This chapter compares students espousing several different and important ideologies, the active use of illicit-exotic drugs being considered as one of these. The study rests upon a sample of students selected for their ideological engagement—a set of commitments to activities and beliefs much more than the simple acceptance of one idea or, as in the case of drugs, one activity.

When we talked to students in the period during which marijuana and LSD were first appearing among graduates and undergraduates on cosmopolitan campuses, we soon realized that those students who were becoming confirmed exotic-illicit drug users were involved in group activities which were strongly related to ideological issues (see Blum and Associates, 1964). No matter how much the interest of students was focused on seeking and talking about drug effects or how important their group activities were, we observed in all those committed to drug use a third less immediate and less concrete component: the sharing of ideas and viewpoints about the world. These, which we term "ideological," were shared by persons in different drug-using groups and on different campuses and were so broadly distributed by age group as to embrace many older drug users—for example, the professional people we describe in Utopiat es—alongwith a very few persons younger than college age.

What we heard either in group discussion or in individual conversations was not only the rights and wrongs of drug use, of what was safe or unsafe or potent or less so, but also a much larger brace of opinions covering politics, pacifism, sex, love, fun, individual rights, the nature of an ideal society, and so forth. Whatever justifications, rationalizations, or party line were detected in these discussions, it was obvious that important social values and special ways of looking at and experiencing the world were part of being a drug user. The beliefs expressed were also certainly more elaborate and sincere than simply being justifications of delinquency or of selfish pleasure seeking—charges often heard and, consequently, often strongly denied by that first wave of illicit-drug users.

The themes in such discussions were—like those we have seen of the valences of drug use in the survey chapters—positive, multifaceted, and interwoven with expectations of what human beings could be and what drugs could accomplish. In those days when drug use was new to campuses—and we would estimate that to be the period of 1962 to 1966—there was also a sense of discovery conveyed during the conversations. Young people had not only discovered illicit drugs and new in-groups but they believed they had also discovered new experiences, new freedoms and pleasures, new insights, and new world views. Nowadays, as drug use appears to be more and more common on campus and as students in urban high schools learn it so that they are "old hands" by the time of college, the feeling of discovery or of the special nature of the drug ideology is likely to be attenuated. On the other hand, since many schools of conservative bent or in rural areas are at the time of this writing just at the point where cosmopolitan liberal colleges were some years before, there are still many places where the avant-garde on campus can be seen in a fervor of drug-linked discovery. That is, of course, not a phenomenon limited to the drug ideology; most educators hope their students will enjoy the fervor of discovery—of ideas, ideals, and of life itself—as often as possible.

During that same period—let us say from 1962 and continuing through today—the most visibly "fervent" groups on campus have been the New Left, the student radicals whose protests, sit-ins, and other forms of political activity have stirred so much interest. Those in the left wing, some characteristics of which are noted in Chapter One, are now shown from our survey data to be the most likely students with illicit- and exotic-drug experience. We also see a tendency for the most intensive drug use to be associated even more with the politics of the radical-left student. This association is not by any means perfect; in our data some left students—Marxists for example—stand out as strongly opposed to illicit-drug use. In any event, with this more-oftenthan-chance coupling of left political ideologies and the drug-linked belief systems, a likely range of possible beliefs emerges within any student drug-using in-group. For one thing, they can be reasonably "pure" in the sense that they are vitally interested in drugs—which means interested in inner experience of various sorts and its correlated outward expressions such as communal living, sexual freedom, "love," "peace," and what-have-you. For another, they can have these drug interests plus a strong admixture of active left politics with its emphasis on power sharing (or grabbing), confrontations, and expanded individual freedom ( or anarchy)'.

One would expect that students who embrace either of the "pure" radical involvements, left politics or drug use, would differ from- one another not just by virtue of their current beliefs but by virtue of the assumption that those ideologies represent an outcome of what the individual himself has been prior to college—his background, development, and current personality. One could also expect—although without a longitudinal study it is not easy to prove—that these students differ in what they are becoming. The reason is not only that the ideologies they embrace commit them to one or another more probable sequence of opportunities but that they are, during these adolescent and postadolescent years, forming themselves out of the ideologies with which they are involved. This is not to say that as adults they will accept everything they believed when in college, but, rather, to suggest, like Erikson (1960, 1968), that adult personalities are partly developed out of a variety of youthful social experiments, each of which contributes something, and that ideologies and group involvements are part of these tests and tastes of life. Being a hippie, as Weakland ( Chapter Fifteen, Drugs I) points out, can be one of these transitional and exploratory periods.

