Adolescent,

Marijuana Abusers

and

Their Families

U. S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES • Public Health Service • Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration
Adolescent Marijuana

Abusers and Their Families

Herbert Hendin, M.D.

Ann Pollinger, Ph.D.

Richard Ulman,Ph.D.

Arthur C. Carr, Ph.D.

NIDA Research Monograph 40

September 1981

DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES

Public Health Service

Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration

National Institute on Drug Abuse

Division of Research

5600 Fishers Lane

Rockville, Maryland 20857

For sale by the Superintendent of Documents. U.S. Government Printing Office

Washington, D.C. 20402
The NIDA Research Monograph series is prepared by the Division of Research

of the National lnstitute on Drug Abuse. Its primary objective is to provide

critical reviews of research problem areas and techniques. the content of

state-of-the-art conferences, integrative research reviews and significant

original research its dual publication emphasis is rapid and targeted

dissemination to the scientific and professional community.

Editorial Advisory Board

Avram Goldstein, M.D.

Addiction Research Foundation

Palo Alto, California

Jerome Jaffe, M.D.

College of Physicians and Surgeons

Columbia University, New York

Reese T. Jones, M.D.

Langley Porter Neurpsychiatric Institute

Unversity of California

San Francisco, California

Jack Mendelson, M.D.

Alcohol and Drug Abuse Research Center

Harvard Medical School

McLean Hospital

Belmont, Massachusetts

Helen Nowlis, Ph.D.

Office of Drug Education. DHHS

Washington, D.C.

Lee Robins, Ph.D.

Washington Unversity School of Medicine

St. Louis, Missouri

NIDA Research Monograph series

William Pollin, M.D.

DIRECTOR, NIDA

Marvin Snyder, Ph.D.

DIRECTOR, DIVISION OF RESEARCH, NIDA

Robert C. Petersen, Ph.D.

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Eleanor W. Waldrop

MANAGING EDITOR

Parklawn Building, 5600 Fishers Lane, Rockville, Maryland 20857
The contents of this monograph are in the public domain

and may be used and reprinted without special permission.

Citation as to source is appreciated.

Library of Congress catalog card number 81-600122

DHHS publication number (ADM)81-1168

Printed 1981

NIDA Research Monographs are indexed in the Index Medicus.

They are selectively included in the coverage of BioSciences

Information Service, Chemical Abstracts, Current Contents,

Psychological Abstracts, and Psychopharmacology Abstracts.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This study of the lives of adolescent marijuana abusers and

their families was supported by Grant No. DA-01489 from the

National Institute on Drug Abuse.

We wish to acknowledge, but cannot individually list, the

many physicians, social workers, family court judges, probation officers, and guidance counsellors in New York City

and suburban counties who referred cases to us.

We also owe a great debt of gratitude to all the youngsters

and their families for their willingness to share their lives

with us.

Herbert Hendin, M.D.

Ann Pollinger, Ph.D.

Richard Ulman, Ph.D.

Center for Psychosocial Studies

Veterans Administration Medical Center

Montrose, New York, and

Department of Psychiatry

New York Medical College

Arthur C. Carr, Ph.D.

Department of Psychiatry

Cornell University Medical Center
Foreword

Substantial evidence is accumulating which emphasizes the significant role the family plays in the initiation, maintenance, cessation, and prevention of drug abuse by its members. This monograph

depicts and investigates that role by studying the families of a

small number of adolescents involved in heavy marijuana use.

The study provides a robust “real life” description of the interplay between family dynamics and heavy adolescent marijuana use.

As the authors state, their specific aims are, “first, to explore

through psychodynamic techniques what in the adolescent’s adaptation and interaction with his or her family contributed to the

marijuana abuse; and second, to identify the functions which marijuana plays in the adolescent’s overall psychosocial adaptation.”

Dr. Hendin and his colleagues offer a number of insightful perspectives and approaches to their subject. First, they utilize

the psychodynamic approach, both in the design of the study and

interpretation of its results, that has not often been taken in

the drug field. Second, they present extensive information about

nondrug-abusing siblings of the target adolescents, comprising an

informal control or comparison group about whom little has been

known. Third, they delineate the adolescent’s family interactions

and relationships in terms of such themes as self-destructiveness,

anger, and grandiosity, an approach superbly utilized in such

family studies as Jules Henry’s Pathways to Madness, but seldom

seen in the drug abuse literature. Fourth, few previous studies

of marijuana-using adolescents have focused exclusively on the

heavy user, and none so intensively. Finally, the authors make

use of the representative case design methodology, a research

approach which has often been praised but infrequently applied.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse believes that these unique

elements, in addition to the information provided through more

traditional means, make this study a valuable addition in the

continuing effort to understand, prevent, and treat adolescent

drug abuse.

Marvin Snyder, Ph.D.

Director

Division of Research

National Institute on Drug Abuse
Contents

Foreword

Marvin Snyder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v

I . INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1. Background ................. 1

Chapter 2. Design of the Study ............ 8

II. THE LIVES OF ADOLESCENT MARIJUANA ABUSERS

Chapter 3. An overview of Adolescent Marijuana

Abusers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

Chapter 4. Representative Cases ............ 26

Angela A ............... 26

Clara D .................. 3 3

Tim H ................... 3 9

Dave M .................. 4 6

Eddie J .................. 5 1

Bobby G .................. 58

Chapter 5. Family Psychodynamics ........... 65

Chapter 6. The Functions of Marijuana ......... 73

III. PSYCHOLOGICAL TEST RESULTS

Chapter 7.

Chapter 8.

Chapter 9.

IV. CONCLUSION

Chapter 10.

An Overview of Psychological Test Results . 81

Psychological Contrast of Marijuana

Abusers and Their Siblings . . . . . . . . . 91

Clara and Vanessa D . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

Tim and Dennis H . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92

Dave and Fred M . . . . . . .. . . . 94

Eddie and Deborah J . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

Bobby and Diane G . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96

Discussion of Psychological Findings . . . . 98

Summary of Findings . . . . . . . . . . . 103

List of NIDA Research Monographs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
I. Introduction
Chapter 1

Background

It has been almost two decades since marijuana made its way from

the ghettos and bohemian enclaves of large American cities into

the white, middle class, urban, and suburban youth culture. Drug

use surveys have documented its rapid spread, with the proportion

of adolescents using the drug increasing steadily throughout the

1970’s. The well-established picture of the adolescent drug

abuser as the product of a broken home and a deprived environment

(Chein et al. 1964, Chambers et al. 1968) began to be broadened

as a result of increasing evidence of marijuana abuse among white

youngsters who are not socially disadvantaged and who come from

intact working and middle class families (McGlothlin and West

1968; Blum et al. 1972; Blum and Richards 1979). Fueled by the

alarm expressed by parents, educators, social workers, psychologists, and psychiatrists, researchers representing a wide range

of disciplinary perspectives have sought to explain adolescent

attraction to this illegal substance.

The study described in this monograph builds on past work in this

area which has been done by ourselves and others during the past

decade. Although it is unique in its focus on white, working and

middle class, high-school-aged youngsters who are marijuana

abusers rather than simply users, as well as in its particular

approach to understanding adolescent marijuana abuse within the

psychodynamic context of the family, this research should be

viewed in relation to both the strengths and deficits of past work.

Much of recent research on adolescent marijuana use grew out of an

attempt to distinguish youngsters who used the drug from those

who did not. In their early work the Jessors (1973, 1976, 1977)

identified role modeling with marijuana smoking friends and peer

pressure as the two most significant factors accounting for a

youngster’s use of marijuana. Somewhat later, Jessor and his

colleagues (1980) reported that such conformity with peers extended

beyond marijuana smoking to include a variety of “problem behaviors” such as early sexual experience, excessive alcohol consumption, forms of delinquent behavior, and use of other illegal

drugs. Kandel (1973, 1978) likewise reported peer modeling and

peer pressure as the critical variables in explaining use of

marijuana by adolescents, although suggesting that certain psychological states, notably high levels of personal dissatisfaction,

1
depression, and strong feelings of alienation from parents, may

play a role in the use of ‘more serious” drugs (Paton et al. 1977).

Another group of researchers stressed psychological rather than

peer variables as determinant of adolescent marijuana smoking.

These studies have identified such factors as low self-esteem

(Kaplan 1975 a,b 1978; Norem-Hebeisen 1975); anxiety, depression,

and lack of self-control (Kupfer et al. 1973); difficulties in

establishing meaningful relationships with others (Esman 1967;

Mirin et al. 1971); and the need to repress feelings of hostility

and aggression (Allen and West 1968) as characterizing young

marijuana smokers and differentiating them from those who do not

use the drug.

Studies correlating marijuana use with peer associations, other

forms of deviant behavior, or various psychological states have

not explained the nature of the relationship between marijuana

smoking and these variables, and have raised for many researchers

the question whether marijuana is the cause or the consequence of

the identified relationships. McGlothlin and West saw marijuana

use as contributing to the development of passive, inward-turning,

“amotivational” personality characteristics. “For numerous middle

class students,” these authors wrote, “the subtly progressive

change from conforming achievement-oriented behavior to a state

of relaxed and careless drifting has followed their use of

significant amounts of marijuana.” (McGlothlin and West 1968,

p. 128). A number of other authors (Kolansky and Moore 1971, 1972;

Kornhaber 1971; Kolodny et al. 1974; Maugh 1974) have concurred

with this view.

