The Family: Pot and Parents

THE FAMILY

As a child, Burt was thin, withdrawn and bookish. His father took the family all over the world—Hawaii, Brazil, France, Japan—as he climbed the ladder of a large chemical company. Three years ago, when Burt was 15, the family moved to Palos Verdes, an affluent suburb south of Los Angeles. Almost overnight the youngster was transformed. He taught himself to surf, put on 50 Ibs. of muscle and a deep tan, was elected to the student council and began dating the prettiest girls. Though his grades slipped to the low B range, his parents were delighted.

Eight months ago, Burt's parents stumbled on four "bricks" (each a compressed kilo) of marijuana hidden in his bedroom closet. "What the hell is this?" demanded Burt's father. "Stuff, of course," answered Burt, nonchalantly adding that he had been taking pot ever since he arrived in California.

Aghast, his father wangled a job transfer to Michigan and told Burt that his next school would be an Eastern board ing school. Burt laughed in his father's face and disappeared for three weeks. When he returned, it was to announce his enlistment in the Marines. The fam ily now lives in Michigan. Burt is a pfc. in Viet Nam.

Attractive Models. If Burt does not quite seem like the boy next door, look again. He is a member of a new and rapidly growing group of drug users that the Rev. Melvin L. Knight Jr. calls "Billy-the-Kid drug heroes." Knight, who is pastor of St. Peter's-by-the-Sea Presbyterian Church in Palos Verdes, observes: "These guys seem to be real straight arrows. They're intelligent, good-looking. Good at sports, popular around school. They have all the characteristics of the old-style campus hero. But they also take and perhaps push drugs: marijuana, pills of all sorts." For these youngsters, adds Knight, marijuana is not so much an instrument of defiance or a means of escape as it is "an integral part of a complicated, energetic life," which is in many ways an all-too-attractive model for the younger kids.

Though the National Institute of Mental Health's most recent (1967) study reported that only 10% of the nation's high school students had smoked marijuana, observers closer to the scene in many communities put the figure far higher. According to a Los Angeles Times survey of Palos Verdes last week, high schools there "now have a proportion of drug-experienced students which police estimate at 50% and counselors put at 75%. An estimated third of the total are habitual users." Even more astonishing, the Times found, drug use has penetrated down to the sixth grade and does not always stop with pot: a few 13-year-olds are shooting the far more dangerous "speed" (Meth-edrine). Often, with eerie sophistication they insert the hypodermic into the underside of their tongues to conceal the needle tracks.