But youths particularly are affected. Drug abuse has become “an extremely deadly epidemic” in American schools, the House Select Committee on Crime reported this June. The Committee said:

“Our investigation demonstrated that the drug crisis in our schools greatly exceeded our worst expectations . . . It is infecting our youth and contaminating our schools and leaving a trail of devastation.”

“It is only the uniquely gifted and self-possessed child who is capable of avoiding involvement with some form of drug abuse.”​—Los Angeles Times, June 30, 1973.

And if you are a youth in school, you may see drugs being passed around.

New York Congressman Charles B. Rangel wrote: “Heroin has destroyed the functioning of our school system. . . . drugs are as available as chewing gum, young girls shoot up in the locker room and 13-year-olds buy dope from 15-year-old peddlers.”

✔ “A state survey of teen-age drug use reported that more than 40 percent of pupils in the ninth to 12th grades in Massachusetts have used illegal drugs in the past year.”​—Boston Sunday Herald Traveler and Sunday Advertiser, August 27, 1972.

✔ A comprehensive survey of over 15,000 pupils in grades seven through twelve in Anchorage, Alaska, shows that over 41 percent of the students have used drugs, other than tobacco and alcohol.​—Journal of the American Medical Association, February 5, 1973.

✔ “Southern California drug abuse authorities report that as high as 80 percent of all high schoolers experiment with illicit drugs. Young people are frequently exposed to drugs as early as fifth grade.”​—Up-Look, Vol. 1, No. 1.

Wherever you go​—east, west, north or south—​drugs are there. They are even in small towns. In Palm Springs, California, for example, the drug problem is so bad that some parents worry about sending their youngsters to school. In Aspen and Boulder, Colorado, drugs are freely used in public. In East Jordan, Michigan; Nashua, New Hampshire; Lansing, Illinois; yes, in just about any place one looks, illegal drugs are used.

Even if some may think otherwise, the illicit use of drugs is probably rampant in their neighborhood too. Fred Hilligiest, whose thirteen-year-old son became a missing person in Houston, Texas, found this to be so. ‘I didn’t have any idea what was going on,’ he said, ‘how many kids were hanging around, taking drugs, and all that. But in the first three weeks we started looking for David, I got a college education.’

‘I thought it was maybe 10 percent of the kids in that kind of life, taking drugs,’ Hilligiest said. ‘But as I went along, it seemed like everybody’s kids were into it, maybe more like 80 percent.’ It is just as Archibald said: “You go to the bottom, it’s there.”

But is drug abuse only an American problem? What about other countries?

Drug Abuse World Wide

United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim observed: “Drug abuse . . . grows and takes on new forms. In some countries, it has reached the dimensions of a national emergency.” The Medical Tribune of November 22, 1972, carried the headline “DRUG TAKING FOUND COMMON IN CHILDREN WORLDWIDE.”

Drug abuse is a particular problem in Britain. London’s Daily Mail declared: “Illegal drug use is today virtually out of control.” Dr. H. Dale Beckett, chairman of the British Association for Prevention of Addiction, said: “There is probably not a school in the whole of the United Kingdom in which drug experimentation does not take place.”

The situation is similar in Australia. The Minister for Customs, D. L. Chipp, observed: “I can guarantee that if you have a child entering teens this year that child will be offered dangerous drugs or narcotics of some description before he or she is 18.”