Since engagement in the left or drug ideologies, or in what appears from our data commonly to combine both, represents an apparent new development for most individuals, it can be conceived of in two ways. One would be a relatively easy or natural movement from family orientations and personal interests into a still consistent but more active and complex set of ideas and actions—an example being the socially aware child of liberal parents becoming a student radical. The other conception implies more tension and putting asunder—that is, a more dramatic shift away from parental values in the direction of disapproved behavior. We already know from the survey data that it is the illicit-drug users—compared with non-users—who more often report a shift away from parental values, opposition to parents, feeling on the "outs" with conventional people and values, and so forth. We also know that it is the total abstainers (no alcohol, tobacco, and so on) who report the closest relationships to parents and the most homogeneous—as well as conservative—family life. Without further evidence, one would expect that it would be the illicit-drug users on campus who do the most shifting from earlier to later years. One additional reason to expect this, of course, is that for students coming from middle- or upper-class homes (the case in most of our sample) and presumably without histories of serious delinquency (a set of inferences from correlated information on educational level, family income, and so on as related to visible delinquency), the move to illicit drugs is itself a rather significant renunciation of convention and of at least one kind of lawfulness. The radical students, of course, take similar action when engaging in "civil disobedience" through trespass, draft-card burning, and the like.

Over the recent years those who have been on campuses—or parents from their vantage points—have been able to watch the coming together of students into groups which have become the nuclei of drug use. Ethnocentric and avant-garde in the early years, proselytizing then and now, the illicit-drug set created a scene attractive to the new arrivals looking for adventure or something special. As young people joined the fringes—and some moved into the centers of these groups to become committed rather than simply experimental or playful users—one observed the changes in vocabulary, in dress, in prized activities, in the definition of who or what was friend or foe, and in explanations for what was wrong and right with the world. Although these were shared viewpoints, each person's own personality modified the group offerings, so that among campus drug users individual characteristics were certainly not submerged.

For most students the involvement in drug use was a slow enough process, one proceeding apace over college years with other liberalizing trends, other growths in confidence and exploration, and other tests of doctrine, pleasure, and action through immersions that were usually not total since the core of self was buoyant and the choice of friends or drugs was apparently not permanent. For a few students the involvement in drugs appeared quite sudden, whether through the accident of proximity to users in a residence unit or because the student himself was ready for something dramatic. Thus, it seemed in some that there was short hair one day and long the next—or as their parents must have felt of themselves, dark hair one day and grey the next! Although these sudden cases must also have been growing, groping, and learning along the way—with some clearly stumbling, regressing, and rebelling—the dramatic character of their engagement in new ways drew attention and for these few sustained the label "conversion." Yet one must grant that individual conversion, like social revolution, is but the final step in a long sequence of less extraordinary events which happen to have gone unnoticed. But, whether conversions or not—and most were not—those students who became heavily involved with drug users and almost inevitably with drug use had made important choices.

The presumption is that these choices were at least partly functional in the sense that they were directly satisfying, attractive to students who were ready for a move in that direction, and useful or instrumental in bringing students closer to other things they wanted. We would say of the drug-linked—or other—student ideology and beliefs that they are like the opinions of which Smith, Bruner, and White (1956) write in that they "reflect the deeper lying pattern of life. They are mediators between the inner demands of the person and the outer environment. . . ." These beliefs and opinions which are part of an ideology can serve a variety of functions, as, for example, in ordering or stereotyping the environment and in the social process facilitating ties between people or, conversely, channeling aggression and vanity so as to identify others as the enemy. As Lewin (1964) and Erikson (1960, 1968) have theorized, they can help people test life and build of themselves an elaborated—or possibly a restricted—personality. It is also the case, as Freud understood, that ideologies are strategies whereby feelings are expressed, defenses constructed, cognitions elaborated, and interpersonal mechanisms routinized. While these are functions of ideologies for individuals, the ideology is also functional for the larger society. Stable when societies are stable, ideologies grow and die rapidly under conditions of change and in doing so go beyond their individual functions to form groups and institutions and to create testing grounds where existing beliefs are challenged and where new social experiments, most of them doomed to failure, are tried. Toch (1965) suggests that social movements—which necessarily express their appeals and programs in an ideology—emerge to meet the needs of persons currently not being met by the social environment.

