About the concept: id & eggo is found at the Loser's Club [now the Y-Not II], 706 E. Lyon St. But it is an independent operation -- 8:30 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. Friday and Saturday -- in a large candle-lit back room with an ambience all its own.

This revivification of the art can be credited to brothers Rod and Norb Eglash [another Eglash, pharmacist Hy, owned the late Oriental Drugstore, and is now at Osco Drugs on Farwell Ave.], who have been planning and thinking and preparing for the opening of their folk-haven "for 15 years," as they explain it.

The brothers point out that they were were brought up in a tradition of folk-music -- they mention Guthrie, Seeger, Belafonte and Baez -- and feel they have a mission "to bring folk music to all age groups."

For the present, only the over-21 group can legally visit the folk-haven, but there are plans for Sunday afternoon jams for younger folk buffs.

Rod (a social worker) and Norb (an advertising manager) will continue their full-time jobs while managing the id & eggo, believing that "people in their twenties, thirties, forties and even sixties should identify with music of their era -- and they'll find something of it in the folk tradition as we try to present it here."

To the Eglash brothers, this is a broad tradition. A singer or singers appearing in front of a simple backdrop, accompanied by a minimum of unamplified instruments -- acoustic guitar, usually, but perhaps a banjo, harmonica, harp or autoharp -- probably qualifies as folk music.

This allows for a diverse selection of entertainment. Many of the folk-haven's performers do original material, but they routinely draw on the output of such artists as Tom Rush, Josh White, Jack Elliott and Buffy St. Marie, to name a few.

The folk-haven's relationship with the Loser's Club is primarily spatial, though friendly -- and financial. This means there is a $1 (75¢ to students with ID) admission for the performers, the rent and expenses, and a $1 drink minimum for the Loser's Club owner.

I recently caught a full cycle of entertainment on a Saturday night (there are three sets, providing continuous entertainment; that night three acts repeated to fill each set).

It was what we might have once expected from a good night at the now-dead Avant Garde, with an especially reverential audience (perhaps a bit over-awed, at that, but the genius of the Eglashes seems to lie in making us think that folk music is, really, important) receptive to a lineup of talent that ranged from the pleasant to the compelling.

Foremost in professionalism was Doug Harris, who bothered with no nonsense, no introduction of songs "that I really take to heart," or "my favorite song of all time," -- as some of the others did -- but got right on with it in a style that needed no excuses.

Such projection -- vocal and instrumental -- was rather rare among the others. Which is not to say that they were untalented, but that they could well drop the semi-professional diffidence (such as Mark Attermeir's: "Well, I 'm going to do this one alone, and I guess you'll have to put up with it") and play to the audience as if it were listening because they enjoyed what was happening. Generally, they did. And if they don't care what's happening, make them listen -- or get off.

Specifically, Chris Neuenfeldt was charming, if occasionally a little too introspective, working primarily in the pure vein of Collins and Baez, and with her own compositions. Inevitably, sweet rather than powerful, but still a graceful talent.

The team of Mark Attermeir and Kathy Leibsch was pretty much more of the same, except that they were two without quite doubling the impact. Several times they did come through quite well as a team -- an extra dose of good spirits was added once as Attermeier's sister joined in on tambourine -- but Attermeir's contribution generally was unexceptional. »»

But it was somewhat of a cultural shock shock for me, having witnessed the day before yet another street demonstration by a virtually disinherited generation, window-trashings and beatings and all, to be plunged into a scene staged like the early 'sixties.

Remember sitting around at beer parties -- no grass -- singing Peter, Paul & Mary to someone's guitar, the pious "protest" songs or the Kingston Trio's rousing pseudo-historical irrelevancies?

Saturday, the performers had that same college-kid wholesomeness -- it was beyond belief that there still are such people. With the exception of Doug Harris, who at least looked -- and sang -- as if he had lived a little bit, they all had the scrubbed, trim-bearded and long, straight, shiny-hair appeal right out of an early Peace Corps party.

Well, they are certainly not to be faulted for their looks -- and it may be only the appearance of innocence, politically, after all -- but it made for an air of incredible irrelevancy. Joan Baez and Pete Seeger, among many, can make one believe their music is more than an empty vehicle honoring forms of the past. There is real, radical substance there.

This is not necessarily the fault of the performers. The Eglash brothers have, though the room is pleasant -- subdued light, gold stars on the ceiling, a variety of couches and tables, an out-of-the-way coziness -- created somewhat of a drawing room sterility.

The music is to be enjoyed -- or not, if such is your reaction -- after all, not worshipped. Though I won't quarrel with the $1 cover, the $1 minimum drink, no matter how little one is hassled, is a bit much. Far better would be 15¢ beers, less of a concert hall atmosphere and more give-and-take in the proceedings.

