Drugs, Sex, and Social Change

from communication center at the university of texas at austin along lauren radio network presents university forum bad the forum is a public interdisciplinary meeting place for the wide ranging world of ideas opinion and analysis dr jo forte is a physician specializing in public health social psychiatry and drug abuse treatment he's also the author of the pleasure seekers and analysis of today's drug culture in early nineteen seventy one dr for visited the university of texas at austin he came to speak at the colloquium on freedom and responsibility the issues of man's responsibilities to himself and to society from the tape archives of communications center we now present that speech entitled drugs sex and social change dr joel ford to begin with we have a total lack of understanding of what the problems are regarding drugs or saks we have totally

different definitions of even when a drug is let alone what the problem is and i'm often reminded of the american tourists experience in england looking at the traffic near the typical american says these people drive on the wrong side of the road set of simply saying more objective way they drive on the other side of the road and we seem to have a compulsive need to take away other people's freedom or to limit their freedom by labeling or stigmatizing them as deviant abnormal illegal criminal or whatever for they're essentially private behavior then we do another very interesting thing over beyond calling them sick or abnormal we tend to identify them in a one dimensional out of context of viewing with alarm

fashion that is the typical technique of madison avenue of the political campaigner and of the person seeking the rewards of the great society that is the rewards of weekly newspaper headlines the chicken and p banquet circuit prestigious invitations and research grants from the national institutes of health now that one dimension of dealing with alarm about sex or drugs is typified by debate i once had with a representative of that optimistic organization the american medical association the stalker speaking to an audience committed to the concept that all homosexuals were sick and needed twenty years of intensive psychoanalysis to be converted to fool her sexuality this doctor said to the audience all the homosexuals in my practice are seriously disturbed people that sounded most impressive until i pointed out that although heterosexuals in his

practice were seriously disturbed people are high in other words why so to speak looking around the room and singling out one facet of a person's life and referring to them as that homosexual over there we make it seem as though they aren't fairly asexual being but they have no other interests no other stars to their life but we never think of doing that with a heterosexual referring to that heterosexual be there so that's all that person was one is evil c'est illustrated by an anecdote about the little boy regularly turning sunday school on sunday morning was as wise teacher are you troubled by evil thoughts and he said no i enjoyed that maybe symbolizes a generation gap in america as well or the

story about the mother who told her son that if he kept masturbating he would go blind so he asked whether he could just continue until we needed glasses yeah what are drugs and what is the drug problem a think it ridiculous that's the question what are drawings but actually a vocal minority in america that has come to be falsely identified as a silent majority doesn't even know what the true contacts of drugs is and it all began many years ago when somebody that has a held up a license your gender vodka and describe it to everybody as a totally harmless inherently desirable beverage and then to stay with that or a tobacco leaf from these evil things every year that are the dress and of course the word dry with like all this

vodka or whiskey virgin which instead of water which i have a pair if i call that by the term medicine or drive or narcotic you would have a completely different reaction to it then with that your beverage salmon from that initial dichotomy comes all kinds of conclusions about who's using what what the problems are and what should be done about them so the only way to understand drugs is firstly in the total contacts of all drugs not only from cleaning up a hollow nicotine sleeping pill stimulants are chaotic seles the marijuana lou gasoline nutmeg catnip morning glory and a variety of other things but even more broadly understanding the drugs include aspirin and a song and a variety of other things and this means that nothing not know one of the things is totally harmless all drugs meaning all biologically active substances have some arrests

and we have to learn the thinking through and recognize perhaps most of law that if your technique you're just now it's at rest are involved is not sufficient to turn people off from doing something that they do for a variety of social and psychological reasons that i'll come to a few minutes nice to have the definition of the problem we next after see the drugs are not used in a vacuum or abuse in the back and they are seeing our best thing in the context of the society in which they're used they are symptomatic of our barometric of the great deal that is going on in schools families of the institutions and leaders of the society and many other things ste whether you want to call it a sick society which is being reflected in the mass of dependency on drugs is really secondary to recognizing the relationship with drug use to the social order

