Drug Abuse

3 SET: THE SOCIAL ORIGINS OF EXPECTATIONS ABOUT DRUG EFFECTS

It might be argued, with some justification, that the kinds of expectations which the neophyte marijuana user may have had about the effect of the drug would be as various as the many accounts of the experience to which he may have been exposed. Although the greatest potential source of these accounts — at least in quantitative terms — might be thought to consist in the vast proliferation of literature on the subject which has occurred over the last few years, there is no question of the important part also played by the more ephemeral media such as radio, television and — perhaps most important of all — rock music. It would be no over-statement to suggest, in fact, that references to the effects of marijuana have at one time or another permeated the entire cultural fabric. The task of assessing the determining influence wielded by discrete cultural productions is a correspondingly formidable — if not impossible — one, and will not be attempted here. A partial solution may, however, be arrived at if one does the following two things: firstly, distinguish analytically between those drug-related definitions which were available within the total culture of society and those which were more specifically confined to the drug-using subculture itself; and secondly, distill from the plethora of individual definitions the kind of drug-related imagery which in each case appeared to be dominant. In the following discussion these two procedures will be combined.

Cultural Imagery: Disinhibition and Passivity

The single most important characteristic of the dominant cultural imagery which the subject would have been likely to bring into the situation of marijuana use was its emphasis upon the ability of drug-taking to bring about an observable change in behaviour. Such I change could be in one of two basic directions: either the activity was thought to result in the uninhibited "acting out" of impulses and ideas over which the subject would normally exercise restraint but which he now had little power to control; or — and equally undesirably — it could have the effect of enveloping the subject in a passive (because "drugged") fantasy world from which he would be either unwilling or unable to return.

Now neither of these perspectives existed in a vacuum. Each of them was a composite made up of a variety of different statements and images, some of them relating to the use, by others, of marijuana itself, others relating to the use of other legal drugs with which the neophyte was likely to have had some first-hand experience. The first perspective, typified by the idea that people under the influence of drugs tend to lose their powers of self-control, owed much, as we have seen, to the widespread use of alcohol and the dominant set of beliefs about its effects — beliefs which the neophyte marijuana user was likely to be as much a party to as anyone else. Moreover, to the extent that the kind of behaviour — and even lifestyle — which thus results was actually welcomed as a pleasurable alternative to its "straight" counterpart, it also received support from the types of imagery disseminated by the manufacturers of legal drugs themselves. In the case of alcohol, the stark contrast between formal lifestyles and behaviour and their subterranean counterparts' is nowhere better illustrated than in the now classic series of advertisements for Smirnoff vodka. Here it was suggested that the effect of the drug may be sufficiently "shattering" to bring about a sudden transition from a stereotypically mundane way of life ("I was Mr. Holmes of Household Linens . . . I'd set my sights on a day trip to Calais — until I discovered Smirnoff") to a romantic fantasy world of bucolic simplicity and Oriental mystery (represented in these two cases by, on the one hand, a scene in which the subject, suitably unkempt and even sporting a hippie-like string of beads round his neck, is pictured idly contemplating life in a remote fishing village; and, on the other, a photograph showing a suavely-dressed young man, now transported to the Orient, being given a ride through a bustling city street in a rick-shaw).2

Interestingly, though, alcohol was not the only licit drug to have become a beneficiary of this kind of romanticization; although seldom attributed with psychotropic qualities, the effects of nicotine have occasionally been accorded similar commercial treatment, as the following two samples of advertising released on behalf of a new brand of cigarettes in early 1973 demonstrate:

Joe's gone mildly continental

Yesterday he danced on the Temperance Hall steps, sang a serenade outside Agatha Ramsbottom's window and kissed a traffic warden. I put it down to those HB Crown cigarettes he's been carrying recently . .. They say they've got this mildly continental taste.

Similarly:

Our Bank Manager's gone mildly continental

The other day he offered me an overdraft in francs, was seen trampling grapes in Mr. Smith's grocery shop, and has taken to wearing beads in the office. It must be those HB Crown cigarettes he's taken to smoking.

As is usually the case with advertising, the efficacy of such vignettes as a means of promoting sales is something about which one can only speculate. But it is important to note that the sudden and bizarre changes of behaviour which they describe are precisely the things for which the use of marijuana (and other illicit drugs) has traditionally been condemned. In view of this, and without wishing to deny the tongue-in-cheek quality of such advertisements, one is prompted to ask whether statements like the one made by a police superintendent already mentioned — "In plain language this cannabis sends you absolutely round the bend" — did not serve to foster an attitude more of fascination than of abhorrence in audiences exposed to them at the time.

I shall return to this latter point below. Nevertheless, whatever their deterrent impact may have been, it seems clear that statements of this kind on the part of social control agents made an important contribution to the "dope fiend" stereotype in question. Indeed, any examination of its history will reveal that disinhibition per se is the very least of the evils of which the drug has been accused. Particularly in America, largely thanks to the unstinting efforts of Commissioner Harry J. Anslinger and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics, it was for a long time fashionable and perfectly respectable to regard marijuana as the cause of a wide variety of criminal offences, ranging from petty theft to homicide.3 Admittedly, such views were not entirely unrelated to the actions of its users. As Becker points out, at a time when a subculture of marijuana use capable of prescribing appropriate ways of using the drug and handling negative reactions to it was still poorly-developed and fragmentary, users would indeed have been prone to lose control and act in ways that, amongst other things, helped to both create and sustain a belief in the existence of what came to be called cannabis psychosis.4 Whether this, to the extent that it occurred, was thus a cause or a consequence of Anslinger's thinking on the matter remains in doubt. But what is more immediately significant is that even by the early 1970s, long after the growth of a marijuana-using subculture had succeeded in making the cannabis psychosis syndrome a statistical rarity, the tendency for the drug to be clearly identified with disinhibition or loss of self-control should still have persisted in this country. One should be wary of attributing the prevalence of such notions solely to the romanticized statements issued by control agents with the primary object of deterring people from using the drug since, ironically, there seems little doubt that much of the superficial plausibility of such statements and the conviction with which they were commonly expressed itself derived from the attempts made by individuals arrested for offences other than merely the possession of marijuana to plead diminished responsibility for their actions by claiming to be the victims of its putative effects.' Any survey of the press coverage given to court proceedings during this period will reveal many instances of defendants having pleaded that they "didn't know that they were doing" because they were under its influence. The following two reports are merely illustrative:

