Drug Abuse

It is particularly apt that a cultural anthropologist should consider the nature and significance of student drug use and its most extreme development, the hippie scene. Such phenomena, whether transient or more lasting, constitute a social movement. Such movements are grist to the mill of modern anthropologists, whose work is now characterized by its concepts and approach rather than, as formerly, by a subject matter limited to remote and primitive peoples. Yet these earlier anthropological predilections are relevant to the present case. The hippies see themselves as a "subculture" outside of, apart from, our ordinary society which is the "straight" world. They see their way of living, especially its communal aspects and "tribes," as a return to simpler and more primitive social forms. Importantly, the straight world also tends to see the hippie scene as remote and strange—therefore, as interesting but curious, nonsensical but threatening, especially when the remote does not stay nicely and safely separate but impinges on the "normal," proper, everyday world by attracting interested inquirers and potential converts from among its young sons and daughters.

There is a further connection to anthropology. Among the hippies and other young drug experimenters, the experience of drugs, and other especially novel, interesting, or gratifying experiences is commonly referred to as "a trip." An anthropologist can hardly hear this word in such a connection without being reminded of those field trips that, although engaged in consciously and deliberately for purposes of research, become a central part of his personal life as well as of his professional career. There are very basic reasons for this response. As Gregory Bateson once said, "In the social sciences, when you put a probe into any human situation, the other end always sticks into you." A field trip, especially, means going out into the midst of a new and strange situation, not merely observing but necessarily becoming involved in a way of living and thinking that is unfamiliar, and being influenced by it. And that is not all. The anthropologist's return from the field to his normal haunts is equally important ;it may be a comparably difficult adjustment or—as many Peace Corps workers have also found—even one more difficult. One is changed by the trip; this may be and often is felt by the anthropologist as broadening, as enlightenment. Yet, that does not remove, or even lessen, the problem of using this enlightenment in the old context or of achieving some integration.

The descriptions by drug users of their "trips" in both nature and functions correspond to this point for point, except that their trips are directed more toward an inner world than a different outer world —though this is largely a matter of explicit emphases and degree; certainly the hippies also explore a different social World, and anthropologists also encounter a new world of inner experience, as Bohannon (1954) describes so well, although they play this down in their usual professional discourse. We may well question whether the drug takers will achieve their stated goals, although their methods have many precedents in other cultures, but we can hardly question the stated aims of their trips—like those of the anthropologist—to explore a new world and to bring back from it new knowledge (or perhaps old knowledge rediscovered) which will be valuable for better living, for themselves or others.

An account focusing on those who take trips must except those who do not; thus, persons taking drugs outside the drug movement- as, for example, those who seek "kicks" only—are tentatively classified as a different order of problem. Very possibly that group is of less social significance despite the anxiety surrounding what they do. Even so, we must remember that the search for kicks itself can be an aspect or avenue in searching for the nature and meaning of life. As for the question of whether drug trippers will ever return to the world from which they have departed—have the hippies "gone native" to stay?— its consideration will be deferred. For the moment, it is enough to say that just as the spectrum of exploring travelers is wide, from tourists through anthropologists to various sorts of permanent expatriates, so is the spectrum of drug travelers, and there, too, the ultimate expatriates certainly will be a small minority. The great majority, on whom our practical social concern must focus, though not necessarily our inquiry, probably are not even at the center of the scale, engaged in field trips, but are only tourists despite common fears that even these will somehow lose their way.

This chapter does not propose to focus mainly on whether the drug users will succeed in their quest by such means. Since all life is largely a search for the good life—yet, what is tried is always marked by great variety from place to place and time to time—this question ultimately seems unanswerable. At most, we may, in deference to the anxieties this type of search has raised in our society, consider whether it dooms its advocates generally, not just to a specific failure and disappointment but to a foreclosure of chances for any other exploration. The more major focus here, however, will be on a question which is experientially, logically, and practically prior. What are the sources of the remarkable current proliferation of people—especially the young —who are taking this particular avenue of drugs? What is the attraction of psychedelic drug taking in general (or perhaps the repulsion from something else that propels in this direction) and of the hippie movement as its extreme form?

It has always been a fundamental part of the anthropologist's job to produce some account of "strange native behavior" that would make sense to those who never left home, with the additional hope that such an account might seem accurate and acceptable even to literate natives as well. This task is more difficult when the two cultures involved are mutually rather hostile, and especially so when they are largely composed of parents on one side and their children on the other. Nevertheless, this is still the aim here. Any answers proffered to the above questions—or, more realistically, any interpretation of the drug movement—will be essentially anthropologically based (though nowadays this may include considerable psychological viewing), and this in two senses.

In the first place, the anthropological analogy of field trips and drug "trips" permeates much of this chapter as a general model for explanatory organization, though sometimes only in the background, and it will be pushed one step further specifically: it seems potentially enlightening to consider in a general way why anthropologists get involved in their own trips, as suggestive of possible motivations (and their interrelations) for taking trips out of the known into the unknown—or, better, the partially unknown, since both in anthropology and the drug movement considerable guidance and structuring from the more experienced members exist.

The other and larger part of this inquiry is an anthropological analysis of available data on the drug movement itself, in this case hippies and semihippies. These data were gathered from November 1966 to early 1968. The hippies represent the full flowering of the drug movement, and here, as elsewhere, the study of extremes or concentrated forms is likely to be especially illuminating about significant things to observe in more "everyday" examples, where they are less vivid and visible. As parallel examples, we may recall the value of studying psychopathology for psychology generally, and the value of studying ceremonies in anthropology as clues to everyday patterns of roles and ideas.

The data sources include, first, field-work sampling from a variety of settings and situations. One weekend was spent at a hippie camping area on the Big Sur coast. A number of visits were made to the major hippie colony in the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco, observing the public scene in the streets, shops, and hangouts and visiting with some of them in their pads. The movement, like other subcultures, has a ceremonial life, so several of the "be-ins" held in San Francisco and Palo Alto and Dr. Timothy Leary's public "Psychedelic Celebration" were attended. Music and art are usually closely related to ceremonies culturally, and the importance of posters and rock bands in the psychedelic scene is well known; accordingly, visits were made to the dances and light shows at the Fillmore and Avalon ballrooms (supplementing this with attention to records of music said to be especially pertinent or popular) and to exhibits of psychedelic art.

Considerable focused interview material was gathered (although drug users generally seem not very communicative verbally) in many settings, ranging from arranged interviews in an office setting, through group meetings with high school students as part of an official county inquiry into drug use, to talks with hippie hitchhikers while driving. In particular, these materials included a number of interviews with young drug users together with their parents in conjoint family therapy; of these about half the cases were my own, while the other half were tape recordings made available to me, with family permission, by James Sorrells. Information was also obtained from secondary but knowledgeable sources, including professional conferences, meetings with Haight-Ashbury observers, and so on.'