Though I don't suggest sawdust and peanut shells on the floor [no doubt a reference to Hooligan's on North Ave.], an increased flow of cheaper booze, some relaxing of inhibitions and better times all around, with the talent struggling a little against the natural conversational bent of people out for the evening seems to be in order.

Unless it's to be a cathedral visited once a year by the faithful -- and what East Side couple will start out spending $4 to get in the church?

But one almost extra-planetary vibration which shouldn't pass unmentioned: It's probably not too healthy for a movement-oriented medium like Kaleidoscope to dwell on superficial characteristics not related to talent, but I'll ignore such a precept any time to remark on someone as vibrantly impressive as Kathy Leibsch.

Miss Leibsch was so outstandingly an attention-getter, simply lovely and so glowing -- albeit with that frightening wholesomeness -- as to make her voice almost of secondary concern. I'd almost pay just to look at her, and that's a quality that won't hurt any artist.

Her voice -- for example, in a nicely-explored version of "Both Sides Now" -- didn't neutralize any of that attention, and I'd like to hear more.

Rod and Norb have promised a great deal more of everything.

To mention five from the top of the list: Max Malinaro, Barry Ollman, Reggie McLeod, Pat Knudson and Muriel Hogan, and perhaps surprise drop-ins by name performers when in town.

Of special interest is the appearance of Ric Ollman, classical guitarist and flutist [and poet], mentioned previously in this column and justly presaged by Rod in his soft, between-sets rap from the stage as "one of the finest classical guitarists in this area, and I mean this part of the country, at least."

And by the way -- the "eggo" derives from a nickname given Eglash's father as a young boy, and what more could you possibly want to know?

Perhaps something about the curious gestalt of the Loser's Club itself -- but that's another column.

   --Mike Zetteler
      

A note from the editors about this article:
                   [Opposite]

This is an important story. It is based on an interview with a Milwaukee dealer who became a narc, and should be of interest to the general reader and anybody with a special concern about present day enforcement of narcotics laws.

It may also be the source of misunderstandings about our intentions by segments of the hip community and by those who consider themselves liberals who take responsible positions. For the confirmed heads and uptight dealers who sometimes blame Kaleidoscope for drawing attention to their activities, we can only say that the narcs are here to stay -- at least until the laws are changed -- whether or not Kaleidoscope ever mentions drugs.

And they don't have to read Kaleidoscope to know what's happening.

The only significant responses to their favorite tactics of terrorism and bribery will come from an informed community, based on articles like those in this issue. And for those who may read into this story support for those who deal in all drugs, including heroin, our position is this:

We unequivocally support the legalization of marijuana and its relatives, the mind drugs. The evidence pointing to their beneficial nature is overwhelming. Their proper use is a subject for education, not secret police tactics.

Some drugs, such as speed, have harmful effects if misused, like many chemical substances, but again this is a matter for education, not law.

In the case of heroin and hard drugs, the evidence is far from conclusive. It is entirely possible that they appeal to a certain number of people who are physiologically and psychologically looking for something to be addicted to. These people always find it, at the terrible price of becoming criminals to pay police-created prices.

It is also possible that the supposed harmful physical effects may result from ignorance of the principles of proper injection techniques and from economic and psychological factors rather than the drug itself.

And it is entirely feasible that confirmed addicts can lead productive and useful (if that's what society demands) lives while receiving free maintenance doses. It is done in England, for example.

How many doctors thrive on their daily, secret morphine fix? They are, in fact, our largest single professional class of drug addicts. Nurses are second. Both get away until they are turned in by their colleagues.

At any rate, the problem -- if it does exist -- is not a matter for the police, whose activities create a large criminal class that turns against the straights to survive, and which subsidizes organized crime.

Opium derivatives would be among the cheapest of substances to manufacture, in a natural economy.

Furthermore, we will vigorously fight against that brand of police activity which depends on secret police, addicted stoolies, paid informers and gestapo tactics of search and destroy (the addict).

If there is a problem, it must be dealt with at its sociological and psychological roots, through the favorite panacea of the liberals in the middle class: education. But the people -- even drug-dependent people -- must be protected from the pigs.

And all narcs are pigs who root around in human misery -- without changing a thing -- while getting fat in the process. [M. Z.]

By Mike Zetteler

   [This May 1970 article looks at the hysteria
over marijuana use promoted by The Milwaukee
Journal. I made very few corrections, though
I enhanced the typography a bit to make it more
appealing on the Internet.]

