The Pot Problem

COED INDICTED: MARIJUANA BY

MAIL ORDER AT CORNELL, said a headline in the New York Herald Tribune last week. Behind such sensational stories lies a somewhat less sensational situation. In this case, Cornell Coed Susan Heiberger, 21, was accused of buying a $5 bag of marijuana from Philip Cook, 25, who had quit Cornell in January, and of mailing some of the stuff on to a hometown friend at Connecticut College. A grand jury charged Miss Heiberger and Cook with selling marijuana, a felony, but they were allowed to plead guilty to misdemeanor charges.

Smoking marijuana--also called pot, tea, grass, stuff, boo, hemp and Mary Jane--seems to be this year's way among students of preserving the perennial illusion that the younger generation is going to hell. Statistics on the problem are nonexistent, and its extent is tough to gauge. School officials normally ignore it or hush it up; students with first-hand knowledge are prone to boastful exaggeration; arrests are relatively rare.

Boston police and New York State's Bureau of Narcotics Control are concerned: both held seminars on narcotics control for the benefit of college administrators. The New York bureau has collected evidence of marijuana use at 15 upstate New York campuses. Dr. Gerald L. Klerman of the Harvard Medical School staff estimates that 10% of the students at such large urban universities as Harvard, Stanford and California's Berkeley campus are "chronic users." As many as a third of the undergraduates at Yale and Columbia, according to an informed estimate, have at least tried the drug. And Cornell's President James A. Perkins is worried enough to have brought the issue out into the open.

Turned On for Exams. Savvy students seem to have little trouble cultivating a "connection" to secure marijuana--most often in the form of a $5 "nickel box" (matchbox size)--in New York City, Harvard Square, California's Sausalito and elsewhere. Up to 40 "joints" (cigarettes) can be fashioned from a box, making marijuana cheaper per kick than alcohol.

Some students smoke several mornings a week to "turn on" before class or before a tough examination. "I feel I'm more relaxed in school tests if I'm high," explains a Redwood, Calif., high school senior. "I feel like I'm going real slow, but I'm going at my normal speed, and all pressure seems off." But the common way of using marijuana is the spur-of-the-moment party in a college student's apartment, a teen-ager's home when parents are away, or a car at a drive-in movie. "The whole car fills up with smoke, like a big tank full of it-it's wild," reports an 18-year-old coed in California's Marin County.

Most pot parties are not really so wild. "You don't go around ripping off your clothes or anything." one coed says. Typically, one recent evening in a darkened Cambridge apartment near Harvard, two girls and two boys lounged around a candle, smoked four joints (each three inches long and less than a quarter-inch thick) in 21 hours. At first they chattered animatedly about what records to play: Charlie Parker won out over a Bach B Minor Mass, and the sound track from Black Orpheus over Charlie Mingus. Then the smokers lapsed into sporadic metaphors and banalities. They pepped up briefly at the delight of peering into a multicolored kaleidoscope, ended by staring solemnly and in silence at the candle, one another and into space.

Illegal Togetherness, Part of pot's attraction is "doing something illegal together," says one teenager. Another part, obviously, is the hallucinatory effect: "You think a lot of trivial thoughts --millions of little tiny thoughts go racing through your head." One girl, trying to capture such fantasies while high, wrote: "Notes from hemp head. Oh dear, the silent nothing around is very silent and very nothing. Outside seems terribly distant. I hear people talking and they are funny--because I am listening with illegal ears."

To most psychiatrists, the increase in marijuana smoking represents not so much a search for new thrills as the traditional, exhibitionistic rebellion of youngsters against adult authority. Parents who are quite agreeable to students' drinking almost always boggle at drugs. "There is not much that students can do that is defiant," says a Boston psychiatrist. "They think with some degree of glee about what their parents would think if they knew they were smoking marijuana." These students also are "looking for changes in personality," and "they lack communication and feel isolated--when they smoke there is a certain togetherness."

The Danger: Habituation. How perilous is pot? Medical authorities agree that it is not biochemically addictive, that it does not induce the physiological craving or withdrawal symptoms of such drugs as heroin or cocaine. It affects the user's judgment, and if used daily, will dull a student's initiative and drive, but on the whole, "marijuana is probably less dangerous than alcohol," insists Rand Corp.'s drug expert William McGlothlin. "The dangers have been grossly overrated and the legal penalties are far too severe."

What does concern parents, administrators and doctors is the possibility of psychological habituation. Chicago Child Psychoanalyst Ner Littner, who compares marijuana with such fads as goldfish swallowing, argues that for the emotionally stable youngster, its use is just part of "the developmental phase of being a college student." But University of Chicago Psychiatry Professor C. Knight Aldrich points out that "the emotionally susceptible person can get psychologically dependent on anything --caffein and coffee, nicotine and cigarettes, alcohol or marijuana." And of these, pot leads to the worst possibility: that the student may take to stronger, crippling drugs. On balance, says U.C.L.A. Neuropsychiatrist Keith Dit-man, "pot is something to be concerned about. It's more frequent than many people realize. But I don't think it's anything to panic over."

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