alarming number of kids are swallowing its message whole. Marijuana ("pot," "grass," "boo," "tea," "mary jane," "broccoli," "weed") is their favorite preparation; in lesser numbers, they are smoking hashish ("hash"), taking mescaline, peyote, psilocybin, LSD ("acid"), using barbiturates and sedatives ("goofers," "downers," "red devils," "red birds," "pheenies," "green dragons," "yellow jackets," "tooies"), swallowing or injecting amphetamine stimulants ("crystal," "crank," "meth," "bennies," "dexies," "Christmas trees," "speed"). The prices of their mind excursions flutuate almost daily with the black market where kids must make their purchases. Depending on location, a dose of LSD or enough Methedrine for one injection costs around $3, while one Dexedrine pill can be bought for only 100. The marijuana contained in one "joint" or cigarette is worth around 750.

These are the pop drugs--the drugs widely taken by middle-class young people, most of whom are white. Their use is growing; marijuana smoking, in particular, is increasing. (Heroin use, by contrast, remains comparatively static.) "For the first time," says California Psychopharmacologist Dr. Leo Hollister, "pot is entrenched in our society, with untold millions using the drug. We have passed the point of no return."

There are vast differences in the effects of pop drugs. New research makes it clear that marijuana is "softer" and less perilous than the others, although for some people it does hold genuine psychological dangers. Pop drugs have provoked a defiance of the law unprecedented since Prohibition. The drug scene has stirred intense debate among scientists, doctors and politicians on how to deal with the problem. Drugs have become so painful an issue between parents and their children that when Mr. and Mrs. Jones discover that a child of theirs is turned-on or freaked-out, they may find themselves, dazed and uncomprehending, turning him over to the police. Pop drugs hardly portend anything as drastic as a new and debauched American spirit, as some alarmists believe. But drug use does reflect some little-recognized shifts in adult American values as well as the persistent unwillingness of youth to accept the straight world. The mounting research on drugs permits some new perspectives on their use and abuse; still, the pop-drug scene is, if anything, more than ever clouded by fear, dismay and mistrust.

Penalties and Harvests

The majority of users are experimenters, who take a drug several times and quit. Even if the users who are heavily dependent on these drugs (perhaps somewhat less than 2,000,000) are combined with addicts (about 100,000), the sum is smaller than the estimated national total of 6,000,000 alcoholics. Some experts even maintain that the "drug problem" has become the "drug-problem problem"--one more distorted priority diverting attention from real national needs.

The issues were aired last week as the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency began hearings to consider new legislation on drugs. The Nixon Administration's bill would permit authorized policemen to break in unannounced on suspected violators so that they could not destroy potential evidence. This is the "no-knock" tactic that some lawmen say is most likely to be employed against drug users. The bill would also restore the tough Federal penalties for simple possession of marijuana recently ruled invalid on technical grounds by the Supreme Court. The bill has drawn sharp opposition from experts who believe that marijuana is a considerably less dangerous drug than speed, LSD or heroin, and should be recognized as such. The bill contains only slim provisions for drug research and education and none at all for rehabilitation of addicts. Meanwhile the Administration launched "Operation Intercept" (see box, p. 70), described by officials as the largest search-and-seizure operation ever conducted by civil authorities in peacetime, in an attempt to stem the flow of drugs from Mexico.

Marijuana and other pop drugs come from many other sources, not the least the U.S. itself. U.S. Cannabis--if not as choice as the Mexican variety--grows wild throughout the Midwest. In Nebraska alone last week, an estimated 115,000 acres of it were nearly ready for harvesting--by any would-be pot-gatherers who could sneak by the police. Yet despite the plenitude of "Tennessee blue" and "Bethesda gold," rising demand for pot in the U.S. has recently been a major factor in producing a marijuana famine in many U.S. cities. Many authorities say that the dearth of pot is prompting users to take up harder drugs like amphetamines or even heroin.