An opposing view has been put forth by such researchers as

Grinspoon (1971) and Hochman and Brill (1973) who see marijuana

use in much more innocuous terms, and largely as a manifestation

of a change in lifestyle. Grinspoon, for example, maintains that

marijuana is, like long hair, simply a mark of change in behavior

quite distinct from personality. “This type of change,” states

Grinspoon, “may be likened to that which a girl who decides to

join a convent may undergo; she certainly appears different with

respect to her values, dress, goals, behavior and so forth, but

beneath her habit the same pre-convent personality resides,”

(Grinspoon 1971, p. 290) Similarly, he believes that underneath

the apparent behavioral changes of young marijuana users are

personalities which have not undergone any basic alteration.

In a more recent study involving psychodynamic interviews over a

period of several months with 15 college students who used marijuana regularly and heavily, one of the authors of this monograph

found that marijuana was neither causative of changing attitudes

toward ambition and success nor simply an incidental concomitant

of a change in lifestyle (Hendin 1973, 1975, 1980). Rather, this

research found that marijuana was used regularly and in large

amounts by these college students to provide relief from competitive

conflicts that were proving intolerable. A common pattern found

among these marijuana smokers was the equation of success with

2
destructiveness, and failure with humiliation. Finding it

impossible to accept either alternative, they used marijuana in

the service of withdrawing from the conflict.

The findings of this research suggested a number of important

directions for the study of adolescent marijuana use. First, the

interview data which were collected provided clear evidence of

the problematic nature of heavy marijuana use in the lives of these

college students and pointed to a connection of this behavior with

longstanding psychological and social conflicts. The failure of

much of the earlier research to distinguish clearly between marijuana users and abusers makes it somewhat difficult to compare

this conclusion with those of other studies and especially with

those which have reported innocuous results of marijuana use. At

the same time, it suggests that among the total population of

marijuana users, as has long been recognized with users of alcohol,

it is those whose intake is in such amounts or with such frequency

as to interfere with their lives who constitute the most appropriate focus for concern and for study. And there is considerable

clinical and research evidence of a sizable segment of the marijuana-smoking population whose use indeed involves such interference (Esman 1967; Wieder and Kaplan 1969; Gottesfeld et al. 1972-

73; Hendin 1973, 1975, 1980).

Second, the use of psychodynamic interviewing in the study of

marijuana-abusing college students was found to be an extremely

valuable research technique which allowed the etiology of the

marijuana abuse and related psychological characteristics of the

abusers to be clearly seen, and provided significant understanding

of the role that marijuana played in the students’ overall psychosocial adaptation. In respect to this method of data collection,

the study differed markedly from most research on marijuana use

which has relied essentially on self-report questionnaires.

Although psychodynamic studies of adolescent marijuana users have

been reported in the literature, those detailed enough to provide

comprehensive information have mainly been individual case studies

chosen simply on the basis of who came to treatment to a particular

therapist (Esman 1967, Wieder and Kaplan 1969, Gottesfeld et al.

1972-1973).

Third, in demonstrating the connection between the students’ drug

behavior and their desire to escape competitive conflicts, this

research suggested that marijuana as a “drug of choice” has

particular functions for particular groups or subgroups of users.

Although the information derived from the sample of this study--

students at a highly prestigious, academically competitive

university--cannot be automatically generalized to all marijuanaabusing adolescents, the importance of understanding the adaptive

function of marijuana for abusers of all ages in a variety of

environments was clearly indicated.

Finally, marijuana abuse in all 15 cases seen in conjunction with

this research appeared to be related to psychodynamic conflicts

having their roots in the students’ family experiences. Parents,

3
in particular, were quite consistently and intimately tied up

with these young people’s sense of being caught in an impossible

position regarding achievement and competition. Although other

members of the family were not interviewed, given most of the

students’ desire to present themselves as independent and separated

from their parents, family-related conflicts were readily apparent

in the course of the interviews.

The focus of most past research on marijuana users of all degrees,

rather than specifically on abusers, and the resulting tendency

to view marijuana as something less than a “serious” drug, has

led researchers to an overconcentration on peer relationships and

to the neglect of the family. In contrast, work done on use of

so-called “hard drugs” has seldom made such a mistake. Drawing

on the research of Ackerman (1958) and Vogel and Bell (1960),

such work has stressed the tendency of troubled families to

“scapegoat” one child and to use his or her problems, including

problems related to drugs, to help hold the family together.

Emphasis has also been placed on explaining hard drug use in

terms of the youngster’s inability to resolve conflicts concerning

separation and individuation. In this light, drug abuse is viewed

as the adolescent’s attempt to create an illusion of defiance while

actually becoming bound closer to the family (Reilly 1975; Huberty

1975; Noone and Reddig 1976; Stanton et al. 1978).

Since subjects in these studies have tended to be only incidental

users of marijuana, it has not been clear whether such patterns

are evident in the case of adolescents for whom marijuana is their

primary drug. Evidence of significant correlations between

parental variables and adolescent marijuana use, provided through

the recent work of Brook and her associates (1977, 1978, 1980,

1981) does, however, support the findings of the college student

study in suggesting the family as a critical variable in explaining

use of marijuana by adolescents.

The present project was undertaken in order to close the gaps in

past research on adolescent marijuana use, particularly those

pertaining to the role of the family. Specifically its aims were

first, to explore through psychodynamic techniques what in the

adolescent’s adaptation and interaction with his or her family

contributed to the marijuana abuse; and second, to identify the

functions which marijuana plays in the adolescent’s overall psychosocial adaptation.

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Allen, T.R. and West, L.J. Flight from violence: Hippies and

the green rebellion. Am J Psychiatry, 124: 364-370, 1968.

Blum, R.H. and Associates. Horatio Alger’s Children: The Role

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Francisco, California: Jossey-Bass, 1972.

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Blum, R.H., and Richards, L. Youthful drug use. In: DuPont, R.

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Psychol Rep 41: 1095-1102, 1977.

Brook, J.S., Lukoff, I.F., and Whiteman, M. Family socialization

and adolescent personality and their association with adolescent

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Brook, J.S., Lukoff, I.F., and Whiteman, M. Initiation into

adolescent marijuana use. J Genet Psychol 137: 133-142, 1980.

Brook, J.S., Whiteman, M., and Gordon, A.S. The role of the

father in his son's marijuana use. J Genet Psychol 138: 81-86,

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Chambers, C., Moffett, A., and Jones, J. Demographic factors

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Chein, I., Gerard, D., Lee, K., and Rosenfeld, E. The Road to H:

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Esman, A.H. Drug use by adolescents: some valuative and technical

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Hendin, H. Marijuana abuse among college students. J Nerv Ment

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Hendin, H. The Age of Sensation. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.,

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Hendin, H. Psychosocial theory of drug abuse: A psychodynamic

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Govt. Print. Off., 1980, pp. 195-200.

Hochman, J.S. and Brill, N.G. Chronic marijuana use and psychosocial adaptation. Am J Psychiatry, 130: 132-140, 1973.

Huberty, D.J. Treating the adolescent drug abuser: A family

affair. Contemp Drug Prob, 4: 179-194, 1975.

Gottesfeld, M.L., Caroff, D. and Lieberman, F. Treatment of

adolescent drug abusers. Psychoanal R, 59: 527-537, 1972-3.

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Grinspoon, L. Marijuana Reconsidered. Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press, 1971.

Jessor, R., Jessor, S.L., and Finney, J.A. Social psychology of

marijuana use: Longitudinal studies of high school and college

youth. J Pers Soc Psychol, 26: 1-15, 1973.

Jessor, R. Predicting time of onset of marijuana use: A developmental study of high school youth. J Consult Clin Psychol, 44:

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Development: A Longitudinal Study of Youth. New York: Academic

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of marijuana and problem drinking in a national sample of adolescents. Am J Pub Health, 70: 604-613, 1980.

Kandel, D.B. The Role of parents and peers in adolescent marijuana

use. Science, 181: 1067-1070, 1973.

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adolescent initiation into stages of drug use: A developmental

analyses. In: Kandel, D.B., ed. Longitudinal Research on Drug

Use: Empirical Findings and Methodological Issues. New York:

John Wiley & Sons, 1978.

Kaplan, H.B. Increase in self-rejection as an antecedent of deviant

response. J Youth Adolescence, 4: 281-292, 1975a.

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Kolansky, H., and Moore, W.T. Effects of marijuana on adolescents

and young adults. J Am Med Assoc, 216: 486-492, 1971.

Kolansky, H., and Moore, W.T. Toxic effects of chronic marijuana

use. J Am Med Assoc, 222: 34-41, 1972.

Kolodny, R.C.; Masters, W.H.; Kolodner, R.M.; and Toro, E. Depression of plasma testosterone levels after chronic intensive marijuana use. N Eng J Med, 290: 872-874, 1974.

Kornhaber, A. Marijuana in an adolescent psychiatric outpatient

population. J Am Med Assoc, 215: 1988, 1971.

Kupfer, D.J.; Detre, T.; Koral, J.; and Fajans, P. A comment on

the "amotivational syndrome" in marijuana smokers. Am J Psychiatry

130: 1319-1322, 1973.

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Maugh, T.H. Marijuana (II): Does

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it damage the brain? Science,

McGlothlin, W.H. and West, L.J. The marijuana problem: An overview. Am J Psychiatry, 125: 370-378, 1968.

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Fisher, S. Casual versus heavy use of marijuana: A redefinition

of the marijuana problem. Am J Psychiatry, 127: 1134-1140, 1971.

Noone, R.J. and Reddig, R.C. Case studies in the family treatment of drug abuse. Fam Process, 15: 325-332, 1976.

