The College Drug Scene

Another Plane in Another Sphere

by JEREMY LARNER

Why do we try drugs? We really feel like we’re limited so much. And we want to do so much. And we’re always told we should try things and grow. It’s part of the liberal arts education. It seems hypocritical of older people to tell us not to try certain things. We feel we can take care of ourselves.

While there are no significant statistics — any more than there are on virginity, and for the same reasons — drug-taking is becoming increasingly popular on American campuses. A variety of drugs can now be easily obtained at any college which draws its students from metropolitan areas — which means that the problem is most acute at the biggest and best universities and at some of the most prestigious small colleges. Marijuana is generally the drug of choice: a young man from an Eastern college claims, “I have yet to see a college party anywhere in the last two years where at least 1/3 of the kids have not been turned on.”

The local marijuana connection is usually a fellow classmate. But if a student wants other drugs, or if he uses marijuana in large quantities, he need not seek further than the circle of hangers-on who live in the university community without attending college. In brief, availability is such that nearly every contemporary student must make up his mind whether or not he wants to try drugs — because he will certainly have the chance.

For most students, marijuana is something to be tried once or twice, to see what it’s like. Those who consider themselves hip will smoke reefers “socially,” in the same spirit in which executives drink martinis. Of these social smokers, a few will get to the point where they are turning on every day; and it is these few who will also try other drugs — for example, amphetamine “pep pills” in quantities that can cause psychotic distortions, berserk outbreaks, and even cerebral hemorrhage. Heroin, barbiturates, and other “hard narcotics” are also available for the self-destructive; but as a rule the hip thing is to take drugs for “exploration” rather than escape.

When drug use first comes to light on a given campus, college officials tend to protect the school’s reputation by expelling the culprits and even by turning them over to the police. Experienced administrators, however, are learning to make a distinction between trying drugs and selling them, and in the former case are more likely to use probation or a psychiatric referral as a means of correction. The fact that drugs are illegal does not in itself serve as a deterrent. Students of all generations have traditionally sought out forbidden activities as a valuable part of their college education. Thus choosing one’s drug, or no drugs, is regarded as a personal decision, like choosing friends, books, or clothes, to be made on personal grounds quite apart from the opinions or threats of authorities.

The modern student will accept responsibility for the effects his actions have on others, but beyond that he sees all arbitrary limits as impositions of the status quo. Personal responsibility, to him, implies the freedom to take risks that involve only himself and his development. He feels that if parents and school officials really believe in that “free inquiry” which is supposedly the ideal of a liberal education, they must respect his right to conduct his own quest by his own rules.

The drugs most talked about in terms of questing are the powerfully mind-disturbing hallucinogens (peyote, mescaline, psilocybin, LSD). Most of the daily pot-smokers will sooner or later try the hallucinogens. Other students are also curious to try them, partly for “kicks,” partly because they feel challenged, and partly because they are attracted by claims of mystic and psychological revelation. The most extravagant of these claims emanate from grown-up enthusiasts who are devoting their careers to popularizing the hallucinogens.

For many young Americans, college represents four years of free experiment between the restrictions of the parental family and the responsibilities of the marital family. The student is aware that every choice he makes — both occupationally and personally — may have a telling effect on the adult he will become. He is under pressure to “find himself” — and quickly.

Like other Americans, the college student may look for his “self” in the products he consumes. Universities that are organized like supermarkets will only encourage such unsatisfying searches. Students, moreover, are susceptible to an existentialist strain of the disease called “conspicuous consumption.” Rerouting the pursuit of the material, they seek to consume pure experience. They hope that by choosing the right activities they can create an external confirmation of the power and beauty they would like to feel within.

Drugs, as we shall see, are products that supply the illusion of choice while they simultaneously minister to the anxieties that choosing creates. The increasing use of drugs may be seen as a reflection of an unconscious belief in the commercials that pound home the connection between a judicious drug choice and the relief of any mental or physical “symptom.” Such assumptions are not easily overcome by a generation that is, after all, the first whose members are lifelong TV viewers, bombarded from infancy by suggestions of false needs.

