I KICKED THE HABIT

I was only a youngster at the time, but I still remember, to the
precise moment, the day many decades ago when some rich kids who lived
near a lush New York public garden offered some friends and me a
fistful of smokes. Their cigarettes turned out to be marijuana -
strong enough to twist a life. Or ruin it.

Often the boys smoked enough to supply themselves with days and weeks
of throwing up, but I can't remember seeing girls with a joint in
their hands or lips. But then, that was a different time.

I turned out to be a short-time pot addict. I cannot testify now how
much I smoked or for how long or what those few days of smoking pot
did to me. All I remember is that I smoked until I vomited.

The others smoked as long as they could stand it - some a few days,
some a month, some a lifetime. Most of them, like me, thought that
they were bourgeois hotshots. But I believe that many eventually
became ashamed about the smoking and the scrounging for marijuana
money. I know that being a worker's child often made me crawl with
inner embarrassment for wasting money. For at least part of the time,
the pleasure of my swagger was consumed by the shame of my smoking.

Years later, I went abroad with my family - my wife and our three sons
- - so I could work as a foreign correspondent. The boys loved those
assignments as much as their parents did (although Poland, which was
then Communist, was not as much fun).

From the beginning of the foreign assignments, I saw the brown
marijuana stubs of my sons and their friends, particularly in New
Delhi, the capital of India. I, of course, had long ago quit using
marijuana and spent a considerable amount of time shouting at my sons
when I thought they were still puffing away. It is a good technique.

I once asked one of my sons why pushers did not concentrate on adults
like myself. He answered pleasantly, "Dad, just take off that tie and
hat. Every pusher in town will try to sell you pot."

People die from the abuse of drugs every day, every minute,
everywhere. I sometimes think of drugs - including even nicotine - as
an infinity of smoldering bodies lying in the hot sand waiting to die.

I keep asking myself as I write this, is this supposed to be medical
news? The answer, of course, is no, we understand that there is a
great variety of drug death waiting for us.

And yet the drugs keep spreading. Methamphetamine addiction, for
instance, is digging deeper into the world of addicts. Specialists say
it is particularly prevalent within the gay community, causing an
increase in unsafe sex resulting in an increase in the number of
syphilis and HIV cases in New York.

Why am I writing this column? I keep asking myself. Probing myself
even just a little, I understand that it is because I never hear my
friends or the people at dinner tables talk about drugs, except
sometimes as if it were funsy entertainment. I hope that they will
talk with each other more often and more deeply, beginning right away.

Drugs must be faced. Let's face them with the law. And most important
of all, let's face them with love for our children.