Puff Job

THE MARIHUANA PAPERS edited by David Solomon. 448 pages. Bobbs-Merrill.$10.

To be with it nowadays, the swinger and would-be swinger are expected to take a blase if not widely permissive view of LSD, marihuana, and virtually anything else that offers a flight into funsville. Since it helps to have a little intellectual support, the more anxiously hip members of the Now Generation will find some comfort in this one-sided propaganda volume in praise of pot.

The book was put together by David Solomon, whose qualifications are limited to the fact that he is a former editor at Esquire, Playboy and Metronome, and his bias is plainly evident. Smoking marihuana, he says flatly in his introduction, is not so harmful as cigarettes or alcohol, and should be legalized.

Joys of Grass. Bolstering this familiar argument are 400-plus pages of statements, essays, papers, adulatory fiction and documentary evidence, some of which are impressive, some simply a drag. Composer-Writer Paul Bowles is present with a marihuana morality tale, and so are Baudelaire and Rabelais-under one name or another marihuana has been around for thousands of years. Beat Poet Allen Ginsberg weighs in with an essay on the joys of grass, which he wrote while smoking the stuff. It is safe to report that marihuana does not noticeably affect Ginsberg's literary style: he is as opaque in this piece as he is at other times.

The most comprehensive defense argument comes from the famed 1944 La Guardia Report, written by responsible scientists and sociologists (though heavily attacked by the A.M.A. at the time). The report concluded that marihuana is not addictive, deleterious to mental or physical health, or the cause of psychotic or criminal behavior. Some more recent medical and statistical evidence also suggests that pot smokers are euphoric and generally agreeable under the influence, suffer no hangovers, and are no more likely to turn into drug addicts than are users of whisky or tobacco. On the other hand, marihuana can precipitate a psychosis in unstable people, and some medical men believe that such people who take up pot are also likely to graduate to stronger stuff.

Passive v. Active. If marihuana is really as relatively harmless as its partisans claim, why is it that the public, law enforcers and physicians are so dead set against it? An intriguing though far from convincing reply to that question comes from Dr. H.B.M. Murphy in a 1963 article in the United Nations' "Bulletin on Narcotics." What puts people off, says Murphy thoughtfully, is that pot users become passivists in a world that values activity. "In Anglo-Saxon cultures," he writes, "inaction is looked down on and often feared, whereas overactivity, aided by alcohol or independent of alcohol, is considerably tolerated despite the social disturbance produced."

That being the case, it is hardly likely that passive pro-pots alone will be able to summon the energy to outargue the active anti-pots. The President's Crime Commission is expected to submit recommendations soon on modern izing law enforcement; it is conceivable that the commission might propose making marihuana legal. Until then, The Marihuana Papers will have to be regarded strictly as a puff job.

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