KIDS & POT

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When people are stoned on marijuana, they tend to focus on one thing at a time: the food, the music, the dog. Conversation deteriorates. More important, says Steve Sussman, a drug-abuse researcher and associate professor at U.S.C., "you don't learn how to cope with real life. You don't learn how to experience life in real terms, to feel bad normally. Let's say you smoked marijuana heavily from age 16 to 26, then stopped. The way you process life events emotionally after that may be more like a 16-year-old." Could it be that the famous reluctance of the baby boomer to imagine himself as an adult has something to do with the weed he smoked when young?

It is in the realm of emotional development that marijuana does its damage. In any case, it seems there has been a mistake. Pot is not the drug of youth but rather of old age, the threshold of death--a little buzz before Kevorkian. It is a dulling drug, certainly useful as a palliative for the elderly. The young don't need to have their pain dulled. They need to learn from it. Perhaps baby-boomer parents, as they grow old, should reserve the world's marijuana supply for themselves and for what will no doubt be the gaudy and self-important theatrics of their dying, and encourage their children to be satisfied with becoming better adults than some boomers have managed to be.

--Reported by James L. Graff/Chicago, Elaine Rivera/New York, Ann M. Simmons/Washington and James Willwerth/Los Angeles