I'm Busted!

A Career Lady, enlightened, building a separate career with and on her husband's (which, reciprocally, her own achievements bolster), told me, all sweet persuasion, how she coped with the pot problem. "I told our Jim [her son] that all we had given him was based on his father's good name as a judge [yes, a judge--I expected, any minute, to hear that his last name was Hardy] and he should take care of that good name by obeying all laws--even silly laws like those against marijuana."

She was right, of course. The kid should feel grateful and help his father. But talk of "all we have given you" and "you owe it to us" and "think of your father's career" is grating to the blinkered and desperate (and therefore selfish) adolescent--grating under the best of conditions, without adding a law to which children are sacrificed for their father's good, a law with which many of those fathers do not agree, a law expressing all too conveniently the hypocrisy of society. Or so the kid must see it. So, at least, many other kids do.

Family ties are not so much cut now as broken through excessive tangling, and one of the things that tangles them is the law--especially pot laws. Parents are fearful of marijuana, not only for its own effect on their children but for the law's effect on those kids who get caught--prison, a criminal record, the company of hardened types. In their concern, they grow more restrictive and the kids--either through fear of such restriction or out of simple deference to parental anxiety--hide their use of pot more carefully. Parents' confidence is broken; the deleterious effects of pot seem confirmed by the withdrawal of their children, this new distant wariness and caution.

And then, perhaps, the law intrudes --no longer mere threat but reality. There is a pot bust. Are the parents to side with their child against the law, fearful that they may be undermining respect for all law? Or should they side with the law, father becoming judge, judge father, the whole domestic-political system throwing its persuasive and coercive weight against the child? Or should a parent steer some middle course, half on the side of the judge and half on that of "the criminal"? Or can he stand off and be neutral, not involved in his child's plight? No stance seems adequate.

These laws, ironically, do not afflict a careless parent but the dedicated ones, These are either paralyzed or forced into undignified attempts to side with the law. This last situation is revealed in the little undercurrents and complicated appeal of a long letter sent by one father to his sons in prep school. The letter, written in 1970, was later published for other parents as an example of wise and compassionate guidance, which proves how confused we are on this subject:

Dear Sons: M. N., after your spring vacation, suggested to me that you were both smoking pot. Your headmaster, John, let fall a cryptic remark whose innuendo I chose not to accept. Your final report, Jim, excellent as it is, does mention a lessening in your community participation over the past several months. The main complaint from your headmaster about you, John, is that you have this past year "retired" from the school and school activities and withdrawn into yourself.

These attitudes of withdrawal are precisely those outward manifestations mentioned in the Toronto medical report I left with you before saying goodbye. If you have read that report carefully, you will realize that the effects of pot or hash are deleterious mentally and psychologically, as well as being cumulative. In the flight from reality, there is a certain schizophrenia. The main difference between these drugs and alcohol, as again pointed out by the report, is that alcohol abused may lead to intoxication; but with drugs the immediate goal is intoxication.

Respecting the harder LSD and mescaline, anyone who experiments with these has to be very stupid, very immature or nuts. Here, the medical findings are beyond dispute.

Returning to hash and pot, let me remind you of the following: (1) the laws, rightly or wrongly, are stringent, and they are being energetically prosecuted; if you are caught in possession of these drugs, or smoking them, you are liable to severe fines and prison sentences. (2) Medical evidence--such as the Toronto report--mounts against these drugs, indicating severe psychological and intellectual consequences. (3) Your uncle Herman is a national figure in the musical world; your uncle David is running for national political office. Your responsibility is not only and exclusively to yourself. (4) To the extent that you are mature young adults and responsible for yourselves, you ought to have the moral courage, really minimal, to reject any temptation toward this sort of dangerous and unlawful nonsense.

Since you began growing into adulthood, I have prohibited you very few things, relying on your judgment, your prudence and your sense of right and wrong. If you write me back to tell me that what I have quoted above is a bunch of horse-feathers, I'll be thankful and, of course, believe you. If you write to say that you once experimented with pot but have quit it, I'll believe you. I'll be thankful, I'll be grateful that you have stopped; but I will be amazed that you have permitted "peer pressure" to so outweigh your judgment. If you write that you have experimented with acid but have quit, I will again believe you, be thankful and grateful that sound sense prevailed, but will not conceal my disappointment in a judgment that was prevailed upon to accept such a serious risk to your health and to break so serious a law. I will love you as always, but there will be a diminution of my respect for you and my confidence in you. It would be untruthful of me to say less.