Rape bid case told of drugged smoke

A man told police he smoked a drugged cigarette before an incident involving a 21-year-old woman . . . According to Mr. Northcote (the prosecutor) Anthony Lawrence (the defendant) "told police it began when he visited a pub, where he met someone who gave him a drugged cigarette". He got into his car, lit the cigarette and drove off. He felt terrible, his eyes were "going all funny" and his head started swimming around. He got out of the car and a girl passed. He remembered walking alongside her and then everything went blank. Whatever she said in evidence he would accept. (Shropshire Star, 7 January 1971)

Drugs "the cause of pub theft"

Cannabis was responsible for a burglary committed by four young men, Gloucester quarter sessions were told yesterday. "This might serve as a salutary warning to those who are advocating the spread of soft drugs", said Mr. Brendan Shiner, prosecuting. Mr. Shiner said the men broke into the Green Dragon Inn at Cockleford, Gloucestershire, and stole cigarettes because they were under the influence of cannabis . . . McDowell (one of the defendants) told police: "We had been smoking cannabis. This probably played a large part in what followed as I feel we wouldn't have done it if we hadn't been smoking. Normally, I wouldn't have the nerve even to think about it, let alone do it". Milne (another defendant) said: "I would never have thought of doing such a thing if I had not been under the influence of drugs" . . . Mr. Jonathan Woods, defending all three, said they were all amazed at what they have done. (Western Daily Press, 28 April 1971)

Of course it is difficult both to accept that an individual can successfully negotiate the necessary sequence of actions leading up to a crime and to credit the claim that at the moment of actually committing it he "didn't realize what was happening" or that suddenly "everything went blank", and the law itself is suspicious of such claims.6 What is also striking about such accounts is the marked contrast that they bear to the subcultural (and nowadays more common) designation of cannabis as a drug whose typical effect is to heighten awareness rather than dull or obliterate it. Indeed, drawing attention to what he believes to be the fallacy of the claim that the drug provokes behaviour for which the individual cannot be considered responsible, Michael Schofield has written that:

Although this claim is sometimes made, the truth is that cannabis will not produce a "black-out" similar to the loss of memory under the influence of alcohol. It is difficult to believe the reports about individuals who have taken so much cannabis that they do not remember what they have done. People under the influence of cannabis may act unconventionally and antisocially, but they know what they are doing and cannot escape responsibility for their behaviour.7

Most experienced users of the drug would doubtless agree with such a view. Yet for Schofield to inform his readers of "the truth" that people who use cannabis know what they are doing is not the same as suggesting that it is a truth shared by those concerned with controlling the activity, especially when one is referring to a context where a significant number of those with whom the latter came into contact — people who claimed or were known to have acquired firsthand experience of this activity — were highly motivated to endorse a quite different version of the truth that was considerably more compatible with their prejudices. Indeed, there is an important sense here in which the statements of deviants and control agents stood in a dialectical relationship to one another, each affirming and in turn being reaffirmed by the other. A clear example of the way in which an almost impenetrable web of mystification could thus be created is provided by the report from the Western Daily Press just cited. In effect, if not by intention, the relationship between the three principal parties involved in the case concerned is a highly collusive one: the defendants, for their part, claim that it was the drug that "caused" them to commit burglary; their counsel, as might be expected, attempts to uphold such a plea; and the prosecution, concerned to find an effective rationale for enforcing the law concerning marijuana use and influenced, very probably, by prevailing opinion on the subject, appears inclined to accept it. The possible impact of such mystifications upon actual sentencing practices is difficult to determine, and in any case not relevant to my present concerns (although they do suggest the paradox that the assiduous pursuit of the administrative goal of deterring individuals from committing one crime — marijuana use — may have hindered the achievement of the judicial goal of accurately assessing the culpability of those who had committed another — such as, in the cases cited above, physical assault and theft). Turning to consider their more general impact, what does seem clear is that they would have made a significant contribution to the kind of common-sense thinking referred to in chapter one, in terms of which almost any form of behaviour which appeared deviant or otherwise inexplicable to its observer could become a candidate for explanation in terms of the putative effects of drugs. But this is by no means all. A further important consequence of such misleading conceptions was that, by perpetuating the long-standing confusion about the effects of marijuana, they served to make those of alcohol appear rather trivial by comparison. A clear example of this latter tendency may be witnessed in the publication of, and response to, the findings of the 1973 Diplock Commission, which concluded that the smoking of pot by Lord Lambton had constituted a "potential security risk". The rationale for this was stated as being that "under the influence of this drug. . . there would be a significant danger of his divulging, without any conscious intention of doing so, items of classified information which might be of value to a foreign intelligence service . . ." (my emphases). The Daily Telegraph commented upon the report as follows:

It accepts the view that cannabis has a relaxing effect which may induce a weakening of vigilance and a mood of irresponsibility. So, no doubt, does an excess of alcohol, but it seems that drugs, even cannabis, are much worse in this respect.8

At a time when the scale of public drunkenness was starting to give cause for public concern, the scenes of social chaos conjured up by the possibility of the widespread use of cannabis could easily thus appear too dreadful for such a possibility to even be contemplated. Arguably this is something that any history of the legal ban upon the drug in this country would be obliged to take into account. However, by far the most immediately important point is that by defining the social reality of the drug's effects in this way, statements of this kind were also likely, finally, to make an unintended contribution to the set of expectations held by the individual who is at present our primary object of concern — the neophyte and otherwise innocent user of marijuana. Whether disinclined or actually unable to challenge the dominant public rhetoric about the drug, he too could well come to suspect that its use would succeed in diminishing his powers of self-restraint, even if only slightly.

Yet although a loss of control, manifesting itself in behaviour which is both unpredictable and undesirable, was probably the dominant image of marijuana use conveyed by those outside the drug-using subculture, it was by no means the only one. Almost equally important was the idea that in taking the drug the marijuana user automatically "escaped from reality" into a twilight world of total passivity, indolence and asociality. This stereotype seems to be a composite of several components, one of the most conspicuous of these being the kinds of statements made by those who sought to defend the existing illegal status of the drug by citing its pernicious effect upon the productivity and "moral fibre" of those societies in which its use has traditionally been widespread. Illustrative of this view is the following letter to the Radio Times of 4 March 1971, whose author was commenting upon a programme on drugs shown on BBC television:

The Horizon programme on drugs .. . did a grand job showing that people don't die from smoking pot, but that's not the point. I don't need the stoned faces of the pot smokers on the programme to know that pot induces a state of half-asleep lethargy.