Norem-Hebeisen. A.A. Self-esteem as a predictor of adolescent

drug abuse. In: Lettieri, D.J. ed. Predicting Adolescent Drug

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Paton, S., Keesler, R., and Kandel, D.B. Depressive mood and

adolescent illicit drug use: A longitudinal analysis. J Genet

Psychol, 131: 267-289, 1977.

Reilly, D.M. Family factors in the etiology and treatment of

youthful drug abuse. Fam Therapy, 2: 149-171, 1975.

Stanton, M.D.; Todd, T.C.; Heard, D.B.; Kirschner, S.; Kleiman,

J.I.; Mowatt, D.T.; Riley, P.; Scott, S.M.; and Van Deusen, J.M.

Heroin addiction as a family phenomenon: A new conceptual model.

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Vogel, E.F., and Bell, N.W. The emotionally disturbed child as

the family scapegoat. In: Bell, N.W. and Vogel, E.F. The

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7
Chapter 2

Design of the Study

In keeping with the overall goal of studying adolescent marijuana

use in the dynamic context of the family, a research design was

developed which differed in key respects from those which have

been most widely used to investigate marijuana use, especially

among young people. Most systematic research on marijuana abuse

has been based on what may be termed an “extensive” design; that

is, one involving a relatively large number of cases from each

of whom a limited amount of information is collected. Participants in this type of study are typically asked quite specific,

closed-ended questions, and the answers obtained are then subjected to tabulation and statistical treatment.

In contrast, this study was based on an “intensive” research

design, in which a relatively small number of cases were studied

in depth over a considerable period of time. In developing this

design, we drew heavily upon recent research on single individuals,

and in particular on the work of Chassan (1961, 1965, 1967),

Shontz (1965), and Spotts and Shontz (1976, 1980). The general

approach taken was that of the “representative case method” as

has been developed and effectively used by Shontz in a number

of separate studies, including an intensive investigation of

American cocaine users.

A number of factors suggested the use of such a research design.

First, the problem area under investigation, adolescent marijuana

use, and the specific focus on family psychodynamics appeared to

be best studied through the intensive analysis of cases lying at

the extreme end of the continuum of adolescent marijuana use.

It was felt that a relatively small number of particularly heavy

users, by representing the essence of the behavior in an obvious,

easily researchable form, would tell more about the psychodynamics

of marijuana use than would a large sample of users of varying

amounts of marijuana. The individuals in the study were to

provide a view which, as Spotts and Shontz describe it, “enlarges

for inspection a component of all people that is normally too

obscure or undeveloped to be clearly seen.” (Spotts and Shontz

1976, p. 35)

Secondly, because the key variable, heavy marijuana use, could

8
be identified in individuals by readily recognizable behavioral

characteristics, the selection of appropriate cases for the

research was conceptually clear. Thirdly, the selection and

analysis of cases were approached with a preexisting framework

for viewing adolescent marijuana use in the context of family

dynamics, out of which an explicit, systematic procedure for

data collection could be developed. Thus; it was felt the

research would minimize the key limitation of many case studies

in which the theoretical or practical significance emerges out

of the descriptive material collected, rather than serving as

a guide for the information collecting process.

The study began with a careful specification of the target group

to be investigated. In order to illuminate the relationship

between adolescent marijuana use and family dynamics, the study

concentrated on adolescents between the ages of 14 and 18, from

middle and working class families, who were still living with

their parents at the time of the research. In order to eliminate the significantly confounding effects of separation and

divorce on the feelings and behavior of the adolescents studied,

only intact families in which the two parents were living

together at the time of the study were included. In light of

the possibly confounding issue of race on the dynamics of

marijuana smoking, the decision was made to concentrate in

this initial project on white adolescents. As indicated

earlier, the study was to focus exclusively on heavy marijuana

users, who were defined as daily or almost daily smokers with

clearly established patterns of smoking marijuana throughout

the day as well as during evening and nighttime hours. Finally,

the concentration was on those individuals for whom marijuana

constituted their primary, if not their sole, drug.

Having set the sample parameters, we then undertook a systematic

analysis of records of over 300 marijuana-abusing adolescents

fitting our specifications, which were obtained through Family

Court, schools, social agencies, and mental health clinics

within a single northeast metropolitan area. In addition, a

wide range of professionals having daily contact with adolescents

were contacted to seek out heavy marijuana users who had not

yet been referred for any type of treatment or identified in

any public way as having a drug abuse problem.

The background research showed a picture of the adolescent

marijuana abuser which was considerably diverse regarding both

demographic and socioeconomic variables, notwithstanding the

fact that all met the general sample specifications. In addition,

the youngsters differed in many respects pertaining to the context

and patterns of their drug abuse. In some cases, for example,

marijuana abuse occurred within the context of a general pattern

of delinquent behavior, while in others, it was linked to an

otherwise law-abiding lifestyle. Sane youngsters' use of

marijuana was accompanied by significant intake of alcohol or

a variety of secondary drugs, while others were purely users of

354-187 0 - 81 - 2

9
marijuana. Some were extremely open in their use of marijuana,

while others took considerable care to conceal their use, or at

least had done so up until the point where apprehension occurred.

Finally, some clear distinctions emerged in the patterns of

marijuana abuse between the young men and the young women on whom

background data was collected.

Out of a wide range of marijuana-abusing adolescents, 17 individual cases were selected for intensive analysis. In no sense

were these youngsters chosen because they represented the “average”

adolescent marijuana user, nor should this group be regarded as

a random sample of the identified target group. Rather each

person was specifically selected to epitomize a particular way

of life seen among the larger group. While all the cases were

experts on the subject of marijuana use and had extensive firsthand

knowledge of this behavior, they were quite different from one

another in many other respects and their selection for the study

was based largely on these differences.

Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish religious backgrounds, for

example, were all represented among the group intensively studied,

as well as various combinations of religions between the two

parents. While the fathers of all the youngsters selected were

employed full-time, their occupations ranged from that of delivery

truck driver and bartender through owners of small stores or

businesses, up to engineer, physician, and corporate executive,

with corresponding differences in affluence and life style.

Cases were selected to represent both urban and suburban residence,

as well as a wide mix of ethnic backgrounds. In keeping with

the ratios reflected among the larger group identified, 11 of

the cases were males and 6 were females. Finally, the youngsters

selected represented both delinquent and nondelinquent groups

and included some users of alcohol and/or secondary drugs.

As other researchers using the representative case method have

established (Spotts and Shontz 1976), the diversity of these

characteristics reflected within the group is regarded as a

particular strength of the study in that it provided an opportunity to examine heavy marijuana use in a wide variety of family

contexts. In addition, as will be stressed in discussing the

research findings, the significance of the patterns observed

among the adolescents is certainly enhanced by the fact that

they emerged from so heterogeneous a group.

The focus of this research was on the family relationships,

patterns of interactions, and psychodynamics which were characteristic of the marijuana-abusing adolescents. Thus, the subjects

of the study included the parents as well as the youngster. In

addition, background analysis had indicated that in most families

in which one youngster was a marijuana abuser, there were close

age-order siblings who were not. This suggested a unique opportunity to use a nondrug-abusing sibling with each family as a

type of “control group” in illuminating the patterns of family

10
psychodynamics which contribute to marijuana abuse.

Drawing on past work with this method (Hendin 1965, 1975) a series

of unstructured psychodynamic interviews was then conducted with

the adolescent, the parents, and in every case where it was

possible with the next age-order sibling. Unstructured interviewing as a data collection technique was used to tap each family

member’s inner feelings as well as consciously held attitudes,

and, in particular, to illuminate the meaning and significance

of the adolescent’s heavy marijuana use within the total family

context.

During the interview process, subjects talked about feelings,

persons, events, and situations, both past and present, of concern

to them. No attempt was made to structure the interviews to

obtain specific types of information from participants. Rather,

the participants’ trend of associations, dreams, fantasies,

omissions, inconsistencies, and reactions to the interviewer were

all used to gain a comprehensive picture of the psychodynamics

of each family member as well as the family as a unit. Where

necessary and appropriate, this also involved some specific

questioning or challenging of defenses by the interviewer; for

the most part, however, the participants simply presented

themselves in their own style and manner.

In each of the 17 cases, the marijuana-abusing youngster was seen

for a minimum of 10 separate interviews, and at least two

interviews were conducted with each parent. In 11 of the cases

an appropriate nondrug-abusing sibling was also available and

agreed to participate and was interviewed at least twice

All participants from a single family were most often seen

together for the initial session. Subsequent sessions were then

conducted on an individual basis, although husbands and wives

were often seen together for some of their sessions. An average

of 25 interviews per family were conducted over a period of

approximately three months. Each family was then followed up

at six-month intervals over a two-year period. In each case a

single interviewer saw each member of a particular family.

At the outset of the research the families were told that both

individual and family psychotherapy would be available on an

ongoing basis in exchange for their participation in the study.

In about one-third of the families at least one member did

continue for some form of short-term therapy, while in an

additional one-third of the cases, at least one family member

went on for longer term treatment. The essential research goal

in each case, however, was to continue to see the youngster and

the family until an understanding of the family dynamics and the

functions which marijuana played for the adolescent was obtained.

In cases where the next age-order sibling could not be directly

interviewed, special emphasis was placed on obtaining a clear

picture from other family members of the behavioral adaptation

of this sibling and the way in which the family psychodynamics

11
worked to shape such an adaptation.

Interviews were taped and transcribed, forming a comprehensive

record for each of the 17 family cases. These materials have

been placed on file at the Center for Psychosocial Studies, where

they are available to interested researchers.

