Millions are experimenting with "pot" (marijuana), tripping on LSD, or are hooked on heroin!
Thousands are "turning on," "tuning in," dropping out.
The shadowy, surrealistic world of drugs is emerging as youth's greatest "cop-out."
Here are the sobering facts about the new drug craze.
"BUT MOM, EVERYBODY smokes pot. Everybody's turning on. You have your mixed drinks and martinis, and we have marijuana. What's the difference?"
Tragic — but almost TRUE! Drug abuse in the United States today is increasing dramatically. "You might as well face it," said a 17-year-old. "If you're going to college, you'll probably smoke pot."
Another youth claimed, "Grass [marijuana] is as easy to get as beer for someone under 18."
The Turned-On World
From Harvard to Berkeley and from Washington to Alabama, almost no college campus is free from drug abuse. A list of American colleges plagued with drug problems would read like a who's who of the educational world: Alabama, Brandeis, California, Colorado, Harvard, Illinois, Michigan, the Naval Academy, Oklahoma, Princeton, South Carolina, Texas, Washington, and on and on.
Drug abuse among youth, even in high schools and junior highs schools, is fast becoming EPIDEMIC!
Warned Dr. Henry Brill, vice-chairman of the New York State Narcotics Commission, recently, "Recent surveys show that twenty to thirty percent of all students have experimented — mostly with marijuana, but also with pills. One quarter of these say they take drugs on a regular basis."
Marijuana arrests have skyrocketed. Some marijuana dealers estimate that from three to five tons of "pot" are smuggled into the United States from Mexico every week. Heroin, marijuana and other illicit drugs pour into the United States from every quarter of the globe.
The primary target: young Americans!
Narcotics officials estimate that Americans spend about $100 million a year on marijuana alone. More than 675,000,000 marijuana cigarettes or "joints" will be smoked in the United States this year — enough to provide 13 million Americans with a weekly "high."
Dr. Dana Farnsworth, director of the Harvard University health services, has estimated that as high as 35 percent of students at major universities on the East and West Coasts have experimented with marijuana once, and about half of them repeat the experiment.
Other hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD expand the problem. LSD is colorless, odorless, and tasteless. Any college chemistry major can synthesize it from lysergic acid amide. Two tiny tablets could give 3,000 people a psychedelic "trip." The LSD black market is a flourishing business.
The age-old traffic in narcotics, especially heroin, is a billion-dollar business in itself. The total drug picture involves BILLIONS of dollars, yearly.
Who are the major users?
People from every strata of society — young and old, rich and poor, housewives and doctors, clergymen and politicians, children and aged folks, educators and students.
Millions Ask — WHY?
Surrounded by the signs of increasing drug usage, millions wonder — WHY?
Why are youth turning to drugs for kicks? What is the CAUSE for the up-surging drug statistics? WHY are millions of kids, even grade school students, experimenting with marijuana, trying LSD, and "turning on" with other psychedelic drugs?
Is drug use connected with the leap in crime? Do drugs do physical and mental harm to those who take them? What is the TRUTH?
Conflicting reports are heard on every side. Millions are confused, perplexed — including parents, teachers, and college administrators.
WHAT CAN BE DONE about the sky-rocketing drug problem? What is the solution?
You need to know the answers. Your family — your own children — YOUR FUTURE, and your children's — is at stake! Your children may be tempted at school, or at parties of their young friends. Don't hide your eyes from the facts — your children could easily become involved!
You need to know how to make sure they don't!
And if YOU, personally, are tempted to try drugs, or think they are harmless — then you need to carefully STUDY the compiled statistics, facts and scientific reports that have been researched in this article — for YOU! Your personal future, happiness, tranquility, and peace of mind may well be directly involved whether you like it or not!
Pot on the Campus
Said one Dean of an eastern college, "If I were a member of this generation, I would probably be tempted to give marijuana at least one try."
At Harvard, an estimated 25 to 30 percent of the freshman class has experimented with drugs. At Princeton, 15 percent of the undergraduates have tried marijuana. About 20 percent of the students at Yale have used pot. The Dean at Columbia wouldn't be surprised if one third of the student body has used it.
Who are the college pot smokers and drug takers? Not the (ringers any longer. The mainstream of the student body, in many cases, are the new users. Athletes, politically oriented men of ambition, fraternity men, artists, aspiring nuclear scientists, even home economics majors.
Declared one user of LSD, "Sure it's dangerous, but so is everything else I enjoy. Why should I worry about my chromosomes when everything else in the world is so messed up?"
The typical collegiate pothead may turn on with marijuana every evening. But one, who saw the worthlessness of pot after trying it, said, "When I saw it was taking me nowhere, I quit."
The "Great Escape" — to NOWHERE!
Millions of human beings are frantically striving to blot reality from their minds.
Why?
Simply because the reality of today's world is too brutal for the squeamish to face.
The awesome potential of the Nuclear Age is too frightening to consider. COSMOCIDE — world suicide — has become an absolute reality. Like it or not, we have to realize the Buck Rogers weapons of past years are no longer only in the comic books. They are real and they are deadly.
Our whole future is at stake. The gigantic implications are so staggering millions try to obscure them in any way possible. Not knowing the answer, or even having hope of an answer, they blind their eyes and seek to escape reality.
The refusal to accept things as they are is apparent in everything they do. It dominates the thinking of millions and permeates our whole society. It has become a totally unrealistic nay of life—or DEATH!
The symptoms are all about us. From the price-rigging executive to the "flower child" in a hippie "love-in." From the slavering, maniacal screams of hate-filled racists to the hackneyed diatribes over U.N. conference tables, the world is filled with the symptoms of a sickness defying diagnosis and resisting treatment.
Today, leaders of the Western world frantically seek solutions to the deeply divisive problems of mankind. They struggle to achieve a workable PEACE, all the while spending more and more billions in a monstrous arms race between the big nuclear powers!
Seeing these enormous world problems and crisis after crisis, millions seek escape from it all!
RELIEVE! PLACATE! ASSUAGE! IGNORE! This is the hue and cry! Just don't face the facts.
While world leaders search for PEACE — for relief from war, famine and poverty, millions of "average" citizens seek relief from their personal problems by taking daily doses from a dizzying array of drugs — all to escape reality.
Rather than producing desperately needed solutions, our modern craze to escape is causing millions to "turn on" with pot, "tune in" with acid (LSD), and drop out of reality for a while!
Drug abuse is one of the most urgent crises of our age! It's time you knew the truth about pep pills, barbiturates, marijuana, and LSD.
In this series you will see the whole "DRUG SCENE" — from the hardened addict who mugs, snatches purses, and robs to support an expensive "habit"; to the quiet housewife who can't sleep without her pills; from the college kid experimenting with pot; to the elementary school child "shooting" Benzedrine!
You'll be shocked to see the true relationship between drug usage and all crime. And you'll be shocked to see the tremendous attempt at justification for mind-altering drugs from all sides.
You'll see how mind-altering food and drink are as old as the human race, and as new as the Space Age. And you'll be made aware, as never before, of the bizarre desire of a frightened generation to escape the realities of our hideously complex world through the simple expedient of a sip or a swallow.