Word: reefer
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...when Robert E. Taliaferro Jr. was transferred from Wisconsin, where he was serving time for murder, he became a Mirror reporter. He quickly learned the dynamics of his new editorial responsibility. "My editor wrote a story about how inmates were smuggling reefer in here in balloons," Taliaferro recalls. "I told him, 'You don't sit up here and put that stuff in the newspaper. You wanna get yourself killed...
Last fall when the Supreme Court nomination of Douglas Ginsburg vanished in a puff of marijuana smoke, more than a dozen of his contemporaries, including Presidential Hopefuls Albert Gore and Bruce Babbitt, rushed forward to admit that they too had succumbed to reefer madness. Most confessions were formulaic: "I once tried pot as an experiment. I did not enjoy it, and I deeply regret my foolish behavior." Few ambitious baby boomers are willing to talk honestly about what they learned from '60s-era dabbling in soft drugs for fear of sounding as if they were about to check...
...hysterically antimarijuana film Reefer Madness was a camp classic to be mocked by stoned viewers at the midnight show in the local art house. The Zeitgeist of that generation is now wildly reversed. Public figures who used pot at that time express regret for the transgression. Political survival demands that they not offend the new cultural norm. Marijuana use now carries a moral taint...
...course, television shows some laughably awful films itself, and Amazon Women offers three of them. One is a 1930s government scare film, a la Reefer Madness, called "Reckless Youth," in which "Mary Brown" (Carrie Fisher) is a corrupted innocent who contracts "a SOCIAL DISEASE!" Another is "Son of the Invisible Man," in which the original's son (Ed Begley Jr.) walks around naked in the mistaken belief that he, too, is invisible...