MARIJUANA

To us a muggle wasn’t any more dangerous or habitforming than those other great American vices, the five-cent Coke and the ice-cream cone, only it gave you more kicks for your money.
Us vipers began to know that we had a gang of things in common: we ate like starved cannibals who finally latch on to a missionary, and we laughed a whole lot and lazed around in an easygoing way, and we all decided that the muta had some aphrodisiac qualities too. . . . All the puffed-up strutting little people we saw around, jogging their self-important way along so chesty and chumpy, plotting and scheming and getting more wrinkled and jumpy all the time, made us all howl. . . . We were on another plane in another sphere compared to the musicians who were bottle babies, always hitting the jug and then coming up brawling after they got loaded. We liked things to be easy and relaxed, mellow and mild, not loud or loutish, and the scowling chin-out tension of the lushhounds with their false courage didn’t appeal to us.

This classic description — from Really the Blues (1946) by Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe — will serve to convey the general relaxation of the marijuana high and the good fellowship which prevails in the society of satisfied vipers. “The LaGuardia Report” — published in 1944 and still the standard scientific text on the subject — confirms that marijuana is non-addicting. The Report warns that marijuana taken in excess may produce anxiety as well as pleasant feelings, and that psychotic episodes are not unheard-of when the batch is strong and the smoker sensitive. The pleasurable response to pot is to some extent learned, and an experienced smoker will not continue once he has obtained the desired sensations. To quote The Report: “The description of the ‘tea-pad parties’brings out clearly the convivial effect . . . and the absence of any rough or antagonistic behavior.”

Obviously college administrators could not sanction pot, even if it were legal, any more than they sanction drinking. But students are contemptuous of the usual line about marijuana leading to heroin addiction. Since heroin is a depressant, its effects are entirely different from those described above, and are sought after by a different kind of person, one who is characteristically dissatisfied with marijuana. Commentators may fasten on the fact that heroin addicts “began” with pot, but it is just as accurate to say that they “began” with liquor. For most heroin addicts have at one time tried liquor as well as pot — and rejected both.

Since pot is outlawed, however, sooner or later a pot-smoker will come in contact with a connection who has other drugs for sale. This, to many students, represents the crucial difference between alcohol and marijuana. One drug is surrounded by accepted rituals, while consumption of the other is ipso facto connected with lawbreaking. Many feel that if marijuana were legalized, society would develop appropriate and enjoyable attitudes toward it. They feel that the comparison with alcohol is all in marijuana’s favor. The White House Conference on Narcotic and Drug Abuse referred to alcohol as “the outstanding addictive drug in the United States.” The country’s five million alcoholics suffer from cirrhosis, nervous diseases, and even brain damage. Nicotine, too, has addictive properties, and cigarettes made from tobacco can cause lung cancer; whereas the LaGuardia Report tells us that “those who have been smoking marijuana for a period of years showed no mental or physical deterioration which may be attributed to the drug.”

The upshot of misinformed fulminations about marijuana is that students in the know feel a certain superiority. They’re entitled to smile when subjected to the liquor industry’s $200 million annual barrage of advertising designed to link alcoholic intake with happiness, youth, and social power. They feel their product is better, cheaper, and less dangerous. And once they’ve tried pot and discovered that official warnings are based more on panic than fact, they are in a position to discredit apprehensions about any drug whatever.

THE HALLUCINOGENS

The hallucinogens — of which the laboratory synthetic LSD is by far the most powerful — produce a stunning impact on the mind. Distortions of time and space, intense color phenomena, and delusions of death and grandeur are commonly experienced. All sorts of thoughts, feelings, memories, fears, dreams, and images are released, often with an overlay of euphoria. Some psychiatrists see the hallucinogens as potentially useful in the treatment of various mental disorders, though most regard the experimental work in this field to date as inconclusive. Psychoanalysts have for years rejected techniques of artificial release — such as hypnotism and “truth serums” — on the grounds that psychoanalysis is not identical with the mere unearthing of material.