A recent Administration task force "conservatively" estimated that at least 5,000,000 Americans have used marijuana at least once. Dr. Stanley Yolles, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, puts the total far higher: at least 12 million, and perhaps even 20 million. Pot is, of course, most widely used by the young. Yolles estimates that 25% to 40% of all students have at least tried it; on many college campuses, particularly on the East and West coasts and near large cities, the figure is 50%.

Last month's Woodstock music festival, where some 90% of the 400,000 participants openly smoked marijuana, brought the youthful drug culture to a new apogee. Its signature is everywhere. Rock musicians use drugs frequently and openly, and their compositions are riddled with references to drugs, from the Beatles' "I get high with a little help from my friends" to the Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit ("Remember what the dormouse said: Feed your head"). The culture has its own in-group argot: "bummers" (bad trips) and "straights" (everyone else), "heat" (the police) and "narks" (narcotics agents), and being "spaced out" (in a drug daze).

A surprising number of straight students are turning on too. The children of U.S. Senators George McGovern and Alan Cranston have been arrested on marijuana charges, as have the sons of California Assemblyman Jesse Unruh and Actor Darren McGavin. One of Vice President Spiro Agnew's daughters was suspended from Washington's exclusive National Cathedral School for three days last spring after an investigation was held to determine if she had been smoking pot. University of Indiana Sociologist Alfred R. Lindesmith, who has spent nearly 35 years studying drug use, contends with a measure of grim humor: "If a kid goes to college these days and never develops an interest in marijuana, he's got a problem and you should worry. He may be a loner or not accepted by his peers."

The age of innocence is moving lower, into junior high schools and occasional grade schools, where youngsters seeking ersatz maturity even gulp codeine-laden cough medicine. (Glue sniffing is expected to decline as word gets out that the largest maker of model-airplane glue is adding sickening mustard fumes to its product's aroma.) Washington's District of Columbia Addiction Center has uncovered pot users as young as eight years old.

Growing numbers of adults are taking up the habit. Many veterans return from Viet Nam with a taste for grass; some military and civilian observers estimate that marijuana is smoked by as many as half the men below the rank of captain. Although many adults who "blow" pot are sadly overeager to stay young, many others are as unselfconscious as the banker in Minneapolis' rich suburb of Wayzata who regularly lights up a joint with his after-dinner brandy and the 30-year-old Manhattan commercial artist who says that "at the parties I go to, whether or not you smoke marijuana is no bigger a question than whether or not you'll take a piece of cheese."

The Vulnerable Years

As with any social habit, all kinds of people use drugs for all kinds of reasons. One obvious age-old drive is the simple impulse to feel good. Like the neolithic men who got high on fermented berries and the Assyrians who sucked opium lozenges, explains Dr. Sidney Cohen of NIMH, a noted drug researcher, today's drug takers "are bored, in pain, frustrated, unable to enjoy, or alienated, and some plant or substance carries with it the promise of oblivion, surcease, quietude, togetherness, or euphoria." Says one Chicago college student who smokes marijuana regularly: "You take it when friends get together or when you're going to see Yellow Submarine. It's not to solve problems, just to giggle."

The old idea of easy euphoria has been underscored as the variety and use of legitimate pills have proliferated. One-quarter to one-third of all the medical prescriptions now written in the U.S. is tor a mood-altering pep pill or tranquilizer; newspaper, magazine and television ads hammer away at the theme that relief is just a swallow away for any condition, from nervous tension to drowsiness. As Sociologists William Simon and John H. Gagnon write: "Modern medicine has made drugs highly legitimate, something to be taken casually and not only during moments of acute and certified stress. Our children, far from being in revolt against an older generation, may in fact be acknowledging how influential a model that older generation was."