Should I get solid evidence in the future that you drop acid or smoke pot, I'll take measures of a severity that I hope may never be necessary. You are forbidden by your father to do either.

The tone of this letter is severe. I am not prejudging you. I am hoping for your avowals that you are neither heads nor acid freaks and I trust you so much that I am confident of receiving such avowals. And I refuse to believe that either of you would lie to me, or the whole tissue of our warm and intimate relationship will be destroyed. Should either of you have once indulged in pot or acid, or in pot more than once, you are commanded by me to stop, but I want to be taken into your confidence, I want to know why you may have done these things and I want to help you if I am able; that is, having told you to stop and you having stopped. I want to extend all the aid that I am able to bring you. Something perhaps drove or drives you to drugs, something we may be able to handle together in mutual trust and affection. The distinction in gravity between acid and pot is wide; but even, in the case of the less-grave pot--nonetheless unlawful, nonetheless injurious--I am unable to come to your help unless you extend to me the confidence I extend to you.

Lovingly,

Father

This father is concerned and trying to be helpful. He is intelligent and has tried to inform himself so that he may enlighten his sons. Then what goes wrong here, what wires get crossed as he writes?

The first difficulty is that he assumes the harmfulness of pot. I say assumes because he is so easily convinced--by one doctor's report, by vague reference to mounting medical evidence and by a false contrast between the mild high sought by most pot smokers (which qualifies as "intoxication") and the relaxed feeling sought from even one social drink (which, the father implies, may not qualify). This approach gives the man a certitude most investigators lack --such certitude that he can dismiss any use of pot as "dangerous and unlawful nonsense." But if it were all so obvious, and if--as he says--he has heretofore relied, and successfully relied, on his sons' good judgment, then mere presentation of evidence so strong should do the trick. But he shows no confidence that this will be sufficient. He must go beyond argument, evidence and persuasion. He must command!

Actually, he issues two commands. The first is: Don't smoke the stuff--under pain of direst penalty ("I'll take measures of a severity that I hope may never be necessary"). These penalties will be brought to bear "should I get solid evidence in the future" (as opposed to inconclusive signs he mentioned at the outset--hints from the headmaster, etc.). Yet he orders them not merely to refrain from pot but to reveal whether or not they have refrained in the past. Here judge becomes father again, appealing to love and trust and saying he will believe their mere assertion (abandoning, it seems, the search for "solid evidence").

Why does he issue this second command? He alleges several reasons. The first is that he wants to help the sons (continued on page 206)I'm Busted!(continued from page 198) by understanding their problems ("something perhaps drove or drives you to drugs ..."). He says their candid admission will allow him to work with them "in mutual trust and affection." Yet he has earlier said that an admission of indulging in pot will diminish his respect for the sons, as having abandoned their judgment to "peer pressure," and that any report of acid dropping will cause "a diminution of my respect for you and my confidence in you." That last is neat. It says, in effect, "I have confidence in you; tell me the truth and I shall believe it is the truth, and therefore I shall lose confidence in you."

The father has, of course, given his own stated motive the lie. He asks for a confession, so he can find what causes the sons to be so driven; yet he has already settled that question in his own mind--weak-kneed submission to "peer pressure" has deprived anyone who smokes pot of the "courage, really minimal" to resist "any temptation toward this sort of dangerous and unlawful nonsense." Thus, there is no doubt left about the intellectual issue--the sons cannot address him at that level. Any defense of "nonsense" must itself be nonsense. The confession will not be made in order that the father may understand and help. He already understands and has judged.

What is the real reason for extracting the confession, then--just a desire to punish, to make sure the boys suffer for their sins? I think not. Another motive slips in quietly here and there. The law will not only punish the boys, if they are caught, but punish, as well, other members of the clan. ("Your uncle Herman is a national figure in the musical world; your uncle David is running for national political office.") The father, no matter how sincere his love for these sons, must also--given the possibility of legal action--honor his fraternal ties. If the boys are doing something that might jeopardize their uncles, the father wants to be forewarned, to alert his brothers and take steps toward neutralizing that threat. This is the only clear advantage to be gained by wresting such odd confessions of moral cowardice out of his sons.

