The Family: Pot and Parents

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On the Hot Line. There is obviously a pressing need for franker conversation between parents and children on the subject of drugs, a fact that communities are only now beginning to face. In Florida's Broward County, Dr. David J. Lehman persuaded the school board last winter to adopt a six-hour "TeenAge Alert" course on drugs as part of the basic curriculum from the ninth grade up. The board also sponsors a companion "Parental Alert" course one night a week. Jacksonville, Sarasota and West Palm Beach have adopted similar programs, which will commence when school starts again next month. In Texas, the Houston Bar Association and the Harris County Medical Society have initiated a program patterned after the one in Broward County; last spring, two-man teams (one lawyer, one doctor) gave drug lectures at 82 Houston secondary schools. Denver District Attorney James D. Mc-Kevitt has been storming Colorado lecturing to teen-agers and, equally important, their parents. "I don't preach," he says. "You can't overdramatize. You've got to draw them out."

In California, the citizens of Palos Verdes have hired a full-time narcotics-education official (salary: $16,000) and set up a 24-hour-a-day "hot line," which troubled parents or children can use to call one of four churches for assis tance. Depending on the seriousness of the case, the caller is referred to a group-therapy session, a minister or a psychiatrist; more than a dozen doctors, lawyers and ministers are contributing their time.

Nothing, it seems, opens the generation gap wider than drugs. Says Palos Verdes' Rev. Mel Knight: "The kids know more about drugs than their parents, and the kids know that they know more. That makes it tough for a parent to have much influence." Yet, while it is certainly true that parents need to develop more knowledge and empathy, it is also true that their children may not know quite as much as they think they do. The final verdict on the safety or peril of pot is yet to be rendered, but youth should at least be willing to recognize that there are definite dangers in the use of Methedrine and LSD.

Even the youngest have heard the words, and from that point it is not much of a jump to trial and error. Consider what happened when Lieut. Joseph Wysocki, of the Redondo Beach, Calif., police went to lecture kindergarten tots on crossing the street safely. "Do you know why I'm here?" he cooed to the little angels. A tiny blonde girl raised her hand. "I know. You're going to tell us about DSL." She got the letters backward, but give her time.