Not all those who take "chemical vacations," in Aldous Huxley's phrase, are simply in search of a high. Pop drugs are inextricably mixed with the youth culture and its distaste for a supertechnology that seems remote, false and uncaring. The two-martini lunch and the cocktail party have become potent symbols of frantic, achievement-oriented Western culture; for the young drug taker, the belligerent or sloppy drunk personifies the older generation's "hypocrisy" and lack of control. The darker side of pop drugs is the fact that some users have serious emotional problems. Dr. Phyllis Kempner, a clinical psychologist who works with drug abusers of many kinds in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, says that many of the kids who are most deeply into mind-changing chemicals "have been troubled long before taking drugs. They have taken drugs to help them cope with these difficulties." Particularly during the vulnerable years of adolescence, drugs can be a way of evading the painful process of growing up.

Parents often are nonplussed. "My mother asked me to tell her if I smoked marijuana," says one high school girl in suburban Smithtown, N.Y. "When I said yes, all she said was 'I knew it. I knew it.' Then she started crying." Parents have many good reasons for questioning youth's resort to drugs. They know that under present federal and most state laws possession of drugs is a felony, and conviction can bar a person from many occupations for life. Drugs challenge the whole structure of adult values. In addition, most Americans' knowledge of drugs has been clouded by a widely promulgated series of bromides. When the topic comes up, most parents envisage the dope pusher standing outside the high school or the Mafioso prowling the streets in sunglasses. Marijuana, most adults believe, identically affects everyone who uses it and inevitably leads to the slow death of heroin addiction. A joint today, they think, means a junkie tomorrow.

The Federal Bureau of Narcotics dispensed these ideas for more than two decades until it was merged into a new division of the Justice Department last year. Accumulating research had exploded such notions, but officials kept repeating them in an ineffectual effort to scare kids away from drugs. Actually, most young neophytes are surrounded not by pushers but by other kids who exert the normal adolescent pressure to conform.

Hierarchy of Danger

The likelihood that any drug will lead to perdition varies widely, the researchers point out; with every mood-changing drug known to man, there is a proportion of people who can use it without suffering harmful side effects or a habit, and of those who cannot. Just as some drinkers become convivial or aggressive and others morose and withdrawn, drug users get as much of their kick from their surroundings and the set of their own psyches as from the chemicals they use. The danger of heavy dependence, the crucial problem with most pop drugs, also depends largely on the personality of the user.

A profile of the "dependency-prone" individual has emerged from recent work with alcoholics as well as pop-drug abusers. He is likely to be narcissistically preoccupied with himself, and be mistrustful of most people. Many heavy drug users, says Anthony F. Philip, a psychologist who heads the Columbia College student-counseling service, are driven by an "intolerable, chronic, low-grade depression," which includes "a sense that somehow they have been cheated by life." Psychologists cannot predict which social drinkers will become alcoholics, and they have no sure litmus test for spotting potential drug abusers either. They warn, however, that the young should be particularly worried if they find themselves popping drugs to overcome an emotional upset or calm their worries about the draft, bad grades or their careers.

In terms of risk, mind-bending drugs can be ranked in an informal hierarchy. The list:

HEROIN, also known as "scag" or "smack," is still the most hazardous. A true narcotic, relieving pain as well as producing sleep, it is the strongest of the opiates. These also include morphine and codeine, which doctors very often prescribe as painkillers in carefully measured doses. Heroin users, who administer their own doses, seek the white powder because it makes them feel physically warm and peaceful and raises their self-esteem and confidence. Large doses can sufficiently slow bodily functions to cause death; more commonly, heroin users develop abscessed veins and hepatitis from dirty needles, are undernourished and prone to infections. Users occasionally have a fatal reaction even before the needle leaves their arm. A person on any of the opiates develops the familiar symptoms of physical dependency: a tolerance that demands constantly increasing doses to maintain the high, and withdrawal symptoms of sweating, cramps and even occasional convulsions when the drug wears off. Although doctors report rare cases of the occasional user who does not develop a heroin habit, nearly 100% of all people who try it on any regular basis become hooked.

