STRUGGLING MAG CAN'T SEEM TO KICK ITS BAD HABIT

Jann Wenner, the editor and publisher of Rolling Stone magazine, announced
last week that he'd acquired a boyish new managing editor from FHM. For
those of you over 25, that's an abbreviation of For Him Magazine, a sort of
newsstand version of the Abercrombie & Fitch catalog -- with a bit of edgy
"text" thrown in.

Predictably, this has led to spluttering in high-minded quarters. A
Columbia Journalism School professor was yesterday quoted in Newsday
saying: "I can hardly express how tragic it is that this decision has been
made by one of the last great journalism institutions." (How delicious to
see liberals play the role of cultural conservatives!)

Mr. Wenner's aim is to get the new editor to perform the Heimlich maneuver
on his lifeless magazine. The fact that Rolling Stone is an "institution"
to some reveals that it is no more countercultural than Sir Mick Jagger.
And Mr. Wenner's hiring of a new helmsman shows that he's not blind to the
fact that his magazine is no longer iconoclastic or hip, or even a
bellwether of cultural trends.

That's fine, and on the money. But what the magazine needs more badly even
than a brand-new editor is to kick its drug habit.

The further Rolling Stone has traveled from its original countercultural
roots -- and with Natalie Portman on its penultimate cover, it's come a
long way, baby -- the more the magazine has turned to drug issues as a
desperate means of validating its own "framers' intent."

This theme is played out in its monomaniacal attacks on the drug war, its
incessant glorification of marijuana and its freewheeling, amoral reportage
on the drug-taking hedonism of pop stars. It has become the main way -- the
only way -- in which Rolling Stone tries to cling to its erstwhile role as
countercultural crusader; and it does so unmindful of the harmful effect
its stories might have on younger readers.

Of those -- younger readers -- it has a fair few. Two years ago, Philip
Morris, under pressure from state attorneys general, suspended advertising
in all magazines that had more than two million readers under 18, or whose
teenage readership was greater than 15%.

One of these publications was Rolling Stone, which, at the time, was deemed
by Mediamark Research Inc. and the Simmons Market Research Bureau --
independent media research companies -- to have a teen readership of 30%
and 28% respectively. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal in
May 2000, the magazine disputed those figures, saying only 6.8% of its
subscribers were under 21.

Last week, a spokeswoman for Rolling Stone refused to divulge to me the
magazine's own figures for teenage readership or subscriptions. "We're not
going to cooperate with your story," she said. Repeating the same phrase,
she turned down a request to messenger over to me a few back issues of the
magazine.

Back issues are available from other sources, and an afternoon spent
reading through them revealed the depths of Rolling Stone's obsession with
drugs .

One can only draw attention to the incongruity of a situation in which a
magazine whose juvenile readership renders it taboo for Philip Morris is
still a biweekly soapbox for pot evangelists, not to mention a vehicle for
stories -- such as a recent one about the death-by-overdose of a singer
called Layne Staley -- that take a microscopic (but never judgmental) look
at those who party hard, pass out and often die.

Rolling Stone was not holding up Staley as a role model, of course, just as
it wasn't holding up Robert Downey Jr. as a figure to emulate in a piece
last year, in which readers were treated to a detailed account (including
how many "lines" of cocaine Downey snorted and how much crack he "cooked")
of a nightlong binge that landed the actor in jail.

But how could the magazine affect a tone that hints at the waste and havoc
of Staley's death, or Downey's disintegration, while speaking all the while
of drugs as a symbol of enlightenment?

In Rolling Stone, those who oppose drugs are cast always as harsh
Savonarolas, or dimwits who just don't get it. A few pages after the Staley
story, there's a piece that condemns random drug-testing in schools as
"straight out of Orwell's 1984." The author describes Justice Antonin
Scalia "glowering down from the bench" at an ACLU lawyer in a drug-testing
case. To leave no room for doubt, there's a mug shot of the judge,
captioned "Supreme Court Justice Scalia recently ripped into a
civil-liberties lawyer."

This from a magazine that describes the crackdown on ecstasy-taking by
teenagers as a "War on Raves," in which the Drug Enforcement Agency is
vilified for trying to "squash an artistic form." And from a magazine in
whose latest issue readers are treated to what is effectively a
drug-takers' travel piece. The "New Pot World Order" includes "the new
stoned Switzerland," where "skiers with a taste for pot are flocking to . .
. resorts such as Verbier."

Don't mistake Rolling Stone's contents for the cutting edge of
counterculture. Just think of it as your in-flight magazine on a trip to
nowhere.

Mr. Varadarajan is the Journal's chief television and media critic.