Pot smokers can hardly get off their bottoms. But what this society needs is energy, more production, more initiative, better working conditions; we can't afford to sit on lotus leaves.

There's the danger of pot. If we all smoked pot we would never get any work done and our whole society would become stagnant and idle. Look at the countries in the East where pot smoking is common — they are in a terrible state. The advanced countries are spending billions of dollars or pounds in aid to these countries, trying to put them on their feet.

There is a simple answer. Outlaw pot throughout the world, blow the smoke out of the pot smokers' minds, and then they will get on and look after themselves better. We know that drinking and smoking causes individual death, but pot causes the death of society .. .

As one might expect in the light of the prominence which they accorded to negative research findings on the long-term effects of marijuana of the kind discussed earlier, examples of the treatment of passivity in such terms are not hard to find in the press, even if the increasingly widespread use of marijuana had brought about a decline in their frequency. Statements of opinion such as the following printed in The Sun, in which invidious comparisons are once again being made with the two dominant legal drugs, still remained largely unchallenged at this time:

The long accepted evils of alcohol and nicotine are no argument at all for accepting cannabis now. The canker in cannabis is that it makes you stop caring. It suspends involvement. It clouds the cruel corners when life seems harsh or humdrum. It lets you trip on by. Caring is being alive to anxiety and pain and hardship. Caring is being alive to love and hope and joy. Caring is fighting the ills in society, not tripping on by.

Who wants to preserve the living, thinking, feeling individual? Who wants to freak out and forget the baby's crying? 9

The linking of drug use with creative and emotional impoverishment is further exemplified in a letter to the magazine Nova (December 1972), which rhetorically asks:

• • what of the young impressionables who find themselves able to obtain and smoke pot at will; turning them from enthusiastic and creative beings into amiable zombies unable to raise a vague interest or sustain concentration in anything; whose conscience is dulled and time sense destroyed?

A similar view was also expressed, it might be noted, in some of the manifestations of social reaction to pop festivals in this country. As we saw earlier, the apparent docility of the typical festival audience when compared with the "normal" (i.e. rowdy or even violent) behaviour displayed by large crowds and assemblies was something which, for some, could only be explained in terms of the effects of drugs. Sometimes, on the other hand, such behaviour was welcomed when contrasted with its feared alternatives — nudity, violence and blatant promiscuity. Where this occurred, a clear distinction was drawn between the well-behaved and peaceable majority, who were regarded as having come along to try and recapture the spirit of Woodstock and experience a fleeting sense of togetherness, and the "lunatic fringe" of troublemakers and perverts.' ° However, the solution of one problem of explanation gave rise in turn to another: the behaviour of the latter group (when this was not thought to be composed exclusively of "foreign agitators") could easily be explained in terms of the stereotype linking drugtaking with disinhibition. But how could the approved behaviour of the majority be adequately accounted for when drugtaking was also acknowledged to be an almost universal feature of such occasions? This contradiction was not easily resolved, as the following extract from a report on the Bardney pop festival bears witness:

The Chief Constable of Lincolnshire, whose men policed the bank holiday pop festival at Bardney this week-end, said yesterday that the "misuse of drugs" during the festival had been very apparent.

Mr. George Terry said: "In its obviously escalating form drugs must be amounting to a threat to society, especially young people. With this exception, the conduct of people was by modern standards good".

He went on: "You had only to walk in the camping areas, which I did, and you could smell cannabis. You had only got to see the degradation we saw when we had to arrest these young people on LSD trips or high on cannabis. They were apparently respectable otherwise".11

Nevertheless, to the extent that it was seen as a consequence of marijuana use, it appears that passivity could in some cases elicit as harsh a social reaction as behaviour which represented its opposite. Part of the reason for this paradox seems to be that such passivity was equated with unresponsiveness: the individual was seen as having been rendered incapable of responding normally to his environment (otherwise why — as the letter cited earlier suggested — would he spend such long periods of time listening to "monotonous" and "discordant" pop music, for example?) Further, this apparent unresponsiveness was typically seen as being the external reflection of an inner deadness; far from bringing about any "heightening of awareness", marijuana was thought to have merely anaesthetized the subject, precipitating him into a state of (literally) drugged oblivion from which — partly because he had used the drug for the purposes of "escape" in the first place — he was either reluctant or unable to return. The actual meaning of the drug experience was thus effectively denied.'

Finally, however, a note of qualification. It is a sociological axiom that no stereotype, no matter how inaccurate or distorted, develops within a complete social vacuum. As I will attempt to demonstrate presently, all of these stereotypes possessed a certain superficial validity, their apparent inconsistency being to some extent a reflection of the non-unitary character of the phenomenon which they attempted to depict.

Subcultural Imagery: Hot and Cool Hedonism

Whilst posing as mere description, cultural imagery of the kind described clearly performed important social functions. Of primary importance was its capacity for reinforcing the right-mindedness of those whose faith in the more compelling and commonly-cited arguments for avoiding marijuana use (such as, for example, the fact that it was illegal, the possibility that it might result in physical or psychological degeneration, or even psychosis) had so far enabled them to resist any temptation to experiment with the activity. In this sense, then, it may have contributed substantially to the continued effectiveness of the ban. It would be misleading, however, to suppose that such imagery cannot also have functioned to attract others — irrespective of whether they too had been exposed to these arguments. Just as there are people who fancy the idea of being spontaneous, uninhibited and even (and perhaps especially) "out of control", so are there those who will be drawn to something which they believe will enable them to "escape from reality" and become literally carefree, if only temporarily.

To say this is in no way to subscribe to a mode of explanation for deviance premised upon the notion of individual or social pathology. Both states of mind, for one thing, would merely constitute responses to well-established sets of subterranean values: as we have already seen, far from being socially condemned the translation of such responses into actual behaviour has traditionally been socially facilitated, as the twin emphases upon the normal use of alcohol as a means of both "loosening one's inhibitions" and/or "drowning one's sorrows" bear witness. In this respect, then, there is a respectable social precedent for such inclinations, whether their end result be positively-valued conviviality or tolerated drunkeness. Moreover, the argument need by no means be confined to a comparison with popular beliefs about the socially acceptable uses of alcohol. There are, after all, any number of pharmaceuticals, health foods and tonics on the market whose use is commercially encouraged on precisely the grounds that they promise instant health, euphoria, and psychic well-being.