BARBITURATES are used by doctors as sleeping pills and tranquilizers. They are taken by kids only out of naivete or in the absence of anything better, since their high is minimal: after an initial flash of relaxation, in which tensions seem to disappear, they produce physical and mental lassitude and can cause death. Barbiturates also create heavy physical dependency.

SPEED, as the hippies warn, kills. Users feel that amphetamines sharpen their physical reactions and increase confidence. In small doses for short periods, these stimulants are considered safe and are legitimately used to treat depression and curb appetite. To get high, speedsters give themselves six to 200 times the daily medical dosage usually prescribed for dieters. In rare cases--particularly when Methedrine is used--the jolt can raise blood pressure enough to cause immediate death; chronic use can lead to a psychosis that many doctors feel is more similar to schizophrenia than any of the psychotic symptoms brought on by other dangerous drugs. While a person is "up" on speed, his body runs down, making him easy prey to disease. Although amphetamines generally are not considered physically addictive, when a user comes down ("crashes") he is so tired and depressed that he is tempted to start again. His body builds up a tolerance.

LSD is 4,000 times as strong by weight as mescaline and psilocybin, the related substances found in nature. It gives trippers intense hallucinations. Waves of color and vibrations sweep through the head; reality dissolves. Imagining that they are birds, some users have plunged to death or serious injury while attempting to fly. Known medically as hallucinogenics or psychotogenics, these drugs are still subject to intense research. They seldom kill outright, and do not create the symptoms of physical dependency. Although earlier researchers found that they can be linked to permanent breaks in animal and human chromosomes, more recent studies have been unable to replicate these findings, and the long-term effects on genes are still unknown. Yet even in apparently stable personalities, the massive doses taken by most kids can bring to the surface long-buried psychoses that will remain as mental illness after the drug wears off.

MARIJUANA is also usually classed as hallucinogenic; its effects range from reddened eyes and relaxation to changed perception. It is not an aphrodisiac, but it can lower inhibitions and intensify sexual pleasure. It seems to make many users temporarily passive, in contrast to alcohol, which frequently releases aggression. "Everyone knows about barroom brawls," says Oakland, California Psychiatrist and Drug Researcher Tod Mikuriya, "but have you ever heard of a pot-room brawl?" Of course, it can be argued that there are worse things than barroom brawls.

Most researchers now classify the dangers of marijuana as on a par with those of alcohol. However, so far there is no scientific evidence on whether long-term use can produce effects comparable to alcohol's cirrhosis or tobacco's cancer and emphysema. Marijuana's active ingredients--chemicals known as tetrahydrocannabinols (THC)--can cause LSD-type psychotic hallucinations when administered in pure form. (Such a reaction can happen considerably more easily with hashish, a concentration of dried Cannabis resins some six times as powerful as marijuana.) Pot affects the sense of time, but not motor and perceptual skills. It is not a narcotic; unlike alcohol in heavy doses, it does not produce physical dependency. Users can, however, become psychologically dependent on it, spending most of their time turned on and talking about it.

Of the students who use marijuana, NIMH Director Yolles estimates that 65% quit after experimenting one to ten times; 25% become social users. Only around 10% become habitual users --a far cry from the level projected by alarmists, but still a serious number. Those in the last category, many of them subject to the depression and discouragement of slum life, often go on to heroin. In a scientific age, the scarcity of research knowledge about pot is appalling; nonetheless it is clearly irresponsible to say, as some extreme defenders do, that pot is no more harmful than cherry pie.

Present drug laws are inequitable as well as widely unenforceable. Most statutes do not distinguish hard narcotics from marijuana, or the pusher from the user. Arrests for marijuana law violations last year totaled 80,000; they increased tenfold between 1963 and 1968. Yet, for all the massive expenditures of police time and money, pot smoking is so widespread that there are roughly 25 times as many users as there are places to hold them in all the nation's prisons. The chances of being jailed for using pot are probably less than one in 1,000, NIMH's Dr. Cohen estimates; only about 1% of those arrested on marijuana charges are brought to trial and convicted.