There was also much written material to be sampled. Highly relevant was the output of the movement itself, such as the San Francisco Oracle, the Berkeley Barb, and the Los Angeles Free Press, as well as Ashleigh Brilliant's Haight-Ashbury Songbook and hippie manifestos or notices. Of a different order were floods of journalistic reports about the drug scene. Although some of these were distinctly useful, the chief value of most such reports probably lies not in their "facts" but in their reflection of the attitudes of the straight social world about the drug movement. In addition, there have been many careful and reasonably accurate objective studies of drugs and their psychopharmacology, but, until now, much less examination of the drug movement or its wider context Finally, there were fictional interpretations of aspects of this scene, ranging all the way from Stegner's (1967) All the Little Live Things to Welles' (1967) Babyhip.

It is plain that these data sources comprise a mixed bag, but this is common in anthropology—though even more so in real life. Anthropology aims to bring sense and order out of the chaos which results, mainly, from apparent strangeness, contradictions, and disjunctions in human affairs. The problem is primarily one of interpreting confusing data rather than one of lacking information—certainly so for the drug movement. The anthropological method for doing this interpretation really is not a matter of detailed recipes or techniques but consists in a general approach. This approach rests mostly on openness to new observations and ideas—a willingness to take the unusual or supposedly trivial equally seriously with what is familiar and authoritative, to accept observable facts and relationships which ordinarily have been left out, ignored, suppressed, or denied. Somewhat more specifically, it attempts to make the strange more understandable by looking at it in relation to its own contexts and by pointing out connections or analogies to more familiar matters, to reduce or eliminate disjunctions by looking deliberately for new logical or phenomenal connections, and to make contradictions more intelligible by recognizing that in human affairs things can be both "yes and no" or "this yet that"—for example, taking drugs can be both "rational" and "irrational," depending on the context and viewpoint. However, since this is not a chapter on methodology, let us not labor further at describing the anthropological ways of proceeding from varied data toward a unified interpretation,2 but let it show forth, hopefully, in an analysis of the motivations—and, to some extent, the probable consequences—of the student drug movement.

Earlier we said something about the nature of the field-trip experience for anthropologists, but our analogy must now be concerned with a different order of question: Why do anthropologists engage in this activity? After all, field trips involve experiences which are largely unpredictable; they can be, and often are, physically and psychically uncomfortable and may even be dangerous. What are the adequate reasons? Why not just stay home? No certain answers can be given even here.' Yet some information and speculations are available, and the picture that can be developed from these is useful for approaching the parallel questions about drug trips and the drug movement.

The main feature of anthropology, traditionally, is quite obvious. This profession has always involved leaving one's own culture. Field trips, in fact, are only the most extreme and specific form of this; even the library-armchair anthropologists of an older era were, in their minds, also voyagers to strange and far places. Yet this fundamental matter itself is full of contradictions, even paradoxes. Have anthropologists really been members of their culture to start with? Considering this question merely at a simple overt level, it has often been noted that a striking proportion of American anthropologists have been immigrants, Jews, or women—all in some sense only partial members of the American culture. Recently, perhaps, this overt disproportion has been less, but there is good reason to believe that, more covertly and psychologically, anthropologists still tend to be marginal members of their society even before they join the profession.

Once they begin to join the profession, however, further departure from the general culture is encouraged by the demands of this profession itself. That is, becoming an anthropologist, assuming attitudes of critical interest toward the variety of social arrangements observable in the world, and going on field trips are not purely a matter of individual interest and inclination, though these are important. Every anthropologist has a variety of personal interests for such work, ranging from curiosity about human living or desires to make life better to wishes for wider experience, and perhaps for personal challenges and proving himself. In that respect the difficulties and uncertainties of field work may be viewed positive/y. Beyond, or surrounding, such personal motivations, however, are professional motivations which are more clearly social. Field trips are important for the anthropologist not only for what he can learn by them—and this is great—but also as a ritual validating his status as a real anthropologist, a member of this socialized in-group, in contrast to other groups and American society as a Whole. It is likely that this, too, is all the more true because the field trip, like drug experience and hippie living, is not all directly pleasant and positive in nature but includes important elements of ordeal.

Yet, despite all this, even as the anthropologist departs for the distant field of some strange society, he carries along much of his own native culture, often more than he recognizes. After all, how could our cultural valuation of scientific inquiry be more dramatically demonstrated and reinforced than by carrying it on at the ends of the earth among people who care nothing for it? Perhaps, thus, anthropologists in their own way of not "going native" even surpass those legendary Englishmen who dress for dinner in the jungle. The practical means of travel and exploration—for the anthropologist, largely physical—also reflect the inescapable society of origin; the field worker does not climb into a native dugout canoe until he has gone as far as he can by plane and steamship, and he carries along his professional tools—once simply notebooks and cameras, but now tape recorders and testing materials—to places where they never belonged before. Even if the ultimate and broadest aim of the anthropologist, on returning from the field, is to change and improve his own world, this aim, no matter how revolutionary, is defined in relation to and against the context of the society he has originally known.

The simple question "Why take trips?" leads first to considering the starting point. What is being departed from, and what is unsatisfactory about that place? Where is the traveler aiming to go, and what does he want to do there? What is the positive attraction of the goal? These questions should be in the plural form; the anthropological example already makes it plain that multiple functions are served by the trip. Also, we have seen the need for a further and more sophisticated question, "What does the traveler take along, perhaps unrecognized?" Necessarily, too, the general question "Why?" cannot be separated either from "What?" or from "How?" In the most obvious instance, on the basis of their means alone drug trips would usually be conceived and evaluated quite differently from anthropological field trips. This raises a further point, and one of considerable scope and complexity. In any attempt to explain behavior, the question "Why?" by itself is necessarily inherently biased in favor of maintaining a status quo assumed to be a normal and natural resting point. The question about the travelers must therefore be balanced by an inquiry of "Why not?" to clarify the attitudes of the stay-at-homes who have labeled the trips as a "problem." If this problem label is to be accepted as reason enough for an inquiry, it is only reasonable to examine its own background also. "Why not?" therefore is necessary to clarify what sort of a question the "Why?" is.

These several questions are basically a general explanatory structure, a set of labeled and interrelated, but empty, boxes. We must now begin to fill these boxes with content by looking at available data on the drug movement. In this effort three viewpoints need representation: that of the drug-using travelers, that of the straight stay-at-homes, and that of this observer and student. This last view draws on and brings in some factual data and observations from various sources, but progresses toward a general interpretation. Because of the limitations of data, space, and time, we shall not attempt here to fill out the explanatory schema completely. Rather, we shall focus first on what is either pervasive or prominent, what is emphasized about this movement by one party or another—and also on whatever may be conspicuous by its absence or avoidance, although the existence of opposing viewpoints already helps perform this function. This focus of attention on prominence will, however, be checked and balanced—that is, backstopped—by some systematic and persistent concern for considering: both the broad social scene and specific aspects within it; both observable behavior and verbalizations about it; both immediate activities and their presumed goals; and both social interaction and individual behavior and experience.