   With a series of articles beginning Sunday, May 10 [1970], entitled "Our Turned On Youth" — supposedly an investigation of drug abuse among high school students — The Milwaukee Journal has sacrificed the talents of four fine reporters and whatever credibility it had as an enlightened force in the area of public education.
   Whatever the intentions of the reporters, the series plays on the worst fears of the conservative older members of society over such essentially beneficial activities as marijuana smoking.
   At a time when millions of persons from all walks of life — teachers, reporters, cops, students, soldiers, welders, lawyers, and executives — are smoking grass and suffering only from the fear they may be prosecuted under the laws that were the product of massive misinformation, the Journal has taken a frightening step backward.
   At a time when hundreds of thousands of middle-class kids and countless — by this time — sons and daughters of senators and government officials face prosecution and jail as marijuana users, the Journal adds to the needless anguish of parents and the youthful victims of repressive laws by feeding the climate which delays repeal of anti-marijuana legislation.
   At a time when marijuana laws are used for outright political suppression and to restrict the advocacy of ideas generated by the alternative culture — 9 1/2 years to White Panther leader John Sinclair for giving away two joints to a narcotics agent, 20 years to Dr. Timothy Leary for possession of a small quantity of grass — the Journal is doing its part to foster this witch hunting and attack on individual liberty.
   Even if inspired by an admirable wish to save so-called "drug abusers" from themselves, the series relies on an anonymous format — thus reducing reporter's individual responsibility — to present a manufactured horror story whose ingredients are myth, half-truths, pseudo-scientific generalizations, self-seeking statements from officials with a vested interest in maintaining "drug abuse" as a governmental concern, and manipulated and edited interviews with those least prepared to defend their way of life.
   I mean, of course, young persons who volunteered when, in the series' words, a "reporter, after putting out the word to schools that he wanted to talk to abusers and pushers, had 24 in a few days."
   Whoever edited the series, possibly Alex Dobish himself — the reporter who "coordinated the project" as well as reported for it — decided that any user they talked to would be labeled a "drug-abuser" — if not a "pusher" — for shrewd psychological reasons.
     [Read another Dobish-related article from the same Kaleidoscope.]  
   And I wonder: If the Journal did a serious investigation into the values of, say, democracy, would they query average high school students, letter club officers or even student-body presidents? I think they would go to statesmen, philosophers and social theorists — from Thomas Jefferson to Barry Goldwater to Abbie Hoffman.
   It would certainly be beneath their integrity to pit young spokesmen against leading proponents of fascism or religiously dominated states, from General Franco of Spain to the Pope himself. Yet, with no qualms the reporters seek out kids who may or may not have problems, with only one thing in common — some experience with drugs of many different varieties.   
   On the other side we have the sterile authoritarian spokesmen for all that is repressive, unimaginative and machine-like in an urban, profit-oriented culture.
   These are the voices of the school principals and administrators — public school administrators, not the O'Neill's of Summerhill fame or the Leslie Fielders who have the security of tenure and recognition in many universities.
   These are the rigid medical and psychological opinions of the most institutionalized and dehumanized experts — officials of county and government supported hospitals, who are unfortunately faced with providing for society's most pathetic rejects, while reflecting the values of the very society that caused the problem.
   And no school administrator ever kept his job by telling a worried parent or scare-mongering reporter, "So Johnny's smoking a little grass?  So what, it's nothing to get upset about — probably does him good. I turn on weekends myself, really helps me get a perspective on things. And I've got a really great stereo..."
   Who would you want for the head of the cuckoo's nest that is Nicolet High School? A powerful, creative and accomplished novelist like Ken Kesey, or its present principal, book-burning automaton James 0. Keiels?
   But nowhere in this series is the voice of an Aldous Huxley, Allen Ginsberg, Alan Watts, Ken Kesey, William James or Timothy Leary heard to defend the values of psychedelic experiences. Not that one would have to go so far from Journal Square to find a balancing point of view — in fact, Alex Dobish and crew need look no farther than the Journal's city room, and they know it.
   Maybe even more damaging is the fact that an extensive body of scientific investigation into the medical, social and political implications of marijuana has been ignored.
   Wait a minute — wasn't this a series about drug abuse in high schools?
   Naturally, that's where the
reporters went. That's where the problem is.
   Oh yeah? What problem? That is the real point of these comments — that there may be problems of many sorts among high school students — and everybody else — but the series has done absolutely nothing but assume the very thing that millions are disputing: that marijuana is one of these problems.
  Then, the error is aggravated by looking to cops and scholastic disciplinarians for control of the non-existent problem.
   Ignored is the plight of thousands of youngsters who are getting a good taste of jail or have records as convicted felons for using or selling to their friends a substance that even the Journal series can find no real fault with except that it causes red eyes, or perhaps "makes the user accident prone."
   In an age when a real campaign to remove marijuana from anyone's list of dangerous drugs is called for, the Journal chooses to march backward by indiscriminately lumping it with everything from alcohol to cocaine [note  the illustrations].