Thus, the law--its effects on careers and reputation--forces the father to a choice between two kinds of family love and, just as damaging, perhaps, makes him cloak that raw choice in the pleadings and cajolings, the emotional blackmail, the intellectual bullying, the blind self-righteousness of his letter. The more one looks at that letter's complicated weave, the more one sees how the law was forcing little violations of his own professions on the man. Even his own readiness to assume the harmfulness of pot comes from an attitude that he rightly senses his sons do not share with him--from a predisposition to agree with laws, think them presumptively well founded, worth observing for the sake of deference to all authority. That is why he is quick to join his own parental authority to the law's binding force; he assumes this will result in mutual reinforcement, rather than mutual undermining.

Some may argue that the law is not at fault here, only the father who could write such a letter. But complacency about parental wisdom is something none of us can afford. Besides, how does one cope with the ever-present chance that one's child may be thrown into jail? Perhaps a child is safe from the law at home; but will he be as safe at prep school or college? The man who wrote this letter knows there is pot to be had at the school. Would there be less if he brought his sons home? Is it worth what they might lose in education to steer them away from all exposure to pot? Where is the law more likely to catch pot users? All these questions pose themselves to a parent even before his children get caught. And after that happens, even a parent more open-minded on the nature of pot, on the laws' limitations, even a father less predisposed to subtle bullying, can make hasty, ill-conceived decisions, lose his children's trust, violate their sense of justice. We all know cases of that, I suppose. Here is one that I know intimately.

• • •

With two sons (Chris and Marc) in high school, Mr. and Mrs. Brown, let us call them, had the normal concerns: getting money together for college, hoping the local college was good enough, inquiring about others they might send their boys away to. Then, while she was cleaning her sons' room one day in 1968, Mrs. Brown saw it--a clear bag full of crackly stuff and the telltale cigarette papers. As she told me later, "They had not even smoked regular cigarettes before then."

She and her husband confronted the boys. Mr. Brown asked that they give up pot while they remained his legal responsibility: "I had to think of the girls--Barbara, thirteen, and Alice ['Lisi'], five." Chris, the elder son, said, "That's the least we can do for you." Chris had always been the forthright one; very open, for all things had come easily to him--grades, girls, sports, friends--and he had nothing to hide. Only fear hides. Trust within the family was instantly restored when he said, "That's the least we can do."

The Browns attended Chris's high school graduation that spring, then went on the happiest vacation the whole family remembers (or will ever know again): They drove "home" to the small Missouri town where Mr. and Mrs. Brown had grown up together, then visited scenic spots in Colorado. It was a festive time for a family used to doing all kinds of things together--going to church, picnicking, painting and drawing, sharing hobbies. The boys' major crises to that point had been lost little-league games or archery matches. Later, the parents would learn things about this idyllic last summer--e.g., that Chris had turned on some kids back in Missouri, children of old friends now grown less friendly--but that was later.

They returned from their vacation unsuspecting and enrolled Chris in the local college, bought his books, waited for classes to begin. Then the phone call came--they did not realize until it came that part of them had been waiting for it all those months. Chris was busted, in the company of a boy three years younger, for possession of marijuana. That was. Saturday, and Chris was released in the Browns' care until trial--on Monday. "That Sunday was the worst day our family had ever spent," Brown says. "Everything we had considered important up to that time went right out the window. We felt so baffled, unable to help Chris. All we could think of was the fingerprinting--the mug shot--the record." The arrest and trial would upset the boy's first weeks at college. There was some relief, though--possession was only a misdemeanor there, Chris was a juvenile and it was his first offense of any kind. "The police we talked to thought he would get off," Brown said.

On Monday, Chris was convicted and sent to a probation officer for recommendation on sentencing. (The boy caught with him--a brother of the boy who turned Chris on--was let off with a warning. He would be caught again later and convicted.) The Browns took Chris to the probation officer, pointed out his good scholastic and conduct records and went away comforted--he would recommend leniency, probation in their custody.

Tuesday morning, back to the judge for sentencing. Some of Chris's longhaired friends--obviously distasteful to the judge--had come out of curiosity. Other young people were there, brought by their parents, to be taught a lesson. The judge, as it turned out, was ready to oblige such parents. He preached over Chris's head to those in the courtroom, talked of the hardening and corruption that go on in those who break the law, said Chris had already corrupted his 14-year-old "partner in crime," then wagged his finger at him: "I won't punish your parents by giving you the fine. Thirty days in jail." Mrs. Brown says now, with the acquired bitterness of dealing with official after official who claimed he would spare her by punishing her child, "What (continued on page 223)I'm Busted!(continued from page 206) kind of man thinks it is not punishing a parent to put her son in jail with hardened criminals?"

