Potted Ivy

In a wide-ranging analysis of alienated students--the bored, the unhappy, the apathetic--University of Wisconsin Psychiatrist Seymour L. Halleck told a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Detroit last week: "Smoking marijuana has become almost an emblem of alienation. The alienated student realizes that the use of 'pot' mortifies his parents and enrages authorities." Unable to change a flawed world, the alienated also seek a quick, "autoplastic adjustment" in themselves: "They can create a new inner reality simply by taking a pill or smoking a marijuana cigarette."

Statistics seem to support Halleck. A recent poll indicated that 15% of Princeton undergraduates had experimented with drugs, and that a surprising two-thirds of these were on the dean's list. The Crimson figured that 25% of Harvard students had smoked marijuana at least once. On the basis of a survey that he has just completed, Yale's chief psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Arnstein, estimated last week that 20% of Yale students have smoked pot, half of them four or more times.

According to Wisconsin Psychiatrist Halleck, one of the root causes of student alienation is isolation from adults: 'A student can spend months on a large campus without having a conversation with a person over 30." As a result, students develop "subcultures dedicated to the rejection of adult values." When it comes to drugs, though, the ironic fact s that often the adults with whom alienated students do establish contact are themselves narcotics users. Example: ast month Yale's popular Art History Instructor William Woody, 30, was arrested by New Haven police for possessing marijuana. At the State University of New York at Buffalo, Critic-Novelist ,Leslie Fiedler, 50, was arrested in his home during a pot-and-hashish party, together with his wife, his 26-year-old son, the son's wife and two 17-year-old boys. Fiedler, who will be tried on drug charges next month, declared that "What's really involved is not a criminal proceeding but an attempt to limit my freedom of speech." Fiedler wants to legalize pot--a seeming recipe for more student alienation.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.