As a verification of the material obtained through the clinical

data collection procedures, and as an aid in developing specific

diagnoses, a battery of psychological tests was also administered

by the project psychologist to each of the marijuana-abusing

youngsters and to the 11 nondrug-abusing siblings. This battery

included the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS), the

Rorschach Test, the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), a Sentence

Completion Test (SCT), the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality

Inventory (MMPI) and a self-report background questionnaire

(Carr 1972). The battery was devised to provide a reliable

estimate of each youngster’s intellectual functioning and key

personality characteristics. The specific nature of and rationale

for including each test have been described elsewhere (Carr 1980).

After the data were collected for each case, the interview

transcripts were reviewed by the person conducting the interviews

with the particular family in order to identify the essential

psychodynamic patterns. A second psychodynamically trained

researcher made an independent review of the clinical material,

and where inconsistencies in interpretation occurred, the data

were presented to the entire research team for discussion and

resolution. The psychological test data were compiled into a

formal evaluation report independent of the clinical interviews.

Finally, a joint analysis by the interviewers and the psychologist

of all information pertaining to the family unit formed the basis

for establishing the dominant adaptation and psychodynamic patterns

of each case.

In interpreting the data obtained, it should be stressed again

that the fundamental aim of this study was ‘to provide comprehensive “real life” descriptions of the interplay between family

dynamics and heavy marijuana use among adolescents which have

not emerged out of earlier studies of this behavior. The research

was specifically not designed to be experimental in nature, and

thus strict cause-effect relationships are not established on

the basis of the information reported. Rather, the behavioral,

psychological, and psychodynamic patterns described in this

monograph and, in particular, those emanating from the comparison between the marijuana-abusing adolescents and their siblings,

provide a dynamic understanding of what in the family interaction

encourages one youngster to become an abuser while the brother

or sister does not.

The following section of the monograph presents a synopsis of

the lives of the adolescent marijuana abusers who participated

in the research. This includes a behavioral overview of the

12
entire group of youngsters, followed by a series of reports on

six representative cases. These are designed to provide an indepth

view of youngsters who illustrate the key patterns which were

observed. The case reports are based on the interviews conducted

with the marijuana-abusing adolescent, the parents, and in five

of the six cases, with a sibling immediately older or younger than

the abuser.

The case reports are followed by two chapters which discuss the

clinical findings of the research pertaining first to the issue

of family psychodynamics related to adolescent marijuana abuse,

and second to the various functions which heavy marijuana use

appeared to perform for the adolescents in this study.

The next general section focuses on the results of the psychological test battery which was administered to the adolescent

-marijuana abusers and, where possible, to their siblings. This

section begins with a brief overview of how the abusers as a

group performed on these various tests. Next, the psychological

test data of five abuser-sibling pairs are presented in detail,

compared and contrasted. A brief chapter in this section then

discusses the most significant implications of the psychological

test findings for understanding marijuana abuse among adolescents.

The final chapter of the monograph summarizes the key conclusions

emerging from the research.

REFERENCES

Carr, A.C. A self-report questionnaire. J Personal Assess, 36:

525-533, 1972.

Carr, A.C. Psychological testing of personality. In: Kaplan,

H.I., Freedman, A.M., and Sadock, B.J. eds. Comprehensive

Textbook of Psychiatry. 3rd Edition, Volume

Williams Wilkins, 1980. pp. 940-965.

1. Baltimore, Md.:

Chassan, J. B. Stochastic models of the single case as the basis

of clinical research design. Behav Sci, 6: 42-50, 1961.

Chassan, J.B. Intensive design in clinical research. Psychosom,

6: 280-294, 1965.

Chassan, J.B. Research Design in Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1967.

Hendin, H., Gaylin, W., and Carr, A.

Research:

Psychoanalysis and Social

The Psychoanalytic Study of the Non-Patient. New York:

Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1965.

Hendin, H. The Age of Sensation. New York: W. W. Norton Co.,

1975.

Shontz, F.C. Research Methods in Personality. New York:

Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1965.

13
Spotts, J., and Shontz, F.C. The Life Styles of Nine American

Cocaine Users: Trips to the Land of Cockaigne. National

Institute on Drug Abuse Research Issues 16. DHEW Pub. No.

(ADM) 76-392, Washington, D.C.: Dept. of Docs, U.S. Govt.

Printing Office, 1976.

Spotts, J., and Shontz, F.C. Cocaine Users: A Representative

Case Approach. New York: Free Press, 1980.

14
II. The Lives of Adolescent

Marijuana Abusers

Chapter 3

An Overview of Adolescent

Marijuana Abusers

In keeping with the study's focus on the ways in which psychodynamics of the family contribute to adolescent marijuana abuse,

an overview is provided in this chapter of the family context in

which these adolescents were operating. This begins with a look

at the youngsters' troubled relationships with their families,

and the generally negative feelings about themselves which

developed out of these relationships. The effects of these

disturbances on their behavior outside the family are then briefly

discussed, focusing in particular on their school adaptation and

their relationships with their friends. This general description

is based on material which emerged from the unstructured interviews with the marijuana-abusing adolescents, their parents, and

in some cases with their nondrug-abusing siblings.

FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS

All of the marijuana-abusing adolescents had quite turbulent lives

at home. In most cases their difficulties went well beyond the

typical problems most youngsters have during adolescence when

faced with new issues and the need to define their relationships

with parents on a new basis. These particular youngsters tended

most often to be locked into destructive, angry-dependent relationships with their parents. These relationships were characterized by a pattern of provocative and defiant behavior which

infuriated and frustrated their parents at the same time that it

forced them to be more controlling and limiting than they might

otherwise have been.

Each of the youngsters, to one degree or another, refused to

follow prescribed rules of conduct at home. Many insisted, for

example, on coming home after school with friends whom they knew

their parents did not want in their house. Most also consistently

objected to helping with chores around the house. When they did

agree to do their household jobs, they would often disappear without

explanation before completing them.

Many in the group came home just enough later than a previously

agreed-upon curfew to infuriate their parents. Although a call

home would often have prevented an argument, they usually chose

not to make it. Sometimes, after telling their parents that they

17
would call, they would stay out all night without calling. Agreements over how they would use the family car or money given them

by their parents were often violated. Taking the family car out

for a late night joy ride was a common activity for many of these

adolescents.

One young man continued to ride his minibike illegally on the highway despite frequent promises to his parents to curtail this behavior. Others would go away to weekend rock concerts over their

parents’ strong objections or would refuse, after much parental

pleading, to go on family outings or vacations. Two boys whose

parents worked in their school systems got into constant academic

and disciplinary trouble, creating an infuriating and embarrassing

situation for their parents. A number of the young women were

quite adept at driving their parents to the point of despair through

involvement with boyfriends they knew their parents disliked.

Several of the adolescents carried their provocativeness, defiance,

and anger toward their families beyond the confines of the home

into the community. This was often manifested in a pattern of

stealing and petty larceny. One youngster regularly broke into

and stole items from cars parked at his parents’ synagogue. Later,

he was arrested for breaking into and stealing valuables from the

same temple. Another boy retaliated against a cemetery night

watchman who refused to allow him to ride his motorcycle around

the grounds by stealing his expensive camera. One young man stole

medication from his therapist’s office, while another youngster

stole syringes, vials, and medication from a hospital where he

had a summer job. Shoplifting from local stores was also common.

Several adolescents had vandalized neighbors’ property or burglarized neighborhood homes, stealing antiques, jewelry, and stereo

equipment. One boy stole thousands of dollars from a country club

safe, while another took a similar amount from his grandparents.

In most instances, there was no attempt on the part of these

adolescents to sell or pawn their stolen property. Instead, they

tended to leave it in attics or under beds where their parents

were likely to discover it eventually or in places outside the

home where it could be easily traced back to the youngster. One

of the adolescents left a self-incriminating note to a girlfriend

in a bag of stolen objects that he had hidden in a neighbor’s

garage. Another youngster stole a ring from the mother of a friend

he was staying with and gave it to his girlfriend which quickly led

to exposure of the theft.

Undoubtedly, one of the reasons that many youngsters used marijuana was to provoke and defy their parents. Some came staggering

home so high that it was virtually impossible for their parents to

ignore them. Others went beyond coming home visibly stoned to

smoking marijuana and getting high at home,

In a number of cases, such blatant behavior did not go unchallenged

by parents and became the focus of constant family fights. One

young man used to have afternoon “pot and booze” parties in his

18
parents’ basement until his mother quit her job in order to put a

stop to such activities. A second young man continued to smoke

marijuana in his bedroom even after his father had reported him

to the police for this behavior. This type of defiance left many

parents feeling that they had completely lost control of their

children. The attempt to regain and reassert control, sometimes

over the full range of their child’s activities, became a constant

preoccupation for some of the parents.

In these cases, the parents tended to treat their adolescents like

young children whose every move had to be watched and supervised.

In return, the youngsters fought such supervision, seldom evidencing

any awareness of their real needs for parental support, guidance,

and approval. That the problem was less their behavior than its

defiant, provocative nature was suggested by the way in which

their siblings also sometimes engaged in disapproved activities,

but in a way which minimized parental involvement and avoided

overreaction.

The relationships of many of the youngsters’ with their families

were marked by explosive, often violent, expressions of anger.

Shouting and yelling among family members were typically reported.

These exchanges were sometimes punctuated by the adolescent’s breaking

valuable household objects, ripping up freshly planted shrubs, or

destroying other family property. One young man used a sledge

hammer to break his parents’ locked bedroom door to get a pair of

shoes they had taken in order to keep him at home following a family

disagreement.

Physical violence toward parents or siblings was also not uncommon

among these adolescents. One youngster was taken by police to a

psychiatric facility after hitting his mother in a fit of rage.