the definition of a drug problem no for most americans is in terms of somebody they don't like who uses a driving disapprove of and the person i don't like is frequently defined in terms of such important characteristics as long hair a typical lifestyle or were cabinets in frequent visits to barbershops or whatever may day and not in terms of any kind of meaningful or objective distinction between human brains the second level definition of a drug problem is any illegal use of brass and of course parents we can refer to that user by searching during terms as hannah freak are free turns obviously designed to help move somebody into the mainstream of society rather than drive them more deeply into

preoccupation with a variety of drugs that's only one example of how we limit freedom and through this statement his asian process of course even if you want to use that ridiculous definition of any illegal use as a problem for say you must include the massive illegal use of alcohol tobacco by those under twenty one or eighteen depending on the political jurisdiction and if we were to enforce all existing drug laws today we could for the first time a lemonade overcrowding in schools of america ninety five percent of the student body is high schools could be imprisoned for the illegal possession or use of alcohol or tobacco with marijuana being a significant a distant third and all the other drugs coming well after that now that brings us to one of the interesting polarization is in our society and turns want you attempted to find a problem how you react to it and we have a pseudo hardline

operating critically among the distinguished figures in the society who become drug experts such as the vice president whose name i can't recall to moment martin john mitchell art linkletter another authorities on drugs and since you may have noticed that following the president's inaugural address they had special buses there to take everybody to a party that martha had arranged they had to build briars into the buses apparently they couldn't even drive eight blocks without turning on a couple of good model to the society for human relationships without drugs now the but this hard line is perhaps illustrated well by an ohio legislator had two years ago for postponing penalties for the illegal possession of catching up after the wall

street journal published an article about ten young people turning on with cabinet and as the construction industry and that's they geared up to build more jails and prisons for cats and presumably for their owners and as a drug police agencies look forward to ever greater power over the lives of all the citizenry fortunately the bill died in committee we have tremendous mythology about how the drugs work and mythology is particularly promoted by the massive advertising about the hall tobacco an over the counter sue those senators the imagery that as stressed by these legal drugs these mind altering chemicals is threefold you'll get sexual pleasure eternal youth and happiness through the magical properties of this drug and by implication of other from other potent

mind altering chemicals the magical thinking has also been communicated by many of the extremist poor i statements that are made in both directions about good and evil effects of drugs such as marijuana lsd at souter and of course the viewer with alarm that predominates in the society alarmist philosophy by using search terms of soft narcotic pollution agenda or something similar narcotic is in him interesting euphemism america because it isn't as it became clear that drugs such as marijuana were not properly label narcotics and were not objective the new language was invented to deal with that contention safe and soft narcotic is beautiful if your purpose is to foster fear and ignorance it seems to say that even though the drug you're talking about is not a narcotic it is still a narcotic but to somehow softer than some never defined concept

of pardons as good americans we've all been taught thought of marchers with a knee jerk reaction or if some self appointed authority drops the term hard drive down inside of the mouth we don't know what it as a wee notion march on the capital to get more penalties against whoever is using it as to what is a hard drive one on that point i think we should try to use that crude language tj you objectively determine real problems and as i see it weakened outlined three dimensions of hardness from the effects of drugs and we should then balance those using a kind of christ accounting or cost benefit analysis balance those against the heart effects of our social policies that were supposedly designed to stamp out to be heart effects of the

drug three hard facts in a list that i do not mean to be a disaster but to be a last minute to you help your own thinking the street hardened emotions would be death and disability psychosis and then addiction just say starting with death and disability i think both the john birch society in the weathermen would have to agree that death is a hard phenomenon so that any drug significantly involved in producing that would have to be considered far no matter what one's biases might be terms of whether drugs are good for business bad for business legal illegal use for young people or old people and if we look at the drugs most involving death and disability we see alcohol and tobacco far in excess of all the other substances put together set back home alone killing four hundred thousand americans premature surely each year and of

course not only including the stimulant drug nicotine but accompanied by such health radiance is arsenic cyanide colts are formaldehyde nitrogen dioxide at souter and furthermore teaching people to smoke that because cigarette smoking is not a natural pattern of behavior god did not give his chimneys in our heads and want somebody has been taught that is somehow desirable an acceptable to put a dry flat leaf in their mouth in the case of tobacco search for a match what this on fire in hell the fumes from an order poisoned their own tissues and then exhale them an order include everyone else's airspace in a society where ecology is now as popular as motherhood and apple pie once you had gained that have but it is very easy to take up some other pattern of cigarette smoking and since there is overwhelming evidence of the heart effects of tobacco smoking it behooves any