Even if this were not the case, it would remain uncertain — as a second point — whether a belief in available ideas about typical drug-using behaviour of the kind described could uniformly act as a deterrent. To suggest that it might have done involves the dubious assumption that expectations are the same things as motivations and, as such, interchangeable with them. Empirically, however, motivations for initial marijuana use typically vary from one individual to another, and even though expectations regarding the likely effects of the drug may figure very prominently in them, they will in any given case almost certainly incorporate a number of other influential factors as well. On the basis of research into this issue of motivation, Joel Hochman for example cites only some of those which have been regarded as important by those writing on the subject:

People generally turn on to marijuana for the first time because (1) they are curious; (2) there is pressure from others to try it; (3) they seek to be "hip" and to have the acceptance of a group of marijuana users; and (4) because they are seeking a change of mood or state of consciousness, out of curiosity, or to alter an emotional state they find unpleasant, or to intensify one they enjoy.' 3

Finally, one must bear in mind the implications of the fact that the phenomenon of marijuana use was growing rapidly throughout this period. The importance of this in the present context lies in what James Carey has described as the "contagion effect", one of whose characteristics is that " . . . the more widespread the use, the easier it is for novices, non-users and relatively straight persons to obtain drugs; the more varied the user groups, the less any potential user has to change identities to begin using a drug".14 This latter point — referring to the extent to which the individual can retain his social identity intact if he becomes a marijuana user — is likely to make an important contribution to his motivational "set". Indeed, it now seems to be quite clearly established that the vast majority of people are introduced to the drug by a close friend or friends.' s As Erich Goode suggests, the principal determining element here seems to be that of trust:

Society's evaluation, even if taken seriously, is a vague and impersonal influence. The testimony of one or several friends will weigh far more heavily in the balance than even parental disapproval. If an intimate friend vouches for the positive qualities of cannabis, the ground has been cleared for a potential convert.' 6

In this sense, then, the growth of marijuana use — or at least experimentation with marijuana — is to a large extent self-generating; potential converts become practising devotees, and in their turn make further converts. To a certain degree, at least, the efficacy of social control becomes correspondingly impaired as a result.

With these considerations in mind, we can return to the kind of situation in which marijuana use actually occurred. It can now be suggested that, depending upon which particular motivational constructs were singled out for attention in any given case, cultural imagery of the kind described will to a greater or lesser extent have receded into the background of the individual's awareness. It should not be thought of as having been forgotten or repressed, however, for at any time it was liable to be "reactivated" by the kind of imagery which the subculture itself provided. As we shall see, the two types of imagery were in important respects complementary to one another. What, then, was the character of this subcultural imagery?

The dominant and apparently uncontested notion within the sub,\ culture of drug use seemed — and still seems — to be that marijuana 1 to a greater or lesser extent heightens awareness. Now historically one might expect this to have been the case even if the substance were proven to be pharmacologically inactive. At one level such a claim served to provide subcultural members with both a rationale for breaking the law and a means of neutralizing (through drawing contrasts, for instance, with the awareness-diminishing properties of their preferred drug, alcohol) the moral judgements of those who condemned the activity. In addition, however, such a view may have been functionally necessary if the neophyte's fears about the possible penalties of deviation were to be transformed into anticipations of certain rewards. It may have helped, in other words, to shift the balance of "opportunity-cost" in favour of the former of these two elements. This, clearly, might be of particular importance in the case of an activity whose ability to provide something worth becoming a criminal for was frequently far from obvious.

Individual opinions about the precise extent to which marijuana heightens awareness have always varied considerably, however. There are clear differences, for example, between the exuberant claims for the quasi-mystical properties of the drug voiced by the nineteenth century French romantics such as Baudelaire and Gautier and the more restrained — and nowadays almost certainly more common — views of those who believe that it merely helps one to "relax" in a way similar to the effect of alcohol, save with less impairment of one's powers of self-control and less risk of subsequent hangover. Nevertheless, it was the imputed mind-expanding properties of marijuana which — once its use first became widespread within the white hippie subculture — both resulted in its classification as a psychedelic and provided much of the basis for its proponents' attack upon the conventional values and behaviour espoused by the monolithic "system" and the "straights" who comprised it.

In itself, however, the notion that marijuana in some way "heightens awareness" remains little more than an unhelpful tautology. As I have already suggested, a more satisfactory interpretation would be that it heightens suggestibility. But in terms of the question of what marijuana can be expected to "do" to the individual, such an interpretation clearly becomes more satisfactory only if one can specify the uses to which suggestibility is put. It has become increasingly recognized (again, as I have already mentioned) that drugs provide means or catalysts whereby the cultural values of the group concerned can receive expression.' What is at issue, then, is not so much the belief in a state of heightened awareness per se, but rather the impact which such an imputed change of consciousness has upon interpersonal behaviour. This is of great importance so far as the neophyte user is concerned: for whilst he may not be told explicitly what kinds of experience he is likely to undergo, an observed change in the behaviour of his peers may be necessary to convince him that the drug will have at least some effect upon him. Moreover, whether through instruction or observation, he simultaneously acquires a conception of what is considered to be appropriate behaviour when high — although, as we shall see presently, this notion of appropriateness is highly problematic. The first of these points has been touched upon by Howard Becker:

Typically . . . the novice has faith (developed from his observation of users who do get high) that the drug actually will produce some new experience and continues to experiment with it until it does) 8

Being possibly over-cautious, however, Becker failed to specify what it is about the behaviour exhibited by other users that leads the novice to acquire such faith. Partly as a consequence of this, he was unable to examine the extent to which sustained regular use of the drug is contingent upon the individual's continued ability to express subcultural values thereby: instead, as we have seen, he resorted to the over-generalized and tautological explanation that he must "continue to enjoy its effects".

