COED INDICTED: MARIJUANA BY
MAIL ORDER AT CORNELL, said a headline in the New York Herald Tribune last week. Behind such sensational stories lies a somewhat less sensational situation. In this case, Cornell Coed Susan Heiberger, 21, was accused of buying a $5 bag of marijuana from Philip Cook, 25, who had quit Cornell in January, and of mailing some of the stuff on to a hometown friend at Connecticut College. A grand jury charged Miss Heiberger and Cook with selling marijuana, a felony, but they were allowed to plead guilty to misdemeanor charges.
Smoking marijuana—also called pot, tea, grass, stuff, boo, hemp and Mary Jane—seems to be this year's way among students of preserving the perennial illusion that the younger generation is going to hell. Statistics on the problem are nonexistent, and its extent is tough to gauge. School officials normally ignore it or hush it up; students with first-hand knowledge are prone to boastful exaggeration; arrests are relatively rare.
Boston police and New York State's Bureau of Narcotics Control are concerned: both held seminars on narcotics control for the benefit of college administrators. The New York bureau has collected evidence of marijuana use at 15 upstate New York campuses. Dr. Gerald L. Klerman of the Harvard Medical School staff estimates that 10% of the students at such large urban universities as Harvard, Stanford and California's Berkeley campus are "chronic users." As many as a third of the undergraduates at Yale and Columbia, according to an informed estimate, have at least tried the drug. And Cornell's President James A. Perkins is worried enough to have brought the issue out into the open.
Turned On for Exams. Savvy students seem to have little trouble cultivating a "connection" to secure marijuana—most often in the form of a $5 "nickel box" (matchbox size)—in New York City, Harvard Square, California's Sausalito and elsewhere. Up to 40 "joints" (cigarettes) can be fashioned from a box, making marijuana cheaper per kick than alcohol.
Some students smoke several mornings a week to "turn on" before class or before a tough examination. "I feel I'm more relaxed in school tests if I'm high," explains a Redwood, Calif., high school senior. "I feel like I'm going real slow, but I'm going at my normal speed, and all pressure seems off." But the common way of using marijuana is the spur-of-the-moment party in a college student's apartment, a teen-ager's home when parents are away, or a car at a drive-in movie. "The whole car fills up with smoke, like a big tank full of it-it's wild," reports an 18-year-old coed in California's Marin County.