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Says New York's Dr. Donald Louria: "We are seeing an era of multiple use of any and every kind of drug. And it is moving so fast that it is different this year from last year." The traditional barriers between much of society and the users of such hard drugs as heroin, cocaine and morphine are collapsing. "Heroin has become respectable," says Mrs. Harriet Benjamin, a worker at Synanon in Santa Monica, Calif. "The image of the dirty old man in the schoolyard is dead." Ten years ago, middle-class high school kids looked down on heroin users; now it has shed the fear and the lower-class taint. Heroin users are no longer an exclusive club. Heroin is part of the larger drug scene.
Part of the problem is that to the young, the adult world sets only a hypocritical example. Parents warn their children against pot, which most kids find harmless. Many of the young smoke marijuana and leave it at that, although Dr. Louria warns that "if a young person smokes marijuana on more than ten occasions, the chances are one in five that he will go on to more dangerous drugs." As Larry Alan Bear, New York City's addiction services commissioner, sees it: "In some cases, the attitude toward the straight world is, 'Look, you kill yourselves with cigarettes and booze; let me use what I want to.' Other times, it's simply an 'up-yours' attitude."
In the ghetto, alienation from the rest of society is nothing new. The children of affluent middle-class America have just begun to turn to narcotics in frustration or perhaps boredom with the world. They may be taking the permissiveness in which they were raised too literally. Sociologists William Simon and John Gagnon suggest: "We have become, as a nation, a population of pill-takers. Both the actual miracle and the myth of modern medicine have made the use of drugs highly legitimate. Our children, in being casual about drugs, far from being in revolt against an older generation, may in fact be acknowledging how influential a model that generation was." Add to that the painful adjustments that every adolescent must endure—the physical and emotional challenges of puberty, the hazard-strewn search for self-discovery —and any drug can mean danger to all but the most stable. Like alcohol, marijuana may not be risky for a secure adult, but to an anxious teen-ager it offers a seductive release from the hard reality of growing up. His judgment is unformed, and he may all too readily go on to harder drugs.
A Flower at the Beginning
Rooting out illegal dealing in heroin poses vastly complex problems. The heroin market is enormously profitable, and drying up the sources of supply involves an incredible tangle of such fractious forces as foreign governments and the U.S.'s own Cosa Nostra.