TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/091889/09188900.000

Text File | 1991-05-10 | 6KB | 107 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.