We organized a board of directors that's doing fundraising. We are supported basically by individual contributions and by family foundations.

Some of the parents have made contributions, and we have done a fundraising concert.

We need more money basically for things like community education programs. We did a training workshop program, also, and we would like to expand on that. We invited counselors, social workers, teachers, to a workshop that lasted for 15 hours. It was crammed into 1 week, 3 hours a day.

And these are people working with young people, and they were very excited by our approach to working with the kids, by the possibilities that we have.

And although none of them started-this is in my testimony-none of them started their own programs, the feedback we got was that they are much more effective in confronting the groups they were working with. Now, a lot of the things that weren't discussed before are being discussed.

We would like to be able to have more money so that we can go on in this way, and then at least for some of us, we could make this a full-time job. Right now, all of us are doing this on a part-time basis— and working 40 hours a week at it as is.

Mr. MEEDS. Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. Thank you, Mr. Eichberg. Thank you, Sandy. Thank you, Mike.

We could listen to your testimony all day, but unfortunately we have a very full schedule-a full list of witnesses, and we have to get some of them on, also.

We appreciate very much your coming. My commendations to both of you you and Mike, too, Sandy. Thank you.

Mr. MEEDS. Our next witness will be Dr. Paul Rosenberg, who is a graduate of the Stanford Medical School and the Cambridge, Mass., City Hospital.

Dr. Rosenberg is currently a psychiatric resident at Camarillo State Hospital, and was the cofounder of the Los Angeles Free Clinic in

1967.

He will testify both to the range and number of juvenile narcotic problems seen in the clinic.

Dr. Rosenberg.

STATEMENT OF PAUL ROSENBERG, M.D., COFOUNDER, LOS ANGELES FREE CLINIC, LOS ANGELES, CALIF.

Dr. ROSENBERG. Thank you.

I think that the testimony we have just heard was quite delightful, and very much to the point. I think the point that was made was that drugs are not the basic problem that we are discussing here. The basic problem is really education, and what constitutes education.

People need to learn, grow up, and this is something that is very difficult for the American educational system. They have their own ideas, and American education is not quite relevant in many ways.

The drug use in schools is increasing, as the kids said, that's where they get their drugs. It's a social phenomenon. I would say there are two simultaneous patterns in drug use going on today. One is the use

of marihuana by older adolescents, and the other is the use of barbituates by younger kids in elementary schools. This is a newer problem. My guess would be that 90 percent of the barbituate drugs come from the American drug industry, although I have no way of substantiating this.

There was a bill passed recently, about exportation of drugs. Barbituates can be sent to Mexico and imported again. This is very important in controlling drug availability.

Drugs are ubiquitous in all cultures. They are certainly ubiquitous in our culture. The middle-class individual has a number of bottles from which he takes a pill when he needs something, whether it is a tranquilizer, a diet pill, or a sleeping pill.

Among adolescents, drugs such as the barbituates, amphetamines, and marihuana, cannot be stopped. Prohibition was unsuccessful. There is no way that society can force adolescents to stop using drugs. Some parents, as we talk to them, have the idea that somehow they can make drugs disappear.

Mr. MEEDS. Legislate them out of existence?

Dr. ROSENBERG. Yes. But this is really not possible. It represents, particularly on the parents' part, a magical way of destroying their fear. If they can just get rid of it, why, they can just make the drug problem vanish.

The kids who are growing up today are growing up in an environment where there are lots of pills and drugs of various kinds available, and they learn from a very early age that drugs are there.

They hear all the publicity about how much grass is found, or how much it is worth-this cops-and-robbers game. The press media focus on this, and kids hear about it from the press, as well as their friends. My impression is that most kids first perceive the drugs that are used by adolescents with a mixture of fear and interest. The hippie way of life is somewhat of an idyllic scene for kids. It is not uncommon to see two hippies riding down the street on their motorcycle and passing an elementary school. The kids will wave at them, because these are their heroes. The hippie culture is in a sense the heroic culture of the kids today.

