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In the age of the youth rebellion, the fact that parents were shocked by drugs was all the more reason for children to take them. Hollywood and Broadway, ever sensitive to changing mores, romanticized the drug culture with pot-smoking antiheroes in Easy Rider (1969) and let-it-all-hang-out hippies in Hair (1968). "In the 1960s the baby boomers got fooled into thinking, just like the people in the 1890s, that you could use drugs recreationally and not get addicted to them," says the National Cocaine Hotline's Washton. "Marijuana had a meaning beyond just getting high. It was the source of shared identity among people who had a common point of view, notably that their parents were stupid, that Government was immoral, and that the war in Viet Nam was wrong."
Slowly the dark side emerged. San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, the communal temple of flower power, became a seedy slum of strung-out addicts. Heroin sent urban crime soaring as addicts stole to sustain their habits. For many college students, LSD became a bad trip.
Even so, illicit drug use had become so deeply entrenched that it continued to permeate all levels of society, particularly the youth culture. While still illegal, drug use became socially acceptable in many quarters. Pot was smoked as openly as tobacco in some city parks and on street corners, while police looked the other way. Newly popular man-made chemicals like phencyclidine, better known as angel dust or PCP, drove users into violent frenzies, making the myth of wild-eyed drug fiends, which had been scoffed at by '60s college students, a horrifying reality.
The mid-'70s marked the second coming of cocaine. It was the perfect drug for the Me generation. "The new morality of young America is success, the high- performance ethic," says University of Massachusetts Professor Ralph Whitehead. "Pot bred passivity. On alcohol you can't perform well. You smell. People can tell when you've been drinking. But cocaine fits the new value system. It feeds it and confounds it. Young adults walk a tight line between high performance and self-indulgence, and cocaine puts the two together."
In show business and in chic society, dinner guests were offered crisp white lines of cocaine along with their demitasse. Cute silver spoons began to adorn the jewelry of hip, rich women. Coke became a workplace pick-me-up, like coffee, only perkier. Says Dr. Wesley Westman, chief of the alcohol- and drug- dependency center at the Veterans Administration hospital in Miami: "Cocaine is the drug of choice by people who are into the American dream -- I love my job, I am successful, except that they don't and they're not."
The U.S. may finally be trying to kick its habit, but other countries around the world are just getting hooked. Like blue jeans and rock 'n' roll, America's drug culture has been exported to European and Asian youth. Although statistics are hard to come by, drug use seems to be expanding worldwide, especially in the countries that export drugs to the U.S.
When the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the overthrow of the Shah of Iran drove the Asian-crescent drug trade through Pakistan, the number of heroin addicts there went from virtually nil in 1980 to some 650,000 abusers today. (The U.S.S.R. is not unscathed by the global epidemic; Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan are said to trade their weapons for opium and hashish.)