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Most pot parties are not really so wild. "You don't go around ripping off your clothes or anything." one coed says. Typically, one recent evening in a darkened Cambridge apartment near Harvard, two girls and two boys lounged around a candle, smoked four joints (each three inches long and less than a quarter-inch thick) in 21 hours. At first they chattered animatedly about what records to play: Charlie Parker won out over a Bach B Minor Mass, and the sound track from Black Orpheus over Charlie Mingus. Then the smokers lapsed into sporadic metaphors and banalities. They pepped up briefly at the delight of peering into a multicolored kaleidoscope, ended by staring solemnly and in silence at the candle, one another and into space.
Illegal Togetherness, Part of pot's attraction is "doing something illegal together," says one teenager. Another part, obviously, is the hallucinatory effect: "You think a lot of trivial thoughts —millions of little tiny thoughts go racing through your head." One girl, trying to capture such fantasies while high, wrote: "Notes from hemp head. Oh dear, the silent nothing around is very silent and very nothing. Outside seems terribly distant. I hear people talking and they are funny—because I am listening with illegal ears."
To most psychiatrists, the increase in marijuana smoking represents not so much a search for new thrills as the traditional, exhibitionistic rebellion of youngsters against adult authority. Parents who are quite agreeable to students' drinking almost always boggle at drugs. "There is not much that students can do that is defiant," says a Boston psychiatrist. "They think with some degree of glee about what their parents would think if they knew they were smoking marijuana." These students also are "looking for changes in personality," and "they lack communication and feel isolated—when they smoke there is a certain togetherness."
The Danger: Habituation. How perilous is pot? Medical authorities agree that it is not biochemically addictive, that it does not induce the physiological craving or withdrawal symptoms of such drugs as heroin or cocaine. It affects the user's judgment, and if used daily, will dull a student's initiative and drive, but on the whole, "marijuana is probably less dangerous than alcohol," insists Rand Corp.'s drug expert William McGlothlin. "The dangers have been grossly overrated and the legal penalties are far too severe."