              
   In an enlightened time when the best thought is toward not punishing real addicts -- from alcoholics to junkies — but to treatment aimed at psychological and sociological causes, the Journal has put its resources into reversing this humanistic trend.
   And the real sufferers of the barbaric attitude that calls for the imprisonment of heroin addicts and marijuana users are ultimately the public. The junkie is driven to crime to pay for his heroin on the Mafia's black market, which in turn uses its profits to make inroads into more legitimate businesses. With marijuana, the enormous costs of police and courts necessary to begin to enforce invalidated laws are born by tax-paying parents who are paying for the privilege of sending their own children to jail.
  Kaleidoscope itself has called attention to the sick web of stoolies, paid informers and the like [see story at right], which police maintain to keep up their arrest quota. While remarkably ineffectual in controlling drug use, the informer system results in innumerable infringements on the right to be free of police entrapment and covert surveillance.
   Unfortunately for these kids and their parents, the Journal could have done a lot to improve communications between the generations and regained the respect of its younger readers. But it chose not to do so; no doubt, all too many will take its slanted, vicious series as the ultimate in a balanced, concerned "liberal" approach.
   In one article, I cannot, of course, completely discuss the marijuana debate as such, or the larger question of whether it should be punishable by jail to merely possess or use privately any substance under the sun.
   But I can provide a direction for the concerned reader in which to look, which the Journal has failed to do. You wouldn't know it, but there are many reputable books, containing results of clinical studies, scientific monographs and overall views on the uses of drugs in this culture which are of infinite more worth than hokey interviews with school officials and self-proclaimed "drug abusers."
   Of course, it is in the Journal's interest — given its intentions — to ignore sound scientific data and rely on inference, juxtaposition and omission to achieve the distortion of reality it passes off as a weighty series on drug abuse.
   It is therefore necessary to expose these devices, and throw in a little explanatory background information, even concerning the personal lives
and work habits of Journal reporters, because the four reporters involved should not sleep well nights, after having prostituted themselves to produce this outrage against morality and common sense.
   Are you noted for serious, heavy drinking, Alex Dobish?  Remember, I worked in the Journal library for 13 months. l am sometimes noted for serious, heavy drinking, I'll admit, and I've also noticed the habitually drunken reporters at Joe Deutsch's and the Turner's Club. Or nodding at their desks.
   [Dobish later wrote a story detailing his own chronic alcoholism, long concealed -- to the extent of keeping  jugs of fine wine in his car trunk to down even as he continued to work.]
   But you say, what has that to do with anything?
   A man can drink hard and still be productive, and it's none of anyone's business. Look at [humor columnist] Gerry Kloss.
   But you, Alex Dobish, are helping to send kids to jail with this series. Even alcoholics are not jailed for owning a bottle of whiskey. Are you proud?
   And you, Mike Schmitz, with your slightly unkempt hair, a moustache, the Journal's likeable hippie reporter. You donate your time and special awareness to the Underground Switchboard. Do you smoke grass?
   You and I know which of your colleagues do. Or some of them — I have not worked at the Journal for three years, and undoubtedly grass is more prevalent now than it was.  Are you happy, Mike Schmitz, that a mother will agonize and her child go to jail, because you wrote for a series which defines marijuana use as a problem and, ultimately, a crime?
   Black reporter Shirley Hatchett, can you be unaware that drug laws are primarily used against minorities — Blacks, Latin Americans, political dissidents and now the emerging alternative culture? How many Blacks are exposed to the training schools of crime, the prisons, [for] minor narcotics violations, while affluent suburban white youths are merely lectured? 
   The climate is slowly changing as wealthy white kids are being prosecuted in ever greater numbers — but you have done nothing to help.
   Education reporter David L Bednarek, why haven't you done your homework? Let me suggest a reading list for you.
   Because this is a point that should be brought home to the Journal's editors: The series not only fails to please a drug-crazed minority of hippies and radicals, it is simply sub-standard journalism.
   To quote Gerald Grant in the Spring 1970 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, on a newspaper: "work tends to be defined as scurrying about and asking questions.  It is the rare reporter who has the fortitude to sit at his desk and read a book on a subject he intends to write about.
