There's Nothing Soft About Pot and Beer
Drug use: A new generation is falling for the celebrity-hyped
myth that marijuana and alcohol are harmless.

By ANDREW MECCA

Advocates of legalizing illieit drugs re-ceived a shot in the arm
from unexpected quarters. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, who
had voiced her commitment to the Clinton Administration to drop
the rhetoric and stick to policy, apparently abandoned that
commitment and played the role of loose camlon with her remarks
that legalization of drugs was worth looking into.

From the surgeon generaI, to film, to music, to television,
*high* fashion is back!

Even the death of River Phoenix outside a Hollywood bar adds a
certain cachet, a touch of glamour, to the new drug culture. Like
James Dean, he died young -- and reckless.

Of course, we're still a long way from destigmatizing the image
of heroin and cocaine, the two drugs that killed River Phoenix.
But we are starting to head down a well-worn path. The word is
going out to the twentysomethings of Generation X and their
younger siblings that marijuana and alcohol are OK after all.

Marijuana use and alcohol abuse have yet to reaeh the excesses of
the 1970s, but we are seeing a reversal of the 20-year trend away
from drugs. The comebaek of these drugs, even among children as
early as the eighth grade, is aided and abetted by youth-targeted
movies like "Dazed and Confused" and by recording artists like
the rap group Cypress Hill who celebrate the high life. It seems
as if a few produeers at some of the biggest recording and
motion-picture studios are willing to ride the crest of this wave
all the way to a better beach, one with bigger houses and great
oceanviews.

Just the other day, I came across a study from a research team at
the Center for Psychosocial Studies in New York. They found that
adults who smoked marijuana daily believed that it helped them
function better, improving their self-awareness and their
relationships with others. Heightened powers are a common
delusion of the stoned. In Vietnam, I ran the drug-treatment
program for soldiers who believed that drinking vodka and blowing
a little "boo" would help them survive. In fact, some believed
that marijuana would make them either invisible or invincible.
What it did was make a lot of them dead. We were losing two wars
at once.

Now one of those wars has come home with us. And thanks to a
minority of producers, a new front is opening in that war.
Perhaps it's time for some members of the Hollywood eommunity to
meet three casualtles of the drug war in their very back yard
Jennifer and her babies.

Jennifer's babies are identical twin girls born with an identical
problem -- fetal alcohol syndrome, a fancy name for My Mom Drank
Too Much Booze. In fact, Jennifer drank up to two cases of beer a
day while she was pregnant. She even drank beer and tomato juice
to down her prenatal vitamins.

Jennifer was honest with her doctorabout her problem with
alcohol. She cut down to two or three six-packs a day when she
was seven months pregnant and thought she was doing great.
Shortly after, Jennifer's uterus started to tear and the doctor
had to deliver the twin girls by Cesarean.

In California, one in nine mothers tests positive for alcohol or
drugs before giving birth -- that's 70,000 womcn a year. The
average cost for treating one of these babies in the hospital is
$36,000.  Statewide, the total is $2.5 billion. Add to that cost
a possible lifetime need of social services and special
education, and the incalculable human cost to families and
communities.

Jennifer's girls weighed less than 3 pounds at birth. One baby
wasn't expected to live. Alcohol had racked the fragile infant's
heart. They were removed from their mother's custody as they took
their first breath.

I've met Jennifer. She must have been pretty once. Now, at 30,
she shows the wear of a woman aged by the harsh life in the fast
lane of a violent drug culture. But the shock of losing her
babies at birth did what her prior 17 felony convictions never
could. It turned her around. Jennifer got into drug treatment to
get her babies back.  Recently reunited with her twins, Jennifer
remains sober to this day.

But will she stay clean? I hate to think that as she struggles to
stay straight, Jennifer will have to try to screen out the
message that marijuana and alcohol are no longer taboo. For such
a person, watching "Roseanne" and seeing the main characters
light up a joint can be a siren song. For such a person, a movie
that makes light of party-animal binge drinking is like a
seductive whisper from a friend.

I am not advocating censorship. I am advocating responsibility.
Our culture still needs to examine our sense of what is funny and
what constitutes the glamorous life.

I just want entertainers to think, before they make the movie or
record the song, of the real-life downside: to remember that
every day in this country, thousands of infants are born knowing
the brutal, unforgiving effects of alcohol and drugs to picture
the needles and tubes stuck into the underweight, fragile,
shaking bodies of children born too soon to never let go of
little hands, even if they are too weak to grasp an adult finger.

Andrew Mecca:Director of CA Dept of Alcohol and Drug Programs.