Behavior: Pop Drugs: The High as a Way of Life

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marijuana is dangerous. Because it is dangerous, they are reluctant to allow work to be done on it. Because no work is done, people think of it as dangerous." Six months ago NIMH began growing its own marijuana for researchers on 23 acres of land owned by the University of Mississippi. The Institute is currently funding around 50 marijuana research projects, but only a few of them involve experimentation with human beings. Social Psychiatrist Joel Hochman of the U.C.L.A. Neuropsychiatric Institute goes so far as to charge that "the Government is giving legitimate researchers such a hassle because they are afraid our work will show no serious side effects, and if there are no serious side effects then there is no rationale for keeping the use of marijuana illegal."

Obviously the ultimate decision on pot is a long way off. Meanwhile there is a growing consensus that mere law enforcement is wholly inadequate to the problems of drug abuse. Medical and psychological treatment needs to be improved and greatly expanded. The nation must also find new paths to prevention, cultivate social patterns that will encourage wise use of drugs—and eventually forestall the development of the drug-dependent personality.

Education is one good way to start. Mindful that it is often the kids in uninformed, isolated communities who plunge most heedlessly into amphetamines and barbiturates, the National Institute of Mental Health this spring began a levelheaded information campaign in the mass media. One of its ads pictures a litter of cocktail glasses, pill bottles and an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts, and asks parents: "Ever wonder why your kid doesn't take you seriously when you lecture him about drugs?" A poster about drugs in psychedelic colors asks kids: "Will they turn you on—Or will they turn on you?"

The Drugless Turn-On?

Such efforts cannot work without the presence of deeper social values, whether they concern smoking, liquor or drugs. To help schools encourage such values, new drug curriculums are slowly replacing the venerable and largely ineffective assembly scare lecture. The programs that seem to have helped most are seminars where kids and their parents can talk out the enticements and dangers of drug use—often with the blunt help of ex-addicts barely older than the kids in school. The meetings expose underlying tensions very rapidly. Wayne Wilson, a psychologist who has helped former addicts set up education programs in several California communities, reported to a recent conference on drug abuse held at Rutgers University: "When we first moved into the schools, we soon found out that it didn't make any difference whether the kids were using drugs or not. After a moment, they were talking about all the problems of life."

Indeed, essential to any intelligent public approach to drugs is the realization that they are not an isolated phenomenon but a product of a complex and often frustrating society. Adults must get used to the fact that their world has witnessed the growth of a separate youth culture, or "counterculture." For many of the kids in it, pot is a part of growing up, and the great majority have no intention of freaking out for good. The young need myriad new opportunities to come to terms with life. In the long run, adults can do most to allay