Another knocked his father to the ground with a blow to the jaw,

precipitating a call to the police. Still another regularly

pummeled his younger brother when he was upset or angry at his

parents.

In some of the cases the adolescents* disruptive behavior within

the family or community led to the parents swearing out a petition

against their child in Family Court. This usually resulted in the

youngster’s being placed on probation. In other cases, adolescents

apprehended by the police were adjudicated as delinquents; some

ended up spending periods of time in various treatment centers or

group homes. One young man was sentenced to a six-month term in

a county jail.

A few of these youngsters attempted to break out of the facilities

in which they were placed. One, for example, twice ran away from

his residential treatment center. On the latter attempt he managed

to escape to a southern state before being returned by his grandparents following the issuance of a warrant. Another tried to

break out of a detention center by smashing a window and later fled

town to avoid a second incarceration.

19
In cases where the youngster dealt with his or her family by concealment rather than provocation, the parents often managed not

to notice even blatant problems. Despite regular and heavy marijuana use, and in two instances, large drug-dealing operations,

some adolescents managed to keep their parents in the dark about

their drug involvement. This pattern of parental myopia in

several cases extended to other areas of ‘their child’s life. The

parents of one young man, for example, who had been diagnosed

early as having a hearing impairment and a learning disorder never

took any corrective steps, despite their son’s poor school performance. Another youngster, who had trouble falling asleep, was

up every night beyond midnight without his parents even once asking

what was troubling him.

Most of the marijuana abusers regardless of their families’ stance

toward their marijuana smoking or other behavior considered their

parents to be insensitive, indifferent to their basic needs, and

generally uncaring. Some were quite verbal about their anger and

bitterness toward their parents. On the other hand, the majority

used their behavior as a way of expressing their anger without

connecting it directly to their feelings. These young people

were invariably unable to deal directly with their parents and

were bound in the need both to defy them and to punish themselves

for their rebellion.

Despite the marijuana abusers’ generally poor relationships with

their families, not one of them seemed able to create real separation from his/her parents. Yet several frequently ran away from

home or stayed away on an indefinite basis. Sometimes this involved hiding at a friend’s house for a period of time; in other

instances it entailed traveling hundreds of miles to other states.

Most of these excursions, however, merely reinforced the angry

dependency which led to their occurrence.

Overall, then, caught between their own and their parents’ anger

and distance, these youngsters in most cases had no adults with

whom they could share their problems, and from whom they could

learn and receive guidance. Far from being a source of strength

and security, their families both contributed to and mirrored the

complex problems which characterized their lives.

FEELINGS ABOUT SELF

Related to and reinforced by the difficulties these youngsters

had in their relationships with their families, were their generally

troubled views of themselves. During the interview sessions, many

of the adolescents openly expressed a high degree of self-hatred,

most often evidenced through strongly negative and distorted body

images. A number of very attractive youngsters were unusually upset about the shape of their bodies, their facial appearance, or

their hair. One, for example, was convinced that his hair was so

kinky that it made him ugly and repulsive. One rather averagelooking girl had difficulty leaving her home for fear someone

would be repelled by her appearance, and two quite handsome young

20
men told of becoming very depressed whenever they saw themselves

in a mirror.

Many in the group had had physical, emotional, or intellectual

problems in early childhood around which they organized and integrated their contemptuous self-images. In this regard, they

appeared to mirror the views of themselves which they perceived

their parents had, and to hold steadfastly onto such views even

though the circumstances which may once have supported them no

longer existed. As a child, one boy had to have his enlarged

breasts surgically corrected. Later, as an only slightly overweight adolescent, he constantly referred to himself as a “fat

faggot” and a freak who would be better off living among bohemians

and hippies. Several other youngsters who had long since recovered

from childhood lisps or illnesses continued to be extremely selfconscious and to talk about themselves as deformed and damaged.

Still others, who as children had had difficulties in learning,

constantly spoke of themselves as “stupid idiots” and “morons”

who would never succeed in school. Many of the youngsters recounted instances from their childhood where they remembered their

parents being critical of their appearance or behavior, and these

appeared to have been influential in the development of the

youngsters’ negative self-images.

At times, their negative feelings about themselves were directly

and physically expressed, as in the case of one young man who

made deep cuts on his arms with a razor after his girlfriend

threatened to break up with him. Another youngster who felt her

mother had embarrassed and humiliated her in front of her friends

responded by cutting her own face with a razor blade.

Some of the adolescents expressed their dissatisfaction with themselves through a preoccupation with death, dying, and suicide.

One girl explained that she was terrified that she would awake

in the morning to find a dead person in her room. She also

described how she would write the words from popular songs, all

having to do with grief, sadness, and loneliness, on her bedroom

walls. A second adolescent was constantly thinking of suicide

and of blowing off his head with a shotgun.

Even those in the group who were not overtly suicidal in their

thoughts or behavior reflected a highly fatalistic attitude toward

the world and a sense that no effort of theirs could or would change

the unhappy circumstances of their lives. They tended to see their

families as the cause of the difficulties they were having; any

improvement in their situation was seen as deriving from a change

in attitude on the part of their parents or siblings.

SCHOOL ADAPTATION

Both the disturbing family situations of these marijuana-abusing

youngsters and the negative feelings about themselves that emerged

from these disturbances were reflected in the remarkably similar

patterns of behavior problems which they exhibited in school. As

21
a group, they appeared to be extremely tense, restless, and loud

in class. When they were not being disruptive, they were often

inattentive, lost in daydreams or mindless staring, and frequently

“nodding off.” They all cut classes regularly with little, if any,

regard for the consequences of their actions.

Many had a defiant and rebellious attitude toward their teachers,

usually coming to school dressed in their most torn and dirty

clothes. Some regularly came to class without paper, pencils, or

books; refused on a regular basis to hand in homework assignments;

and managed to miss scheduled tests. Others would get up in the

middle of class, leave without an excuse, and then fail to return.

The behavior problems of some of the adolescents went beyond being

inattentive, disruptive, or defiant, and involved verbal or even

physical abuse of their teachers. Some of them recounted cursing

at teachers, threatening to hit them, and at times pushing or

shoving them. Fights with other students were also frequently

described, and several had physical confrontations with principals

or other school administrators. Several were either suspected of

or caught stealing school equipment or money from teachers’ unattended purses. Others participated in after-hour acts of vandalism such as setting off firecrackers in school buildings or

destroying school property. In one instance, an adolescent girl

and her male friend broke into their principal’s office and

“trashed” it in an angry display of their dislike for him.

Another of the girls was part of a group that held up other

students and then used the money they had stolen to buy drugs.

About a third of the youngsters had long histories of learning

difficulties. In some instances these had been diagnosed early

and the youngsters had received special educational instruction.

In other cases, the problems were not diagnosed or responded to,

and the child was left alone to handle, however inadequately, the

process of learning. These learning problems usually included

particular difficulties in reading, writing, and spelling.

The other two-thirds of the group had good to excellent early

academic records. When they entered high school, however, these

youngsters commonly began to manifest such problems as difficulty

in completing assignments, paying attention, or remembering and

using what they read or heard in class. Several began to find it

extremely difficult to read aloud or speak in class and generally

stopped participating actively in the learning process.

In addition, a number of these adolescents had consistent patterns

of truancy, suspension, and, in a few cases, expulsion. Over the

three year course of the study, only two of the group remained in

the same high school in which they were originally enrolled. These

moves, resulting from either academic or disciplinary troubles,

and sometimes both, did not appear to bring about significant

change in their school adaptation, except in those several cases

where the transfer was made into an “alternative” educational

program characterized by less pressured, more individualized, or

22
“real-world,” orientations, For those who remained in traditional

educational environments, early school problems were usually

repeated wherever they went.

The youngsters’ schooltime use of marijuana should be viewed

within the context of their pervasive behavioral and academic

problems . Most of the group met their friends early in the

morning in order to get high before starting the day. Smoking

continued throughout the day, intensified during lunch hour, and

often resulted in the youngster’s not going back in the afternoon.

Those who cut afternoon classes would often meet friends near the

school grounds to continue their smoking during the late afternoon

hours.

For those who had at one time done well in school, the onset of

heavy marijuana use tended to coincide with a withdrawal from

scholastic and athletic competition. One young man with an

excellent school record and test scores that placed him in the

98th percentile among high school students in the nation, began

in the 9th grade to find competition intolerable, gave up all

attempts at academic success, and became a “pothead.” Another

youngster had been a relatively good student and an outstanding

athlete in several sports. Beginning in the 10th grade, however,

he found succeeding in school and in sports less pleasurable. He

stopped trying in class and quit in rapid succession the baseball,

football, and wrestling teams.

Given the degree of difficulty these adolescents had in functioning

in a regular high school environment, it is not surprising that

most had serious problems remaining in and graduating from high

school. Several were repeating grades they had failed with little

hope of ever graduating. Others simply dropped out prior to

graduation with no intention of returning. For many of these

youngsters, instead of being a way-station between childhood and

adulthood, high school seemed to one degree or another to represent

a dead end.

PEER RELATIONSHIPS

In addition to affecting their school adaptation, the marijuanaabusing adolescents’ difficulties at home and their pervasive

feelings about themselves as damaged, incompetent, or inadequate

carried over into their relationships with other youngsters. Most

of the adolescent marijuana abusers had friends of both sexes,

the majority of whom were other heavy marijuana smokers. They

tended to be uncomfortable when alone and would invariably “hang

out” with others in preference to spending time by themselves.

