"In my movies, only the troubled guys do drugs," says teen-scene king John Hughes . . . Thus, the dope-smoking sequence wasn't meant to show that drugs are cool. Still, a lot of critics thought it was. But Hughes argues, "If you notice, the kid who has the drugs. . .doesn't partake of them himself. Instead, he uses the drugs to manipulate the others. The intent was never to show the positive side of drugs-I'd never do that" (Broeske 42).

We always envision those long-haired hippies, circa 1960-something, with a joint in hand, swaying to the Grateful Dead or "One toke over the line . . ." But while in 1962 only 4 percent of the entire American population had ever taken an illegal drug, a survey by the National Institute on Drug Abuse reported two decades later that 64 percent of Breakfast Clubbers had tried an illegal drug before finishing high school (Holtz 67). Drug use by high schoolers actually peaked in 1982, although use of alcohol remained at a high throughout the decade, marking a difference between older and younger Clubbers (Holtz 68). In the 1989 case study of teenagers in several American localities, The Search for Structure , Francis Ianni notes that when asked why they used drugs, suburban teenagers-like those Hughes' movies portray-"offered curiosity about drugs and the peer pressure of 'everybody doing it' as explanations. Many also maintained that they had observed fathers having a cocktail or two when they returned from work, or mothers using legal drugs for stress relief; these teenagers saw the 'soft drugs' they used as simply another form of the stress-relief syndrome" (201). Urban, inner-city youth gave different reasons for drug use, of course-poverty, unemployment, alienation, and an environment of police indifference to (or even involvement in) the drug trade-but that's a story for a different day (Ianni 201).

The suburban teens' reasoning sounds just like the old "Just say no" commercial where Dad bursts in to find Son (looking about 12 years old) smoking up: grabbing the paraphernalia he barks, "Where did you learn this?" The boy shouts back, "From you! I learned it from watching you!" We made merciless fun of the boy's near-tears outburst. But the ad was no doubt produced by hippies who did a 180-degree about face from tuned-in turned-on to parents with DARE! (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) bumper stickers. In The Scapegoat Generation, Mike Males, himself a Boomer and admitted sometime inhaler during the 1960s, observes:

We ourselves, writing in Rolling Stone, assured us that our motives were noble:

At first glance, this conservatism may seem hypocritical: "It was all right for us to try this, but you'd better not." Yet in the end, it may be less despicable than that. It's not so much that they want to deny the next generation the freedom to experiment. It's more that they acknowledge the high toll exacted for that experimentation. . . .

But it's not as drippy as that is it? The poll showed only one fifth of the pot smokers, one fifth of the heavy drinkers, and one third of the hallucinogen and cocaine users regretted having used drugs as they did. Half of our drug contingent still uses drugs, and half of them as much as they ever did. That doesn't sound like a bedrock just-say-no ethic. (160)

So we got conflicting messages from parents who continued patterns of substance abuse, from Mrs. Reagan, and from movies which showed drugs as a way for kids to come together and open up and find something real-without intending to show "the positive side of drugs" (the implication in Hughes' comment being that this side does exist, however).