   "Not infrequently one reads a long newspaper series — in which hundreds of man hours of reporting and travel time have been invested — and it's glaringly obvious that some of the most basic books written in that field have not been glanced at by the writers."
   Similarly, Grant writes, "The reporter calls an expert for a quote as an unfortunate shortcut to thinking the problem through himself. He asks not what do I think, but what do they think? He seldom has a sense of personal responsibility for what he writes."
   Surely the Journal could have provided some depth to exhibit, as Grant says, "an independent intelligence that seeks to wrest meaning from the torrent of events rather than acting as mere transmission belts."
   The sad thing is, though, that the four reporters are acting as transmission belts precisely because their investigations are being used by the Journal to fit someone's preconceived notions about drugs and what the public should know.
   Let's take a look at how the series achieves some of its more insidious effects, in a strikingly uniform handling of subject matter.  Its most glaring fault lies in the definition of terms.
   As I've mentioned, any subtlety is excluded from the start: "Drug USE is the properly directed use of drugs in medical treatment... Drug ABUSE is the use of a variety of products — from aspirin to heroin — not for medicinal benefits but to change one's level of awareness."
   There you have it: IF it's medicine it's all right. Anything else that changes one's level of awareness is abuse.  It follows that anyone who admits to having used these substances should be labeled a drug-abuser. Using these loaded terms, the series goes on to try to prove the existence of a problem by referring to the very thing that should indicate something is wrong with this classification: the large number of people who indulge in the activity.
   And what does "change one's level of awareness" mean?
   Certainly, no one smokes grass with the same set of expectations that lead one to turn to downers.  Let me indulge then, in a scientific definition of terms, which the Journal finds convenient to dispense with.
   It is from the book, The New Social Drug; cultural and legal perspectives on marijuana, edited by David E. Smith, M.D., and published as a paperback Spectrum Book by Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, N.J.
   In an article titled Use of Marijuana in the Haight-Ashbury Subculture, J. Fred E. Schick, M.D., David E. Smith, M.D. and Frederick H. Meyers, M.D. write: "It is of central importance to distinguish between the use and the abuse of a particular drug, whether one talks about alcohol, marijuana, or the amphetamines. Any drug may be used or it may be abused. For example, many people drink alcohol but do not become alcoholics. How then do we define abuse? Abuse may be defined as the use of a drug to the point where it seriously interferes with the user's health, social or economic functioning."
   But this definition is ignored by the Journal precisely because nowhere — if one scrutinizes what is really
said and discards the skillfully planted emotional inferences — is it ever stated why grass is considered dangerous. How then can it be abused? Consider their table of drugs and effects. Grass produces "erratic behavior, distortion of time, space, color and sounds and loss of memory" following bigger doses. Small doses produce "feeling of great perceptiveness and relaxed pleasure."
   In such bald terms, "loss of memory" is an outright lie, though one's experiences of events — including the memory of them -- are necessarily affected. As for the rest, they certainly aren't expressed in positive terms — imagine a symphony on a radio described as a "distortion" of normal sound; that is, what the listener hears before he turns the stereo receiver on. Essentially, marijuana awakens a dormant sense of appreciation in a manner similar to turning on a radio.
   Or describe it any way you like — naturally it has effects, but if this is the worst they can come up with, many people should wonder why John Sinclair is serving 9 1/2 years in jail.
   Oh yes — it also "makes the user accident prone." But nowhere in the whole bloody series is this charge documented. All the research — as the reader can confirm for himself, in the book mentioned — is to the contrary. Even if true, this charge would merely indicate common sense [be used], as in any human activity, not jail for the users.
   One last "danger" — that of "psychological addiction."  But of course if it isn't dangerous, any sort of addiction isn't dangerous.  And anyway, psychological addiction is no addiction at all, as you might be able to figure out if the writers wanted you to.
   Psychological addiction means that you find it pleasurable and tend to do it again. Like eating sundaes, mountain climbing or watching television, it may become a part of your life.
   Of course pot is pleasurable, or people wouldn't take it up.  But we trust that most people learn to regulate their lives to allow for pleasurable and unpleasurable activities.  Nothing