LSD cultists feel that under the effect of a hallucinogen, the mind activates in-born knowledge long “repressed” by civilization, knowledge which reveals the mystic “oneness” of the universe. The individual personality is supposedly dissolved in “The Void,” where space and time vanish and all is impersonal “ecstasy.” This experience, along with the emergence of “repressed” psychic material, is supposed to help the individual gain a transcendent perspective with which to reorient himself to the “illusory” world of earth-bound humanity.

It is claimed that the regular use of LSD increases individual development and lovingness toward others, and that therefore the drug should be freely available. An LSD millennium is seen as inevitable, bringing with it the dissolution of human conflict and the recognition of the cult leaders as prophets of a scientific, philosophic, and historical “breakthrough.”

Most psychiatrists, however, are wary of dangerous reactions to the hallucinogens. There are many verified reports of students in whom a hallucinatory drug touched off a latent psychosis so severe that hospitalization was required. Prolonged psychotic states, depression, recurring hallucinations, and suicide attempts (some successful) have resulted from the use of LSD — in some cases months after the drug was taken. As for the effects of LSD on the personality, medical investigators have noted the following: 1) dissociation and detachment, 2) personal insensitivity, superiority, 3) religious and philosophical solipsism, 4) impulsivity, poor judgment.

These observations, to be sure, depend on the observer’s point of view. One of the chief concerns of the dedicated drug-taker is precisely to repudiate the values, judgments, and most basic perceptions of the persons he believes to represent a monolithic and repressive authority. He does his best to perceive school officials, scientists, teachers, psychiatrists, and indeed anyone who does not appreciate “the drug experience,” as an organized “Establishment” conspiring to suppress individual “freedom.”

THE DEDICATED DRUG-USER

It is now possible for a disaffected youngster to assume a highly developed role as drug-user. He usually begins with the perfection of a “cool” manner. The world is “too much”; his coolness announces that the cool one is invulnerable to involvement. He has taken the cure well in advance of the disease. To put it in consumer terms: desire is a weakness, because it expresses unfulfilled need. The cool one has found and taken the products that he needs.

To blow one’s cool, then, is to reveal — to oneself as well as others — an inner lack. To maintain one’s cool is to signify, “I’ve had it.” The double meaning is intentional; for the cool one claims no great worldly future. He knows that his gestures are stylized; his pride is the masterly knowledge that in this world of appearances, style is all that matters. Unlike others whom he sees as selfdeluded, the cool one suits his actions to his ideas. He has found a philosophy simple enough to live by (almost). In this sense, he alone has achieved the academic ideal.

There is, after all, a twisted idealism involved in submitting oneself to drug experiments. Erik Erikson, in “The Problem of Ego Identity,” tells us that some young people respond to environmental pressures by trying to create a “negative identity.” According to Erikson, “many a late adolescent, if faced with continuing diffusion, would rather benobody or somebody bad, or indeed, dead — and this totally, and by free choice — than be not-quite somebody. ” (Italics his.) Drugs, in these terms, provide the idealist with a chance to control his own destiny and to go all the way. There is a distorted testing mechanism at work here; Erikson speaks of “a radical search for the rock bottom ... a deliberate search” — as if the searcher could master a sense of unworthiness by seeking out and inflicting upon himself certain selected dangers. Drugs are like Russian roulette: if you survive, you must have something going for you. It shouldn’t surprise us that one of the most common, popular, and easily induced drug delusions is the fantasy of rebirth.