Since the drug movement is posed as a problem, we will begin by reviewing its nature and attempting to clarify its aims before approaching the more crucial matter of the contexts out of which it has arisen. Where are the young drug users traveling, anyway—both in the present sense, and in terms of their implicit and explicit goals? In the first place, although their evaluations of the two sides are poles apart, the straight and hippie worlds share a common belief that they stand opposed and distant from each other. By now this seems so obvious that it tends to be taken for granted; yet, as a central premise, it particularly needs careful examination. We will look first at the presumed opposition and separation, and later at what is common or interrelated.

Although particular aspects of the drug movement such as its philosophy of gentleness and nonviolence may be acknowledged as admirable if impractical ideals, in the eyes of the straight world this movement is viewed mainly as an aberration, in a fashion that is typical of our society's viewing of other behavior considered as aberrational, such as mental illness or extreme religious behavior. This basic conception is clearly implicit in typical statements which not only characterize the behavior of this movement's members as wrong, dangerous, and anxiety-provoking, but also label it as foolish and occurring without any good or understandable reasons, as in the common parental cry, "Why is my child doing all this when we've given him everything at home?" This conception, moreover, is not just a matter of negative attitudes and evaluation but a matter of negative cognition in the way the movement is labeled and described. That is, in general, the drug-using hippie world is characterized not directly but by contrast with what it is not—by how it differs from the straight world of normal American society. Such more direct and positive description of this world as there is focuses largely on the most specific and manifest features of the movement—drugs, costumes, music, and lights; therefore, it does little to get at the inherent general nature of the movement, at what might be called its cultural systems and premises.

If there is to be any blame for this shortcoming, however, it must be substantially shared by those on the hippie side, because the movement in large measure carries on its tasks of self-definition in much the same way as the straight world—that is, in terms of opposition to and contrast with the values and activities of ordinary American society. For the movement broadly this is communicated quite clearly by both verbal and nonverbal means. The hippies explicitly state their belief in dropping-out of usual society and forming a different, opposing subculture—in the terms of Lou Gottlieb of the hippies' Morningstar Ranch, an "alternate society." Drug use in particular is often specifically promoted as a means for breaking out of the ideational mold of straight society. And the life style of the movement is not only different, and stated to be different, but it is inescapably and observably different. There have always been considerable numbers of young people (but also quite a few older ones) who did not buy all the standard middle-class American beliefs and practices, but in the past most of them went their different ways more privately and sub rosa, individually or in small groups. Today, even the drug use of students is more of a group affair and less concealed from the adult world, while the hippie extreme makes one thing very clear: although the movement's aim may be stated as each person "doing his thing" as an individual, the doing occurs mainly on a group scale and whatever it is, it is pointedly different from usual American behavior—even before the sensation-minded mass media point this out further.

The same business of behaviorally insisting on difference and separateness from the straight world appears repeatedly in many more specific ways in the drug movement, whether or not this is claimed or denied as a conscious aim of these behaviors. The use of drugs by properly raised middle-class young people for purposes either of enlightenment or pleasure (although this must receive more analysis later) is only the central example. The practice of unashamed begging or other forms of dependence is clearly parallel to the unashamed use of drugs. The dress of the hippies, though sometimes also practical in terms of cheapness, obviously makes the same point about difference. Identification with the American Indians, just as with Eastern mystical experience and wisdom, equally involves a clear rejection of the culture of origin in favor of foreign models—regardless of whether these are really understood or not. The "love ethic" is strongly claimed not only to be at an opposite pole from an American culture viewed as competitive, hostile, and violent but, specifically, at the sexual level to contrast with middle-class precepts, if not always practices, enough so that many of the parents concerned are shocked. This list could be extended almost indefinitely—for example, "free stores" versus commercial enterprise may be mentioned as another polarity—but the pervasive emphasis on difference, opposition, and separation is already amply evident. That is, this is itself a central and fundamental principle of the movement, not just part of the straight world's jaundiced view.

This principle alone, however, is not enough to characterize the essential premises and basic nature of the movement. To make this characterization it is also necessary to see how the same general principle of distance and separateness or noninvolvement operates even within the movement itself, to view some of its secondary correlates or subprinciples, and to relate such broad orientations to the level of individual attitudes and behavior. This may now be approached by considering some of the movement's major social and individual goals. The drug movement has repeatedly been attacked as having no social goals: "OK, so you drop out to look after your own soul. But what about all the other problems in the world today? You're just escaping from them." But this is not quite the whole story; the movement does offer one social "answer," which also is alluded to in Leary's famous slogan, "Tune in—turn on—drop out." One should not only get with this scene himself, he should join with others, and they should then endeavor to turn on equally even the squares of the world. The significant point here is not whether this is possible or what problems would remain if it happened. Rather, it is the conception, partially but not wholly implicit, that the gap between the two opposed worlds can only be dealt with effectively by a process of conversion of the members of the establishment, so that they become fundamentally like-minded with the hip. The often-emphasized "communication gap" seems to be viewed as unbridgeable, at least by any ordinary verbal means such as confrontation of differences. What is still more striking, however, is that this "similarity principle"—essentially, that one can make real contact and get along only with those like oneself in values and attitudes, and not with those who are different—appears strongly even within the movement. Despite all the emphasized belief in freedom and doing one's thing, the hippie world ( and, significantly, also the peer group of student drug users) is very marked by its own kinds of conformity. This is perhaps most evident in terms of dress and drug use, but the hippie world also has its own moral standards and fixed conceptions of proper social behavior—in fact, quite rigid ones.

At the center of these is the "love ethic," especially as it applies to social relationships generally. The movement is, of course, much concerned with social relationships and even with ideas of building a new society—one of its main differences from the old beatnik movement—but its conception of this is very special and, in an important sense, very limited. First, "love" is seen as the sole valid basis for any positive human interaction. Any behavior which might influence or order human relationships by any other means—that is, any deliberate means, or even any influence from spontaneous expression of emotions such as anger—are conceived both as evil and doomed to ultimate failure. Obviously, this view is closely connected with the idea that positive social intercourse is limited to similar people, that little useful contact and communication is possible with those who are different. Acting on this view, one would have to abandon not only government but even psychotherapy—except that new schools of therapy oriented around similar conceptions are now springing up.