more one consistent person who is concerned about some other former smoking that they seek to stamp out all types of smoking rather than concentrating on one segment of the total picture of horses involved in the thirty eight to forty thousand deaths a year from drunk driving involved in tens of thousands of deaths each year from psoriasis of the lever you're a chronic alcoholism then we have the desk from barbara curator other saturday of overdoses urine was suicidal intent or by accident and we have the occasional accidental or suicidal death involving an lsd type there are separate the president at this point let me make one thing clear says and that is that when you expressed concern about one drug problem it in no way is minimizing her should imply that you're minimizing some other drug problem it has long been my position

that immoral and rational society which we may someday become you try to reduce all unnecessary deaths and disability and the other artifacts of drugs no matter what kind of drug comes from not neglect any of them but certainly not ignore the bigger drug problems because they make significant contributions to political campaigns to the advertising revenue of the mass media and so on and so forth these biases of course creepy and drop roxie moore the sexy and you have to learn to understand how they influence people slightly sahr it another dimension of partners a psychosis again we have many drugs involved in that we have the chronic psychosis from alcoholism permanent brain damage that results in large numbers going to mental hospitals we have huge huge psychosis and in general if you're going to have a psychosis

it's better to have an acute one chronic one we had the acute psychosis it comes from chronic and family a news we have the acute or chronic psychosis that occurs with lsd typewriter is the so called that trap and we have the occasional acute psychosis with marijuana use frequently you hear that talked about totally out of context it is certainly true that some people have a bad trip from marijuana and in fact if you understand and i get to this in a minute how drugs work that would not be surprising at all but in proportion to the number of users some twenty million or so in the number of times they use marijuana the occurrence of psychosis is relatively small and as i've just pointed out acute or chronic psychotic reactions occur are with the whole gamut of drugs and then we had the addiction to mention of partners which involves not only here one the most publicized but all other

narcotics meaning opium or feigned amro methadone and other drawings including marcher aids and oregon mill town or ecuador and many many others all these drugs have the potential for producing physical dependence of remember then that we have many drug problems if we define it in this way sand they involve many different drugs and it is impossible to honestly talk about the drug problems being one of a certain age group or certain two or three drugs and when we think about public policy and the the balance between the policy and the artifacts you have to keep all these drugs in on returning them to the basis for the drug effect i consider this the most important concepts for understanding the drug scene it's a

basis of the demon our guinea the husband about them but many drugs the magical expectations both for good and evil live in promulgating the typical i was perhaps best illustrated by the well publicized hearings that the undistinguished senator from connecticut held many months ago about the causes of the my lai massacre you may recall in these hearings the american people were told that because sixty percent of one's water so your smoke pot twenty four hours before this massacre occurred and it had nothing at all to do with war having of brutalizing effect on people nothing to do with being taught that your opponent was a non human less than three fifths of a man or a woman it had nothing to do with the availability of weapons or anything else here we see something else and illustrated it's very important in trajectory thinking through the issues of freedom and responsibility we are a nation that craves over simplified some of those

solutions that likes to deal with branches across the road long ago said that there are a thousand people hacking away at the branches of evil for everyone striking at the roots and certainly we see that illustrated many many times in the drug same sex scene in other aspects of our society so people wanted to believe that bizarre antisocial horrible behavior whether this example or a lot of other things that you say in the papers wanted to believe that it has not did not reflect on family life on religion on education or anything else but was totally explainable through the magical properties of the chemical its a new kind of dinner how did these drugs actually work for the best illustration is the most common drug experience in american society the cocktail party or some other event centered around the drug alcohol people are the same backgrounds body sizes etc

consumed comparable quantities of this drug if any of you have ever attended one of these right are houses a social anthropologist studying clay customs of primitive people or you may have observed that far from everybody behaving in one manner after consuming the drug they behave in many different wives some become boisterous or aggressive some become passive withdrawn or sleepy some become an amorous flirtatious streaming service same drive the same kind of people that as illustrating what is true of all potent psycho actor drugs including marijuana and thought it means barbiturates and others that the main ingredient in the drug's effect is the underlying personality character mood in attitudes of the user all which interact with the pharmacology of the drug and the social setting but mainly what comes out of it is what

