Major Project Progress

More on drug use.

This website has provided an interesting insight by denying the severity of drug use in the 60s. Interestingly, their claims are supported by statistics, which forces us to wonder - are other historians exaggerating and romanticising the explicitness of the sixties OR has this website used unreliable data to support an incorrect thesis

The 1960s brought us tie-dye, sit-ins and fears of large-scale drug use. Hippies smoked marijuana, kids in ghettos pushed heroin, and Timothy Leary, a Harvard professor, urged the world to try LSD. In popular imagination, the 1960s were the heyday of illegal drug use -- but historical data indicate they probably weren't. In fact, surveys show that drug abuse was comparably rare, as was accurate information about the effects of illegal drugs. In a 1969 Gallup poll, only 4% of American adults said they had tried marijuana. Thirty-four percent said they didn't know the effects of marijuana, but 43% thought it was used by many or some high school kids. In 1972, 60% of Americans thought that marijuana was physically addictive (research shows that it is generally not physically addictive because regular users rarely show physical withdrawal symptoms, but marijuana can be psychologically addictive).

Alana Anderson, a child custody officer, graduated from college in 1969. "My generation was told that marijuana caused acne, blindness, and sterility," she said. "It was a scare tactic rather than an education tactic."

Teens of Anderson's generation were as observant as they are now. They noticed the difference between parental warnings and actual fact. So, many of them stopped believing anti-drug messages in general. "Scare tactics are a big disaster," said Gary De Blasio, executive director of Corner House Counseling Center for Adolescents and Young Adults in Princeton, N.J., "They don't work, especially if you use them on kids who have used drugs."

http://www.gallup.com/poll/6331/decades-drug-use-data-from-60s-70s.aspx

In addition, a book I read called American Culture in the 1960s by Sharon Monteith also failed to address the "drug crisis" of the 1960s. Although mentioning it where relevant, Monteith did not designate a great proportion of her novel to drug use. Instead, she focussed upon issues such as music, performance, poetry, fiction, media etc.

I can't help but wonder - was drug abuse as big of an issue in the sixties as some historians would have us believe?