Second, the conception of "love" involved here is also a very special one. Although often spoken of, the hippie idea of love is vague and hard to clarify. It is evident, however, that this "love" is centered in the individual, connected with one's personal achievement of self-knowledge and realization of harmony with the entire universe—"consciousness expansion" by drugs, meditation, or otherwise—and harmonious social relationships are seen as mainly a natural resultant of the achievement of this similarly by many individuals, in parallel yet essentially separately. Or, as the Beatles' guru put it in a recent interview, "'I've been going around the world with my message of inner peace for the individual, and thereby attempting to create a natural state of world peace for all men.' He explained that through meditation . . . the body relaxes and the mind expands and tensions and frustrations float away. And it is individual tensions and frustrations, he said, that collectively lead to war."'

In other words, the main focus is on the individual and his relation to the world, globally, rather than on the specifics of one person's relationship to another or others. This basically individual-internal focus is characteristic of many aspects of the movement. Most notably, of course, it accords with the dominant role of drug use, for whether drugs are used for enlightenment or for "kicks," the focus is on inner experience. The same orientation exists in the movement's interest in inwardly-focused Eastern philosophies and religions, and in the often espoused aim of life as "self-actualization." That inward focus ties back logically and behaviorally to the major theme of separateness. Aside from getting "high," the state that is claimed most desirable is "keeping one's cool"—the "hang-loose" ethic that is perhaps much more widespread among young people today than the drug movement specifically. It almost seems that the only alternative envisioned, if this noninvolvement is lost, is becoming "uptight." That is, not only is manipulation seen as necessarily bad—except influencing another by "love"—but there is also little conception that commitment and intense feelings, especially toward another person, might be positive or desirable. And, indeed, personal relationships among the hippies, though pleasant and easy-going, often appear as cool and thin, as essentially transient—not necessarily brief, but never necessarily lasting. This even appears true of "love" in the specifically sexual sense, although the amount of free sexual activity (even this may be overestimated) makes it hard for the straight world, hung up on a mixture of moral disapproval and secret envy, to see that the amount of personal involvement is limited. The same impression is produced by a visit to the Avalon or the Fillmore Ballroom; in these large halls, crowded with dancers and listeners, there is amazingly little contact, physical or verbal.

Much of the above was summed up in a more concrete and personal form in the course of an interview with two sisters who were hitchhiking from Big Sur to Carmel. One asked me what I thought was the main aim in life. My answer was "To handle my relationships with other people well," meaning this to include both the pleasant and the difficult relationships that anyone must encounter. The elder sister demurred and stated her own aim as "self-actualization." I raised some question how this could be done without effective dealings with others, which, in turn, led to her view that often such dealings are impossible—in particular with her own parents. I inquired about them; there was little doubt from her description that they were very difficult people. But when I made the suggestion, based on a considerable experience with families in conjoint therapy together, that there were several possible ways she could deal with them better—not by submission but by being more active and exerting more influence on them—she would not entertain this idea at all. Her one view was that the only answer for her lay in as complete separation from them as possible; she persisted in this view even when I suggested that one has to get together with people to a certain extent even to get away from them.

In attempting to bring out some central aspects of the drug movement and put them together in a new way, the preceding account has been one-sided and unfair in not viewing this movement in relation to the straight society which it opposes and from which, after all, it derives. It will take some time to balance out the picture by giving an account of some features the two worlds share despite their opposition, and then of the social contexts of the movement. Until this can be done, it should be stated explicitly that most of the features of the movement pointed out rather critically here also have important positive value in emphasizing things neglected in our society or in opposing things overdone. Moreover, even where the movement's own emphases appear excessive or misdirected, these "irrationalities" are themselves usually rooted in the social situations from which the hippies began their journeys.

What are the drug users taking along on their journey from their starting points in middle-class America? Any detailed answer would require some close examination of the point of departure, which is yet to come; here we intend only to present a few examples and some general principles about change and continuity, to suggest that continuity and similarity are much more prevalent than is apparent on the surface. Indeed, although both the straight world and that of the drug movement make such a point of their difference and distance, basic similarities have appeared already. For instance, the hippies' insistence that the parental world of the supposed Establishment can contact them only by "turning on" themselves is the exact counterpart of what the young people recurrently complain of bitterly, with considerable justification—that they can only get together with their parents if they behave according to the parents' terms and standards.

The standards and evaluations are in opposition, but underlying both positions is the common premise that contact depends on likeness.

The observer comparing two social positions or sets of practices should not expect all-or-none identities. Thus, upon finding, as in the foregoing, an overt difference with covert similarity, we must not stop there. We must also ask whether there are overt similarities and covert differences. The quality of life and personal relations, for example, is thin in the middle-class and in the hippie group, but quite possibly for very different reasons. It is also well to examine apparent opposites most closely for, as in mirror images, these may be complementary. Denial, for instance, suggests the probability of a connection with what is denied.

The matter of extremism is especially interesting because the hippie culture appears to be typified by extremes. On the one hand, there are the numerous apparent extremes of rejection of prominent features of ordinary American life—commercialism, material comforts, and alcohol, to mention only a few. On the other, and less noticed, side, many central features of the hippie culture represent extremes of acceptance of old, established American traits or values—such as taking seriously beliefs in love, individual freedom, equality, and social harmony. Even the importance attached to drug use in the movement is largely visible as an extreme acceptance of ordinary American valuation of drugs, plus certain shifts of focus that we discuss later. In addition, a further point of connection is recognizable. On an outside viewing, American culture itself appears as extremist in many important respects, such as its emphasis on success, on material comfort, and on social conformity rather than individuality; it could even be said that middle-class America is extremist about moderation and rationality. To sum up, if one is comparing these two worlds not to isolate and attack one side or the other, but rather to understand and move toward some resolution of conflict, he must be wary of the illusion of alternatives; apparent opposites may in fact be closely related and fundamentally similar. To return to a familiar but central example, the view that there is a basic gap between similarity and contact on the one hand, and difference and distance on the other is largely shared, though in opposing specific manifestation, by the drug and straight worlds. Both of their versions, however, are very different from the third view that human relationships always necessarily involve some mixture of differences and similarities, distance and contact, with communication as a complex but versatile tool to be used for making connections.

Moving on, one asks what are the means of travel involved in going to or with the drug scene and in taking trips within it? How are the means related to the goals, and to the points of departure? The strikingly evident features of the movement's life style, such as its argot, hair styles, styles of dress which are really costumes, the intense noise level of the music, the manner of housing and being together, and the business of food and self-care, have multiple significance. They may be seen as characteristic values of the hippies which then become goals of those joining the scene; their adoption becomes the means for becoming a hippie or, for semihippies, expressing a predilection. Further, they are the devices which establish, maintain, and dramatize the difference and the distance between the straight world and the hippie world. These aspects are extreme, appear extreme, and yet in contextual analysis function much like the professional attitudes and practices which characterize the anthropologist's initiation and early career.

