A vital part of the High Times operation was the

I go out there with a critical eye. I'm there for work, not play. I have to tell our readers what's happening in Mexico, or Colombia, or whatever, because our readers can't be there in person. I don't say, "Oh wow, look at this!" Instead I ask questions: How long has this been going on? How much money is involved? How much are you growing?
    If another war breaks out in the Middle East, you know that I'll be there. During the civil war I went to Lebanon. I wanted to find out what the hell happened to all that hashish! It turned out to be a major consideration, because the Christians were trading hash to the Israelis in return for guns. The deal was consummated in Spain. That's an angle nobody else covered.
    No other publication has realized the vast potential of the drug beat. No newspaper I know of even has a full-time drug reporter; most of them are still covering drugs from the police desk, under the heading "narcotics." It's like where rock music was ten years ago. Then John Rockwell got hired at The New York Times, and suddenly rock found a place in respectable journalism. It changed the whole image. With drugs, it's just a matter of time before the same thing occurs.

    The world represented by High Times and by the paraphernalia industry remains foreign to many of the sixties smokers. Some are uncomfortable that drugs have become so visible. "It bothers me to drive to work and see high school kids smoking openly on the streets," says a stockbroker who has been smoking marijuana since 1966. Sixties smokers are more concerned with paranoia than paraphernalia, and they still recall a time when marijuana represented excitement and danger, when schools like Stony Brook carried an air of intrigue, when the "B" colleges (Buffalo, Brandeis, Bennington, and Berkeley) and the "weird three" (Antioch, Goddard, and Bard) were as well known for drugs as for their academic achievements.
    Sixties smokers look back to a time when, as they see it, marijuana involved a commitment to a countercultural way of life, and they lament its growing commercialism. "To get high used to be a beautiful thing," complains Sarah. "People would give you dope. Nobody would dream of making money on it. Now, it's just one more part of the capitalist system."
    A college teacher in his mid-thirties, who has been smoking for fifteen years, had a group of students over to his house one evening. The students asked if it was all right if they smoked, and he nodded his assent. Seeing that he was happy to join them, one wide-eyed sophomore came up and said, "I didn't know that you did this. You ought to try it for sex sometime." The teacher nodded. "Good idea," he muttered incredulously.
    Sarah and Mark have a problem with marijuana that they never had in the 1960s. Their four-year-old son enjoys playing with the rolling papers and pretending he is smoking a joint. They are afraid that the youngster may go into his "marijuana act" the next time his grandparents are visiting, which could lead to awkward problems.
    When recalled through the glow of nostalgia, the sixties take on a special quality. A journalist recalls that "grass used to taste purple back then," that it had a flavor of pioneering and excitement. He recalls a time when he and his friends "actually believed that marijuana was good for you." They don't believe it any longer. Sixties smokers are often critical of younger users who smoke marijuana as a substitute for alcohol, not for enhancement or growth but for intoxication.
    The younger smokers, for their part, are proud of their relationship to the drug. A college student from Minnesota describes a "bag night," an evening whose entire purpose is for a group of friends to come together to smoke as much marijuana as they possibly can. This student's older brother is not impressed: "5hthen we got stoned," he notes, "people used to talk about what it was like. Do that today and you'll just get a lot of weird looks."
    People who began smoking in the early 1960s were daredevils and risk-takers who became annoyed over marijuana's popularity later in the decade. Perhaps because it was centered in the universities, smoking during the middle 1960s was an elitist experience. "Initially," says drug researcher Lance Christie, "drugs were a means of taking a Hero's journey. A student who bought into the drug culture in 1965 was buying into an elitist high-performance group." One of those students, now a veteran smoker, describes the change:

Dope has become the psychedelic movement made safe for mass consumption, like rock concerts on TV, underground FM cleaned up for AM listeners, or condominiums replacing communes. Vanguards are always more real than what follows in their wake.

    For their part, younger smokers insist that the environment surrounding the use of marijuana is now healthier than it used to be, since the drug has been demystified and desanctified to the point where today it is almost free from the old attitudes of fear and paranoia. The seventies smokers enjoy their own nostalgia, as portrayed in this story from a suburban high school student about a young man known simply as "Fish":

Fish had done everything, he had been everywhere. He was really into grass, and parties. He was always carrying a bong, usually a fancy one with many chambers. He was known for his bongs.
    The thing about Fish is that he was always getting high, always getting other people high. When you asked them why they were hanging around, they would tell you that Fish was coming by later that evening. People would cheer him as he came, and say, "All right, Fish, all right." He even had a bong with a mask on it. There was something magnetic about Fish that drew people to him, and he was a genuinely nice person as well.
    Fish brought people happiness through his bong. At every party, Fish would be there, and he was known in the school just like the quarterback on the football team, and the captain of the debating team.
    Fish was always there, with those great bongs of his. God knows where he got them. And he always had good stuff too.