In cases where a conviction is obtained, justice frequently is dispensed with more spleen then equity. Last February, for example, police in Danville, Virginia, rooted from a bus station one Frank Lavarre, a 19-year-old who had been suspended from the University of Virginia because of bad grades. He was carrying 61 pounds of marijuana to friends in Atlanta. In court, the case was tried by Judge Archibald Aiken, four times Frank's age and a rigid traditionalist who loathes pot smokers and longhairs. Although Frank had never been in trouble with the law before and pleaded guilty, the judge gave him 25 years (five suspended) in the state pen and a $500 fine. Frank has been in Danville jail, waiting for his appeal to be processed, for the past seven months.

Social scientists note that punishment, to deter, must be immediate and impartial. During Prohibition, when enforcement of the Volstead Act was roughly comparable to that of the present drug laws, the nation's per-capita consumption of liquor actually increased 10%. The blunderbuss approach to marijuana creates widespread disrespect for all law among young people; perhaps worst of all, it makes it difficult for young people to believe adults' warnings about other drugs, and discourages the young who need medical help and advice from seeking it.

To loosen the legal straitjacket, eight states recently have reduced the penalty for possessing marijuana from a felony to a misdemeanor, or given their judges the discretion of reducing it. Their action is in line with the recommendations of every national commission that has studied the subject since a White House conference on drug abuse in 1962--and directly opposite to the tack that the Nixon Administration is taking.

Legalize Pot?

The sentencing proposals in the Administration's bill overrode the milder recommendations that had been agreed on by many officials in the departments of Justice and Health, Education and Welfare. The measure raises penalties for LSD, and keeps marijuana in the same classification as hard narcotics. The minimum jail sentence for a first offense would be two years. The bill's only concession permits a judge to release on probation first offenders who are found guilty and, if they behave properly, to dismiss them with a clean criminal record.

Nixon's proposed law doubtless reflects his intuition that most of the country still considers marijuana a strict law-and-order issue that can be dealt with by police and punishment. "Most parents won't defend a drug user--until he's their son," says Stanford University Psychologist Jean Paul Smith. However, the experts have become increasingly concerned over excessive drug penalties. Dr. Roger Egeberg, the Nixon-appointed Assistant Secretary of HEW for Health and Scientific Affairs, says that the laws governing marijuana "are completely out of proportion" to the dangers of the drug. Declared the Mental Health Institute's Dr. Yolles in his testimony last week: "I know of no clearer instance in which the punishment for an infraction of the law is more harmful than the crime."

Would the ideal solution be to legalize pot? No, say most authorities. Long-term use of marijuana may hold yet unknown health hazards, and might conceivably induce in America the passive, fatalistic outlook common in many Asian and Middle Eastern nations, where marijuana-like preparations are traditional and ubiquitous. (Some experts disagree, suspecting that the problems of Eastern drug-using societies are more a result of religious attitudes and chronic malnutrition than a product of chemistry.) The opponents of legalization argue that even if marijuana is no more dangerous than alcohol, one chemical escape valve is enough for any society. As Beverly Hills Judge Leonard Wolf puts it: "It would not be a particularly healthy situation to unleash upon the public a second intoxicant that would rival alcohol. Alcohol is tremendously dangerous to society, but it has become part of our culture. Is that any reason to invite in a second, equally dangerous substance?"

However, the time for a choice is already past, argues a growing band of responsible advocates of legalization, among them Psychiatrist Mikuriya and Stanford Law Professor John Kaplan. They do not argue that marijuana is harmless, and they are seriously concerned that the open sale of pot would almost certainly increase its use and abuse, producing greater numbers of "pot lushes" and even pot skid rows. They defend ultimate legalization only because they believe that its probable costs to society are outweighed by the disadvantages of continued prohibition. They point out that as long as marijuana is forbidden it will continue to have the appeal of the illicit.