Mrs. Brown contrived to see Chris every day in jail, bringing fresh clothes or razor blades or other supplies. She watched, day by day, the changes taking place in him with dismaying rapidity. Early in Chris's stay, his fellow prisoners' complaints broke out in a mini-revolt--men hammering at their bars and crying for redress to a thousand grievances, real and imagined, private and shared. Their plight angered Chris (convinced from his own case that the law could be blind and cruel) and their defiance exhilarated him. "Hell, he was only seventeen years old," his father says now. "He had never seen anything like this before. It excited him." Chris wrote a letter to his parents, a glowing new chapter, he thought, in the prison literature of our era, describing the wronged men and their captors. Prison censors read the letter, called in his parents, warned them that their son showed signs of being a criminal type (well, what other type belongs in jail?) and kept the letter on file. His jailers would release him one day a week to go to a psychiatrist. Happy to get him out on any teams, the Browns agreed. They took him to sessions with a psychiatrist at the Army hospital nearby--the Browns, both skilled with pen and pencil, as family drawings all over their home testify, are civilian cartographers working for the Department of Defense and lived in a compound on the Army base. The psychiatrist stressed Chris's duty to his parents, the disproportion between any pleasure he might get from pot and the anguish he caused his family. Chris played the game, with a developing sense of irony--he had nowhere found pot so plentiful nor cheap as in jail.

Meanwhile, Brown worried about Marc, his other son, who ran in the same crowd as Chris had. Local police, responding to community sentiment, were dogging that crowd now. Brown felt it was only a matter of time before Marc, now a high school junior, would get the same initiation into criminality that Chris was undergoing. Marc was better looking than Chris--taller, blonder--and probably more talented, but was content to follow in his brother's footsteps, treating him as a hero. In his preschool days, he drew very well, a talent descended from both parents; but when Chris brought home stick-man drawings from kindergarten, rude first efforts that had been praised by his teacher, Marc gave up his own style and mimicked these cruder works. He was thoughtful and accommodating, almost to a fault. He liked to please, to do what was expected of him. Though he played baseball well, he seemed to "blow" games when his team was expected not to win. He "got along" too well, considering the company he was getting along in. Aside from that, Mrs. Brown for years had wanted to send Marc, the family's best student, to a school that would test his abilities. Despite his good grades, he was bored at the local school, where he could get away with anything. The Browns therefore asked around and were told of a strict military school that "straightened out" other drifting kids from the area--so the Browns moved fast. (Four weeks of the fall term had already elapsed.) They telephoned, wrote, bought, packed, put Marc on the plane; and turned back to Chris's problem.

Brown went to the dean of the local college and to some professors, but it did no good--Chris had exceeded the cut allowance in each course during his 30 days in jail. He was out of school, which meant, in that locale, out of everything. There were few civilian jobs of any sort and even fewer left for teenagers. In his first weeks out of jail, Chris kept going to the psychiatrist, until--with the candor required of a patient--he told the psychiatrist he was still using marijuana. "I can't help him," the psychiatrist told his parents, "if he is going to keep using pot." Yet pot was supposed to be his problem. The doctor's attitude seemed to be: "Don't come to me unless you don't have that problem--and then, of course, you won't need to come to me." Catch-22 1/2. The Browns feel the doctor was afraid of being charged with complicity if he knew Chris continued to smoke pot. The same law that divided Chris from his parents now divided him from his doctor--was slowly dividing him from any society but that of convicts.

So now his parents knew he still smoked pot; knew, as well, that the danger of a second arrest was acute and knew this second offense would mean at least a six-month sentence--a real break in his life--with college deferred again (perhaps forever) as he served a term in Federal prison, not the local jail.

The best thing, they felt, was to get him into school, if only on a part-time basis. One school they had earlier considered was the University of Maryland--Chris wanted to go there because his girlfriend, daughter of a military man, had moved with her family to Washington. So Chris was sent there to enroll (part time, if he could) for the fall term, or full time in the spring. But it was too late to enroll; instead, he took a job at the Library of Congress, grew very close to his girlfriend and her family and blew a lot of grass with the girl (who had begun using it before he did).

