Going the Donkey Route

By Bob McCabe

LOVE NEEDS CARE by David E. Smith, M.D. and John Luce. 405 pages. Little, Brown. $8.95.

During the mid-'60s, San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district gained dubious fame as a doped version of Fort Lauderdale, complete with acidheads, amphetamine freaks, pot lovers and a sizable sprinkling of good old American paranoids. Until late 1967, some credulous observers believed that American youth, led ever onward by psychedelic visions from the best LSD ever produced, was on the brink of making some sort of cultural breakthrough. In truth, however, the Haight had by that time become a transcendental sewer.

Ten years earlier, the beatnik takeover of the Bay City's North Beach area had produced some fine poets, including Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, and Novelist Jack Kerouac. From the Haight, though, little emerged to ennoble the spirit--except, perhaps, the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, which is the subject of this book.

The clinic was chronically short of funds and a steady target for the sneers of San Francisco's medical establishment. From the beginning, its chief was a young M.D. named David Smith who, as the book notes, "identified with the young . . . shared their frustration and disillusionment and their Rousseauan faith in the virtue of natural man."

The clinic offered more than therapy for victims of the drug salads consumed daily. It had doctors and nurses able to help out with psychiatric cases, general internal-medicine problems, venereal diseases. For the doctors there were educational fringe benefits as well, for they could observe a stunning variety of examples of drug abuse. Smith himself, sympathizer though he was, came to "see that the community contained the seeds of its own destruction in its refusal to accept social and individual controls and in its acceptance of unbridled experimentation."

His clientele at first were mostly zonked by bad acid trips, and later strung out by huge, mind-bending doses of speed (amphetamine). Finally, many were destroyed by heroin. Their condition reflected a decline described by Jackie, a victim who saw it all in her late teens: "Sometimes I wish I was back in kindergarten," she told Smith. "It used to be like that here when I first came--people giving away flowers, sharing their food. Now it's turned into a big ego trip, nobody smiling or sharing."

Precisely because he did care, Dr. Smith's book, which was written with Journalist John Luce, makes a compelling document. Though the tragedy of drug escalation has often been described, its lessons bear repetition. The children Smith describes took drugs for a number of inner compulsions, which in themselves, as he points out, needed expert care. But they also gravitated toward disaster out of stupidity, conformity, inertia, the need to run drug risks as a challenge to adults, and the dream that drugs are a short cut to truth and beauty. In their hopes and delusions, they resemble nothing so much as the poor, sad, small boys in Pinocchio who head for the land of free play and candy, only to end as whipped and harnessed donkeys.

qed Bob McCabe

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