Just as the anthropologist may go only to a local ethnic perhaps farther to the Indians of the American Southwest, or still farther to the interior of New Guinea, the journey of participation in the society of the drug movement is also a matter of degrees and stages. A large number of youth never travel beyond occasional use of marijuana (and, in fewer numbers, LSD), rather quietly and inconspicuously in their own peer groups and within their local communities. Some go on with more drug use and greater display of other aspects of the related life style to become hangers-on or week-end hippies, and fewer still—though certainly enough to be very visible and disturbing to the straight world--become full-time hippies. Yet, as the field worker in interior New Guinea still maintains some contact with his home base, even this last group not only takes along aspects of the straight world but maintains some contact with it. Some otherwise thorough-going hippies receive financial support from the families they have left—remindful of the old English custom of the family black sheep's becoming a remittance man. Even the most detached and independent members of the movement still live within the physical and social boundaries of American society and, therefore, cannot be completely detached from it. One may even question seriously whether they really want to be—some contact is necessary to make a point of being separate and distant.

The use of psychedelic drugs is the chief means of entry into the movement, the chief means of "trips" within it, and a chief means of characterizing the drug world and differentiating it from the straight world. Accordingly, the use of drugs is also central for the evaluations made of the movement, from both sides. It is probable that drug users overrate the value of drugs and that their opponents overrate their dangers. Also—and in line with our society's tendency to be more concerned with the special, spectacular, or sensational than with what is important simply because it is ordinary and pervasive—both sides may focus on the matter of drugs so strongly as to neglect broader and even more basic aspects of the movement. Nevertheless, drug use exists as a central emphasis, and it is correspondingly important now to look at its nature and social context.

American society is very much a drug-using society. That observation solves one problem, but it makes two others more acute. The American reliance on drugs in conjunction with easy availability of psychedelic agents obviously gives such drugs a head start as a means for the movement's purposes. But, on the other hand, why should a movement centering around opposition to the straight world adopt oneof its favorite agents? And when drugs are adopted, why should the straight society object so violently? The answer to both questions lies in the fact that while drugs as such are culturally accepted, the kind of usage promoted by the movement is opposite to what is culturally approved. In American culture drugs are acceptable and approved essentially when used to relieve some kind of pain, illness, or disability or, more generally, to help bring a person from some negative state toward or up to a condition seen as "normal." The disabilities countered by drugs usually are medical or psychiatric, although they may be social as well. For instance, it may be more or less all right for a student to take stimulants to meet the specially rigorous demands of examination week or for a tense hostess to have a pick-me-up to help her greet guests properly. In general, however, for drug use to be acceptable in cases of disability, the disability should be involuntary—that is, "not the person's own fault." Also, although the principles are the same, the rules are applied with more leeway in the case of drugs which are not culturally defined as drugs—tobacco and alcohol being the prime examples. Consequently, the latter drugs may be used to enhance "normal" social behavior or to provide or even justify the release of "normal" but ordinarily "unacceptable" impulses such as aggression, sex, or tenderness.

In the drug movement, on the contrary, the drugs used are "real drugs" and their use is clearly and explicitly stated to be for the purpose of going beyond the normal, to get "high," whether this high is viewed as "consciousness expansion" or just "kicks." This statement may not be altogether accurate, and it would be interesting to speculate on the public reaction if the members of the movement said they were just trying to get back to normal with these drugs after being made miserable and sickened by social forces—but they have defined the situation otherwise, as one for which drug use is not tolerated in our particular society.

It appears, however, that the proscription of drug use in our society is about as indirect as the prescription, and both are justified on much the same grounds, which are almost exclusively an anxious concern about someone's physical or mental health. In the case of the psychedelics, this dominant orientation seems to account for trie extreme extent to which parental and social interest in the movement is focused on the possible hazards of drug use—the only other comparable focus is on young people's behaving too independently, especially leaving home on their own—and on the accompanying conviction and insistence that these hazards must be serious. The drug users themselves find it easier to attribute these "over-thirty" attitudes to hypocrisy, stupidity, or ill-will rather than to acknowledge that everyone's views are culturally determined or that parents may be genuinely quite worried.

We do not mean to imply that there are no realistic hazards from drug use. In some cases these are clear and considerable. Equally clearly, however, fear of drug use often goes beyond realism. Indeed, the basic attitude that the use of drugs for positive enhancement of experience must be bad is so strong that the suggestion may be made quite seriously that if any drug exists or is found which delivers such results with no direct ill effects—no damage, no hang-ups, and no hang-overs—it would still be attacked, and quite possibly even more strongly, by denial of the facts or the invention of new grounds for objection, if necessary. Such may already be the case for marijuana, which is probably the safest drug, yet is the most savagely attacked of the psychedelics.

The view that concern about the possible specific hazards of drugs is partly nonrational, perhaps even a screen or substitute for other concerns, is also supported by two more concrete lines of observation. In the first place, there is much more concern about drug hazards than about a similar degree of hazard involving other means. As Lettvin (1967), no advocate of drugs, puts it, "The chances of going mad or getting permanent brain damage are certainly there, but then what adventure is not accompanied by danger? A fair number of scuba divers, mountain climbers, and astronauts are killed off by what they do, and nobody makes much fuss (p. 15 ) ." Second, there is plainly an attitude of insistence that such drug use must be seriously injurious, no matter what the available evidence is. If limited scientific tests indicate, inconclusively, a possibility of chromosomal damage by LSD, this is at once generally interpreted in a conclusive and maximal way, while any findings of absence of harmful effects are seen as indicating nothing reassuring, but only as a need for further and more intensive work to uncover the deleterious consequences that somehow are known to be lurking somewhere.

However, these drugs have one undeniably real and fearsome influence. Whatever their physiological effects, their use, as a means and as a symbol, plays an important part in young people's rejection of and moving apart from their parental homes and society. But before the drugs as such are given too much credit and blame for this—that is, taken as a cause—one must look both more closely and more broadly at what is being left. This act of rejection, like the act of violence in a murder mystery, requires a motive, an opportunity, and a weapon. Drugs may provide an opportunity, and even, in parental eyes, a weapon, but for the motive we must look also at the social contexts to which the movement is a reaction.