"I look at it as a community service"
               —Dope Pusher
                         [Journal Article]

could be finer than a nice spontaneous walk on a pleasant summer day, but your average wage earner will overcome the temptation and stick at his job.
   He has learned that working ultimately produces its own rewards, and that a walk in the sun won't keep a roof over his head in the winter. The same for pot-smoking: it's just a part of life, and very little comes for free.
   Paradoxically, the detractors of grass used to argue that it inflamed one to the point of committing crimes of passion and violence: rape, murder or the legendary, "I'm a bird and I can fly out the window" suicidal scene. Now they claim it leads to lethargy, indolence and lack of interest.
   Well, it's hard to deal with myths, and the Journal doesn't help. Oddly enough — perhaps because the series tries to avoid creating a favorable attitude towards grass among its readers — the users interviewed seemed to have had rather a disappointing time of it.
          
   Well, it's too bad but grass, like alcohol, doesn't agree with everyone. On the other hand, it should be a point in its favor that it's not an irresistible delight. But the series doesn't have to depend on fact to achieve its effects.
   To take a typical example, we are told about a car with Wisconsin plates that was seen harvesting wild marijuana in South Dakota.
   The driver was stopped and arrested on his return to Wisconsin.
   The next paragraph: "We concentrate on the pusher," (police inspector) Dolan said. "We feel the pushers are the most vicious people involved."
   Next paragraph: "Marijuana also grows wild in some sections of the state. It's there for the picking."
   The whole passage is introduced by reference to the Winnebago State Hospital, "where hopeless addicts sometimes end up, physically and
mentally wrecked -- vegetables."
   Is anyone claiming that there is any such thing as a hopeless marijuana addict? Vegetables, no less? But somehow people picking wild
marijuana are labeled "vicious people," because they -- naturally -- are going to sell it to those that don't have their own.
   Of course, the distinction between a pusher and a dealer is ignored for the purposes of making (headline): Mothers Weep as They Learn of Sons' Drugs. But the hip community, like Steppenwolf, knows a dealer is a man with a lot of grass in his hand, and a friend, but "Goddamn the pusherman."  
   If the series' irresponsible refusal to look honestly at the differences between heroin and marijuana didn't turn you off right away, you were then treated to interviews with "abusers."
Poor 17 year old Mary, who "smoked a lot of crud," which she thinks was not even marijuana. After several more sessions she (a "hippee" and a "neophite," which are certainly unusual spellings) succeeded in being not depressed. But even hash turned her off, and she gave the whole thing up.
   Then, incredibly, we are told she "watched some of her friends get deeper and deeper. Drug suppliers profited. They traded on the misery and pleasure that drug abusers get."
   What is the meaning of that garbage? The subject is pot, remember. How did they get "deeper and deeper?" You mean that, unlike Mary, they liked it?
Then how is anybody trading on their "misery?"
   Of course, dealers make a profit — but remember, even though it grows wild for the picking, Alex Dobish and Co. like to see the pickers sent to jail. So the dealer is compensated for his risks, charging what the traffic will bear. This is known as capitalism.
   It's probably pointless to analyze all the distortions in the articles. The pattern is always the same.  The histories of kids with problems are superficially analyzed, and they all seem to start with grass and then LSD and go on to speed or heroin.
What good does it do to quote experts elsewhere in the article who point out that grass is not addicting and does not lead in any meaningful sense to heroin?
The worried parent reads the lurid case histories and makes the obvious associations.
   Of course, well-adjusted users are notably missing from the interviews, though if the problem is so extensive as to give rise to percentages of users in student bodies of 50%, surely some scholarly, well-adjusted dopers could be found.
   While the series does, at first glance, seem to recognize that marijuana smokers like to call attention to others' dependency on alcohol, an important point is ignored. This argument is really meant to point out the hypocrisy of alcohol users, not to say that all drugs are equally bad.
   In fact, marijuana is nothing but a boon to most of its supporters, and a remedy for alcoholism.
   This effect is verified by the Haight-Ashbury study I mentioned. Yet the Journal tries to use alcohol's known disastrous effects to influence our thinking about grass.
   And what are we to make of this double talk by Dr. Treffert of Winnebago State Hospital on the relative merits of grass and alcohol: "It is true that there is no compelling evidence that the occasional use of marijuana is harmful in the biological sense.
   "But, the marijuana user starts out specifically to get himself to the point of intoxication in order to avail himself of the drug effects.
   "The alcohol user generally is not looking for intoxication but rather relaxation and some of the other effects of the drug short of intoxication."
   In other words, no matter what effects you're after with grass, if it works for you, you're guilty of intoxication. But with alcohol, you've got to be falling-down drunk, otherwise you're just relaxed.
   And this outrageously slanted value system is also a justification for sending smokers to jail or mental hospitals, even though no one would crash through a door to apprehend a sleeping drunk.
   It has never been Kaleidoscope's intention to discount the dangers of drugs like heroin, speed and barbiturates. Or even alcohol. But laws
against the possession of drugs — as opposed to regulation of sales — breed illicit traffic in them and create criminals out of people with problems.
   And most people learn to deal with the real world, which contains a variety of harmful substances. Many of these substances, though they can be damaging, can be used for a variety of purposes with no bad effects.  Wise
use depends on education, and newspapers — underground or otherwise — can play a large part in this education. Laws simply will not work.
   Furthermore, marijuana should not even be mentioned in a discussion of drug abuse.  But the Journal's series — with so many additional errors that we have run out of space to correct them individually — can earn only the contempt of anyone who Is knowledgeable about drugs.
   And it has helped destroy the lives of persons young and old who use marijuana, and needlessly assaulted the serenity of their misinformed relatives and friends.
   To verify this, we recommend The New Social Drug (previously mentioned), The Book of Grass (a Grove Press book), and Marijuana Papers, edited by David Solomon, available at Interabang bookstore.  With these as a guide, the reader is on his own way to an intelligent decision.
   I cannot resist one more quote from The New Social Drug, from an article by Gilbert Geis, Ph.D. He writes:  "It matters not much, I think, whether marijuana will prove to be somewhat more or somewhat less harmful then we now believe it to be. There are things much more dangerous than marijuana that remain well beyond the reach of the criminal law. It may be noted for instance that overindulgence in food presents considerably more serious problems for the well-being of our society than use of marijuana. Overweight people kill themselves prematurely, make poor soldiers, and waste valuable commodities. Yet nobody seriously proposes the creation of new crimes, labeled first- and second-degree obesity, or the establishment of an S.S. corps (for Supermarket Surveillance), or restrictions on the import of Israeli halvah, Swiss chocolate, or Italian spaghetti — commodities that poison the bloodstream and make us vulnerable targets for a foreign takeover."
   And to quote again, from the same issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, Clarence Darrow at a trial of the Communist Labor Party members said in 1920:
   "When a new truth comes upon the earth, or a great idea necessary for mankind is born, where does it come from? Not from the police force, or the prosecuting attorneys or the judges or the lawyers or the doctors; not there. It comes from the despised and the outcast; it comes perhaps from jails and prisons; it comes from men who have dared to be rebels and think their thoughts; and their fate has been the fate of rebels. This generation gives them graves while another builds them monuments; and there is no exception to it. It has been true since the world began, and it will be true no doubt forever."
   It is perhaps unrealistic to expect the Journal to be in the front of a campaign to overcome superstition and legalize marijuana. But they could at least do an honest job of reporting all sides of the question.  The best of their reporters — quaffing their beers and passing joints around in a small gathering after working hours — will agree, and do nothing.
   The worst — the whoring Dobishes and Schmitzes — can go about earning their money while bearing the knowledge they helped send teenagers to prison for smoking one of nature's gifts, and led families to grief at one another's lack of comprehension.
    