If one is to be reborn, one needs replacements for the mortal, fallible parents and family whose existence dictates unendurable limitations. Says Erikson, “Young people often indicate in rather pathetic ways a feeling that only a merging with a ‘leader’ could save them. . . . the late adolescent wants to be an apprentice or a disciple, a follower, sex mate, or patient.” The contemporary campus is replete with drug-givers who will gladly initiate the yearningly incomplete student into all of the above roles. The novice is then equipped with drug priests for parents and fellow acolytes for siblings. The members of the drug family are connected not by birth and mortality, but by destiny and salvation. They reinforce their new improved personalities with ceremonial rituals, an in-group language, and — above all — the taking of the sacrament.

Before long the initiate drug-taker is in turn initiating others. Their desire directed toward him helps to confirm him in his role of “holder” and to convince him that he is indeed in possession of something worthwhile. It is to his advantage that expectation and suggestibility play a tremendous role in an individual’s reaction to drugs. He himself is no longer surprised by the sensations produced by powerful drugs; he has learned to enjoy them and to interpret them in accordance with his own desires. Therefore he can guide the initiate who is panicky under his first dose of, say, a hallucinogen, can calm him with lofty wisdom, and help him explain his experience in the language of the drug ideology.

As the drug-taker becomes drug-giver, he cultivates a transcendent personality. He views the world with the secret superiority of one who has access to something better. All of you are playing a game, he says in his every gesture, but you could be saved if you’d follow me. Reality for him is no longer the uncertainty of the ordinary world but the heightened visions he experiences when high. Should his would-be disciples reject their own visions as drug-induced delusions, he informs them that they are tied up in “ego games.” For him, the only criteria for interpreting drug phenomena are the phenomena themselves.

The transcendent personality is particularly useful for a student supported by his parents or a technician performing a job he despises. Ordinarily such a situation would raise a crisis of identity centered around the problem of achieving independence and self-respect. But for the true holder, serving his drug postpones the questions, Who am I? and What can I do?

Further, those dedicated to drugs have avoided the ambiguities of democratic face-to-face personal relations. Clinging to an in-group solidarity, they divide the world into sages and fools, saints and devils, holders and seekers. Richard Blum, in his book The Utopiates, speculates that drug proselytizers are particularly afraid of seeking and being denied. So they reverse the process, becoming tempters and rejecters. For this writer, the essential point is that both seekers and tempters are still caught up in the infantile drama of power-testing. Unable to bear a grown-up world without absolute power, they have invented that power — and invested it both in drugs and in the parental figures who oppose drugs.

GETTING HUNG UP

“David” is a brilliant student at an excellent college, well aware of the advantages he’s had, and aware also that much is expected of him. Here, David tells of a recent experience which caused him to give up drugs entirely:

At the beginning of this year, I felt really low, I got completely bored with school, and I felt the teachers weren’t giving me anything. I had been involved with a girl, but it ended at the end of the summer. And that was one of the things that really depressed me, you know, that I couldn’t find anybody. Sex became a real drive, but since none of the chicks meant anything to me, sex itself became meaningless. I just didn’t know what to do with myself. So I started smoking pot every day — to the point where I was high every minute.
Grass had become a crutch all of a sudden. I turned on before I went to class, before dinner, before skiing. I felt that everything could be better. It wasn’t just music and girls; it was everything.
But after a few months, I got so I was tired all the time, my mouth was dry. I wasn’t doing anything but getting high, and I couldn’t get high anymore. I’d been dependent on getting high, and I wanted something to change. There had to be something that would shake me. No people were shaking me, no ideas were shaking me, and no course was shaking me. And no experiences were shaking me, so I said, what can shake me? LSD, maybe. So I thought I’d try LSD, to see if it shakes me into something new.

At this point David contacted a disturbed young friend who had been taking drugs heavily since he was fourteen. When David arrived, his friend had taken four times what is considered a heavy dose of LSD and had been hallucinating for five days. He gave David a black market sugar cube and told him it contained a heavy dose of LSD. After swallowing the cube, David found out that it held twice a heavy dose. “I think he was so far out of it he knew he wasn’t coming back, and he wanted to take me with him.”