What are the young drug users getting away from? This question must be less simple than it seems, because we now have considerable information available on this without having made much apparent progress toward any answer that seems both sensible and satisfying. There is much evidence that the young members of the drug movement come very largely from middle-class families, and there is some indication that they generally are intelligent kids rather than the reverse—even parental and official anguish and complaint to the effect: "How could they do these stupid, irrational things?" testifies in this direction. There is much talk of "lack of communication" between parents and children as underlying the similar lack between the straight and hip worlds, and that the "generation gap" is wider than ever before. Yet these attempts at explanation seem not to provide much enlightenment but, rather, to leave a similar question: "Why is there such a lack of communication?" Nor is the matter resolved by the usual references to the wider social context and its urgent, disturbing problems, such as the Vietnam war, civil-rights struggles, and widespread student dissatisfaction with the nature of the educational system. Though all these factors obviously are somehow relevant, this "somehow" remains vague—the pieces have not yet been put together.

Perhaps a fresh and closer look at some of these factors which aims more toward what they are like and how they are related will enable the "why" of the situation to emerge more naturally, less forced. We may begin with the wider social context and then move toward the family situation as the concrete locus of communications and interaction between parents and children. At the same time, this examination will also be proceeding from the more overt and factual levels toward the more covert and psychological levels. This re-examirlation, with one exception, is not new in data, but in varying ways is new in point of view—some views will include aspects previously not interrelated, some will invert usual viewing, and some will attempt to bring opposites together.

For the broad middle-class scene, in spite of our ideals of individual freedom, equality, and tolerance, it appears that American views about social organization and social behavior have traditionally been rather simple, dualistic, and extreme. In the sphere of evaluation and attitudes, it is not only on TV shows that our world is antithetically divided into, individually, good guys versus bad guys, and, socially, "the American way of life" versus "un-American" views and actions. Such dualisms have been pervasive and have been paralleled by a related dualism in our traditional cultural ways of handling the inescapable and persistent problem of conflict between social group norms and the differing orientations of individuals or subgroups; the dominant formula over a long period has been "Take it or leave it" or "If you don't like the way it is here, go elsewhere." In other words, in relation to the problems of social order and conflict, freedom has consisted largely in freedom to join the established order by adaptation and conformity—very strikingly illustrated by the acculturation to American ways of millions of immigrants—in combination with the freedom to leave this established order and behave differently elsewhere—exemplified variously in the earlier behavior of these same immigrants, in the "frontier" movements, and in the pronounced American pattern of leaving the parental home, and often locality, at maturity. One observer, Saul Bellow (as quoted in the Stanford Daily, 1968), puts it this way:

Americans have a way of seceding when conditions displease them. . . . When they do not secede publicly they do it internally, subjectively. The early settlers were separatists, and separatism is still an important American phenomenon. Under certain pressures, when people feel that they are being conned, snowed, put on or bamboozled (the very abundance of terms for this is itself a sign of great sensitivity to the phenomenon), they abstract or remove themselves. They light out for the territory ahead, like Huck Finn, or become sages at Walden (a rare reaction today) or take pot or LSD.

Today, however, this set of social devices appears increasingly less workable, at least in the traditional forms of simple adaptation or simple departure. With increasing size and power of all kinds of social organizations—governmental, economic, and educational—more pervasive communication, and population growth, both the social and physical worlds are becoming vastly more encompassing in extent, as well as in the degree to which they control even formerly "private" areas of behavior. There is both less chance to take one's leave, since anywhere is much the same now, and greatly increased general demands for conformity, even if many specific social and moral norms have been replaced or abandoned. And all this applies not only to the adults enmeshed in government controls and company standards, but also to their children, who are now not only faced with greatly increased pressures for performance in school, but outside school with the Little League instead of spontaneous games and city specifications even for tree houses. Moreover, the more standardized, pervasive, and publicized the dominant social goals become, the more strained the situation grows for those to whom these goals are not rewarding, or to whom their access is denied—at the same time that these goals are built up as the only things worth living for, with no viable options available.

There appear to be three major lines of response to this situation. The most constructive focuses on actively working for a change of social organization and relationships in one's own social system, large or small. This involves a combination of the two traditional poles of departure and adaptation. The idea that everyone should have some real voice in shaping the social contexts in which he must live has been a major aspect of the woman's suffrage movement early in the century and continuing struggles for equality of the sexes, of the labor movement, of the minorities' struggles for civil rights, of the current student movement for more voice in the direction of higher education, and even in the rise of family therapy as a means of resolving conflicts within this small but fundamental social system. In all these instances—although there have been many failures and often the creation of new constricting systems—it is plain that established authority and procedures have been challenged by the formerly weak, disadvantaged, and passive adapters, with the aim of achieving some generally positive reorganization of the system.

The other two lines of response, however, are much more germane to the question of the drug movement. The main and obvious line, of course, is the majority position of further adaptation an conformity to things as they are, the established order, perhaps modified by a partial and compartmentalized escape in one's leisure time—to the extent that this itself has not yet been encompassed within the going system.

The less obvious line of response is the course of separation, to whatever extent it is still possible. "Dropping-out" in this sense is the legitimate successor to the old pattern of taking one's leave for greener —or at least different—pastures. This line of response leads, in today's circumstances, to such manifestations as the setting up of "Free Universities" by students on their own as against reformist attempts to gain influence in university administration, to the Black Power position in the Negro-White conflict, and to the drug involvement and the hippie movement on the youth versus age front.

These phenomena, of course, are all extreme manifestations along this line. Ordinarily, both acceptance and rejection are engaged in more minimally or even apathetically; then, the two are much less distinguishable. There are, however, as suggested earlier, important sociocultural bases for such extremism itself. As already mentioned, there is an American tendency toward polarization between a majority view of proper social behavior and minority views, with little provision for working out changes or mutual adjustment of differing positions. Objectively, in the middle-class world today, considerable order, comfort, and security exist, but along with these there are also much dull routine and regimentation, frantic competition, and lack of deeper meaning and satisfaction. Outside of this middle-class America, there is some evidence of historical progress but obvious problems of war, poverty, and oppression of minorities. But when middle-class majority attitudes and values are seriously questioned, apathy gives way mainly not to discourse but to active self-righteous defense and counterattack. Naturally, this reaction is reciprocated, with the result of increasing polarization, so that the parental world ("over thirty") comes to see itself almost exclusively as good and the world of the separatist young as bad. To use currently fashionable terminology, there is a lack of communication built into our system, which is obscured by the fact that a considerable degree of "free speech" exists. Communication, however, also requires "free hearing." To speak but not be heard and replied to plainly is common today, and this is probably more frustrating and confusing than to know one must be discreetly silent.

One aspect of this situation especially contributes to the extremism of the drug and hippie movements, though it has largely been overlooked. Precisely because the established order today is so pervasive and encompassing—yet also amorphous, impersonal, and even flexible and tolerant at certain levels—it is not only directly powerful but also enormously absorptive and hard to confront. It takes extreme behavior and attitudes to establish and make stick any difference from and opposition to such a system. There seems to be no effective way to be moderately different and independent. For this reason, beyond and in addition to any other values and functions, the characteristic features of the drug-movement's life style—not only long hair and odd costumes but especially the open use of drugs—must not only be different from the ordinary but blatantly so. High visibility of the withdrawal from straight society is essential for the movement's existence.

