KIDS & POT

By LANCE MORROW

In a drug-and-alcohol rehab, the wounded sit grimly on folding chairs, acknowledging the folly of their old life--their misadventures with alcohol, cocaine or other poisons. Then comes the afternoon that is set aside for atonement on the subject of marijuana. Now the chastened air gives way to argument. The house divides along generational lines. The oldest of the sinners (mostly age 50 or older) nod agreement with the official message: Yes, indeed--devil weed. The baby boomers, however, with their rich pharmaceutical histories, begin to snigger and squirm. "Give me a break!" rings out in the hall. The youngest members of the congregation (some in their teens) sit in bewilderment, trying to decide whether to support the geezers or the boomers.

There it is again: the Marijuana Exception...the Reefer Loophole. All the idiots who drank Canadian Club and Heineken for breakfast, or wrecked themselves on smack or meth--they know they done wrong. But "merely" smoking pot? Well...

The question of whether marijuana is a dangerous menace or something less than that--even, perhaps, a kind of benign and unfairly persecuted folk medicine--suddenly dominates discussions of the great American drug habit. Last month voters in Arizona and California passed ballot propositions that legalize the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes, a kind of backdoor quasi-legitimation alarming to the pot hawks, who fear that high-minded tolerance (pot as pain reliever, glaucoma salve, general angel of mercy) may become infectious and spread to the other states.

In August the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released a study that surveyed almost 18,000 Americans and concluded that marijuana use among youths (ages 12 to 17) has roughly doubled in the past few years. Use of pot by young people rose 105% from 1992 to 1994, and gained 37% between 1994 and 1995. At the Phoenix House Foundation 10 years ago, 13% of adolescents sought treatment for marijuana; today that figure has jumped to 40%.

It is possible that the increased popularity of marijuana is merely cyclical, part of the usual flux and reflux that have also seen harder drugs like cocaine and heroin rise in their allure for a time, and then decline when the consequences became more luridly obvious--only to rise again when a generational forgetfulness sets in and a drug's glamour could assert itself afresh. Indeed, today some experts are worried that an obsessive concern about marijuana may confuse overall perspectives. Says Mark Kleiman, a UCLA professor who specializes in national drug policy: "It's destructive to focus the country on one small part of drug use. Focusing on marijuana ignores the rising use of methamphetamine and the fact that heroin appears to be coming back, and ignores the No. 1 drug of abuse among high school kids--alcohol."

But after all that is said, the marijuana question remains--and is in some ways a more complicated dilemma than, say, heroin, because the problem is morally, culturally and politically subtler. The young indulging in pot these days are mostly the children of the baby boomers, who, once upon a time in the '60s, took to reefer as their recreational sacrament, their generation's almost universal drug of defiance. Now the boomers, who were raised on episodes of Ozzie and Harriet (and, if anything, identified with David and Ricky), find, to their astonishment, that they themselves have become Ozzie and Harriet: middle-aged! Parents! Conventional! It is a discomfiting transition, as if former members of a Dionysus cult were asked to take up duties as parole officers. The boomers raised hell with authority in the '60s; now some have mixed feelings about exerting that authority themselves--as if it would somehow turn them into their own enemies.

What should the boomers tell their children about marijuana? Should the parents be candid about their own pot use when young? On what authority can the parents persuade their children to avoid pot when the parents have made it to full adulthood more or less seemingly intact, none the worse for their youthful indulgences?

During the '70s, when a certain amount of marijuana burnout from the '60s became evident, pot fell into relative disfavor. But in the past decade, media stories registering disapproval of marijuana have tapered off. It has hardly discredited the substance that Head Boomer Bill Clinton, after stating four years ago that he hadn't inhaled, told an MTV audience that he wishes he could have done so. The President's sneaking snickering line (a kid still putting one over on his parents) suggested the boomers' ambivalence about pot and a kind of time-warping refusal to see it or themselves honestly. A haze of self-cherishing nostalgia confuses them. They want to be their child's friend; they do not wish to be uncool. They may still smoke sometimes and hide it from their kids, as they once hid it from their parents--an amazingly demeaning drama of arrested development.

The case against marijuana remains relatively undramatic. It is true that the new generation of weed is stronger than what the boomers remember; that potency means it takes fewer puffs to get high, thus cutting down on damage to the respiratory system, for example. On the other hand, stronger pot and higher kids lead to more reckless driving and car accidents. It is true that smoking pot is less harmful than heavy drinking and does not threaten one's life, as do addictions to harder drugs. Proselytical pot smokers love to point out that a fatal overdose would require, say, 40 lbs. of grass smoked over a period of, say, 25 min.

Apologies and rationales for marijuana are often ingenious, sometimes fervent, and in their essence, when applied to marijuana use by adolescents, dangerously wrong. The stage of development through which a child passes from ages 12 to 18 is critical. Adolescence is the labor that gives birth to the adult. It is a painful, indispensable process. Adolescence quite precisely requires the pain and difficulty of learning in order to come out well. Among the lessons, of course, are how to love and support others and how to be responsible.

When people are stoned on marijuana, they tend to focus on one thing at a time: the food, the music, the dog. Conversation deteriorates. More important, says Steve Sussman, a drug-abuse researcher and associate professor at U.S.C., "you don't learn how to cope with real life. You don't learn how to experience life in real terms, to feel bad normally. Let's say you smoked marijuana heavily from age 16 to 26, then stopped. The way you process life events emotionally after that may be more like a 16-year-old." Could it be that the famous reluctance of the baby boomer to imagine himself as an adult has something to do with the weed he smoked when young?

It is in the realm of emotional development that marijuana does its damage. In any case, it seems there has been a mistake. Pot is not the drug of youth but rather of old age, the threshold of death--a little buzz before Kevorkian. It is a dulling drug, certainly useful as a palliative for the elderly. The young don't need to have their pain dulled. They need to learn from it. Perhaps baby-boomer parents, as they grow old, should reserve the world's marijuana supply for themselves and for what will no doubt be the gaudy and self-important theatrics of their dying, and encourage their children to be satisfied with becoming better adults than some boomers have managed to be.

--Reported by James L. Graff/Chicago, Elaine Rivera/New York, Ann M. Simmons/Washington and James Willwerth/Los Angeles

With reporting by JAMES L. GRAFF/CHICAGO, ELAINE RIVERA/ NEW YORK, ANN M. SIMMONS/WASHINGTON AND JAMES WILLWERTH/ LOS ANGELES