Almost all in the group sold marijuana to friends as a way of

paying for their own supply. For some, however, selling was a

lucrative business. One young man functioned as a wholesaler,

linking a main supplier and a small group of friends, who in turn

dealt to others. Several of the adolescents grew marijuana themselves, including one young man who was eventually arrested for

23
attempting to grow marijuana in a field alongside a country road.

The adolescent marijuana abusers smoked with their friends at

special "hang outs," while riding around in cars, and at parties.

Common leisure activities included throwing frisbees and listening

to music while high on marijuana. Traditional high school clubs

and organizations, including athletics, were usually disavowed.

Unable to find a satisfying place for themselves in the structured

world of the high school, most of these adolescents appeared to

find an alternative in their attachment to a loosely knit group

of other marijuana-abusing youngsters.

Many of them, however, fluctuated in the extent of their drug use

and in their attachment to drug-abusing peers, During periods of

greatest marijuana abuse they gravitated toward other drug abusers,

but at times when they curtailed their use of marijuana, nondrugabusing friends tended to become more important to them. For the

boys, these periods of curtailment sometimes were found to coincide

with renewed involvement in high school sports, while for several

of the girls, they followed a breakup with a drug-abusing boyfriend.

Consistent with research findings reported by others (Goode 1972;

Jessor and Jessor 1975) the marijuana-abusing participants in this

study tended to have sexual experiences at an early age, significantly earlier than their nondrug-abusing siblings. All of the

abusers, for example, had had sexual relations involving intercourse. Virtually all of them, however, exhibited significant

difficulties in establishing ongoing meaningful relationships.

Brief, intense attachments to friends of both sexes were commonly

seen. Particularly in the case of boy-girl relationships, the

youngsters’ attachments were stormy and characterized by fights,

breakups, reconciliations, and recriminations. For many of the

girls, their relationships exposed them to considerable risk,

including the risk of pregnancy. In spite of the frequency of

sexual encounters, regular use of contraceptives was extremely

rare, and several of the girls had had abortions. In addition,

an attraction to physically abusive young men was fairly common

among these girls, as was frequenting dangerous places. One

young suburban girl, for example, had a habit of hitchhiking in

strange places late at night. Once she and a girlfriend were

picked up, taken into the central city, and barely escaped being

forced into prostitution. This behavior reflected the themes

of self-destructiveness and fatalism which were earlier discussed

in relation to the adolescents’ feelings about themselves.

The young men also appeared to have difficulty forming close relationships which gave them positive feelings about themselves; for

many, their marijuana use appeared to be related to this fact.

Several spoke of increasing their use of marijuana in an attempt

to deal with anxieties surrounding emotional and sexual intimacy,

while for others the precipitating factor was breaking up with a

girlfriend on whom they had become dependent.

24
The willingness of many of the marijuana-abusing girls to expose

themselves to physical abuse and danger had a comparable pattern

among the boys in their behavior with their cars, motorbikes,

and motorcycles, around which a significant part of their leisure

time activities revolved. Driving without a license at excessive

speed and in a reckless manner, one 14-year-old lost control and

smashed up the family car. A second young man tore off his scrotum

in a reckless motorcycle accident and required extensive surgery

to repair the damage. Another young man was killed shortly after

he completed his interviews when his motorbike crashed into a

truck. A fourth youngster rode his motorcycle on a rough trail

in the woods while drunk or stoned, convinced that nothing could

happen to him despite numerous accidents.

Overall, then, these youngsters? while often seeming to be relaxed

and comfortable in casual relationships, did not evidence a

significant capacity to relate with peers in a way which was both

self-protective and genuinely caring and protective of others.

Rather, their interactions with their friends, like so much of

their behavior in school, reflected the same impulsive, destructive,

and self-destructive qualities which characterized their relationships with their families. How such behavior developed, how it

was related to the psychodynamics of the youngsters and their

families, and what role marijuana played in their attempts to

deal with their problems becomes more evident in the detailed

picture of several representative cases which are presented in

the next chapter.

REFERENCES

Goode, E. Drug use and sexual activity on a college campus. Am

J Psychiatry, 128: 1272-1276, 1972.

Jessor, S.L. and Jessor, R. Transition from virginity to nonvirginity among youth: A social-psychological study over time,

Dev Psychol, 11:475-484, 1975.

25

354-187 0 - 81 - 3
Chapter 4

Representative Cases

This chapter presents six of the representative cases of marijuanaabusing adolescents seen in this study. Although each of the six

cases is unique in its own way, as a group they demonstrate the

most significant behavioral and psychodynamic patterns which were

identified.*

Angela A

At 14, Angela was short, stocky, and fair; she had an attractive

pleasant face. Her speech, mannerisms, and dress were those of

a tomboy from a poor neighborhood. Although not a member of a

gang, she frequently wore a shiny, bright colored battle jacket

with a name across the back that suggested a gang uniform. She

had found a social world in a life of getting drugs, taking drugs,

and talking about them, explaining that she could not relate to

people who were not on drugs.

Angela's marijuana use had started when she was 11 years old.

by the time she was 13 she had also tried virtually every illicit

drug, including heroin. She was a particularly heavy user of

marijuana, smoking it on the way to school, during lunch hour,

after school, and until she went to bed. To finance her marijuana

use, she stole from her parents and others, dealt in drugs and

went around with a group of girls who intimidated and robbed

other youngsters. She sometimes obtained money by arranging

for more attractive girlfriends to sleep with older men and

sharing the profits and admitted to accepting money once for a

sexual involvement herself. Although she was articulate and

perceptive, she had been in trouble in school for poor work,

truancy, and being high in class.

Angela blamed her marijuana use on the constant friction and

fights in her family. Her father, who worked evenings and nights

as a bartender, frequently came home drunk in the early morning

and was often verbally and physically abusive to the rest of the

family. Her mother had no control over the children. Angela

said, "As long as life in the family is the way it is and they

don't change, why should I change?". She said her use of marijuana

made her feel less depressed about her life.

*All names and identifying features have been changed.

26
The A’s were an Italian family who lived in a black and Puerto

Rican neighborhood. Mrs. A blamed some of the family’s difficulties on the neighborhood, complaining that her husband had

promised to move when the children were older, but never did.

In addition to Angela, the A’s had a daughter, Lisa, who was one

year older than Angela and a son, Tony, who was four years

younger. The family had been closer and happier during the

first six years of Angela’s life. It was not until Tony’s birth

that Mr. A had begun to work as a bartender and to drink immoderately. Tony, at the age of 10, was withdrawing from the

disorganization and tension of the family into an asocial,

isolated life in which he was preoccupied with suicide. He

would not close the door when he went to the toilet out of fear

of bodily dissolution.

Lisa was a tall, blond, attractive young woman who seemed several

years older than her actual age of 15. Drugs had never been a

problem for her; her main concern was boys for whom she wished

to maintain a glamorous image. She had been caught several times

stealing clothes which she felt she needed to maintain such an

image. Although she came to the interviews several times with

Angela, and would talk freely in the waiting room, she said she

could not be interviewed because her boyfriend objected strenuously to it. Angela and her mother thought he was afraid Lisa

would reveal his involvement in her shoplifting and his sexual

history -- he had made several neighborhood girls pregnant.

When Lisa was 16, she too became pregnant with his child, but

shortly thereafter they began to live together and eventually

married.

Mr. A said when he met his wife everything was wonderful between

them; they were even more in love when their first two children

were little. He did not know what changed things, but wondered

if he had been too strict. He said he would frequently come

home to a messy house and would become angry that his wife could

not manage better.

Mr. A said he went to work as a bartender to earn more money,

but laughed at, without dismissing, the possibility that he used

the job to get away from his wife and family. He and Mrs. A

never went out alone because he did not like to leave the children

for fear of what they would do. He denied he had a drinking

problem although Angela, Lisa, and his wife insisted that he

frequently came home intoxicated and that it was at these times

that he was physically abusive.

Mr. A said he favored neither of his two daughters and would do

anything for either of them, but felt his wife had always favored

Angela and was jealous of Lisa. He recounted how Mrs. A would

became upset and start a quarrel if he told Lisa how pretty she

was. Mr. A described Angela as sometimes lovely and considerate

and at other times belligerent and arrogant.

27
Mr. A’s own parents had also quarreled most of the time. His

father worked long hours in a fish market and his mother felt

he had no time for the family. Mr. A had quit school at 16 to

work with his father; he lived with his father and an older

married sister after his mother died. He was still close to

his family but did not want them to learn of Angela’s difficulties at school or her use of drugs.

Mrs. A showed pride and affection in describing her husband in the

early years of their relationship. When she met Mr. A she was

involved with another man who was sadistic and unfaithful. She

had met Mr. A in the bar they all frequented and even before

she was involved with him, he warned her boyfriend to stop

beating her and later hit him when he continued to abuse her.

She admired her husband’s courage in scaring away a black man

who was interested in Lisa when she was only 13. She compared

her husband when angry to James Cagney.

Since he had become a bartender, Mrs. A. felt his anger had been

directed mainly toward her. When he was drunk he would call

her an ugly hag and would beat her and their daughters. Sex

between them stopped some years ago, and they began sleeping

in separate bedrooms.

Although Mrs. A had put her husband out of the house a few

years earlier because of his physical abusiveness, she was

totally unable to control the children when he was away and

began to drink heavily herself. During this period, Angela

began to bring her friends to her room at night, and they would

drink or smoke marijuana while Mrs. A would go to the neighborhood

bars. After a year, Mrs. A asked Mr. A to come home and he did.