Even the proponents of legalization favor tight regulation of marijuana: no sales to children under 18, no advertising, laws against driving under its influence, federal quality controls, severe penalties for illegal pushing, and excise taxes to further discourage impecunious youthful purchasers. Such a policy would roughly parallel the nation's present attitude toward alcohol and tobacco, and one tobacco company executive confides: "A cigarette concern would have to be pretty stupid if it weren't looking into marijuana."

Unfortunately, neither side in the legalization dispute can produce conclusive arguments, for although much has been learned about marijuana in recent years much more is still unknown. Years of exaggerated and oversimplified speculation have created a vicious circle that still hampers the growth of real knowledge. Researchers Norman Zin-berg and Andrew Weil, who last year did the first truly scientific study of marijuana's effect on the human organism, maintain: "Administrators of scientific and government institutions feel marijuana is dangerous. Because it is dangerous, they are reluctant to allow work to be done on it. Because no work is done, people think of it as dangerous." Six months ago NIMH began growing its own marijuana for researchers on 23 acres of land owned by the University of Mississippi. The Institute is currently funding around 50 marijuana research projects, but only a few of them involve experimentation with human beings. Social Psychiatrist Joel Hochman of the U.C.L.A. Neuropsychiatric Institute goes so far as to charge that "the Government is giving legitimate researchers such a hassle because they are afraid our work will show no serious side effects, and if there are no serious side effects then there is no rationale for keeping the use of marijuana illegal."

Obviously the ultimate decision on pot is a long way off. Meanwhile there is a growing consensus that mere law enforcement is wholly inadequate to the problems of drug abuse. Medical and psychological treatment needs to be improved and greatly expanded. The nation must also find new paths to prevention, cultivate social patterns that will encourage wise use of drugs--and eventually forestall the development of the drug-dependent personality.

Education is one good way to start. Mindful that it is often the kids in uninformed, isolated communities who plunge most heedlessly into amphetamines and barbiturates, the National Institute of Mental Health this spring began a levelheaded information campaign in the mass media. One of its ads pictures a litter of cocktail glasses, pill bottles and an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts, and asks parents: "Ever wonder why your kid doesn't take you seriously when you lecture him about drugs?" A poster about drugs in psychedelic colors asks kids: "Will they turn you on--Or will they turn on you?"

The Drugless Turn-On?

Such efforts cannot work without the presence of deeper social values, whether they concern smoking, liquor or drugs. To help schools encourage such values, new drug curriculums are slowly replacing the venerable and largely ineffective assembly scare lecture. The programs that seem to have helped most are seminars where kids and their parents can talk out the enticements and dangers of drug use--often with the blunt help of ex-addicts barely older than the kids in school. The meetings expose underlying tensions very rapidly. Wayne Wilson, a psychologist who has helped former addicts set up education programs in several California communities, reported to a recent conference on drug abuse held at Rutgers University: "When we first moved into the schools, we soon found out that it didn't make any difference whether the kids were using drugs or not. After a moment, they were talking about all the problems of life."

Indeed, essential to any intelligent public approach to drugs is the realization that they are not an isolated phenomenon but a product of a complex and often frustrating society. Adults must get used to the fact that their world has witnessed the growth of a separate youth culture, or "counterculture." For many of the kids in it, pot is a part of growing up, and the great majority have no intention of freaking out for good. The young need myriad new opportunities to come to terms with life. In the long run, adults can do most to allay youth's disaffection by the admittedly arduous process of mending the social and political dislocations of the times: uncertain wars, a capricious draft system, inequitable distribution of opportunity and income, institutions too immured against necessary change. The goal probably should not be to eliminate drugs entirely, which is impossible, but to control them and diminish their allure by offering the only valid alternative--a life of challenge and fulfillment. That, as kids who have reached a mature understanding of drugs already know, can also be a turn-on, and a better one.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.