TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/091889/09188900.000

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 6.2 KB | 118 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 104

Feeling Low over Old Highs


By Walter Shapiro


    For the most part, I stopped smoking marijuana in the
mid-1970s because I grew bored with ending too many social
evenings lying on somebody's living-room rug, staring at the
ceiling and saying, "Oh, wow!" This renunciation was not a
wrenching moral decision, but rather an aesthetic rite of
passage as my palate began to savor California Chardonnay with
the avidity I once reserved for Acapulco Gold. Yet as an aging
baby boomer, my attitudes remain emblematic of that high-times
generation that once freely used soft drugs and still feels more
nostalgic than repentant about the experience.

    This permissive mind-set colors my instinctive response to
current drug problems. The initial breathless media reports of
the crack epidemic aroused all my journalistic skepticism, and
I groused that the antidrug frenzy seemed like Reefer Madness
revisited. On those infrequent occasions when friends and
acquaintances still pass around a bootleg joint, my reaction
remains benign tolerance. Just a few weeks ago, when marijuana
made a furtive appearance at my wife's 20th high school reunion
in upstate New York, I viewed this throwback gesture as a
quaint affectation, almost as if the class of '69 had all shown
up in tie-dye T-shirts instead of business suits and cocktail
dresses.

    Many may scorn these confessions as evidence of immaturity,
unreliability and even moral laxity. But we are all the product
of our life experiences, and I, like so many of my peers,
cannot entirely abandon this Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
heritage. Normally I only share these slightly outre sentiments
with close friends. But such views have become a public issue
with drug czar William Bennett's attacks on my generation's
self-indulgence, coupled with George Bush's prime-time address
to the nation on drugs. For in identifying those responsible for
the cocaine crisis, the President pointedly included "everyone
who looks the other way." Am I really a fellow traveler in this
epidemic of addiction? Do my affectionate, albeit distant, ties
to 1960s-style permissiveness render me as culpable as Bennett
claims? Or is my comfortable, middle-class life so far removed
from inner-city crack houses and the Colombian drug cartel that
any allegation of causal nexus represents little more than
politically motivated hyperbole?

    The honest answer, which both surprises me and makes me
squirm, is that to some degree Bennett and Co. are right. My
generation, with its all too facile distinctions between soft
drugs (marijuana, mild hallucinogens) and hard drugs (heroin and
now crack), does share responsibility for creating an
environment that legitimized and even, until recently, lionized
the cocaine culture. This wink-and-a-nod acceptance, this
implicit endorsement of illicit thrills, has been a continuing
motif in movies, late-night television and rock music. My
personal life may rarely intersect with impoverished drug
addicts, but the entertainment media created in the image of
people like me easily transcend these barriers of class, race
and geography.

    And what should the Woodstock alumni association tell its
offspring? Conversations with friends, especially those raising
teenagers, suggest that adults with colorful pharmacological
histories face unique problems in following the President's
exhortation to "talk to your children about drugs." For such
parents, family-style drug education often comes down to
awkward choices like lying about their own past, feigning a
remorse that they do not feel, or piously ordering their
children to read lips rather than re-enact deeds. More subtle
messages can get lost in the adolescent fog. One 17-year-old I
know well seems to misinterpret his parents' preachments about
the particularly addictive nature of cocaine to mean, choose
prudently from the cornucopia of other drugs available at your
local high school. How much easier the burden must be for a
parent who can honestly instruct his children, "Don't tell me
about peer pressure. Remember, I got through the '60s without
drugs."

    Such self-righteousness is inappropriate for those of us
with a less sterling record of resisting temptation. Thus I
stand, a bit belatedly, to concede my guilt in contributing in
a small way to the drug crisis. Maybe the '60s were a mistake,
maybe I too frequently condoned the self-destructive behavior
of others, maybe I was obtuse in not seeing a linkage between
the marijuana of yesteryear and the crack of today. I hope that
this admission, which does not come easily, will animate my
behavior. But while I am willing to shoulder some of the blame
on behalf of my generation, I trust that the other equally
respectable co-conspirators in America's two-faced war on drugs
will acknowledge their own complicity.

    The list, alas, is long. Begin with public officials who
have exploited the issue for 20 years, advocating phony
feel-good nostrums like the current fad for drug testing in the
workplace, as if mid-level bureaucrats were society's prime
offenders. Joining the politicians in the dock are those
antidrug crusaders who have either squandered credibility with
exaggerated scare talk or strained credulity with prissy
pronouncements. The media are culpable as well, for
sensationalized coverage that has often served to glamourize the
menace they are decrying. Then there are the social-policy
conservatives who purport to see no connection between the
flagrant neglect of the economic problems of the underclass and
the current crack epidemic. And sad to say, well-intentioned
parents can also contribute to the hysteria by viewing drugs as
the sole cause of their children's problems, rather than as a
symptom of family-wide crisis.

    For drug use, as Bennett argues, is indeed a reflection of
the nation's values. And as long as American society continues
to place a higher premium on titillation than truth and on
callousness than compassion, the latest attack on drugs may
prove, like all the failed battle plans of the past, to be
mostly futile flag waving.