Well, I mostly agree. Except that there hasn't really been a significant rise in drug use. Just occasional significant shifts from one drug to another (coke gets expensive and risky, coke dealers switch to meth and the users take what's available) And there was a significant rise in the
perception of drug use being a major problem.
But I don't think the troubled parent industry is growing to meet a real deman. One big clue is how the rhetoric has changed. In the early `70's (summer of Manson, etc) the media was all a twitter w/ fearmongering about the inevitable wave of heroin addiction. We knew that GIs in Vietnam were using a lot of it. And we "knew" that heroin is instantly and morbidly addictive. So we "knew" that, as the vets came marching home from Vietnam, they'd bring their addictions w/ them. So the White House tasked NIDA (then headed by Bobby DuPont) to come up w/ a solution to this impending crisis.
But it never happened. As it turns out, most ppl who were using heroin in Vietnam under unbearably stressful circumstances simply quit when they got back home.
So here we were with all these rehabs underway, and mostly built on the Synanon method, and no damned heroin addicts! Legend has it that that's where the gateway theory came from. At the same time, there were lots and lots of pot smokers representing a boom market to any salesman who could sell the gateway theory.
If there's a worse idea going than locking people up for drug use, it's probably locking them up in close proximity to some tyranical altruist who wants to 'help' them with a problem that probably doesn't exist
-- Ginger Warbis
having had about all the help I can stand!