Pot and Parents

THE FAMILY

As a child, Burt was thin, withdrawn and bookish. His father took the family all over the world--Hawaii, Brazil, France, Japan--as he climbed the ladder of a large chemical company. Three years ago, when Burt was 15, the family moved to Palos Verdes, an affluent suburb south of Los Angeles. Almost overnight the youngster was transformed. He taught himself to surf, put on 50 Ibs. of muscle and a deep tan, was elected to the student council and began dating the prettiest girls. Though his grades slipped to the low B range, his parents were delighted.

Eight months ago, Burt's parents stumbled on four "bricks" (each a compressed kilo) of marijuana hidden in his bedroom closet. "What the hell is this?" demanded Burt's father. "Stuff, of course," answered Burt, nonchalantly adding that he had been taking pot ever since he arrived in California.

Aghast, his father wangled a job transfer to Michigan and told Burt that his next school would be an Eastern board ing school. Burt laughed in his father's face and disappeared for three weeks. When he returned, it was to announce his enlistment in the Marines. The fam ily now lives in Michigan. Burt is a pfc. in Viet Nam.

Attractive Models. If Burt does not quite seem like the boy next door, look again. He is a member of a new and rapidly growing group of drug users that the Rev. Melvin L. Knight Jr. calls "Billy-the-Kid drug heroes." Knight, who is pastor of St. Peter's-by-the-Sea Presbyterian Church in Palos Verdes, observes: "These guys seem to be real straight arrows. They're intelligent, good-looking. Good at sports, popular around school. They have all the characteristics of the old-style campus hero. But they also take and perhaps push drugs: marijuana, pills of all sorts." For these youngsters, adds Knight, marijuana is not so much an instrument of defiance or a means of escape as it is "an integral part of a complicated, energetic life," which is in many ways an all-too-attractive model for the younger kids.

Though the National Institute of Mental Health's most recent (1967) study reported that only 10% of the nation's high school students had smoked marijuana, observers closer to the scene in many communities put the figure far higher. According to a Los Angeles Times survey of Palos Verdes last week, high schools there "now have a proportion of drug-experienced students which police estimate at 50% and counselors put at 75%. An estimated third of the total are habitual users." Even more astonishing, the Times found, drug use has penetrated down to the sixth grade and does not always stop with pot: a few 13-year-olds are shooting the far more dangerous "speed" (Meth-edrine). Often, with eerie sophistication they insert the hypodermic into the underside of their tongues to conceal the needle tracks.

"Anyone who tries to say that fewer than half the students in any high school in Southern California have taken pot doesn't know what he's talking about," insists Caldwell Williams, guidance counselor at Los Angeles' University High. Cub scouts in San Francisco discuss the pros and cons of pot with savvy, and in nearby San Rafael a marijuana sale took place right in class before the eyes of the astonished sixth-grade teacher. Nor is the increase in pot use limited to California. When the headmaster of a Colorado boarding school asked students who were using marijuana to admit it, one-third of the school trooped through his office; they are now on a year's probation.

My Father, the Bigot. Despite such evidence, the discovery that their own children are smoking marijuana still leaves most parents incredulous. "Pot is like syph," says a senior at New Trier High School in Winnetka, Ill. "Parents can't conceive of it until it hits them in the face." When it does hit them, they scarcely know what to do. For, unlike sex and alcohol, drugs played no part in their own rites of passage. Wails one anguished Manhattan mother: "None of us knows anything about it. It's so new." One Detroit moth er turned her daughter in to the police, because "I was scared." All too fre quently, blind rage is the response. One San Francisco father beat his boy for 45 minutes after finding marijuana in the youth's bureau; another, a heavy-drinking millionaire, disinherited his boy. "I'd kill the sonofabitch if I ever found out he was smoking pot," says a Manhattan father. Says his 16-year-old son, who has been using marijuana for a year: "I smoke pot because it makes the world a beautiful place instead of a place filled with narrow-minded bigots like my father."

Hoping to anticipate the problem, some parents try to scare their children with lurid stories about drug addiction and highly pertinent reminders that mere possession of marijuana constitutes a felony. But teen-agers tend to regard the supposedly inevitable progression from pot to heroin as myth, and they scorn the marijuana laws as hypocritical. At the other extreme are a few parents who introduce their children to pot in the home in the same way that countless parents start their children drinking. One San Francisco attorney turns on all three of his children, including his six-year-old. Still other parents respond by taking a kindlier view of early drinking, in hopes that their children will find liquor an acceptable alternative to pot. That ploy often fails, mainly because so many youths are convinced that marijuana is less harmful than "juice."

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.

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