                          
 [See Postscript at right]

     [I wrote this for the same May 1970 issue of
Kaleidoscope as the article about Dobish & the Journal on the left.  In light of the later flap over sexism & my role at the paper, discussed on this page, it is especially appropriate, if trivial in itself.]

3rd Grade Sexism

   When Journal reporter Alex P. Dobish is not busy concocting horror stories about drug abuse in high schools, he puts his talents to perpetuating the stereotypes about women in which the mass media specialize.
   In a no doubt well-meant story about a third grade class discussion on ecology, Dobish describes some some interchanges between the kids and Whitefish Bay Village President Henry F. Mixter:
         Mrs. Gloria Sison, the room 213
      teacher, mentioned an experiment
      some of her boys had conducted.
      Two youths pushed a glass of
      what appeared to be water into
      Mixter's hands.
         "You want me to try it?"
         "Yep," they said.
         "Very good," he replied.
         The kids explained that it was
       a glass of desalted water they
       had made from salt water.
          "We distilled it," they said,
       proud as could be.  Little girls
       looked with worshipful eyes at
       at the two successful experi-
       menters.
    Maybe little girls aren't considered capable of such experiments in Mrs. Sison's class, something Dobish might have wished to question. But to have them looking with worshipful eyes at the little male heroes probably says a lot about what Dobish thinks women are sup-
 posed to be doing.
    And if that passage didn't strike you as a bit of role manipulation the first time around, it just proves a point: sexist attitudes are formed early, and  little boys and girls had better learn to act the way middle-aged male reporters expect them to.