Marc, meanwhile, hated military school and missed his home; yet his grades were still good. He crammed for exams with the help of pep pills, smoked the readily available pot, tried "meth" to cope with the boredom of a place scholastically inferior to his old school. He spent that Easter with a classmate, the son of a clergyman, in Cincinnati--and, in the preacher's house, took his first LSD trip. "Sending him there was the worst thing I could have done," Brown sees now, looking back. Marc also spent part of the next summer in Cincinnati, with his friend--and with LSD. He came home in time to enter senior year at the local high school, though; no more military school for him.

He was already in school when Chris, too, came back--he had tried to stay in Washington, near his girl, but the parents of boys Chris had turned on in his home town wrote to Washington, warning the girl's father about him. The man threatened Chris with arrest for giving his daughter marijuana. (There was a parent who found the law useful.) Chris had again returned too late for the fall term at the local college and had to wait three months to enroll. He did small chores, went surfing every day, ran errands, baby-sat with his sister Lisi.

The family got through that Christmas intact, though with uneasiness. Chris was breaking the law and they knew it. They also knew he was being watched--by other parents, by the local police. Knowing this, they watched him, too, to see if he was giving himself away to those who would report him or lock him up. And he felt their scrutiny, equated it with that of the faceless others he felt hounded and pursued by. So, with silent helpless half-gestures and covert looks. they passed new mild forms of paranoia around to one another at every meal, in each family gathering, every time one came in the door or went out. Had Barbara, 14 now, started yet? Was Marc back on pot? Would Chris get caught? Even young Lisi felt inexplicable currents of fear, suspicion, pity, hostility, running from member to member of her family. They all lived now--directly or vicariously--outside the law, "underground," yet terribly exposed and blind, like moles without their cover of earth.

The apprehension centered on Chris, with his circle of pot-smoking friends, in which he was so popular. But Marc was in deeper trouble. Always a loner, he struck off into the woods by himself, all that fall, dropping acid sent to him by friends. Yet he did not become noticeably erratic till after Christmas.

Chris, to get back into the local college after serving a jail sentence, needed a special dispensation from the dean. Brown went with him, backed him up: "Chris lied through his teeth, and I knew it--said he was off pot and would never go back on it." But Brown felt he must get Chris into school, stop his life of drifting with nothing to do.

Then Marc, who had been looking odd, took off--got out of the car one day as Chris was driving, wandered into the woods and was not seen for 36 hours, from early Sunday morning to 10:30 Monday night. A heavy dose of acid had stayed with him, had grown more intense; for almost a week, he had struggled back toward earth but could not touch down; he tried to go about ordinary activities and not show what strange things were loose in his hallucinating mind as he went to class, watched the surf, threw the javelin at a track meet, ate with his parents. He had not made it down, so he was surrendering at last--in the woods, he took off his clothes and went into a stream, dreamily Ophelialike, wanting to die. "But something kept pushing me back toward life," he told his mother later. "Always something kept me moving, a scratch, a bite, the cold." He heard dogs bark and two giant eyes loomed in his path; but he was ready to fight for his life--he grabbed something and hit the beast between its huge eyes.

It was a police wagon, driven there in answer to reports of a naked boy in the area, its lights left on while police searched for him in the dark. They found him, when they returned to the wagon, beating on its hood with a stick. The Browns picked him up at the police station, took him home (still hallucinating) for clothes, a shower, some sleep; then off to a local mental-health center, where he could be drugged out of his own drugs, drugged into reality (of a sort) and made part of a group-therapy program aimed at bracing its participants for life without drugs. Soon he was back in high school, returning to the hospital after the class day for more sessions and tranquilizers and study--and for the inevitable search, on his return, to see that he brought nothing back in with him.

That search became important to Brown now--he had just learned that others besides irate parents or zealous police were watching his son. Since the Browns worked on a military base, they had to follow security procedures. After Marc's recovery, though no criminal charges had been pressed, military intelligence called Brown, wanting to ask Marc where he got the acid. Brown let them know his son was sick and should be left alone. The head of Brown's program was then told he had been uncooperative. Under such scrutiny, Brown felt his other son, Chris, had no chance. He was bound to be caught.

