Review & Outlook

The Dope on Spring

About this time last year, a forwarded email message was making the rounds of college campuses. "Don’t forget," the message advised, "the appropriate greeting is "hi, how are you?" not "how high are you?""

This month, while grown-ups were busy preparing tax returns, a lot of their college-attending children were partaking in the annual springtime bacchanalian (Ed. note: Named for the god of wine, so that is okay.) festivals either in warmer climes or in on-campus celebrations of some meaningful date in their school’s history. On these occasions many of the students ingest a cornucopia of drugs that most of their parents (despite imagined baby-boomer sophistication) have never heard of.

In fact, this is a drug "culture" with frightening differences from the glory days of 25 or 30 years ago. Today even "soft" drugs like marijuana can be as much as 10 times more potent than the joints their parents toked.
(Ed. note: The Dow Jones Company is famous for the accuracy of its numbers, but not on its editorial page. There is no data to prove that the average potency of marijuana has changed. In fact, there is no data on potency from 30 years ago at all. Moreover, there is no reason to think that "teenagers" could afford the best on the market. So the extremes are irrelevant.)

Because of crackdowns on smuggling, the neighborhood greenhouse business has flourished: New strains like "hydroponic," where the plants are grown without soil, and "wet"—marijuana soaked in formaldehyde—have been increasing the drug’s potency exponentially. Meanwhile, drug use among teenagers has doubled since 1990. (Ed. note: The kindest word for this is "stupid." First, "hydoponic" is not a "new strain." It is one way of growing marijuana indoors. However, it is not even the most popular method of indoor growing, because it is relatively more difficult than growing in pots with soil. On problem with "hydro" is that one mistake can ruin a crop. In Holland, the closest thing to violence that one will encounter in cannabis circles is the argument between "hydro" and "bio" (soil) growers.

However, while the "hydroponic" nonsense is merely silly, saying that "’wet’—marijuana soaked in formaldehyde—have been increasing the drug’s potency exponentially" is not only absurd, it is totally irresponsible. In over 30 years of smoking marijuana, over 25 years of writing about it, and 3 years as National Director of NORML, I have never heard of soaking marijuana in formaldehyde, for the simple reason that doing so would not increase its potency, but make you very ill.

This is dangerous, irresponsible, stupid, unconscionable, immoral, even deadly, just like their prohibitionist ideology. They should run a correction and apology on their front page. Don’t hold your breath, and don't inhale any formaldehyde!)

Other drugs, like methamphetamine, are also the product of basement alchemy, often involving youths producing it, which in turn introduces some of them to criminal enterprises. There are substantial profit margins in this new underworld for chemists who turn over-the-counter cold medicines into a particularly wicked concoction called "ice," "crank" or "speed." Costing $5 to $25 a dose, it offers a high similar to powder cocaine, which retails at upward of $100 a gram, but it is much more accessible to a middle-schooler’s allowance.
(Ed. note: Are these the same kids who can afford $500 per once boutique sinsemilla? "Boutique" is a new strain of marijuana grown in Perrier water in basements on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. Shh, they’ll probably believe it!)
And these laboratories are proliferating.
(See How the Narcs Created Crack)

Something else that’s new: The spread of black-market pharmaceuticals like Ritalin and Ephedrine, which have become a hot commodity in many suburban neighborhoods. Last November, a group of suburban middle-schoolers got hauled in by Virginia police when the principal caught a seventh grader selling his Ritalin prescription to his pals. Other favorites come right off the store shelves: Krylon gold paint for inhaling and whipped-cream cans for nitrous oxide.
(Ed. note: Why don’t we arrest adults for possession of these things. Doesn’t prescription Ritalin tell kids that it is safe for kids just like morphine, which is also medically available.)

Last April, a 16-year old in a Chicago suburb was caught with 37 grams of marijuana, (Ed. note: The Journal hasn’t gone metric, but somehow 37 grams sounds like more than one and one third ounces.) some opium and paraphernalia stashed in his parents house. A 15-year-old set up shop selling pot, PCP, Extasy and Special K in an affluent District of Columbia suburb. These aren’t just the kids from the wrong side of the tracks. Ask any college student about the prevalence and diversity of the new chemical culture. You’ll get an education.

For the ‘70s generation, famous for its hedonistic experimentalism, the statistics suggest a willful ignorance. Parents disbelieve, perhaps because they’re afraid to find out the truth. Polls show that 82% believe drugs are a "serious problem nationally," but only 6% think the problem exists in their local high school.
(Ed. note: Perhaps this is because they are right about their children’s schools, but base their beliefs about the nation on prohibitionist propaganda.  It is also possible that they could be right on both counts. The two are not mutually exclusive. If 18% of the schools had a "serious drug problem," then that could be interpreted as being a serious national problem. The "drug" problem need not be in the schools at all, for that matter. I really hate sloppy thinking, especially by people who get paid as much as these clowns.)

The baby-boomers’ self-indulgence has come home to roost, only this time there’s no ideological crutch. What’s becoming increasingly obvious is that Gen-X drug use involves teenagers who’ve rejected their parents’ political ideals but adopted their libertinism.
(Ed. note: This kind of generalization about two whole generations is pointless. Very few people were hippies in the ‘60s, or flappers in the ‘20s. There were a few thousand people in San Francisco with flowers in their hair; most just read about it in Time Magazine and liked the song.)
A 1995 study by the University of Michigan revealed that after a 13-year lull, teenage drug use had climbed three years in a row. Yet nearly one kid in three claimed that his or her parents have never discussed drugs with them. Only a quarter say it’s a topic of frequent conversation. (Ed. note: If these numbers are valid, could this be because the Just Say No prohibitionist propaganda, so beloved by the Journal, was counterproductive? No it must be the parents’ fault. The editors are never wrong. )

Earth to parents: It’s spring, and it might be time for a chat.

Today the same page has an editorial "How to Sell Cigarettes to Kids" that makes this all the more bizarre. Believe it or not, it actually says, "The best answer yet for the anomalous rise in black teenage smoking, up 80% in six years, is that cigarettes go well with marijuana, whose rising consumption is another hallmark of the Clinton administration ."

Further on it cites an anti-smoking activist as "warning two years ago that the Clintonites had created "a monster" when it decided to use the kids to flog their war against tobacco."

" On the slight chance that anyone in Washington is really interested, "just say no" was probably the most effective message ever aimed at kids. It didn’t wheedle them or treat them like babies. It invited them to assert the power of choice on their own behalf."

Whether or not it really does is very questionable, but how could it possibly do that in the context of a prohibition that arrested millions of adults for asserting "the power of choice on their own behalf."