(4 of 10)
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