Mrs. A agreed that her husband favored neither child, but felt

he gave Lisa more money because Lisa asked him for it. She felt

he would have given Angela what she asked for as well, but Angela

was not the sort who would ask. She said that while he still

gave their children material things, he had stopped being involved

with them when they were no longer little. She described Angela

as “good, passionate, warm, and bright.”

Mrs. A was worried about Angela’s school work, her drug use, and

her sexual behavior. She had read in Angela’s diary of her sexual

encounters with a married man in the back of his car. She saw

Lisa as cold and unaffectionate and complained that when Lisa

fought with her, her husband sided with Lisa.

Mrs. A liked to talk of her glamorous life working as a hostess

in supper clubs before her marriage. She yearned to be young

again, have her looks back, and have a lot of money. In her

neighborhood, she said, she “stands out like Marilyn Monroe.”

She spoke of wanting a man to take her to Argentina; she said

she would be the only bleached blond there.

28
Her own childhood and family life had been even more insecure

and precarious than her present life. Her mother, whom she

described as a “gregarious swinger,” left her, her father, and

sister when she was six years old. She lived with her father,

sister, and aunt for the next nine years. At 15, without explanation, she was put on a train and made to rejoin her mother who

had married a man 20 years her junior. Mrs. A was tearful in

recounting how she had been sent away to rejoin her mother and

in describing what she and Mr. A had lost. She showed the

same mixture of admiration and affection mixed with sadness

and disappointment in discussing both Angela and her husband.

She was like Angela in that if she felt uncared for, she let

everything go.

Angela expressed considerable conscious desire for change. She

talked of not wanting to end up as others she had known on her

block. Partly because of this attitude on her part, she aroused

a sympathetic protectiveness in the interviewer as well as in

most of her teachers. She did not want treatment, however, but

was willing to come in for a few visits periodically to discuss

what was going on in her life.

Angela said her father could be pleasant to her at times, but at

others he disparaged the way she looked or hit her for not having

done what he wanted. Although she became angry with her father

when he beat or insulted her, she blamed her mother more than

her father for the family’s difficulties. She had urged her

mother to get rid of him, but held her mother responsible for

the family’s difficulties after he left and finally persuaded

her to take him back. Once, when she saw her mother drinking

in the street during the period when her father was away, Angela

deliberately overdosed on drugs.

Angela saw herself as having a terrible temper and recalled how

she used to break windows in the house when she became angry.

She fought with her sister who resented her mother’s favoritism

toward Angela, although she blamed her mother for creating the

problem.

During the period in which the family was being seen, Mrs. A

was diagnosed as having an inoperable uterine cancer. Angela

found herself also blaming her mother for her illness, but

thought at times that her death would be a relief because it

would stop the fights between her sister and herself.

As her mother became sicker, Angela had to take care of her and

the house. Her father was obliged to be nice to her mother, so

he had begun to yell more at Angela. She thought a great deal

about her mother’s death and about the responsibility for her

brother that would fall on her shoulders. Around this same time,

her father had a mild heart attack. Angela told him that she

blamed herself, feeling that worries she had caused him were

responsible for his illness.

29
She began doing somewhat better in school partly because of help

and support given her by several teachers. She felt pride and

pleasure at her parents’ satisfaction over this and hoped her

mother would be well enough to attend her junior high school

graduation. She liked to come for interviews when she had something favorable to report; otherwise, she preferred not to. If

things were bad, she said she was afraid she would lie and cover

up which she did a lot and considered one of her worst faults.

During this period she spent many of her weekends at the home of

a former teacher at her school, a woman who with her husband had

befriended her. They spent a considerable amount of time with

her and often took her out to play tennis or to the movies.

Angela liked them and had fantasies of living with them permanently, but admitted she could not enjoy the things she did

with them because around them she was not able to get high.

Angela became involved sexually with a new boyfriend, a young

Hispanic named Charles. She blamed the fact that she often felt

no sexual desire on the fact that she had started her sexual

life too young. Several dreams about her relationship with Charles

suggested a linkage between her lack of sexual desire and her

relationship with her parents.

She dreamed that Charles was in her room with no clothes on. The

telephone rang in the next room and he jumped to answer it. She

yelled not to, but he did not listen. Her father was in the

other room. Charles came back with her father running after

him. She cringed in the bed.

Angela said that they slept together in her room, but hid it from

her parents. He always left before her father came back from

work, but she was nervous about being caught. She also took no

precautions to prevent pregnancy and had some anxiety over this.

Although she saw her father as frightening, Angela, like her

mother, had positive feelings toward him. She arranged a

surprise party for his birthday in a rented hall, and its success

meant a great deal to her. Her sexual relationship in her home

and her dreams of discovery by her father may suggest both oedipal

feelings and her defense against them.

Discussion of the above dream seemed to have been the stimulus

For another of Angela’s dreams. There was snow and ice on the

ground. Her mother was across the street shopping. She was

trying to get to her mother when a young man with a Spanish

accent stopped her and frightened her, saying she had to have

sex with him. She yelled “rape,” two men came, and the Spanish

fellow ran away. Angela kept running, looking for her mother.

The threat of actual punishment from her father was less significant in its impact than her fear of losing her mother, represented in the dream by her mother’s being separated from her by

30
a street covered with snow and ice. Some months later, after

her mother’s death, Angela stopped having sex with Charles completely, saying that her mother was with her all the time, and

that previously she could hide it from her but now she saw

everything. As important as the actual content of Angela’s

dreams is the degree of emotional involvement and tension with

her parents that they reflect -- an involvement that supports the

family contention of an original greater closeness.

During the same period that she had the above dream she was asked

to make up a fairy tale as a school assignment. She was pleased

to be asked to read and discuss it during her interviews. The

story, just as she wrote it, went as follows:

THE PRINCESS’S GOOD LUCK

Once upon a time, a princess by the name of Angela lived

far in the woods with her father, King Joe, and her mean

brother, Prince Peter. Her mother and father had gotten

divorced when she was very little. She used to go and

pick blueberries every day, and take long walks in the

woods. Her father would get mad if she didn’t pick a

certain amount of blueberries everyday because she

would make pies and all kinds of deserts (sic) and he

would sell them. He had a pie-making industry called

Joe Daughter, Inc. He would beat her and sent her

to bed with no dinner. Her brother, Prince Pete, would

also treat her very mean. He killed her pet dog and

burned all her Seventeen magazines. He wouldn’t allow

her to see any boys. She was also very beautiful but

she was not allowed to look at herself in the mirror.

Everyday her father and brother would tell her how

ugly she was. One day her brother decided to kill

her. So he poisoned all the blueberry bushes. While

picking blueberries she got stuck by a thorn and soon

died. When she again opened her eyes she was in a

terrible forest, There were dead bushes and people

standing behind trees laughing at her. Then came this

twinkle. It was a good fairy. “In order to get back

from where you came from,” the good fairy said, “someone

has to have a good thought about you.” Then she disappeared.

Her brother, wanting to make sure she’s dead, goes to

stab her with a sword but before he could, this toad,

hanging out by his favorite pond yelled, “No, you can’t

stab her, she’s so beautiful.” All of a sudden the

Princess comes back to life, kills her brother with

the sword, poisons her father’s blueberry pie, and she

and the toad live happily ever after.

Although Angela had often wished to be rid of her mother, and

blamed her for her inability to cope with her father, for the

friction between her sister and herself, and for the disintegration of the family, she suggested in her fairy tale some

31
anticipation that the friction might increase when her mother

died.

The toad is probably a self-representation. Interestingly, it

does not turn into a prince as is usual in such tales. Angela’s

sense of ugliness appeared to derive from the family situation

in general and her father’s treatment of her in particular. She

was bound to have some sensitivity about his disparagement of her

appearance and his complimentary remarks concerning her sister’s

attractiveness. She had no female rivals in the tale since her

mother and sister were not in the story. Her sister who was

often mean to her was probably represented as Prince Pete. This

may have made it easier to deal with the sister whose attractiveness was hard to compete with and may have contributed to

Angela’s tomboy attitude. In the fairy tale, this sibling

was stopping her from going out with boys. After taking effective

action against the father and brother she again became a princess,

came to terms with the toad in her self, and lived more happily

with herself. Angela’s sense that there was something attractive

or worthwhile about herself that was being prevented from

expressing itself suggested some core of intact self-esteem

that was consistent with her actual behavior. Her more direct

actions against the brother in the dream perhaps acknowledged a

displacement of feelings toward the father which were inhibited

by her fear of him.

When Angela was seen after her mother died, she said she had at

first been angry with her for leaving her the responsibility of

caring for the home. In particular she felt responsible for her

young brother to whom she was serving as a surrogate mother,

preparing his meals and seeing that he did his school work. In

addition she had a weekend job in a supermarket. Her father was

at first critical of her housekeeping and abusive toward her,

but when she told him she was doing her best and would leave

if he did not stop, he stopped.

Although Angela attributed her loss of sexual interest partly

to her mother’s death, her mother’s absence had no such effect

on her use of drugs. One of the men she worked with dealt in

marijuana; he would come over most nights of the week and

they-would smoke steadily for several hours together. On

weekends after finishing up at the supermarket she drank

heavily with a group from work, all of whom were older than

she. She would often consume a quart of whiskey during a

single night.

Angela managed to continue in school, to more or less care for

the house and her brother, and to hold her job. She saw

marijuana as lightening her mood and contributing to the funny,

witty way she tried at times to use in dealing with the pressures

of her life. She felt she had a funny word for everyone when

she was high and was admired for her sense of humor. She

attempted to be entertaining in her interviews as well, but

32
admitted eventually that she feared the interviewer and other

people would not like her if she were not this way. Marijuana

helped her achieve some detachment from the anger and resentment

her life aroused. Her enormous weekend consumption of alcohol

after her mother died appeared to be a further attempt to escape

the increased tension and responsibility of her life.

