Tuning In, Turning On, and Dropping Out, Part-2

One Boomer’s Regrets and Ruminations

A sweet, pungent and unfamiliar aroma greeted us upon entering Jim’s apartment. I’d never smelled anything quite like it. Jim was my best friend’s older brother. We’d gone there to score some pot. We were first-timers. He gave us a couple of joints each, explaining to us novices about how the first time we might not get very high. He also showed us how to inhale. Since I’d already been smoking cigarettes for a couple of years, inhaling presented no problem, although inhaling from a tapered and pencil-thin joint required a different technique. With this, my initiation into pot culture had begun. I had reached the turning-on stage of the 3-stage transformation process Timothy Leary had recommended.

Turning on by becoming a pothead—and using other drugs—was key to setting the stage for my eventual dropping out. It did so in several ways. The most effective of which was to instill in my consciousness my determined willingness to commit what was then a felony. It was the crossing—a stepping over—of an understood line. I had become an outlaw, even if only in a technical sense. Of course, all us pot smokers scoffed at drug laws as ridiculous, overblown, and unfair. Still, choosing to commit felony acts and risk prison significantly changed my/our relationship to society—if not outwardly, then certainly inwardly. My generation and I were flipping the bird to society and its rules by flaunting one of its serious prohibitions.

The other way pot smoking primed me for dropping out was the subtile way it warped my thinking and judgment. My still-developing brain was certainly affected. As I was being radicalized from without by the social changes happening around me, I was, at the same time, being radicalized within by the mind-altering drugs I was using. These twin influences combined to foster in me a deep sense of alienation from society. This alienation expressed itself through my rebellion at school and my emotional estrangement from family at home.

Thankfully—and for whatever reason—I never became addicted to any of the drugs I used. [Sometime in the late 80s it became acceptable for politicians and others to say, Well, yes, I did experiment with drugs back in the 60s. In the 80s, when confronted with accusations of past drug use, a politician would never say “Yes, in the past I used drugs”, but instead, in my youth I experimented a little… as if it was really just a brief attempt to satisfy a youthful scientific curiosity. Ha!]

I could tell a handful of crazy stories from my days of using psychedelic and other drugs, but that is not my purpose in this piece or this series. Perhaps I’ll tell those stories as warning tales in future articles or essays. The two things I am examining in this series are how a whole generation took such a big and radical turn away from the values of the previous generation, and how I was swept up and carried along in with it.

In addition to examining the hows and whys of the social transformation or the 60s and 70s, I want this series to stand as my personal confession as well as an apology from me and my generation to the current crop of young people—and their parents—who are having to wade through the wreckage my generation wreaked.

[Some of my Boomer readers may resent me speaking for them in this way. If so, all I can say is, fair enough; I invite them all to sit down and write their own essay about how the cultural revolution we launched made things today so much better]

Next week: About my dropping out and how/why I never dropped back in.

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