Yet, given the relevance and importance of these broad social factors as a background for the existence of the movement, further explanation is obviously required. After all, despite all the furor, the movement clearly represents only the behavior of a minority, for the full-fledged hippies are a very small portion of America's young people. Nevertheless, this minority is significant. All social movements begin as minorities, and even if, like most, this one never proceeds further, there remains the question "Why do the particular young people in the drug movement become involved?"

This question cannot be answered definitively here, but important leads can be found by viewing their social background. This, of course, has already been a main focus of interest and concern, and from at least three different sources. One is the parents, worried or angry, or both, with their recurrent cry, "Why are our children doing this?"—often, implicitly or explicitly, "to us"—"when we've given them so much?" Another source is the children who speak strongly but not clearly of the intolerable pressures and emptiness of life, and of no understanding from their parents. Still another source is all the observers and students of the scene who are concerned about "lack of communication" and the "generation gap." Yet, with all this expressed concern, not much understanding of the family's relevance to youthful unrest and the drug movement has been reached, mainly because all of these viewings are oversimplified and lacking in perspective.

In the first place, factors of real importance, such as parental authority, value differences between the generations, and communication are commonly viewed separately and absolutely rather than in terms of combinations, contradictions, and the complex interrelations of individual behavior and family contexts. The use of drugs especially is usually viewed in a simple-minded, absolute, and isolated way, not as behavior in a context of family relationships, whether this use is being condemned by parents as inherently evil, or being upheld by their children as the magic key to a more abundant life (although the young appear more flexible in this area than their parents). Given this sort of isolation, either the drug use or the parental objections must appear inexplicable and senseless. Let us illustrate how drug use can better be seen as more complexly involved—yet more simply understandable—in connection with the large issues of family authority, independence, and communication. At a meeting of high school students, one girl described how her mother had enjoined her to be careful and rational about drugs, not just to get caught up in drug taking because other students might be taking them, but to be aware of the dangers. As a result, the girl went to the library and did rather extensive reading in the literature on drug use; she then reported back to her mother that there was little evidence of harmful effects from smoking marijuana, although she had not yet tried it herself. Her mother's response was to hit the ceiling and to say she knew otherwise—on the basis of a couple of popular-magazine and newspaper stories she had seen. In reporting this episode, the girl made it clear that it was not simply her mother's position and authority she was complaining about, but the bind into which she had been put. This bind was real and complex and is widely relevant. The story, in fact, suggests that in today's society many parents may abdicate their real and inevitable responsibility to lead their children by presenting them with incongruent combinations of directions—a very different matter from simplistic ideas about conflict between parental authority and youthful pressures for independence. The parents may be "permissive" but with hidden strings or reservations. Thus, one mother of a pot-smoking boy seen in therapy was clearly much too willing, in response to his complaints, to do things she really saw as wrong (such as helping him get a transfer to a school in a different district and letting him live away from home) in order to "help" him, when he could not but be aware that she did not really approve of these moves. Or parents may recite to children their advantages of education and position, exhorting them to work hard, utilize their knowledge, and be responsible, andthen try to halt them as soon as they try to carry out any independent action that the parents do not like. Anthropological study of many widely differing cultures has shown that children can and usually do learn to behave as their parents expect them to if only the set of expectations and prescriptions are fairly consistent. Response to incongruent instructions, however, is a different matter.

Another major aspect of the family context has also been neglected. Even when some attempt has been made to consider interaction, this has often been only in terms of parents versus children, as if the mother and the father were one and the same. "Parents" is a unity only as a category; in any real family this means two individuals who may differ greatly from each other and have conflicts and communication problems. From data derived from psychiatric study and treatment of whole families, one is led to expect that family structure and problems would be highly relevant to the drug scene. Some available specific data are in agreement with this general expectation, although no systematic studies have yet been made along these lines.

We may consider Stegner's (1967) novel, All the Little Live Things, for a starter, since essential patterns are often more clearly portrayed in works of art than in actual life, even if such evidence is less conclusive. Stegner's narrator Joe, a straight but intelligent middle-aged man, makes it quite plain that his antihippie attitude is closely related to past experience with his own wastrel son, Curtis; it is equally clear not only that the parents were at odds over the handling of their son but that the mother was overprotective of him in relation to her own usual standards—much like the mother of the pot-smoking boy discussed above. Here, Joe asks

What should one do? If Ruth had any better luck with him [Curtis] I would have thought that he simply had to attach himself to antifatherly gods until he proved himself a man in his own terms. Ruth was infallibly gentle with him, though tartness is more her natural style. She didn't push him, she followed him clear to the bottom of his burrow, trying to understand, she forgave him incessantly, she was the pacifying force when he and I clashed. And he went out of his way to treat her with even greater impatience and contempt than he treated me . . . . Sometimes I wonder if he didn't abuse her because she tended to take his side—he wanted no mediator between us (pp. 177-178) .

Although Joe sees the difficulty with his son, characteristically, only as a conflict of value systems, a psychological connection between the unresolved and often-covert parental conflict and the son's delinquency is visible to the reader. The whole pattern is played out again when Ruth, through repeated subtle maneuvers that Joe does not face up to, pressures him against his wishes into letting Jim Peck, the hippie, camp on their land. Despite their many subsequent conflicts, Joe sometimes wishes to communicate with Jim, to meet him halfway, but he always rejects these tendencies, and the breach widens—perhaps he has nothing left after going so far to meet his wife's way.

Babyhip is a very different work from All the Little Live Things. Sarah, the teenybopper, is immersed in her own world ( a strange mixture of realism and wild fantasy in which she sees herself as an individual because she's "classless, stateless, homeless, establishmentless, schoolless, moneyless" ) and remote from her parents' world (strangely fantastic in its determined everydayness and to Sarah occupied not by individuals but only by classes of people who make up her "Idiot List" and other derogatory lists). Nevertheless, as in Stegner's book, we get clear glimpses of persistent parental conflict, with her indulgent father undercutting her mother, and of conflicting messages from each parent individually.

An examination of the communication and interaction patterns of real families with a problem about drug use provides confirmation of literary insights. In interviews these families repeatedly exhibit parental conflict—conflict that, whether covert or open, is focused on side issues. The "problem" child figures importantly as a buffer in these parental conflicts. He is used as the focus for indirect conflict and as a means for avoiding direct between-parent battles. Parents get together in attacking his "bad" behavior, yet disagree on what to do about it. Even while they jointly disapprove of long hair or smoking marijuana, they may argue about how one or the other handles the child instead of how they treat each other. The child's "wrong" behavior thus plays a positive role in maintaining the going family system of relationships, though this fact and that the child may be encouraged to be "bad" are unrecognized by all the participants. The child's "difficult" behavior serving such functions may, like long hair, be more pervasive but less extreme than using drugs or leaving home—although even these extremes often may unite the parents through mutual anger or mutual concern.