Ordinarily, as Apter (1964), Lane and Sears (1964), Toch, and others have discussed, ideologies are familial—that is, they are transmitted from parents to children in the home and, in stable societies, can be maintained over many generations. They are also modifiable—typically in America on a gradual basis and by exposure to important groups, such as friends, fellow workers, teachers, and so on. They are also modifiable intellectually and by exposure to mass media, although the latter process is usually mediated by influential persons. During college years, modification is not only expected but usually demanded by the university as horizons are broadened and gradual shifts away from parental views are encouraged. Ideologies can also shift suddenly, although that is not the college pattern. Conversion is an illustration, but this is a rare case and among those so engaged the presumption is of considerable pre-existing tension, of very great immediate pressure (whether under the sword of the conqueror or from the persuasive arguments of spouse or of laws) and often of unstable solutions—as one sees in the seekers and joiners moving from sect to sect. Buckner (1966), Dohrman (1964), Stark and Lofland (1965), Pratt (1924), and Wilson (1961) provide illustrative studies of the latter. Implicit in the understanding of who will shift in response to mediating environmental forces—especially involvement in group situations where others hold different views—is the idea that there are individual differences in conformity. These demonstrations have long been the business of social psychologists Asch (1952), Berg and Bass (1961)1, Cartwright and Zander (1953 ), Crutchfield (1963), Janis and Howland (1964), Kogan and Wallach (1964), Rokeach (1960), Sherif (1936), and Witkin et al. (1962), all of whom have made important contributions which show, in essence, that the size of the group, level of membership in it, importance of the issue, kind of communication, status of the person, and his personality ( confident or not, flexible or not, neurotic or not)' all play a part.

Since in this chapter and the next we are looking at students with three important styles of belief—political, religious, and drug oriented—it may be well to look briefly at where these ordinarily come from and how they change. There is some literature on the religious phenomenon and, as we saw in Chapter One, a very considerable literature on politics and student politics in particular. For the most part, the literature shows belief systems to be transmitted in the home and, if there are shifts, these to be in the direction of the collegiate milieu in America—teachers and older peers—who are usually liberal. Fichter, for example, cited in Carrier (1965 studying "model" Catholics finds that among very religious youth a shift to "negligence" occurred about age twenty and continued in many through age thirty-nine; beginning at age forty, a return to religious values was observed. That return is accentuated among older persons who have children (Telford and Reuss cited in Carrier). The importance of religion to youth varies with the intensity of their religious education during childhood, which is, in turn, a function of the importance of religion to the parents -( Carrier)1. When religious disaffection occurs, it is likely to be in combination with other forms of dissassociation of the youth from his parents. Cohen and Hale (1967)  concur that lack of religious interest on the part of parents is necessary before campus liberalizing pressures are effective in shifting student religious affiliations. Defection from religion as such tends to be a Protestant phenomenon "(Allport cited in Carrier

With regard to political shifts, the same factors appear to operate and have elsewhere been demonstrated. Lane (1962, 1959)', for example, finds that there is a strong relationship between parental and offspring ideology; for example, Democratic preferences occurred among 82 per cent when both parents were Democrats and Republican preferences among 73 per cent when both parents were Republican (see Lane and Sears, 1964)'. Lane and Sears cite a study by Middleton and Putney (1963 )1 showing that degree of parental closeness was the critical factor in rebellion against parental political stands; the less close a child felt, the more likely he was to change his politics, particularly if politics was an important area for the parents; thus, the student choice of politics as an area for rebellion was dictated by parental interests, this disagreement dictated by conflict. The investigators found that such rebellions generally involved mild shifts rather than the adoption of dramatically different positions. Lane and Sears have discussed how exposure to college leads to shifts in the liberal direction in regard to political stands.

Specific studies on left politics abound. Some of those focusing on students have already been cited in Chapter One. Others of note include Almond (1954), Howe and Coser (1957), and Krugman (1964), focusing on adult American Communists Studies of the right wing are fewer but when linked with personality research include Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford (1950), Apter '( 1964 ), Bell (1963), Chesler and Schmuck (1963), McClosky and Scharr (1965), and Shils (1956). Although Apter's results do identify a very successful radical-right constituency, generally neither the social situations nor the personalities of either the extreme left or of the extreme right—or even of the less extreme right—are described as favorable.

As for our own sample, we at first sought converts since we had a special interest in ideological change—this because of our drug-use focus. However, after canvassing all of the campus ministers, we found few converts except to the more liberal or humanistic creeds, Unitarian, Congregational, or Quaker. With all respect to the churches based on such creeds (and the author is a member of one of them we felt they were not good examples of religious conversion; to the contrary, they were illustrations of liberalization in college which were, if anything, in the direction toward reduced dogma and faith. Consequently, we were unable—on a campus of 11,558 students—to find sufficient religious spiritual converts to constitute the sample we desired. Abandoning the search for converts, we settled for devoutly religious students, of whom we were sure a sufficient number would exist from traditional families in spite of the data showing that Protestantism suffers most from religious defection; thus, School I draws its students from mostly Protestant homes.