you are as a human brain there is no drug unfortunately that will make an ignoramus into a creative genius there is no drug that will solve school or family problems or rebuild neighborhoods by going on a trip with whether the opera hall where nicotine or grass or some other drama the properties of drugs are much less in both directions and we properly billy i wanna give one illustration that ties in with a discussion of the lee of sex in america an illustration of how drugs affect occurs suppose we take the average american male sitting in his living room in his favorite armchair watching his favorite television program which is awaited for the last week and i suppose that some drugs which are perhaps his wife comes up with a potent drugs such as a martini to try to turn them on to sexual interaction

there is no drug that was somebody away from their favorite television program into a sexual interaction whether that be kissing or more elaborate forms of such interaction however for biological and psychological reasons a person has some already existing interest in sex as i understand a great many americans though they may certainly his mind altering drugs in association with that already existing interest oakley remembering which shakespeare wisely pointed out in the breath about wine that may stimulate interest would diminish performance in other words recognizing that whatever happens they are incompetent say that they show sexually or intellectually or any other way rest mainly with them rather than with the magical properties of the drug and hopefully recognizing that thereby enhancing their own sense of words

self esteem and identity set while many people use drugs well properly this is asked about young people in about a few dragons and of course the kind of question we ask will determine the kind of answer we recently it is said that as gertrude stein lay dying in paris or longtime companion our speech hopeless who was later immortalized by peter sellers sadly her gertrude what is the answer and are dying words are supposed to have been what is the question that's a very profound comment or if you think about it so why do people young adult black white brown yellow etc use drugs meaning out of on nicotine marijuana narcotics and center i wrote a comment on one major reason that we live in a dried red and drug saturated society massively promoted few terms of advertising for the alcohol

tobacco and over the counter set of industry a society where we're talking have been say a concept a better living through chemistry meaning that every time you have a paid problem more trouble you're taught to drop a pill take it right or smoke a cigarette critically one that is one inch longer than another and therefore will kill you two years earlier or communicated through the twenty two thousand hours of television that the average american watches between a zero when they pop out of the births in our place in front of the tv set maternity room and age eighteen it's communicated through the role model example of parents teachers and politicians to show that every time they relate to another human being whether at a wedding funeral or whatever they apparently can only do so through the use of a potent chemical how often do people sit down and turn on simply do that warmth and pleasure of another person's

personality physical presence psychology or whatever very very rarely we tend to define the relationship in terms of rushing to the liquor cabinet the cigarettes are going to catch up now on a pill bottle or whatever all this is is institutionalized as the oppression of minority groups or that the youth women blacks or whatever and as institutionalized as many other things we take for granted in the society so it's difficult even to perceive that is going on we have psychological reasons why people use drugs reasons that i summarize as pleasure seeking behavior and about which we have very contradictory and punitive actions in american society after carefully dichotomy rising one's own pleasure seeking behavior many americans dedicate themselves in stamping out other people's pleasure seeking critically by passing a law against i'm sure you're aware that sex is basically only one

america just as the user possession about the heart about by those under age or marijuana or other drugs at any age is considered illegal or criminal rip psychological reasons this pleasure seeking behavior bring down puritanism and the best single statement about that that i know of was made by h l mencken redefine puritanism as the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy an interesting philosophical point here says that we think of pleasure only in terms of something quick or in terms of the chemical and we'd been taught to do that by the institutions of the society and more broadly what we need to recognize is that strangely enough

sometimes education can be pleasurable that work can be pleasurable that are a variety of things over beyond the possible possibility of drugs sand bring us pleasure and insofar as drugs bring closure and of course they do to some people and that's a prominent reason for their use would be alcohol marijuana or something else insofar as they bring that it rest mainly as i said on the user or consumer and it is at best one of many options or joyce is available to an individual for pleasure or meaning in their life fear grew pressure is certainly a factor criminal janet effect of the law that is the symbolic significance at a private behavior takes on what he's ruled deviant for bed and are illegal whether drug behavior such behavior or gambling things that when somebody else doesn't we called weiss's or immorality is and that we sometimes and label as criminal

