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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