For example, in one such family, in addition to other problems, the son Wanted a motorcycle. The father opposed it, while the mother covertly encouraged her son—for example, by pointing out motorcycle ads to him—but backed down and denied her encouragement when explicitly asked whether she thought the boy should have a cycle. The father's objections, typically, were strongly moralistic but yet amorphous; although he said the boy would first have to show enough stability and self-control to justify a driver's license, he would not establish any explicit standards for judging either. Meanwhile, the boy on the surface struggled noisily to defend himself, while actually, at bottom, protecting his parents at his own expense. He made no comment on how his mother left him in the lurch over the motorcycle ads, and although at times he would begin to point out the vagueness and impossibility of his father's standards, at the crucial point he would always become vague himself and get excited in a way that his father could use against him and thus escape. The incidents that his father used as evidence for his son's getting "upset over trifles" were ones in which the boy was involved in protecting his mother's interests instead of his own against his father's power, but no one, including his mother, took note of this fact.

Such patterns, while often markedly clear in families with a drug-use problem, are too broad to be claimed as specific causes; rather similar patterns occur, for instance, in families with schizophrenic children. Until there is further study of the more specific factors involved in choosing one line of symptomatic behavior rather than another, it is only possible to offer tentative suggestions about the determinants of becoming involved in drug-oriented groups. In conjunction with the drug movement's promises of individual escape, new experience, and group support, easy access to the drug movement as a way of life seems of prime importance. This is not just a matter of easily available drugs and drug-using social scenes; a more crucial factor is that, despite its emphasis on individuality and opposition to the straight world, the drug movement, steeped in conformity to in-group codes, is not really such a big jump from the restrictive world of family pressures to conform.

In conclusion, some words of clarification and judgment—part apology and part criticism—are necessary in fairness to the drug movement and its relationship to American society. This movement has been looked at here in a rather special and unusual way. In contrast—almost in opposition—to most commentaries on the hippie scene, this chapter has paid little attention to the stated hippie ideals, claims, and criticisms of the straight world; instead, emphasis here has been on relating characteristic features of the movement and of the straight world and on inquiring especially about the family as well as other social contexts pressing young people toward drug use.

Lest this be seen as indicating general hostility to the drug movement, a denial of its aims and ideals, or because of references to "symptomatic behavior," as offering the view that the drug movement is just "sick," let us clearly state that such is not our intention. In line with a growing orientation in family psychiatry today, "symptomatic behavior" is not construed as "sick" in any absolute sense, but as an instance of human behavior that is special only in being socially identified and focused on as a problem. Correspondingly, an "identified patient" in a family is not to be considered as any more "sick" than the other members. Indeed, some sympathy with the position of the young should arise from the analysis and the examples we have presented. As for a conclusion, it must be that in a family "they're all in it together," regardless of apparent separation and obvious difficulties in communication. We are, in fact, all of us in it together as members of our society.

We can also agree that much of the movement's criticisms of middle-class society are apt and many of its ideals are desirable, although questions must be raised about the extent to which these views are seriously held in the movement at large. Hippie goals and especially the means by which they are supposed to be realized—not just drug use but the whole life style of the movement—are not to be taken at face value, any more than are middle-class claims about the good life. In this area, the really important focus is not on where the hippies themselves say they are going but on the actual consequences of the movement. The probable outcomes appear quite different both from the utopian claims and expectations of the drug users and the dire predictions of the middle-class world.

The essential point is that both parties deny that they are all in it together. That is their basic communality. Parents of drug users will, for example, claim that they have nothing to do with drug use, that it is the child's own choice and conduct. Drug users, on the other hand, claim they can resolve their "hang-ups" by themselves and without improved relations to parents or community. The drug users present their concentration on self as a glorious and universal solution to the problems of social living. They do not look upon what they do as a desperate reaction to particular pressures. Nevertheless, observers who see a shift in the drugs of choice—as, for example, the shift from marijuana and LSD to methamphetamine and opiates, or from occasional to chronic use—may well infer that drug users are finding that their initial drug choices are not solving their troubles. The observer, but not the hippie, will also predict that the escalated use of drugs will not provide the solutions either.

As far as real solutions are concerned, the theme presented here is that what happens among and between people is as important in accounting for behavior and feelings as anything psychodynamically idiosyncratic or pharmacologically induced, and ultimately is inescapable. Accordingly, the challenge facing youth is not how to make a break for a getaway but how to "get more with" their own families, how to get to see the situation as it is, and thus to make possible a limited but genuine freedom. A spurious and temporary escape into what seems a radically different situation but is genotypically quite similar can hardly be conceived as successful progression.

There can be no question that the drug movement, with its hippies, parahippies, and interested followers is having and will have an appreciable effect on the participants, their families, and the cornmunity, but these consequences will reflect neither the hopes of the hippies nor the fears of the straight world. As in every generation, some of the young will be lost, and some will find a new and different life, but these will be few. The majority will rejoin society, changed and matured a bit, but, for the most part, only older. Their families and the larger society will have changed a little, too; one already sees the popularization of psychedelic art and music, of hippie language, even of hippie costuming. How can a separatist movement survive absorption through superficial emulation and more profound vitiation? It cannot. The changes it brings will be less than those worked upon it.

Paradoxically, the real problem of the drug movement is not that it is too extreme. The problem is that it does not go far enough in genuinely new and integrative directions. It is not that most of the young drug experimenters will never return to the straight world but that when they do return, they will be too little changed in happier ways, and what is new and different that they do bring home will make too little difference in their own lives and in society. Too much will be absorbed, too much ignored, too much forgotten. Sad, yes, but remember that others who take trips also return home with much that might have been learned or transmitted brushed aside or but briefly practiced. The anthropologists themselves, though professional travelers, have not yet made a brave new world either.

1 In addition to SorrelIs, our sources here included Robert S. Spitzer; James Terrill; Paul Watzlawick; Jay Heley; G. H. Harrison of the LSD Rescue Service; and Al Rinker of the Haight-Ashbury Switchboard.

2 This is discussed at more length in my article, "Method in Cultural Anthropology," Philosophy of Science, 1951, 18, 55-69.

3 This is not surprising, since little research has been done. Anthropologists, like other groups, have not inquired much into the motivations of their own characteristic behavior, even though this is their professed focus elsewhere.

4 Jerry Buck, "Beatles' Guru Offers Prescription for World Peace," Palo Alto Times, January 22, 1968,

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