So I took the cube. For a while it was nice, I’d lie down on the bed, hear some music, the music would sound nice, I’d see pretty colors dancing on the wall. But the fact that new and completely different, if not contradictory, ideas kept popping up in my mind, gradually began to depress me. I kept thinking I had the Answer to Life. I’d jump into one thing, then I’d say No, that’s wrong; then another thing, then No, that’s wrong . . . and finally I saw that the answers were just as illusory as the colors I saw on the wall.
And when I started to feel my mind flipping out of my body, I thought, Jesus Christ, I don’t care how simple the pleasures would be, I’d rather be back there. I’d rather be in a boring state than where I am now, because I cannot live this way, I don’t want to be like this. I’ll commit suicide if necessary. I thought that this was going to go on continually, and I just couldn’t cope with it.

Though inside himself David felt desperately hysterical, his outer manner was so remote that he couldn’t convince the college doctor he needed help. Finally, after three days of hallucinations, David found a doctor who administered an antidote.

The LSD experience caused David to reconsider his way of using marijuana:

I realized afterwards that, as a result of smoking grass, the things that had been important to me were not only no longer important, I was incapable of doing them. I couldn’t write, I couldn’t think, I couldn’t carry on normal relations with people. I saw how much time I’d been wasting. I mean, I sort of knew it all along. But when I took the LSD I just had three days of intense fear and running around and nervous energy, and when I was brought back to earth, I said, God, your whole last few years have been like this! You haven’t been doing anything; you’ve just been running around — and heading in toward a dead end. I hadn’t been developing at all; I was just completely stagnant.

After telling his story, David gets into an argument with his roommate about a mutual friend who was once a brilliant musician but who now does nothing but stay high on pot all day long. David’s roommate refers him to a long list of first-rate jazz musicians who are well-known vipers. David is forced to admit that the problem resides not in the marijuana itself but in the immaturity of his friend, who is “a weak, dependent person needing a crutch.” The roommate presses further: isn’t their musician friend just as well off staying high all day as he would be playing the piano? As long as he feels good, does it make any difference how he gets that way? David replies with some warmth:

No, my friend does not feel good — he could be happier with music than with pot. Because music never ceases to move and develop. Pot, instead of broadening and deepening, just becomes less than it was at the beginning. You could say the same about any drug: it’s a dead end.

THE MYSTIQUE OF “THE CREATIVE EXPERIENCE”

Thousands of students would passionately object to David’s separation of drugs and art. They would insist that drugs are indispensable for the understanding and creation of modern poetry, painting, music, fiction, and sculpture.

For reasons of social dislocation which the campus only mirrors, masses of the most confused, aimless, and sensitive young people are drawn to the arts and humanities. A common theme in the humanities is reverence for art — a reverence crudely reinforced by a society which has discovered the commodity value of culture. The student finds “great” art painstakingly analyzed by teachers who are masters of academic method. If he is not satisfied with mere learning, the student may be tempted to transcend the analysis and identify with the projected image of the artist. Art raises the possibility that one is possessed of a non-intellectual, unmeasurable, mysterious something that defies all academic categories. Under the circumstances, it is natural for the artistic student to be overly impressed with the notion that art is inspired by irrational mental states — even to the point where he regards insanity as a divine visitation.

For the would-be artist, drugs are a magic product advertising the separation of art from talent, time, judgment, and work. One turns on, and one has Visions. One digs music and painting with drug-heightened attention, and one has Revelations. If one tries to paint or write under the influence of drugs, the results are invariably disorganized and disappointing. Still, one has somehow been “creative.” All that is necessary to call oneself an artist is to replace palpable creation with the notion of “the creative experience.”

The trouble with “the creative experience” is that anyone can have it. But for those who cannot produce art itself, the drug ideology offers membership in an artistic consumer elite.