But a solution suggested itself. If Marc could be an outpatient of the mental-health center, be kept off drugs while attending high school, why not put Chris in also, to undergo group therapy while he attended his first college classes--and to be searched for drugs on his return every afternoon to the hospital? Chris resisted but did not refuse. He was willing to talk it over with the head of the hospital, a woman doctor. "The woman came on strong, really told Chris off," Brown remembers, and Chris bridled. The doctor was for committing him; Brown took him outside and asked that he do this, part time. "I'd rather go to prison for six months," Chris said--and Brown, feeling desperate, made his greatest mistake. To save him from worse imprisonment by the state, he sent his son to this benign-looking "prison" full time.

Now both sons were in the hospital and the elder one was dropped again from the rolls of the local college. Both behaved well, though, and began going home for weekends, surfing together, picnicking with the family. Chris was "freed" on a part-time basis, working eight hours a day at the local employment office, with another outpatient from the hospital. The Browns often took the two of them to lunch at a favorite restaurant, breaking up the workday for them. Chris took nothing back to the hospital with him--he and his fellow patient had arranged to get and take their "speed" on the job.

There was one more summer together, the last one, not too bad. The boys were both out now, both enrolled in the local college, already taking summer courses, and their grades were good. But Chris had picked up a 16-year-old girlfriend and had turned her on. The therapy sessions continued, but Chris knew that they were just a game. When he smoked pot in the bathroom, he turned on the exhaust fan--and Brown, going outside, smelled the stuff, looking nervously around for others who might catch a whiff. "You get kinda paranoid."

At the last summer meeting with Chris's new psychiatrist, Brown suggested that Chris attend the fall term as a part-time patient of the hospital. Chris had not expected this--after his first day's class, he ran away. His 16-year-old girl told her mother she was on pot and asked to live at the mental-health center while attending high school--she hoped that would bring Chris back and she could be with him. Instead, he found her at school and she disappeared as well.

Now Brown had Marc wanting to leave home (the local college was not challenging enough for him), Chris gone, his girlfriend's parents blaming him and college entries to be lined up again (if he could find his other son before too much of the fall term had gone by). Marc had heard good things about the University of Hawaii and he planned to get seaman's papers and work his way there from New Orleans. Brown gave him money for the plane.

Police found Chris and his girl in the shack of a professional drug peddler and they were returned to the hospital--where military police served Chris papers banning him from the entire base on which, technically, his parents' home stood. Similar papers came for Marc. Brown asked what Marc had done--and was told he collaborated with Chris. The Browns now believe their phone was tapped--for Chris had called Marc to get clothes out of his house.

Chris was now in the maximum-security section of the mental hospital, as a runaway. Violent cases are kept there and he had three fights with them. Brown, having put him in there, now worked hard to get him out. Chris was freed and went off--not interested any longer in college. Marc, alone in New Orleans, called his friend in Cincinnati--and ended up there. Chris, when last heard of, was hanging out near Berkeley. Neither writes home.

"I should never have sent them away to school," Brown now says bitterly. "It would have been a thousand times better to keep them with us. I shouldn't have put Chris in the hospital. But I was trying to find some sanctuary for them, some refuge from the law. Everything I did was done from fear of the law." He has become obsessed with the marijuana laws. He admits his case is special in some ways--the military nosed in and made things worse. But every family has some social or career pressure, superadded to the law's effect. Besides, the military came in long after the civil authorities had jailed Chris and set in motion all the family's reactions, each one futile or self-defeating, each one motivated by fear of new arrests and worse penalties. It was seeing Chris in jail, seeing what it did to him, fearing jail would touch their other children, that made the Browns act desperately through the course of three years they look back on, now, as one continuous nightmare--one that has not ended and probably never will.

Chris had told Brown all about marijuana after his mother found it in his room. He had collected articles and reports on the subject; Brown read these while Chris was in jail, and got angry. If pot is harmful, he believes, it is not bad enough--not even by the worst accounts of it--to put him and his wife and his boys through what they suffered. In all his own mistaken actions, he never made the mistake of panicking over "the evil weed." He did not put Chris in the mental hospital to cure him of pot, which he did not fear, but to keep him from the law, which he feared, perhaps, too much.