     I made several attempts at conversation with a rather distant, obviously tired Paul Goodman before and after his recent poetry reading at UWM.  I was especially interested in his reaction to the emergence of an underground press and the organization of hippie and dropout types around communal efforts at economic and social survival.
               Throwback
     He said that the idea of a decentralized press, autonomous in an immediate community and joined to a loosely structured press syndicate was great.  However, he personally disliked most of the examples of this type of publication he had seen. The psychedelic art -- the pastel colors and Beardsley stylizations -- are, to him, uncomfortable throwbacks to the age of art nouveau.  And that was the period whose influence he and his contemporaries grew up fighting against.  In his youth, he said, he rejected the Victorian fantasies his mother loved so dearly, and found in Picasso and cubism a style suited to the present.
                 Out Of Date
     In a sense, the psychedelic generation is 60 years out of date, he feels.  The art, after all, is based on the same drug-induced states the bohemian and artist of the Victorian age found so romantically attractive. Opium, hashish, absinthe -- these were all known and used for their consciousness-expanding effects, with, Goodman feels, rather un-expansive results.
     He made a similar criticism of much of the writing found in underground papers.  He called it a disjointed, spineless style, an impressionism comparable to the Amy Lowell school of imagism that was dubbed "Amygism" by Ezra Pound.  This again is something he and his contemporaries rebelled against as they established their own styles.
             Preceded The Fad
     The last part of our fragmented conversation took place at what turned out to be a rather subdued party, given for him by Barbara Gibson.  Surrounded by a respectful audience, mostly students, he responded to questions on a variety of topics, though with little enthusiasm.  He agreed with me his novel Making Do illustrated the functioning of what was, in effect, a hippie community, although it preceded the fad for beads and bells.  He pointed out that The Empire City (his greatest and least-known novel) went even beyond this point, to an underground that invented its own rituals and mythology as it reshaped American life through communes that sprang up on the west coast.  This, of course, was written long before Haight-Ashbury and the Diggers.
                     On LSD
     On the subject of LSD, he commented to the room that anything middle-class American kids take up in large numbers has to be essentially harmless.
     After about an hour at the Gibsons', he finished his second small glass of wine and left for the hotel where he was staying.  As he left he seemed a rather lonely and dispirited figure -- qualities that had appeared in some of the poetry he read earlier -- and I thought of a remark he had made to me, that his reputation seemed to be based largely on his efforts as a social critic [much of it in Playboy], rather than on his fiction and poetry, though, for example, he considered himself to be the best American short story writer since Hawthorne.  This surprised me, since l had long admired his novels, had been greatly impressed by the poetry in The Lordly Hudson, and assumed that most people were at least somewhat familiar with his work in these areas.
                  Prophetic
     But as I questioned some of the people who had come to the Gibsons' to meet him, I found that very few -- and there were many English majors in the group -- had heard of his fiction, or even knew he was a poet until the reading was advertised.  But he had also mentioned before he left that Empire City has a slowly growing reputation in what have almost become cults, much as the influence of Stranger In a Strange Land has grown.
                         

Note:

It was a special honor for Kaleidoscope, long after its demise in 1971, to be singled out by the report of the Senate Select Committee (the Church Committee) on Cointelpro in the section on the FBI's illegal activities, specifically against the "New Left,"  in the "underground newspaper" portion of its exhibits, the only paper mentioned there by name by the Committee:

FBI COINTELPRO Documents 
from the Church Committee reports* 

* Books II and III of the Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities of the United States Senate, 94th Congress, 2nd Session, 1976 

[Exhibits]
New Left, Students for a Democratic Society, MOBE, NMC, LNS [Liberation News Service], REP, National Lawyers Guild, Columbia University, Princeton University, anonymous letters to students' parents, university officials, members of state legislatures, press, use of drug charges against, BPP [Black Panther Party] informants create rift, split with YSA [Young Socialists Alliance] and SWP [Socialist Workers Party], FBI use of astrology and mysticism, Kaleidoscope, Key Activists, Tom Hayden, David Dellinger, Jane Fonda, John Lennon, Jean Seberg, David Herreshoff, David Simpson. 

The Bureau's attitude towards the growing movement may be summarized by the following, from the Special Agent in Charge, Newark, N.Y., to J. Edgar Hoover:

SAC, Newark to Director 
May 27, 1968 p. 2 

It is believed that in attempting to expose, disrupt, and otherwise neutralize the activities of the "new left" by counterintelligence methods, the Bureau is faced with a rather unique task. Because, first, the "new left" is difficult to actually define; and second, of the complete disregard by "new left" members for moral and social laws and social amenities. 

It is believed that the nonconformism in dress and speech, neglect of personal cleanliness, use of obscenities (printed or uttered), publicized sexual promiscuity, experimenting with and the use of drugs, filthy clothes, shaggy hair, wearing of sandals, beads, and unusual jewelry tend to negate any attempt to hold these people up to ridicule. The American press has been doing this with no apparent effect or curtailment of "new left" activities. These individuals are apparently getting strength and more brazen in their attempts to destroy American society, as noted in the takeover recently at Columbia University, New York City, and other Universities in the U.S. 

It is believed therefore, that they must be destroyed or neutralized from the inside [italics added]. Neutralize them in the same manner they are trying to destroy and neutralize the U.S. 
... Newark believes that it might be possible to attach the stigma of informant or Government "fink" to HAYDEN because of the apparent unlimited finances at his disposal, enabling him to take numerous trips in and out of the U.S., without a job or other means of financial support. 

SAC, Philadelphia to Director
May 29, 1968 p. 2