The ‘Drug Scene’

Abstract

The attitude of the adult community to drugs is like the Victorian attitude to sex, one of covering up, distrust, ignorance, inhibition and fear. It is a paradox in a divorce-prone, tobacco-smoking, alcohol-drinking and sleeping-pill taking society that the adolescent’s exploration of sensation—whether the body’s senses as with sex, or the psychological perceptions as with various pharmacological substances—should receive such ferocious condemnation. That the developing youth should feel a need for ‘escape’ from the society he sees himself being plunged into is perhaps more a condemnation of the society than of the youth. But then the older generation has ever been prone to a judgement of its young—which is tainted by the guilt of its own experience.