LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
WHAT THE 21st-CENTURY DRUG CULTURE CAN LEARN FROM THE DRUG CULTURE OF THE 1960s
“If you can remember the ‘60s, you weren’t there” is a quote variously attributed to Grace Slick, Dennis Hopper, RobinWilliams, and a bunch of other people because – you guessed it – nobody from back then can remember anything.
half a century ago, when I was thinking, “Wow! This is great f***ing s**t!” (Notice that my thoughts were so fuzzy that I was thinking in asterisks.) Recreational marijuana is now legal in 10 states, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. territory of the Northern Marianas Islands (talk about “far-out”). Two countries – Canada and Uruguay (the Canada of Latin America) – have fully legalized consumption and sale of marijuana. Two other countries (with absolutely nothing else in common) – South Africa and the former Soviet Republic of Georgia – have declared all personal possession legal. Marijuana is legally tolerated in licensed cafes in the Netherlands. At least 32 other nations, as diverse as Croatia and Jamaica and Luxembourg and Ukraine, have decriminalized the drug.
I’m a veteran of the ‘60s drug culture. At least I suppose so. I was there – a 19-year-old college kid during the Summer of Love. And I wasn’t some Student Senate, frat boy, ROTC, squaresville college kid. I was fully onboard the Magical Mystery Tour. It’s just that I don’t recall much about it. Where were we going in the “bong bus”? What did we do when we got there? Who else was along for the ride? And why, when I try to think of their names, do they all seem to have been called “Groovy” and “Sunshine”? Oh my gosh, I hope I wasn’t driving... Fifty-two years later, everything is a purple haze – so to speak. But today there’s another “drug culture” in progress. In an attempt to learn from the past, we should be thinking about this new drug culture... Although maybe not the way I was
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American Consequences 7
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