There are in fact two quite distinct subcultural traditions with which the use of marijuana (and to some extent the more powerful psychedelics such as LSD) has traditionally been associated; two distinct ways, that is, in which the heightening of awareness attributed to these drugs has been translated into actual styles of behaviour. Both owed much to the tendency toward dereification, or what David Matza has described as the "sensibility to banality", characteristic of the state of being high on marijuana." But as against Matza, who merely states that such sensibility is "fun" without specifying the kinds of behaviour with which such fun is associated, each of them extracted and accentuated those facets of the experience which both concurred with and facilitated the expression of existing subcultural values. Thus in the one case an awareness of the creative role of the self and the relativity of established cultural standards could become a cue for immersing the self in whatever project or fantasy might come to mind, regardless of what from a more conventional viewpoint would be considered as the consequences thereof (including the common attribution that such a mode of behaviour represented and was prompted by a mindless search for kicks). Whilst in the other case, the articulation of such awareness in action was subordinated to the task of using it as a means of exploring the inner world of the psyche, the composition of the self and its objects being regarded primarily as subjects for peaceful and controlled contemplation.

These two alternative directions into which the drug experience could be channelled have been usefully characterized in the literature on bohemianism by the terms hot and cool hedonism.'° Whilst the one laid stress upon the attainment of personal freedom and sensory gratification through an unremittingly uninhibited or "out front" sponteneity of behaviour, the other favoured a reflective and more cerebral turning inward, directed towards the pursuit not of sensory stimulation but rather of personal self-knowledge. In terms of the analysis of specific subcultures whose members used marijuana in the context provided (probably more importantly) by their experiments with LSD, they found their most clear-cut representation historically in, respectively, the anarchistic revelries of Ken Kesey's "Merry Pranksters" and the controlled, "truth-seeking" experiments undertaken by those guided by the semi-mystical writings of self-appointed Western gurus such as Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. The contrast between these two lifestyles has been vividly expressed by Tom Wolfe in what has now become a classic documentary account of the evolution of the hippie phenomenon in the United States:21

Right now there are two ways it can go in Haight-Ashbury. One is the Buddhist direction, the Leary thing. There are good heads like Michael Bowen and Gary Goldhill who want to start the League for Spiritual Discovery here and pull the whole movement together into one Church and give it a focus and even legal respectability. And they have given up much for this dream . . . Bowen has an apartment with India-print spreads lining the walls and couches on the floor and hand-made Indian teapots and cups and three small crystals suspended from the ceiling by almost invisible threads and picking up lights like jewels in the air, a place devoid of all the shit and gadgetry of the modern American plastic life, for, as Leary has said, a home should be a place of purity that the Guatama Buddha himself could walk into from 485 B.C. and feel at home. For some day grass must grow again in the streets, in pastoral purity, for life is shit, a duress of bad karmas, endless fight against catastrophe, which is to be warded off finally only by the purification of the soul, utter passivity in which one becomes nothing . . . but a vessel of the All . . . the All-one ...

. as against the Kesey direction, which has become the prevailing life style of Haight-Ashbury . . . beyond catastrophe . . . like, picking up on anything that works and moves, every hot wire, every tube, ray, volt, decibel, beam, floodight and combustion of American flag-flying neon Day-Glo America and winding it up to some mystical extreme carrying to the western-most edge of experience?'

As one might expect, the representatives of these two lifestyles tended to maintain an attitude of mutual antipathy toward one another. When they came into contact, there was often a degree of conflict and misunderstanding falling little short of that which has traditionally been seen as existing between each of them and the wider society. An illustration of this is provided in the following passage (again from Tom Wolfe) in which Cassady, one of the most eminent of the original Pranksters, and a leading organizer of the original unashamedly hedonistic series of Acid Tests, unwittingly enters upon a similar event staged by a group of "righteous acid heads":

He was sailing on speed, as the thirty or forty heads there could tell by the way his eyes jumped around, going tic tac tok tok tok tac tok tac tok tik tik . . . either that or he was amazed at this Acid Test through and through. There were no lights except the slowest and most fluid light projections, no noise except the most mellifluous hi-fl playing . . • what the fock (sic) . . . Sitar? Sitar? Sitar? . . . The garage was scrubbed and chaste and pure with wall hangings of the most meticulous sort, India-print coverlets, delicate and intricate of pure vegetable macrobiotic dyes. A few crystals in the air picked up rays of light one by one like ... jewels . . . And all the good heads were stroked out most silently, propped up sitting against the walls or stretched out, each grooving on his own private inward thing, receptacles of the Buddha, the All-one invited guest, and the Buddha could have walked in at any moment and felt right at home, 485 B.C. or right now, the . . . dead-ass little gook ... Cassady can't believe it
. He is rapping a mile a minute, but nobody picks him up on it. They just stare at him through great amethyst eyes, full of tolerance and pity as his own eyes sprocket and his shoulders bob and weave • . . "Hey! Don't you want to do anything - get it started, you understand - slide it around" — They just stare at him, peaceful luminescent violet jewel children, smiling like a bunch of freaking nuns, full of peace and tolerance and pity . . . as he turns around shaking his head and his shoulders and kicking and flailing disappearing out on to Harriet Street again."

Now it should not be thought that this bifurcation of the Bohemian subculture into hot and cool components is a particularly recent phenomenon. Nor is it entirely true, as has been suggested,' that each can be identified with distinct class groupings within the subculture. Whilst I do not wish to trace their historical origins here, it is worth noting that the distinction is one which reaches quite far back in time. This is evident from the following passage from a 1961 article by Jack Kerouac on "the origins of the beat generation", which bears a striking resemblance to those just cited:

By 1948 the hipsters, or beatsters, were divided into cool and hot. Much of the misunderstanding about . . . the Beat Generation . . . derives from the fact that there are two distinct styles of hipsterism; the cool today is your bearded laconic sage . . . before a hardly touched beer in a beatnik dive, whose speech is low and unfriendly, whose girls say nothing and wear black. The "hot" is the crazy talkative shining-eyed (often innocent and open-hearted) nut who runs from bar to bar, pad to pad, looking for everybody, shouting, restless, lushy, trying to "make it" with subterranean beatniks who ignore him. Most beat generation artists belong to the hot school.' s

Although the differences between these two expressive styles may to some extent have been reflected in the class backgrounds and associated values of their members, it is impossible to establish any direct one-to-one relationship in this respect. Commenting upon what he has relabelled as the "frivolous" and "morose" traditions of Bohemianism, for example, David Matza points out that "they are often combined in the career of the same person".2 6 This view received support from Kerouac's account of his own experiences:

