Word: marijuana
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...most part, I stopped smoking marijuana in the mid-1970s because I grew bored with ending too many social evenings lying on somebody's living- room rug, staring at the ceiling and saying, "Oh, wow!" This renunciation was not a wrenching moral decision, but rather an aesthetic rite of passage as my palate began to savor California Chardonnay with the avidity I once reserved for Acapulco Gold. Yet as an aging baby boomer, my attitudes remain emblematic of that high-times generation that once freely used soft drugs and still feels more nostalgic than repentant about the experience...
...breathless media reports of the crack epidemic aroused all my journalistic skepticism, and I groused that the antidrug frenzy seemed like Reefer Madness revisited. On those infrequent occasions when friends and acquaintances still pass around a bootleg joint, my reaction remains benign tolerance. Just a few weeks ago, when marijuana made a furtive appearance at my wife's 20th high school reunion in upstate New York, I viewed this throwback gesture as a quaint affectation, almost as if the class of '69 had all shown up in tie-dye T shirts instead of business suits and cocktail dresses...
...honest answer, which both surprises me and makes me squirm, is that to some degree Bennett and Co. are right. My generation, with its all too facile distinctions between soft drugs (marijuana, mild hallucinogens) and hard drugs (heroin and now crack), does share responsibility for creating an environment that legitimized and even, until recently, lionized the cocaine culture. This wink-and-a-nod acceptance, this implicit endorsement of illicit thrills, has been a continuing motif in movies, late-night television and rock music. My personal life may rarely intersect with impoverished drug addicts, but the entertainment media created...
...research psychopharmacologist at the UCLA School of Medicine. In Intoxication: Life in Pursuit of Artificial Paradise (Dutton; $19.95), Siegel argues that the war is doomed because it is against man's own nature. His controversial contention: humanity's pursuit of happiness through chemicals -- whether ; caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, opium, marijuana or cocaine -- is a universal and inescapable fact of life...
...difference in perception stems from one very basic fact: Mexico does not have a drug-addiction problem. Some drugs have been consumed in Mexico for many years -- marijuana has been smoked in Mexican army barracks for well over a century now -- but there is no major drug problem here in terms of Mexican youth, in terms of addiction and consumption. There is a drug-production problem and a drug-trafficking problem, but addiction is not affecting broad sectors of Mexican society, as of today. So inevitably that leads everyone in Mexico to view the problem of drugs as less important...