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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    one form such behavior may take. One of our Seminar participants observed in this connection: It seems to me that you’ve got this affluence. So that while most of us grew up with the feeling that the channels within which we were going to have to move and make choices were very narrow, channels for these youngsters look absolutely open. It’s an absolutely a la carte menu—it’s the biggest a la carte menu you can imagine. [This occurs] in a situation in which this sense of radical change is going on so fast that you can’t master it, together with a feeling that the society 1s being operated by very large organizations which you can’t get a grip on, giving one a sense of helplessness, of not know- ing where to take hold. All these things inherently are disorienting to youngsters and don’t give them a feeling of challenge, [but rather] a doubt as to the meaning of their own lives, of the sig- nificance of their being here, [a sense of] being atoms. So then they do act like children in the sense of behaving violently to call atten- tion to themselves. They do a whole lot of other things which, it seems to me, are the sort of things you often see when people feel their lives have no meaning. Skepticism Another major influence in contemporary American life with sub- stantial relevance to the marihuana problem is the uneasy relation- ship between the individual and society’s institutions, particularly the state. For 50 years, there has been a continuing upward flow of power to large institutional units, whether they be corporate con- glomerates, labor unions, universities or the Government. We have created a society which “requires the individual to lean on society,” observed one of our Seminar participants, “in ways that formerly he did not have to do. He used to lean on the clan, on the family, on the village. We have used bureaucracy to deal with these problems.” For many, the Federal Government epitomizes this development, bureaucratizing a social response to the most human of needs. We suspect that the implications of this trend for the individual, although inevitable, became more visibly apparent in the 1960’s. Mass institutions must deal through rules; the individual becomes a num- ber. “Intuitively, [the individual] feels that bureaucracies must make man into an object in order to deal with him.” So we have a deper- sonalization at exactly the time that many individuals are casting about for identity and fulfillment. Simultaneously, technological advance poses the awesome prospect of 1984: the intrusion of the omnipresent state into the private affairs of the individual. Computerized data-banks and electronic surveil- lance are perceived as restrictions on individuality at a time when the desire for personal privacy is ascendant.