. . . In many cases the mixture is 50-50. It was a hot hipster like myself who finally cooled it in Buddhist meditation, though when I go in a jazz joint I still feel like yelling "Blow, baby, blow!"' 7

Turning again to the hippie phenomenon, one finds a similar ambiguity. Discussing the relationship between the cultural ideals and the structural base of the hippie subculture in this country, for example, Jock Young has commented upon Davis and Munoz' class-based distinction between "heads" and "freaks" as follows:

Although I would agree broadly with their class distinctions, ("hot" is more true of the Beats and "cool" of the Middle Underground) I feel that this contradiction is diffused throughout the total culture . . . (such) inconsistencies occur throughout hippie culture and on all levels . . . there is no one-to-one relationship between culture and structure ... 8

But clearly there were important differences between American hippie culture and its British counterpart, the most significant in the present context being that within the latter the differences in expressive styles described were rather more closely and explicitly identified with class differences. Indeed, Young goes on to point out that a major cause of the disintegration of the hippie phenomenon in this country — at least in its pristine form of seeking a social revolution through the propagation of "love and peace" — was the conflict over scarce resources associated with such differences. As he nicely puts it, " . . . the Lower Underground (which he identifies with the beats) had a tendency to overstay their welcome at the flats of the Middle Underground, an irritating habit of taking the ideals of shared money and property literally."' 9 It seems clear that in this country the "hot" and "cool" subterranean traditions were closely enough identified with specific class groupings within the Underground as to make individual transitions between them considerably more difficult than appears to have been the case in the United States. Because of the more integrated economic substratum underpinning the beat and hippie subcultures in the latter country, reflected in the relative absence of material scarcity among its members, any espousal of "hot hedonism" could be both claimed and interpreted as the product of a conscious decision, a certain freedom of choice, rather than the outward reflection of an unthinking philistinism bred of ignorance, deprivation and educational failure.' Thus even if figures like Ken Kesey and Dean Moriarty before him failed to earn the approval of dedicated followers of the Leary school, their behaviour could nevertheless be seen as an ideologically-informed attempt to reject and make fun of the conventional world, whereas that of their British counterparts was more likely to be seen by their coolly-hedonistic peers as having merely been determined by it. One consequence of this was that in this country, unlike the United States (or at least California), the ideology of cool hedonism familiar to members of the "Middle Underground" gained a fairly rapid ascendancy. Because of the lesser necessity of remaining of the defensive, however, it became a somewhat diluted version of its American counterpart. This is a point to which I shall return in a later chapter.

Now the elaboration and discussion of such distinctions would obviously have been irrelevant unless they were to have an important bearing upon the processes whereby the typical expectations — and thus actual drug experience — of the neophyte marijuana user take shape and develop. But to the extent that until fairly recent times much of the activity of marijuana use occurred within and even constituted a symbolic prerequisite to membership of the bohemian sub-culture (whether in its Beat or its hippie form), it seems quite reasonable to argue that initiation into it may be regarded as having been inseparable, empirically, from initiation into one of the ongoing expressive traditions described. As Young has written elsewhere:

The role of head is learned in the context of the most central grouping in hippie culture, the circle of experienced heads sitting passing a joint from one to the other. He learns in these circumstances not only how to interpret, direct and tease out the physiological effects of the drug but the perspectives and values of a whole culture which in turn determine the effects of the drug and methods of drug use.3 1

But this statement is incomplete in two respects. Firstly, as we have already seen and as Young himself states, hippie culture has never been unitary or "whole" but was shot through with inconsistencies in the realms of both valued ideals and material interests. Secondly, and of greater importance in the present context, is the fact that the actual behaviour of the "experienced heads", in relation to which the neophyte learns the "role of head" and, correspondingly, the effects of the drug relevant to this role, remains unspecified: they are merely described as sitting in a circle passing the joint from one to the other, and it is "in these circumstances" that this learning occurs. Yet if the problem of assigning causality is to be fully confronted, the concept of "circumstances" in this respect must be unpacked; we must return, in other words, to the categories of set and setting. The latter, it is true, has still to be examined. But in connection with the former, the often inferential character of the initiation of the learning process should again be emphasized. Situated at the invitational edge of the phenomenon and confronted by behaviour which — at least so far as he is concerned — represents something of what he might hope to experience himself were he to indulge, the neophyte marijuana user pieces together his own set of expectations about the drug's likely effects. In the light of these he literally, as Matza put it, "makes up his mind" about it. This he has to do since, contrary to some formulations,

. . the being who is converted is a subject. He engages his milieu and the others in it, grapples with them, considers their beliefs, tries their style, anticipates or imagines the place he will have among them, and worries about whether choosing them will preclude others . . . The subject who experiences conversion, like the sociologist utilizing the notion, has made a choice.' 2

The Complementarity of Cultural and Subcultural Imagery

Situated thus within the shifting and ill-defined parameters of one of the expressive traditions described, most probably to the exclusion of all meaningful contact with the other, the hippie marijuana user was also well placed to appreciate the parallelism between cultural and subcultural imagery of the kind mentioned. Cultural stereotypes of the drugtaker, he might have realized, were not merely the fabrications of hostile and ignorant media personnel and the control institutions whose interests they supposedly represent; nor were they solely the product of betrayal on the part of fellow drug users. Rather, they were grounded in and to some degree reflected — albeit in an exaggerated and perhaps distorted form — certain observable characteristics of behaviour within the drug-using subculture itself. In this respect, the two dominant traditions within the subculture can be said to have stood in a dialectical relationship to the cultural stereotypes mentioned, simultaneously providing substance to them and — to the extent that drug users incorporated them into their own behaviour — being affected by them.

