Marihuana : a signal of misunderstanding first report of the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse.

  • United States. Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse
Date:
[1972?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Marihuana : a signal of misunderstanding first report of the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    ethic. The implications of enforced leisure time are only now becoming apparent, and the concept of “idle hands are the devil’s plaything” has to be reexamined in terms of acceptable forms of non-work be- havior. This new time component, allowing for the assertion of indi- viduality, has produced both privileges and problems. In the last decade we have seen the beginnings of the institutionali- zation of this leisure ethic. A leisure-time industry has sprung up to organize this time period for the individual. Many Americans, due to the nature of their jobs in an automated economic system, find little personal satisfaction in their work, and many are now searching for individual fulfillment through the use of free time. Where meaning is not found in either work or recreational pursuits, the outcome is likely to be boredom and restlessness. Whether generated by a search for individual fulfillment, group recreation or sheer boredom, the increased use of drugs, including marihuana, should come as no surprise. Another social development which has chipped away at individual identity is the loss of a vision of the future. In an age where change is so rapid, the individual has no concept of the future. If man could progress from land transportation to the moon in 60 years, what. lies ahead? Paralleling the loss of the technological horizon is the loss of a vision of what the future, in terms of individual and social goals, ought to look like. Are times moving too fast for man to be able to plan or to adjust to new ways and new styles? This sense of the col- lapsing time frame was best summed up by one of the Seminar participants: .... there are great forces that have developed over the last several decades that cause one to lose sight of the distant future. Let me contrast a rural farm family of several decades ago which settled a farm. They expected their children to live there, they can imagine their grandchildren living there—there is an image of the future. There is really no one who [now] has any image of where his great grandchildren will be or what they will do. This comes about because of the nature of industrial society; it comes about because we have retirement plans instead of looking after one’s own old age. There are a whole set of these [ factors]. Now the morality, the ethics get tied into it because ethics are really a long-time horizon concept. It’s something you engage in because it’s contrary to immediate reward and immediate gratifi- cation and so you look to some distant future. But as one loses sight of any future then I think the ethics and morality creep up to the very near term also ... We have no one who has got an image of this country two hundred years from now, who is trying to create a structure that he believes will exist that long. So a number of these things . . . tie together in terms of the long-term Ly