The young kids learn that drugs are not necessarily bad. Everyone survives taking them. I think the biggest thing that they can't understand is the reaction of parents, which is so outraged and so horrified and so strong. This is very confusing to the kids, because to them it is just something that they live with every day.

Drugs are a very common phenomenon. They are not something kids find revolting, so they don't understand why parents are so outraged, and why they are so prejudiced against the drugs.

It's hard for the kids, to feel their parents are prejudiced. It hurts them when parents won't discuss or even consider drugs, but just give a blanket rejection.

The schools are acting the same way. Kids soon learn that there are many kinds of drugs, and the youthful society that they are part of directs them, through social pressure, to take certain drugs and not take others, or to try them all.

On the one hand, the kids are very well informed about different kinds of drugs, particularly the older kids who have some access to newspapers and discussions.

The younger kids, unfortunately, are very uninformed, and really need some kind of education which is sensitive to their needs, and which they can trust.

The schools are not doing their job in educating kids. They are not doing their job in educating them about drugs, because it's impossible for the school to really be truthful with them.

Mr. BURTON. Would you repeat that sentence.

Dr. ROSENBERG. It is impossible for the school to be truthful with the students about drugs.

In other words, the things the students learn from experience, from reality, the schools are committed to deny, and to lie about. And this creates a tremendous atmosphere of distrust in the schools. The kids, as these kids did, reject the school. It has nothing to say, and you can't really expect someone who is lying to their students to be a good teacher. Students just won't listen.

The real problem I see with this is that there are many important things that the schools should be saying about drugs which the kids can't listen to, or can't hear, because the truth is so mixed with ambivalent falsehoods of various kinds.

Schools are not teaching. They are propagandizing about drugs. They are trying to support the society view of drugs. Kids reject this attitude. Therefore the education is worthless. It's a tremendous waste of money.

There is a tremendous outrage against drugs, and the outrage, I think, is caused in part by the fact that drugs are a threat to certain forms of dishonesty. When you take drugs, you have to confront yourself not always, but often you can come to yourself and see your problems more strikingly. Drugs threaten to disrupt society.

The kids reject the patterns and the way of life that go on in our society. This is in part a drug effect, because many of the drugs used erase the patterns of socialization in the mind, and allow the development of new patterns.

These drugs can be very useful-medically. They have been used on dying patients to make them less frightened of death. They have been used in psychotherapy in other countries with very good results over extended periods of time, and are felt by some to be very curative agents in certain kinds of psychiatric diseases.

Mr. MEEDS. This is in a controlled setting.

Dr. ROSENBERG. Oh, absolutely-in the hospital, under supervision with other forms of therapy. Not just by themselves.

Drugs can be very frightening to kids. They distort reality. The ego destruction that drugs can create, the fear that it promulgates in some people is very striking. We have kids coming into the free clinic afraid that their bodies are falling apart because they are no longer able to grasp reality.

This is something that happens only to certain kinds of kids.

The average kid who uses LSD, which is a very potent and dangerous drug, usually comes off without ill effects. Certain kids disorganize totally. I have one patient who developed nine separate personalitieswhich she is still living with-after the continued use of peyote, which is another one of the psychedelics.

Drugs are a way of rebellion today. There will always be rebellion in adolescents. The psychiatrist sees this rebellion as a function of

the individual's own internal conflicts in trying to establish himself in the world.

This is where kids needs help: DAWN is a very good example of how educational programs can begin to answer these students' needs by discussions of what is going on inside of them.

I think that we were fortunate to have them here with us. They have given us some insight into what they are doing. The schools, as they stand today, are not relevant to the students' needs. The educational programs don't touch on what the students really want to talk about.

The seven liberal arts, which are more or less what the schools are trying to teach, must be taught, and they are important things to teach, but more important is the question of: "Well, what is it to grow? What is education, and how do you help a child grow?"

Drugs have some very seductive aspects. Marihuana is a potent aphrodisiac. LSD can give you beatific visions such as nothing else can. And I think that many people use drugs today as a part of growing up. Many people experience tremendous growth through the use of drugs.

