Essay: Feeling Low over Old Highs

• Share

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.