There were, nevertheless, important differences between the two sets of imagery, and if the subject did in fact decide to embrace the phenomenon — if, that is, he did accept the joint when it was finally passed to him and did, moreover, learn both how to use it and how to identify its effects — he would almost certainly have become aware of these. For whereas cultural imagery, predictably, addressed itself primarily to the apparent changes of behaviour associated with marijuana use, which typically (as we have seen already) were regarded as undesirable, the subcultural imagery laid primary emphasis upon changes in experience, which might or might not — depending upon circumstances, motivation and, if necessary, the user's skill in maintaining self-control — be reflected in behavioural changes. To be more specific: whereas protagonists of the dominant cultural imagery typically viewed marijuana itself as being in some way responsible for what appeared to be mindless hedonism or a regrettable loss of inhibitions, the more sophisticated members of the marijuana-using subculture would probably have emphasised that the individuals concerned were acting in that manner quite deliberately, and that their drug use was of only incidental significance. Similarly, they would have been likely to argue that behaviour which looked like passivity or drugged, vegetable-like inertia to the uninitiated observer was in fact merely the outward (and therefore irrelevant) expression of an intensity of subjective experience which the unfortunate prisoner of "straight", conventional thinking could never hope even to understand, still less appreciate. Certainly, they would have vehemently rejected the characterizations of themselves apparent in many of the attempts made by representatives of the conventional world to "make sense" of their activity. For a final example of these, one might refer to a press report on the 1970 Isle of Wight Pop Festival carrying as its title the unambiguous pronouncement "They've turned their backs on life,' in which the "obvious" rationality and unbiased intelligence of the news reporter who compiled it is contrasted with the apparent vacuity and feeblemindedness of the festival-goers. Sharing joints and listening to music which the reporter himself admits to finding incomprehensible, the latter are described as "giggling at the most stupid remarks", then becoming "glassy-eyed, as if a million miles away". The reporter tells us that after two hours he had had enough, and left feeling "bewildered". For him, as doubtless for many of his subsequent readers, the whole thing was clearly a complete mystery, with the most disturbing implications for any assessment of the state of the nation's youth. "Why", he asks finally, "should thousands of young people be happy to channel their talents into nothingness?"

It should be pointed out, however, that many of those who at or around this time decided in favour of marijuana use — and thus became fully aware of the kinds of misconceptions upon which the cultural images or stereotypes were based — were likely to have viewed these with a certain degree of scepticism in the first place. Because of the closeness of their affiliation to the bohemian subculture and, correspondingly, the extent of their exposure to — and identification with — the values and lifestyles of those whom it embraced, subcultural imagery will inevitably have tended to dominate their thinking about the effects of the drug. In a manner similar to that suggested by Edwin Sutherland in his well-known theory of differential association,' 4 but acknowledging the subject's ability to choose between conflicting sets of social definitions, such imagery will have tended to provide such individuals with a means not just of neutralizing cultural imagery of the kinds mentioned, but of substantially replacing it.

Now until the late 1960s, it might have been possible to conclude this section at this point and move on to a consideration of the kinds of settings in which these different types of imagery became translated into the changes in experience and behaviour commonly associated with marijuana use. By the early 1970s, however, there seemed to be little doubt that when compared with the total number of those who had ever sampled marijuana, those who could in any way be identified as bohemian users constituted an increasingly small minority . Since it clearly has a decisive bearing upon the validity of the analysis thus far presented, this warrants a little elaboration.

The Growing Disjunction Between Subcultures

As we have already seen, the numbers of people in both this country and the United States who have at least sampled marijuana are generally conceded to have increased substantially over the recent period. In view of this, the reader may justifiably have remarked upon the implicit static bias of all the characterizations of the phenomenon of marijuana use so far discussed. To the best of my knowledge, very little of the available literature on the hippie subculture — even if it acknowledges the contradictions and inconsistencies within it — has attempted to examine the changes in the social meanings (and thus the kinds of experiences) associated with the use of marijuana which may have occurred as a result of its increasing diffusion throughout the social structure. Because the activity has apparently been linked in most of these accounts with membership of a particular (i.e. bohemian) subculture, it has too often been assumed that a diffusion of the former would necessarily be accompanied or followed by a growth of the latter. Such, indeed, was the assumption underpinning the fervour and dedication with which subcultural members themselves initially proselytized the activity ; committed as they were to a totally idealist philosophy whose central tenets fostered the notion that "dropping out" was a natural sequel to "turning on" and "tuning in", it was widely believed that a thoroughgoing social revolution could be accomplished merely through "turning people on" or secretly "putting acid (LSD) in the water supply".3

Such optimism was short-lived, however: for despite the sustained growth in the extent of marijuana use this patently did not happen. "The diffusion of marijuana to a wider public did not create the Love Generation prophesied".3 6 Whilst it is undoubtedly true that some of the more superficial manifestations of bohemianism were expropriated by those (otherwise wholly respectable) persons who wished to imbue their occasional potsmoking sessions with an aura of subterranean "in-group" trendiness or what Tom Wolfe has aptly termed "radical chic", there is no evidence at all that significant inroads were made into the consumption ethic throughout society as a whole, or that respectable businessmen began selling up their property and swarming in droves to rural communes. On the contrary, far from being antithetical to the Good Life, potsmoking has been reputed by many to merely enhance it.3 7 Increasingly, in other words, it became apparent that the boundaries of the subcultures of marijuana use and bohemianism were by no means coterminous.

Now this growing disjunction between the peripheries of the marijuana using and bohemian (or hippie) subcultures had important implications. On the one hand, it meant that the neophyte marijuana user increasingly tended to find himself detached from the distinctive kinds of imagery which the bohemian subculture itself provided its members. Rather than being influenced exclusively by one of the expressive traditions mentioned, he was likely to a greater or lesser degree to be exposed to both. Alternatively, or in addition, he might have sought guidance from the proliferating body of published testimonies and supposedly scientific studies on the effects of the drug. But in both cases the clear association of marijuana use with a particular (and from his point of view probably undesirable) lifestyle was increasingly likely to be replaced by the rather more ambiguous — and thus, as we shall see, problematic — notion that the drug in some way "heightens awareness".3 8

A weakening of the impact of subcultural imagery was one important consequence of the "centrifugal" diffusion of marijuana use. But it is clearly not the only one: for the process of subcultural dislocation that it entailed also rendered the neophyte user more vulnerable to cultural imagery of the kinds mentioned. However, the dominant image here was likely to be that which associated marijuana with disinhibition. There are a number of reasons for this, some of which — as I shall suggest presently — are situational ones having to do with the partial suspension of "normal" social constraints and the subject's desire to signify his appreciation of the drug's effects. But in the present context there are at least three factors which warrant mention: firstly, the neophyte will increasingly have tended to be someone who was already quite well acquainted with the disinhibiting effects of alcohol and whose preconceptions concerning appropriate behaviour when intoxicated would to a correspondingly greater extent have been formulated in the light of these. Secondly, due partly to the absence of clear subcultural directives and partly to the widespread tendency to romanticize the unknown, he was increasingly likely to draw upon the more pervasive commonsense belief that a drug necessarily "does" something to one — a belief which his initiators (if any) were themselves unlikely to repudiate, especially if (as was likely) they were concerned with countering his misgivings for having taken it. Thirdly, and most important, is the fact that the alternative cultural image, that of passivity and stupefied inertia, has consistently tended to be more closely associated with heavy or prolonged use: as the so-called "amotivation syndrome"39 and the press material cited earlier both indicate, people were generally thought either to become progressively transformed into helpless and unresponsive vegetables through marijuana use, or to have chosen the drug because they wished to escape into a state of mindless oblivion in the first place. In neither case was the imputed motive one of enjoyment, hedonism or self-realization, and in neither case was the image of marijuana's effects likely to be a particularly appealing one to the neophyte. Instead, I suggest, the cultural image of disinhibition was likely to predominate. Given an appropriate situational context of the kind that I shall outline in the next chapter, it is this image which the kind of behaviour that followed would be most likely to reflect.