additionally so we have many psychological and social reasons for using a drug we have many kinds of drug problems involving many drugs we have people who are mainly used drugs rather than abuse them so that the public policy question can be phrased in terms of what you do with human beings that is a human question rather than a drug question which it has been for so long what you do with human beings including your own brothers and sisters sons and daughters who do things that you considered evil you don't even have to get into the question of whether the behaviors inherently bizarre or harmless because you can't really say that about any of these forms of behavior but you can assume if you choose to that is eve or an acceptable or a new sensor undesirable or whatever we still have to face the philosophical problem more a

problem of what you do to that human being and without human thing that will be effective and moving them in a direction you consider more constructive and world oil being more be struck the enviable you are seeking to combat that's a way i think the question should be frey is either about drive ins or about sexual behavior about some of these other things we're discussing today send then you say destructive effects that have to be balanced against the possible destructive effects of the different drugs i'm not going to take the time to review the many things that can be done in public policy sen terms of the law we should first of all recognize and law project at the criminal law it's not the proper way of course in virtual morality that it's only one of many approaches that a sophisticated society can use in dealing with complex behavior but the mainly for necessary in our

criminal law as part of solving the real problems is to decriminalize the private views or possession of drugs not just concerning yourself with marijuana or without the whole concern yourself with a broad spectrum andy and the implications in terms of personal freedom and responsibility a branding the individual as a criminal making known to making them feel that when they engage in certain types of sexual behavior or drug use in total privacy that they are committing a criminal offense going on to arrest hundreds of thousands and then to quote rehabilitated unquote tens of thousands of them for the private possession of a particular drug here again is an interesting euphemism of our society we built a multimillion dollar institutions we stab them with expensive administrators and guards and we put a sign up calling it a correction or a rehabilitation center and good americans

know that rehabilitation therefore takes place there when you send somebody up to the institution for the private user possession of a drug or for private consenting sexual behavior surely honorable men would not like to us about anything that important it would not tell us that that was going on of really worked in reality however what happens is that in the juvenile hall reform school jail or prison you have the only known cure for heterosexuality that is you have an aggressive introduction of homosexuality you are given a post graduate course in real crime often being taught how to use her one and were to obtain it you are dehumanizing and then you're sent forth as an x contract with even greater difficulty completing an education or getting a job but as long as we call rehabilitation it's all right we must be criminalized and stop thinking of this so we in terms of the criminal law sam only proper

focus for criminal law is on his first leon antisocial behavior first crimes against the person yes relating crimes of violence most of which do not involve drugs and when they do mostly involve alcohol secondly crimes against property and in the drug area putting the saudi the only officers on the major trafficker as for example the major trafficker in here one in thailand south vietnam mexico turkey and other close friends of the united states that would be a pro upper emphasis of the criminal law more rational priority and more importantly get away from the idea that law is the best early approach to dealing with this behavior we have to do many other things at the same time stopping the advertising and promotion of dangerous substances like alcohol and tobacco massive educational programs in the

schools rehabilitation critically outpatient treatment of all forms of drug abuse from alcoholism in her one addiction and attacking the roots on the roots of alienation etc which i'll return to in my concluding remarks we have to do all those things together if we hope to have any degree of success so actually we have a very distorted situation a great deal of talk about sex revolution the concept that all young people are simultaneously playing in the streets rioting smoking pot and dropping acid a concept which of course is led ohio elected office in california and some other states but unfortunately a concept which does very little bit helpless understand life or deal with it in any reasonable way what is really going on sexual and as

far as surveys can be german is a much greater degree of openness and honesty in dealing with sex and moving away from the idea that sex is a four letter word or they cannot be discussed or another way of putting it is the movement away from the hope obviously that has characterized sexual behavior in the past but premarital behavior extramarital behavior in a variety of other things going on today were not discovered by the present generation read the kinsey report if you have any doubts about that what happened in the past was simply the people denied engaged and they hid it from each other or from themselves and the real breakthrough in terms of the sexual revolution for women at least the curtain on in the nineteen sixties but in the nineteen twenties with the then the women's liberation movement that women's suffrage and the other things that accompanied with sexual behavior we have re

labeling phenomena of the stigma possession of the homosexuality mentioned where we fail to recognize that the behavior were worried about is the anti social conduct behavior that infringes upon some other human bang that is involves assault also crimes against children and remember that most such crimes are committed by heterosexuals and that the distinction is not like between heterosexual and homosexuality but rather between private behavior and antisocial conduct sally approach again to sexual behavior we disapprove of it has been to pass a law against the sex laws are perhaps the most far sweeping the most detail the most inconsistent of our laws we have in california law that bars the lady of animals within five hundred yards of schools churches and taverns even if there was some

