Did Anti-Drug Propaganda Help Bring About a Psychedelic Renaissance?

By Ryan Grim, Wiley Press. Posted July 20, 2009.

She was working from a set of assumptions that was backed by more than just pop psychology. At a 1995 Aspen Institute program called “The Challenge of Parenting in the ’90s,” those gathered heard from Harvard professor Stuart T. Hauser, then-director of the school’s Judge Baker Children’s Center. Relying on a longitudinal study he published in 1991, he told the conference that the “chances of a teenager experimenting with new ideas and embracing new perceptions are greatly increased when he or she is in a family where curiosity and open-mindedness are valued, and uncertainty is tolerated.” The goal of his research, he said, was to “enhance” parenting “so that it will not interfere, obstruct, or aggravate the greatest difficulties during the teenage years.” The title of his lecture, “Adolescents and Their Families: Paths of Ego Development,” is telling—the family belongs to the child.

Few parents, of course, wanted no structure or discipline at all. Hauser, in his talk, recommended required educational programs dealing with violence, drugs, pregnancy, and school failure. For young potential psychonauts, the rise of the codependency movement and the spread of D.A.R.E. dovetailed fortuitously: Kids were encouraged to satisfy their curiosity, which uniformed officers piqued by waving baggies of pot in their faces during school.

Healthcare activist Mykey Barbitta says that his first exposure to marijuana came during a D.A.R.E.-like field trip to a police station in fourth grade. “They had that cabinet that had all the drugs in it and they said, ‘These are all dangerous,’” he recalled. “I saw marijuana sitting there at the bottom, right in the middle, and I’m like: this I can see, the needles, the pills. I can understand, in fourth grade, that those can hurt you. But how can that little leaf hurt you? I just had my doubts ever since then.”

Today, Barbitta is a drug dealer: he runs a state-sanctioned medical-marijuana shop in San Francisco.

Not surprisingly, the University of Michigan survey shows that just as the inner child was breaking out, LSD use among the children of the most educated parents—the sort who might watch a John Bradshaw special on PBS—began rising. According to most surveys, it’s almost always the children of the least educated parents whose drug use is the highest. But not for LSD in the nineties, especially in the Northeast and on the West Coast among white, educated young males.

In 1975, 11.2 percent of all twelfth-graders said that they’d used “hallucinogens” at least once that year. Use skewed toward males, with 13.7 percent claiming to have used compared to 9 percent of women. Use of LSD specifically stood at 7.2 percent. The numbers for both hallucinogens and LSD slowly declined over the next fifteen years, dipping to a low of 5.5 percent of all seniors having taken hallucinogens in 1988.

Then the trend started turning around, and by 1994, use of LSD was back to 1975 levels. Mid-nineties acidheads differed demographically from those of twenty years before, however. The Michigan survey breaks the nation into the Northeast, the North Central, the South, and the West. Acid use in the seventies was spread evenly throughout the country, save for the South, which lagged behind. As far back as the surveys go, blacks barely register on the hallucinogen scale. Whites top it, although Latinos aren’t far behind. The level of education of a child’s parents, however, played little role in whether that kid would try acid or hallucinogens.

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Ryan Grim is the senior congressional correspondent for the Huffington Post and can be reached at ryan@huffingtonpost.com. He is author of "This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America (Wiley, 2009).

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