Although difficult to substantiate, some evidence for the validity of this latter proposition can be derived from studies of the behaviour of neophyte users whose lives have been relatively untouched by either of the subcultural traditions I have described. Writing as long ago as 1938, well before the emergence of an identifiable Beat subculture split into "hot" and "cool" elements, R. P. Walton for example remarked that:

The neophyte usually is ecstatically euphoric, laughs loudly and has an increased appetite and thirst. A subject who has taken it for say two years is much more repressed in his laughter and general boisterousness.4°

Based upon an exhaustive programme of research begun in the same year, although not finally published until 1944, the oft-cited La Guardia report on the "Marijuana Problem in the City of New York" documented a similar tendency. Discussing the findings of the important clinical section which deals with the differences in "emotional reactions and general personality structure" between marijuana users and non-users, the report states that:

When the subjects were "high", particularly in the case of the non-user, there was a general loss of inhibition and lessening of many social restraints which had previously been exercised. Thus, all the men talked much more freely, confronted each other more directly, and manifested a state of well-being at times amounting to euphoria. They were much more confiding, talked spontaneously about love and sensual affairs, and in two instances exposed themselves and masturbated.4 1

Now this latter form of behaviour is almost certainly atypical by any standards, and may be partially due to the fact that the men selected for participation in this clinical study were all prisoners. Indeed, the report itself concedes this possibility, noting that
. . the behaviour of these prisoners was more like that which any men deprived of sexual activity for a long period of time would display under a releasing stimulus and not at all like the behaviour shown at marijuana 'tea-pads' ".42 Such an admission clearly does much to undermine the usefulness of the findings presented in this section of the report. At the same time, however, it underlines the point I am arguing here: for even if we ignore the apparent correlation between unfamiliarity with marijuana use and uninhibited behaviour, the fact that the individuals concerned in this case were prisoners makes it difficult to view such differences in behaviour as responses to emergent "hot" and "cool" traditions within bohemia, unrecognized as such at the time.

Even so, it might be thought that the apparent existence of such differences in the late 1930s provides a poor guide to the analysis of the drug scene in the early 1970s, being merely a product of the grossly romanticized conceptions of the effects of marijuana prevalent at the time and the relative absence of a strong supportive subculture capable of neutralizing these. However, a similar pattern has been detected by the more recent studies such as those by Tart, Grinspoon and Hochman.'" In each case the behaviour of regular or long-term users was reported to be typically more restrained and subdued than that of the neophyte. In each case, moreover, the study has been carried out sufficiently recently and (at least so far as Hochman's research is concerned) based upon a sufficiently large and heterogeneous sample to disallow interpretation of these findings in terms of the traditional categories of hot and cool bohemianism.

The fact that such differences thus appear to have been correlated with different stages in the career of the individual marijuana user, whether or not he may have had any close links with the bohemian subculture, is something which clearly requires explanation, if only in order to combat the possible drift back toward essentialist theories of the long-term consequences of using marijuana. For it is clearly not difficult for those anxious to defend the existing illegal or officially deviant status of the drug to cite such differences as evidence of its pernicious long-term effects. Consider for example the following extract from the 1972 report of the United States National Commission of Marijuana and Drug Abuse, in which the typical behaviour of "moderate" and "heavy" marijuana users is being compared with that of "experimental" and "intermittent" users:

The social adjustment of the daily users, when judged from a traditional psychiatric viewpoint, was impaired. Individuals tended to be more withdrawn and to interact less with each other than the intermittent users, regardless of the type of activity or state of intoxication .4 4

From the conventional standpoint this statement can be interpreted in one of two ways: either it can be used to enhance the plausibility of the notion, discussed earlier, that marijuana use may result in cerebral atrophy or a "permanent softening of the brain", whereby people become progressivley transformed into inert and passive vegetables; or it can be regarded as lending support to the prevalent psychiatric belief that it is only people who are socially maladjusted who are likely to become regular marijuana users anyway.
Now the acceptance of either viewpoint as they stand would, I believe, be profoundly mistaken. In order for them to be effectively repudiated, however, it is necessary to examine the career of what — in view of the kinds of processes mentioned — might reasonably be considered as the most typical kind of marijuana user during the period under review: the person who had been exposed to and had to some extent internalized the differing images of the effects of the drug that the original subculture of marijuana use had disseminated (if only in the form of the elliptical and truncated notion that it heightens awareness), but whose own values and lifestyle were not influenced by this subculture to the extent that his drug use constituted a central symbolic component of his daily existence. Even if it is only possible to do this is an ideal-typical fashion, the analysis of such an individual's career as a marijuana user will, I believe, necessitate the formulation of a somewhat different account of the relationship between those forms of behaviour traditionally characterized as "hot" and "cool" hedonism. It will also, I hope to demonstrate, reveal something of the subtlety with which the social control of marijuana use could inhibit the pleasurability of the activity. However, in order to understand the process whereby expectations about the effects of marijuana did in fact become translated into changes in subjective experience, it is necessary first to outline the significant properties of the social situation in which the drug was likely to be used. In doing this, I shall temporarily abandon the past tense that I have predominantly utilised hitherto: partly for reasons of simplifying a sometimes rather complex argument, but partly also so as to confront on its own terms at least one important sociological theory about the process of identifying and enjoying the effects of marijuana which, as I shall seek to show in chapters 5 and 6, remains analytically impoverished precisely because it fails to take the historical dimension and its implications sufficiently into account.

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