logic to the first part of it i fail to understand why the mating of animals near taverns wouldn't carry bodies morals and the penalty for that i guess for the owner or the person for letting it to occur is up to six months in jail said we have this strange variations sex laws in a few states for example i think it's an alabama the penalty for oral general relationships whether between husband and wife or whatever is life in prison and hard labor whereas the penalty for animal or courses five years it seems to reflect the ruling intonation of the particulars they have for we have not learned as these few examples illustrate to make distinctions between what we subjectively disapprove of or what we might consider a nuisance and what really

constitutes a menace to society and we have gone to a tremendous extreme in all reacting and infringing upon the freedom of millions of americans literally in the drug and such worries in the name of saving them as to move once said the welfare of the people has always been the ol boy i've tyrants said we don't even have a definition of freedom of course of if i think i have a sweatshirt that has the year rand mcnally definition of freedom on and i forgot to bring it and you can see the great variation in the dictionary concepts of it but more importantly in terms of the way that society defined that we call many countries free because their anti communist instead of defining it in terms of totalitarianism versus freedom and more reasonable and rational kind of distinction where we would be as concerned about

fascism as we are about communism and recognizing infringements of all forms of you tell terry knows i'm a fine individual freedom but we set up a course another kind of the knowledge and that way let me summarize or the sex laws are out very briefly the only form of sexual behavior that is everywhere illegal in the united states that is that does not violate some local county state or federal sex or is he now badger know intercourse between a man and woman married to each other were both have voluntarily consented to that particular act where there's no degree a blood relationship between the protests of prince or the act case takes place in private and where the man is on top of the woman any variation and that has some were illegal in the united states and i think you will grieve from any researcher may have done that there are great many violators of the

sex laws and therefore most americans our sex criminals by definition just there's probably most have been drug criminals at least in terms of violations of the alcohol and tobacco laws if not other drug laws the picture then is quite different from the one customer we presented to us i know what i try to relate that in my concluding minutes because i hope to allow some time for questions and discussion one relate to these cities comments about drugs and sex and their relationship to freedom and responsibility to the phenomenon of social change in general and our society's inability to cope with that there are many people in our society who have been talking about are writing about different dimensions of social change and i don't intend to summarize that those were to repeat any of them we all know

about technology of modernization about overcrowding about overpopulation about air pollution et cetera and we should all bear that in mind as part of what is going on in society in addition to the war disease racism etc but i want to concentrate on an aspect that i had been deeply involved in a really yours that never gets a kind of attention that drives or sex or more controversy or more emotional things get but which i think is far more pork and relates to a problem that i call institutional pollution by which i mean the bureaucratic political process in the united states the influx of all they were generally an unresponsive most of our institutions and leaders the crises of mediocrity and senility which we face in most bureaucracies the congress most notably where we have probably our largest and most expensive restaurant in america

if we look at these institutions we see i think a displacement of goes most of them are organized for the convenience of the people who work in them and not for the convenience of the people that are supposedly to be served by their organizing a rigid hierarchical pyramidal way erin they do human eyes both the people who work in them and the people that come to them for various services assemble they are unable to cope with the problems of the sad our society today that does not mean to me that the alternative lives with anarchy it means to maybe we have to rethink the purpose of institutions and our concepts of leadership we have a situation going on i think very parallel to ancient rome where the least enable people are in charge of

leading a society where we have administrators bureaucrats and politicians who built their careers and lying cheating bribery and general moral corruption which we refer to by other concepts when it involves now that is the mass media never used the term wire or sleeves or says the things that they would use with your eye if we did the same kinds of things we have a very important double standard golden of the whole process but the way you achieve success in these kinds of institutions is through that kind of moral corruption the person further who does not make waves does not rock the boat in other words he does nothing rises to the top and of course this parkinson long ago pointed out work expands according to the time available to perform so that without any clearly defined goals most organizations in the public or