As for the right, we did not go looking for converts, simply for confirmed believers. Following Apter's (1964)- finding of a heavy concentration of upper-status, Protestant, and well-educated whites in California's radical right, we felt safe in assuming that enough of their children in School I would be true to the family spirit to comprise a sample. With reference to the left—and, in particular, the "pure" left—we were unsure. There was no question that leftist agitation and interest on campus were generating the impression of multitudespro-Mao, pro-Castro, and pro-Che Guevara, among others. How many dedicated leftists there actually were we could not be sure—nor were we confident of their cooperation with a bourgeois or establishment venture such as ours. As for the drug users, we knew they were there because we knew many of them from other studies and other times. As for their ideological development, we expected them, by reason of the body of research findings, to show evidence of independence of and opposition to parents and authority and, because of the fact of illicit-drug use, to report shifts in beliefs in the direction of a drug ethic incorporating and supporting unconventional activity. On the other hand, we thought it unlikely that most of the involved drug-using students would have moved to positions dramatically different from those of their parents on matters of life interest or fundamental value. After all, if we concluded from the studies done that ideological movement is for most people only a matter of small shifts, the shortest distance to left-and-drug ideologies is from the liberal or radical, permissive, unconventional, and personal enrichment oriented home. There was another reason not to assume that even the unconventional students at School I would have moved dramatically far from home base. In spite of trappings of beards and beads or of mysticism and militancy, these students were from a well-nourished and privileged elite whose very presence in school testified to their intellectual capabilities, their social grace, their physical and mental health, and their sensitivity to the kind of an education that bodes best for later careers. We thought it unlikely that such a favored and realistic group would be about to destroy themselves, at least within the limits of their estimates of risk and gain, by any behavior so radical or so unconventional that it posed a genuine danger to safety, personal relationships, freedom, or career. Thus, we did not expect to find in School I, with its high standards for entrance and continuation, much in the way of disabling pathology and social deprivation of the sort that contributes to self-destructive and compulsive drug use such as that of heroin (Blum, 1967; Chein, Gerard, Lee, and Rosenfeld, 1964; and Robins, 1966).

On the other hand, the drugs in question, mostly LSD and marijuana, are illicit and even if by now experimentation is common, their use in School I in 1965 to 1966 was unusual enough to be taken as a sign that something was "wrong." It was reasonable to assume that the deviancy of the committed users of that time—and here, as throughout this section, we are not considering playful or conforming marijuana experimentation—would express itself in some aspect of their past—that is, something was unusual or "wrong" there, too. As the data from Keniston (1965), Middleton and Putney (1963), and Maccoby, Matthews, and Morton (1954) suggest—and as we have already seen from the survey data on student-parent conflict and dissatisfaction, that "something" was likely to be a family matter or, at least, partly a family matter. We shall see that it turned out to be so, that the intensively involved campus drug ideologist of 1965-1966, like the illicit-exotic student user of 1966-1967, was one who seemed to lack close relations with parents and appeared to suffer from unresolved family and interpersonal problems. These were the students who were often sensitive and visionary, relatively without structure, discipline, or genuine people-to-people warmth and who lacked enthusiasm for their community or careers.

COMMENT

Out of theory, others' findings, our earlier observations„ and from sheer hunch, we developed a set of questions which constituted our inquiry to students in the several ideological groups. What would be the differences among students who came to the drug-oriented life style compared with those who chose ( or, if one were to pretend to strict determinism, had no choice but to follow) other life styles equally available on campus, equally respectable in terms of having at least some campus support and no formal negative campus sanctions, and able to provide equal opportunities for being with friends, being active, and for developing a world view and fashioning out of oneself an identifiable person in the sense of having things to believe in, to be for, and to be against—in other words, having a cause? We chose ( and thereby strongly deny strict determinism for ourselves!) four positions to contrast; as indicated, these were the involved illicit-exotic drug users, the radical left, the deeply religious, and the political right.

It was our intention to draw a sample of about twenty-five students representing heavy involvement in each of these ideologies. To recruit our samples, we asked students we knew to make nominations of persons on campus whom they considered to fall into each of these groups. Among students initially classified by us or others as demonstrating the ideologies which we sought, we asked for further nominations. In addition, we scanned the published membership list of the various political and religious organizations on campus. For the religious sample, in which we sought not simply affiliates of conventional churches but students who were deeply religious, we asked each of the campus ministers to nominate his most spiritual or devout student parishioners.