Brown began a private energetic campaign against the law (which is what first brought him to my attention). He wrote letters to Congress, to all its relevant committees, to local officials and Federal bureaus, to newspapers and magazines, asking for the law's repeal, drawing attention to new medical reports, programs, information, hard cases. It is a labor of purgation, partly. He knows he can do nothing further to help his own sons--except, perhaps, get Chris's conviction expunged from the record. But he might help other families escape the nightmare. When he reads that some legislator thinks it enough to demote possession of marijuana from a felony to a misdemeanor, he is at his typewriter, telling that man what happened to his children and to many of their friends in an area where possession was already a misdemeanor. When others use bad statistics, bad logic, to spread horror stories about pot, Brown is on them in an instant. Senator Marlow Cook answered one of his letters with the argument that marijuana should be kept illegal because a stronger form of it was being used in Vietnam and brought back. Brown proved from the very committee testimony Cook referred to that the "stronger" marijuana was actually marijuana mixed with other opiates, that, even so, "bad trips" occurred to only three tenths of one percent of the heavy users and that war conditions could well aggravate effects of pot.

When others said men might steal to buy pot, he came back: The average marijuana user spends less than a dollar a day, against $30 to $200 a day for the heroin user. And besides, legalization would make the use of marijuana approximate mere cigarette smoking--how many people steal to support their cigarette habit? If one is interested in law enforcement, Brown says, why not "free the nation's completely overworked and constantly harassed narcotics squads from petty tactics against teens and twenties pot smokers?"

When people use statistics to show heroin users "started" with pot (in reality, that means they have also used or still use it), he is ready to dispute such figures: "To make a clear and honest picture, there should be a head count of all who have ever experimented with pot and compare this amount with the ones who have then gone on to heroin use. I believe the percentage would be so low as to be almost meaningless."

When people say pot causes violence or Vietnam atrocities, he writes of his own experience of war: "Combat, the shooting at and the killing of fellow human beings, is absolutely dehumanizing.... [In World War Two] after we had taken a German line and were passing through it, I walked coldly by a wounded German who was pale from a bleeding wound and begging for a drink of water. Under almost any other circumstance, I would have given water to that fellow human in need.... I sincerely believe that if I had used pot ... I would have given the water to the wounded soldier."

Brown, of course, wants all pot laws struck down. Lowering the penalty, advising therapy, improving public education--these are worthless palliatives; none would have altered his sons' cases. Indeed, he asks for more than the laws' abolition. He recommends an amnesty that would erase all pot convictions--or, at the least, all convictions for mere possession (as in the case of his son): "Chris is only a paper criminal, after all ... all he wanted to do was to smoke non-physically addicting pot instead of cigarettes (a habit millions of humans all over the world find impossible to break) or to drink liquor (with its 6,000,000 alcoholics)." And while the laws are being struck down (or studied), while the nature of pot itself is under investigation, he asks--very reasonably--for a moratorium on the laws' enforcement. As Mrs. Brown says, "A parent cannot even purchase or sample marijuana, to know what the kids are talking about, to see for themselves what its effect is." The law-abiding parent is the one kept in the dark, liable to be uninformed and panicky about the drug and, therefore, prone to overreact.

It is a lonely business, speaking out of personal tragedy to men proud of "the law's delays." Back from Senate offices came politic epistles--hedged, timorous things, promising nothing, praising Brown for good citizenship. The facile expressions of sympathy: "I share your concern...." (Do you? How many sons have you lost to the law?) Judicious, meaningless agreement: "I certainly think [how brave and forthright the formula] the matter merits further investigation...." All the minimizing stalls and substitutes for action: "Probably very serious ... deserves attention ... enclosed is a statement ... greater not less effort ... blue-ribbon study." Each answer a shove of the thing three steps further off from solution: a law "now pending ... would establish a commission on marijuana to conduct a study ...[as a] first step in answering the questions."

And, most heartbreaking of all, the standardized letter geared to other parents' concern with the evil of drugs--Senator Charles Percy assuring Brown he will work for "stiffer penalties for drug pushers" and Senator Warren Magnuson thanking him for his letter "urging my support of action to prevent legalization of marijuana"! Yet even that obtuseness is better than the smug things said by "hard-liners" on the issue. Mark Hat-field, one of those "Enclosed-is-a-statement" answerers, thinks the solution is "instilling of a strong moral fiber in our youth," and he reminds Brown--Brown, who did everything to observe the law, defer to it, exact conformity with it from his sons--that "it is important that we recognize the necessity of complying with the law as it stands, while it stands. Your son's experience is an unfortunate one, but while drug usage is illegal, justice can only be rendered on the basis of that legal norm." Just Brown's point, Mr. Senator--justice can at present only serve that legal norm. But what kind of justice? What kind of norm? What kind of law?

Killing kinds.