I recently met a young engineer who feels greater rapport with his girl when both are high. Every night they turn on while watching a TV movie and “really dig it.” The engineer feels that everyone should smoke pot. “When I go out in the world looking for friends, the first question I ask myself is, do they smoke? Because if they don’t they look at me like I’m a drug addict.”

The engineer insists that he turns on not for escape but for “insight — to learn things about myself.” As an example of his insight, he states that “ordinarily I have a masochistic streak: I let people get away with saying things they shouldn’t. But when I’m high, I know what to answer.”

The engineer’s girl friend is an art student who claims she paints better when high. “I can paint and take in everything going on in the room at the same time.” She enjoys the fact that so many of her friends use drugs. “You feel you’re privileged — you’re part of an artists’ community.”

College drug use reaches a peak at big city art schools. It’s worth noting that at the art colleges young people in training to become fashion illustrators and advertising directors are exposed to a highly pretentious milieu. They make contact with future artists — and form an alliance between art and advertising which has proved effective in bringing visual art, more than any other, into the consumer marketplace. To be hip in the art world, one must now consume the newest thing in art in the same way one consumes drugs — for the latest sensation. Like “creative experience,” the fabrication of “pop” art is within reach of anyone. And art fashions, like drug fashions, offer their consumers the justification of an in-group ideology.

THE AMERICAN DREAM

Ever since the discovery of the New World and the Frontier, Americans have been looking for an absolute truth. This truth is thought to be natural and good, yet often it is to be attained through technical developments. Our politicians reflect these assumptions whenever they resort to the apocalyptic view of history, in which the United States is to play a divinely ordained dramatic role in directing the “progress” of the rest of the world.

D. H. Lawrence once described Americans as “Some insisting on the plumbing, and some on saving the world: these being the two great American specialties.” The LSD missionaries are out to do both at the same time — to save the world by tinkering with the internal plumbing. As in the drug ads, the idea is happiness and fulfillment through the ingestion of a synthesized additive. If drug evangelists combine proselytism with claims of mystic serenity, it’s not because of any profound “paradox,” but because they are, at bottom, American innocents.

Another American tradition — which can be encountered in any decent course in American literature — is the myth of the New Self. The myth is that a powerful experience can purge a hero of his past and release innate powers which have been hitherto suppressed by an unnatural society. The desire is to rid oneself entirely of fear and guilt. For the American student, drugs are the latest platform from which the New Self may be announced. The young user may rejoice in a mode of being which seems utterly to bypass his everyday problems in coming to terms with the world. He can occupy, for a while, “another plane in another sphere” — where everything depends upon himself and what he puts into his mouth.

Newness, by its nature, is temporary. Before long there may be a letdown, an impingement of the dreary “old” self who has survived somehow after all — then a need, as David puts it, for something to “shake” one. That something, for the modern student, is closer than the campus drug store. It will be ready for him as often as he has to have it.

Eventually he may wonder why. Speaking of “insight” — as young “heads” are so prone to do — the deepest insight one could gain from drugs would be to discover, not one’s essential greatness, but the reason one needed to take drugs in the first place. This knowledge comes from life rather than manufactured chemicals. As a matter of fact, there is a tendency for collegiate drug-users, such as David, to reach a peak and then abruptly leave the drug scene. But until an individual can understand his drug need in terms of his own psychology, drug use for him will continue to be one of those symptoms that perpetuates its causes.

People who are attracted to the hallucinogenic drugs are often those most likely to be harmed by them. . . . Latent psychotics are disintegrating under the influence of even single doses. . . . Habitual use of the drugs will lead, in some individuals at least, to looseness in thinking and difficulty in communicating coherently. One individual known to the writer can hallucinate at will, without resorting to the drug.
Our accumulating day-to-day experience with patients suffering the consequences of the hallucinogens demonstrates beyond question that these drugs have the power to damage the individual psyche, indeed, to cripple it for life.
DANA L. FARNSWORTH, M.D.
From the Journal of the American Medical Association
September 14, 1963