sometimes in the private bureaucracy will take years to do something that was some commitment and dedication some reorganization of priorities could be done in days weeks are certainly no longer than marques i believe it is this phenomena of institutional pollution which is the major eliminating force in american society today young people in america as an example or component of this do not find going to school even in kindergarten her elementary school do not find going to school and exciting meaningful role that experience they often find it boring monotonous many find it a form of slavery but instead of looking at that facing up to it and trying to bring about constructor re form including the institution up participatory democracy in schools as well as in other institutions and so they're doing that we prefer to

concentrate on the superficial aspects to wonder why some young people are protesting are discerning and by the way it's a relatively small minority in some ways a greater social problem is a massive apathy of our society among both young and old but we wonder why some young people are protesting we wonder why some are dropping reds not communist but second hour capsules or smoking pot or doing other kinds of drug taking and instead of wondering about that so much we should wonder why millions of people prefer to be under the influence of a potent mind altering substance rather than turning on to the educational experience to oversimplify it somewhat i think the more we make going to school in mind expanding experience for people and the more we have the mythology eyes drives the less likely people are to turn to those chemicals for their alleged mind expanding the facts but until we deal with

these real roots of alienation and they're and secondarily the roots of drug use or other behaviors we call deviant or unacceptable we will not progress and said we'll have more and more that kind of unacceptable behavior sag the reforms that i think we have to do or concentrating on increasing personal freedom and setting more rational priorities in all these years this is true in the drug inside syria take out private behavior between consenting adults charlie from deal with it if we must to education and prevention most of all three providing positive options freedom of choice positive alternatives to people we might call it a carrot approach to substitute for our national obsession with a stick approach that is with punitive repressive approach that causes more limitation freedom

warrior responsibility then the original behavior somehow as a nation we are i'm going to try out positive options we seem to lack confidence in the ability of these things to compete in the marketplace of ideas with these so called deviant behaviors but i think that reversal would do is far more good than any other single site with institutions we have to not only interview super to secure democracy but we have to convert them into ad hoc problem solving institutions where you get your sense of words and value from dealing with important problems helping human beings rather than from advancement over a period of thirty or forty years to a certain kind of title or whatever the average older american is not really dissimilar from the younger

american i described was turned off by the schools most americans as i see it from their thirties if not earlier are already concentrating on me i imagine benefits of retirement at age sixty five and along the road that focusing on longer coffee breaks more vacations a parking place at the worst rome or a prestigious title on their door or desk i submit two year that those people are deeply alienated from the world around them and that one symptom of their alienation is the whole range of extremists and drug taking behavior the massive dependency on alcohol tobacco kills etcetera among older americans the way to change these things then comes i think brings a city alderman question about personal freedom socrates put it very well when he said let him go would change the world's first

change himself is very easy and most of us do have to say that just the situation is hopeless course thereby creating a self fulfilling prophecy among other things but saying that change must occur in the state capital in the national capital where can only be done by car full of people and in many ways as a couple as well as socially destructive but it is a successful cop and i think we must begin with ourselves changing what we do to pollute the atmosphere by our smoking by are discouraging of refuse or whatever it might be a changing what we do to discriminate against a repressive other individuals changing our lifestyle influencing those most close to us are families the people we teach people we work with or whatever i meant to broaden that and to get more and more people who are changing their own lifestyles i'm

concerned about the extension of freedom to other people freedom of course is an ideal that like christianity is rarely implemented letter remains a worthwhile idea will and there are ways that each of us i think an extended for ourselves and for others i think it was brooke who once said that that those who do nothing in times of great moral crisis are the ones who are responsible for the problems in the society be apathetic person the person who leaves it to others or dante put it well when he said the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crisis do nothing so i would say in conclusion that we should not overreact to other people's behavior that we consider unacceptable we should certainly not in the name of freedom limit their own freedom but more than that we should move beyond our preoccupation with drugs or with other

kinds of behaviors that now our prevailing in the society including violence move beyond these things to creative social change which involves activism individual as a sense of mutual aid of mutual responsibility and i think then we could three we could prevail in bringing about the civilized society that gandhi once commented on he was asked by an american reporter what you think about western civilization sector some moments of reflection he said it would be nice thank you very much and after speaking about drugs sex and social change a remark you just heard were recorded at the university of texas at austin you've been listening to a

university forum producer stewart wilbur this program was produced and distributed by communication center university of texas at austin a way this is the longhorn radio network