We accepted the nominees who were willing to participate in the study and who, after initial screening, appeared to fall within the ideologies of interest to us. We were, from the beginning, required to accept mixed rather than "pure" cases simply because we did not have the resources to conduct a more extensive search. Indeed, we had no assurance that twenty-five pure cases of single-minded investment in each of the four contrasting ways of life could be found in all of School I, even though our final classification scheme hardly required fanatics. Our definitions were as follows: a drug user was a student who had in the past taken one variety or more of the illicit-exotic drugs three times or more, who at present was still using these drugs, and who, in the future, intended to continue using them. A religious student must describe himself as "interested" in religion, as having an institutional religious affiliation or preference, and as never having changed from a strict to a liberal faith—for example, from being Methodist to being Unitarian. Further, on the self-rating item "Religion: being a religious person, having religious sentiments," he must rate as "very important" (the most extreme rating). The left political student had to meet the criteria for such descriptions as New Left, Social-Democrat, Marxist, Maoist, Communist, radical, Castroite, and so on. In response to an item asking whether his left direction had changed, if he answered "yes" he must have moved further left and, in the self-rating, he must describe as "very important" the item on politics, subdefined as "caring about who obtains power and public responsibility, how it is exercised, and what political ideologies hold sway." To be classified as right politically, the student must describe himself as conservative (not Republican), preferring Goldwater, Rousselot, and so on. When asked about political shifts, if answering "yes" he must have changed to the right and on the self-rating must rate as "very important" to himself the political item quoted above.

The final sample was composed of 105 students as follows:

I. Illicit-drug users who were not involved in religion or politics, N = 26

II. Religious students who were not political (as defined above) and who were not drug users as defined above, N = 24

III. Left-wing students who were also drug users as defined above, N= 17

IV. Right-wing students who were not religious or drug users, N = 13

V. Our screening failures who turned out not to be drug users, religious right, or left wing. We have tried to make ourselves feel better about this unwanted group by calling them "controls," N= 10

VI. Left political students who were not involved in drug use and not religious, N = 5

VII. Right political students who were also religious, N = 4

VIII. Drug users who were also religious, N = 3

IX. Students who were simultaneously left, religious, and drug users, N = 2

X. One left student who was religious, N = 1

Only groups I, II, IV, and VI were pure in the sense we sought, with a combined N of 68. The remaining thirty-seven students
were mixed as to ideologies. In response to these harsh realities, we set up two other analytical schemes. One classification combined all drug users into one group regardless of their other interests; thus, groups III, VII, VIII, and IX, all of whom included drug users, were contrasted to the nondrug-user groups I, II, IV, V, VI, and X.' A second comparison limited itself to the drug users and compared those with multiple-drug interests to those with restricted interests. The multiple-vs.-restricted scheme was derived from our pilot study of a normal adult population. (See Chapter Eleven in Drugs I.) Students were asked whether they had used any drugs on a list of 13 ranging from those we found often employed to those rarely employed. By classification, these were home remedies and medical painkillers, social drugs, prescribed psychoactive drugs, and the illicit-exotic drugs. The cutting point for dividing our drug-using students fell midway, so that those who reported use of six of these different drugs (or drug classes) or less became the restricted-drug group N = 24; those who reported use of seven or more of these drugs were classified as multiple-drug users, N = 22.

The procedure we shall follow in the presentation of data is to identify those factors in student background, viewpoint, and activity which, following our inquiry, were found to differ from samples under comparison. Our criterion of "difference" here is that of statistical significance at the .05 level or beyond. So as not to overlook trends, we shall also report on differences which are not significant according to the .05 convention but which fall between .05 and .10 levels of probability. For each variable, three different runs were made, the first on all of the ideological subsamples, the second on drug users vs. nonusers, and the third on the multiple-vs.-restricted drug users. We shall see that the latter comparison but rarely yields differences, whereas the former two show consistent ones. As we discuss the differences among ideological groups, one should keep in mind that a significant Chi Square, which is the test used, tells us only that the differences in the overall table would not have occurred by chance any more than one time out of a hundred ( or a thousand or ten thousand as the case may be), while not specifying what directions of difference are involved. We shall undertake in the discussion to indicate the direction the differences take. Any one such difference which we remark upon without further test against all others might not by itself prove significant but, as part of the distribution of the variable, does contribute to significance. At the end of the chapter, we shall consider those major items )yhich we expected also to discriminate among groups but which failed to do so.

1 On some early computer runs, the control group, group V, was excluded from comparisons.