Craig's Message

"I'll tell you one thing, Dave, and anybody else who's listening: you can really get messed up on that stuff." The "stuff" was LSD, and the words were spoken into a tape recorder last year by Craig Gardner, a University of Utah honor student, just a few hours before he drove into the Wyoming countryside and shot himself between the eyes. Craig's warning about the hazards of LSD, addressed chiefly to his roommate Dave Bizak, is beginning to reach a far wider audience. It is incorporated into the sound track of a new educational film that shuns the usual dull recital of facts about drugs in favor of a firsthand story about one addict's innermost feelings.

The film, titled . . . And Anybody Else Who's Listening, is the work of Producers Maynard Clark and Arthur Miller of Princeton, NJ. They acquired the tape by chance and set out to learn more about Craig by interviewing his relatives and friends. Then they filmed the apartment he had shared with Dave (and where he had begun experimenting with marijuana before moving to LSD). They also worked in some of the Gardner family snapshots and home movies and added some moving comments by Craig's younger sister Gayle.

Craig's own final comment on his life begins with a kind of oral will: "Larry, you can have my shaver. Big deal. Oh brother, this is terrible . . . I give Dave my stereo and tapes." Then he settles his debts: "I got Dick's money on the table, ten bucks that I owe him, and got my settlement with Dave here on the table." Then he tries in vain to explain his imminent suicide: "Well actually, the real reason is that I really don't know."

All he is sure of is that he should not have taken LSD: "It's bad news; it really is . . . I think what acid does is it intensifies everything, my feelings about myself. I was screwed up enough without taking acid. Probably just buried me deeper in my hole than I was before I started tripping out."

One feeling magnified by Craig's addiction was his sense of physical inferiority: a bout with polio at age two had left him with a shortened arm. The defect was so slight that most of his friends were not aware of it, and it did not keep him from becoming expert at tennis and skiing. Yet on the tape he said. "I've lived with my physical condition, but I really can't cope with it." In the end he even doubted his sanity: "After you've taken so much of that stuff, you just really don't know where you're at. You don't know if your reasoning is correct. It's hard to distinguish between real and unreal, and you're lost. I really don't know if I'm nuts or what."

To Yosh Kawano of the New Jersey division of narcotic and drug abuse control, Craig's indictment of drugs is an effective form of "feeling communication." Students at Peddie, a Hightstown. N.J., private school where the film was shown, emphatically agree. Says one: "You walk out and the film hasn't ended. That picture really doesn't end for a long time."

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