Word: cracking
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...HOURS: RETURN TO CRACK STREET (CBS, Sept. 14, 8 p.m. EDT). CBS's often ! absorbing, occasionally overheated series of slice-of-life snapshots launches its new season by revisiting the drug scene it first surveyed three years...
This permissive mind-set colors my instinctive response to current drug problems. The initial breathless media reports of the crack epidemic aroused all my journalistic skepticism, and I groused that the antidrug frenzy seemed like Reefer Madness revisited. On those infrequent occasions when friends and acquaintances still pass around a bootleg joint, my reaction remains benign tolerance. Just a few weeks ago, when marijuana made a furtive appearance at my wife's 20th high school reunion in upstate New York, I viewed this throwback gesture as a quaint affectation, almost as if the class of '69 had all shown...
...pointedly included "everyone who looks the other way." Am I really a fellow traveler in this epidemic of addiction? Do my affectionate, albeit distant, ties to 1960s-style permissiveness render me as culpable as Bennett claims? Or is my comfortable, middle-class life so far removed from inner-city crack houses and the Colombian drug cartel that any allegation of causal nexus represents little more than politically motivated hyperbole...
...honest answer, which both surprises me and makes me squirm, is that to some degree Bennett and Co. are right. My generation, with its all too facile distinctions between soft drugs (marijuana, mild hallucinogens) and hard drugs (heroin and now crack), does share responsibility for creating an environment that legitimized and even, until recently, lionized the cocaine culture. This wink-and-a-nod acceptance, this implicit endorsement of illicit thrills, has been a continuing motif in movies, late-night television and rock music. My personal life may rarely intersect with impoverished drug addicts, but the entertainment media created...
...belatedly, to concede my guilt in contributing in a small way to the drug crisis. Maybe the '60s were a mistake, maybe I too frequently condoned the self-destructive behavior of others, maybe I was obtuse in not seeing a linkage between the marijuana of yesteryear and the crack of today. I hope that this admission, which does not come easily, will animate my behavior. But while I am willing to shoulder some of the blame on behalf of my generation, I trust that the other equally respectable co-conspirators in America's two-faced war on drugs will acknowledge...