Drugs, in my view, serve as an Odyssey through which you travel, a way of building up your own prestige. The African can still kill a lion, but an American has very little that he can do to prove his worth, to be an adult, to grow up.

It used to be if you got really drunk and you were able to walk down the street and not show anybody you were drunk, you were proving something.

Today, the proof is that you can take LSD and make it. It gives you prestige. It is a way adolescents use to build up their egos. Everyone needs some accepted pattern that the society sanctions to build up their ego. And in this society today, it's drugs. Kids use them for that pur

pose.

Drugs are both good and bad. They represent a kind of running away for many kids. They represent a tremendous isolation, getting away from feelings, away from communicating.

The drug culture-the Haight-Ashbury culture-which is dying out today, is dying out because there is no love at love-ins. There is no communication. They are not what people thought they might be. But the value that drugs can have in bringing out personal integrity cannot be overlooked. Drugs can help in learning to live a life that is meaningful to the individual, and not to someone else. This is very important.

These are the good kinds of things that kids are learning from drugs. The society is rejecting them, saying, "Drugs are bad. Anything you say is bad." The society isn't taking what they learn and trying to help them get more out of life.

One thing that we see very frequently at the Free Clinic, particularly if we are able to follow a kid over a number of years, is that there is a striking natural history of drug use.

Kids may start out today with barbiturates, usually, if they are young. If they are older, they may start with marihuana, and they will go through different kinds of experiences. For the most part, they will eventually put down their abusive use of drugs, and use them either not at all or in a very mild way.

I think it's important to realize that the drug problem is in a sense self-limiting in that as kids grow up, and they want to get married, they can't say, "Well, I'm going to live in a forest." They have to say, "I will have to look for a job." Their drug use decreases with their increasing maturity.

Drugs do affect the mind and can make people act very immature or make unwise choices-even as adults-if they are abused. I think that drug abuse and drug use should be clearly separated, just as with alcohol.

If you are an alcoholic, and you drink before breakfast, you are in a bad way. But if you would drink once or twice a week in the evening, no one would even bother mentioning it.

I think the same is true with drugs. If someone smokes marihuana once a week, that is innocuous and is not particularly harmful. It might even be healthier than drinking. It doesn't kill the liver. I don't know what it does to the lungs, but its not particularly dangerous.

The kids who use drugs in an abusive way have deep personality problems, and psychiatrists are reporting more and more on the patterns of personality development that predispose kids toward certain drugs.

The kids whose parents are ferocious, threatening, hostile, and angry, although they may be very loving at other times, threaten their child's self-esteem. The child feels like reality can be snapped away from him in a flash. He can have no trust of himself. These kids often use amphetamines, because this gives them a kind of flash, and makes them feel powerful.

The kids who are depressed and dislike themselves will tend to abuse the barbiturate drugs and the hard narcotic drugs like cocaine and heroin.

The kids who come from middle-class families who don't have a set of values that they are really able to accept, whose parents can't really talk about things openly, will much more tend to be involved in marihuana and LSD. They use these drugs in a search for themselves.

But these drugs can be very destructive, they can fracture egos, and be confusing; so the problems can get greater, rather than getting solved.

Education really is needed. It must be seen that drugs are not good or bad, but that they are both, and the schools must face this. The schools must stop lying to the kids, and must allow them to choose freely how they want to act.

If schools continue to propagandize as they do, and say only one choice is possible, then the kids will not listen. We'll be wasting all the money we have spent on education in the whole country. The kids must be encouraged to make decisions for themselves, to be given facts and guidance. They have to be encouraged with support, and with limits, to slowly develop their own independence. The schools don't help the kids do this.

Furthermore, they don't teach kids how to protect their egos from their parents. They don't teach them how to set limits for their parents, and to see what of their parents' behavior is destructive to them.

The child can't stop their parents, but the child can be told, "This is not just something you have to accept." You don't have to believe your parents when they say such and such, such as "You're horrible."