She was in mourning not so much for her mother as for the life

with her parents she had lost years before. Her initial remark

that if her family did not change, she would not, suggested that

if they did not care for her enough to make the family work, she

could not care enough about herself to give up marijuana. Now

that it was clear that the family would not change in a way that

benefited her, she resisted the possibility of change on her

part. When her teacher befriended her and offered her the possibility of a different life, Angela still thought it was better

to get high. Marijuana has been her buffer against change as

well as disappointment in relations with people. In her fairy

tale, it was not another person with whom she lived happily

ever after, but a self-image, the toad.

Clara D

Clara D had pleasant features but was thin, pale, nervous in

manner, and almost sickly in appearance. She played with her

cigarette in a manner that had burned and ruined many of her

good clothes and was also suggestive of the self-destructive

quality of her behavior. When first seen Clara was 15 years

old, but she had been smoking marijuana since she was 11.

During the past year she had become a heavy user, smoking

before school, during lunch, and throughout the day. She sold

pot when she needed money, and at times the sales had netted

her considerable profit.

Clara was referred by a physician who saw her after she had taken

9 or 10 sleeping pills following a fight with her parents over

her boyfriend. Her drug involvement had been influenced by

this young man whose behavior revolved around drinking wine

and smoking pot. Her parents did not know of her marijuana

abuse or that her boyfriend was also a drug abuser. They

threatened to stop her from seeing him because they were upset

that she was not doing her schoolwork and was not coming home

right after school. They did not tell Clara, but they were

also afraid she would become sexually involved with him. They

did not know that she already was.

Clara had had longstanding difficulties at school. According

to her mother, she was restless, talked in class, and in the

first two grades “stole everything in sight.” Although the

stealing stopped, problems with her school work and classroom

behavior continued to the point where she had been required

to leave several different schools.

33
Clara was seen by her family as a devil. Her 17-year-old sister,

Vanessa, was considered an angel, and both girls seemed to try

to act out their roles. Clara was described by her parents as

defiant, disobedient, and “fresh.” Her father was particularly

upset by her lying and her mother by her poor schoolwork.

Vanessa was seen by the family as more intelligent, more

attractive, more popular, and better adjusted. Whatever was

confident and secure in the parent’s relationship was focused

on Vanessa, while Clara was the focus of all their anxiety and

discontent.

The D’s were an upper-middle-class family living in a fashionable urban neighborhood with both their children in private

schools. Mr. D had worked as an executive for a variety of firms,

but had had moderately long periods of unemployment between

positions. Mrs. D had worked continually as a librarian since

her children were little. Although he was Protestant and she

was Catholic, they had both been raised with a puritanical

strictness and that attitude was reflected in the way in

which they treated their daughters.

The D’s were firm about the hours their daughters kept and about

their daughters’ friends. They required the girls to come home

and stay home after school, unless they had received specific

approval from them to do otherwise. Mrs. D was constantly

worried that her daughters would be mugged, raped, or murdered,

and a tense overprotectiveness characterized her relations with

them. Vanessa reassured her mother, calling her, for example,

if she wanted to stay out beyond an agreed-upon hour. She was

given more freedom and did not feel imprisoned as Clara often

did.

Mrs. D was attractive, vivacious, and tense. She felt her husband

only married her because she was pregnant and she would not have

an abortion. She believed he stayed with her only because of

the children and was more involved with the family now because

of Clara’s problems.

She considered Mr. D to be a failure as a provider, as a father,

and as a husband. She often compared Clara to her husband,

saying they were both unaffectionate, irresponsible, unappreciative, and uncommunicative. She saw herself as unable to

manage without her husband, but said she might have been better

off if he had left in the past as he had threatened. She had

virtually stopped a sexual life with him, saying he used her

only to satisfy his needs and that she was starved for affection.

She did not see his constancy, fidelity, or sexual interest as

signs of his affection.

Mrs. D had lived with a lifelong insecurity concerning the men

in her life. Her father, a relatively wealthy American, met and

married her mother, a French woman, while he was on a visit to

France. He left the family when Mrs. D was three years old,

34
returning to America to settle his business affairs. The family

did not join him in this country until Mrs. D was nine. Since

he continued an affair he was having, Mrs. D felt that her mother

would have returned to France if the war had not made it impossible

Her mother essentially raised Mrs. D and her sister by herself,

as strict Catholics. They were not allowed to date until they

were in college.

Mr. D, who was seen by his family as unaffectionate and uninvolved, came himself from a family where there had been no

affection between his parents whom he described as puritanical

Baptists. His father worried and irritated his mother because

he was away a great deal of the time in connection with his work

and did not let her know where he was. The mother managed without

the father, and Mr. D believed she did not expect her husband

to be involved with the children or with family problems. Mr.

D saw both his father and his brother, who rebelled against the

puritanical atmosphere of the home, as more successful than

himself; and he saw his mother as a better manager than his wife.

When Mrs. D asked for reassurance or expressed doubts about his

feelings for her, Mr. D confirmed her fears by telling her he

was not particularly in love with her or excited by their being

together. On the other hand he had never been more excited by

any other woman before or since his marriage. He was sexually

attracted to his wife and had been faithful to her. He was

also not affectionate with his daughters whom he said he did

love. He seemed to care for his wife as much as he was capable

of caring for a woman.

Clara and Vanessa were close enough in age to share some of the

same friends, although the drug abusers among their friends

became more important to Clara than to Vanessa. Clara fluctuated

in the intensity of her marijuana abuse, and during the periods

of her greatest abuse she gravitated more towards other drug

abusers. Vanessa had experimented with drugs from time to

time but had rejected the image of the drug user.

Clara formed intense attachments with her friends, but these

relationships were stormy and short-lived. Vanessa had had

more stable relationships with peers of both sexes.

Clara was more active sexually than Vanessa, although she showed

a good deal of shame and guilt about her sexual behavior. She

had also been involved in relationships with young men who abused

her. When confronted with young men who seemed genuinely to care

for her she became acutely uncomfortable. She clung to her most

recent boyfriend in a dependent way, although he appeared to have

lost interest in her and mistreated her. In her sexual involvement with him and with other boys she took no precautions to

prevent pregnancy.

Clara was depressed, frequently thought about death, and believed

35
she did not have long to live. She had made cuts in her face

after a fight with her mother and related her occasional use

of amphetamines and tranquilizers to her desire to do harm to

herself.

Clara complained that her parents did not give her enough freedom

and did not trust her as they did her sister, but she behaved in

ways that caused them to restrict her further and trust her even

less. She was conscious of trying to provoke and infuriate her

mother.

Clara dreamed on two occasions that she was with friends going

inside a haunted house. The devil was inside the house and there

was some danger the devil would get inside her. Her friends disappeared, and she was left alone outside the house, frightened

and crying.

She had often used the word "devil" to describe herself, adding

that that was how her parents saw her. She related this dream

to a television movie about a girl who was possessed and could

levitate tables. She had not been allowed to see 'The Exorcist,"

a type of film that terrified and fascinated her. The dream

suggested both fear of the devil inside her taking over her

personality and her sense that this aspect of her behavior isolated her from other people. Not surprisingly, Clara had retained

her childhood fear of the dark. If alone in the dark, she feared

a man would kill her or a monster would take her to another world.

Vanessa repeated twice during her first interview that she was

no angel, but it was clear she felt she was expected to be one.

Vanessa had had boyfriends but had never had sexual relations.

She felt she must not misbehave or let her mother know any of

her troubles because her mother already had so many problems

with Clara. She smoked cigarettes outside the house but hid

this from her parents.

Vanessa had tried to tell them that she was now, for the first

time, doing poorly in school, but they would not hear her.

This made her extremely anxious because of her awareness of

how important her school performance was to her parents and

particularly to her mother. In talking of this, she recounted

an instance where Mrs. D had encouraged Vanessa to lie and say

she had received a 98 on a regents exam instead of the 94 she

had actually received because another girl in their apartment

building had received a 97. She blamed her recent poor marks

on the tensions in the house, the same reason given by Clara

for her need to smoke marijuana.

Vanessa felt affection toward her parents, although she wished

her mother were less emotional and her father were more involved.

Vanessa recognized that she was trusted more and restricted less

than Clara, but often felt Clara got more attention for her misbehavior than she did for her good behavior. She cited as evidence

36
the fact that her parents sent Clara to an exclusive private

school in the hope she would adjust there (she did not), while

saying that they could not afford to send Vanessa to a comparable

private school that she wanted very much to attend. Vanessa was

protective of Clara, but her resentment came out in dreams in

which Clara fell out a window or was hit by a car. Like Clara,

she had frequent dreams of monsters coming after her.

How different a response the parents had to misbehavior of their

two daughters was revealed when Vanessa forged her mother's signature to a bad report card. When her parents discovered this,

her mother was not upset and her father's reaction was that it

was a pretty "gutsy" thing to do. He admitted that he would

have been infuriated with Clara in the same situation, particularly since lying was the single thing that bothered him most.

It was virtually impossible to engage the parents in any problem

of Vanessa's or even in the strain she felt at having to have

no problems, since they insisted on seeing her as without

difficulties.

The difference in parental attitudes toward the two girls started

virtually at birth. Vanessa was a wonderful, beautiful baby;

Mrs. D was &lighted to be married and have a child. She and

her husband confirmed they were happy during this period. When

Clara was born, Mr. D was often away, traveling in his job or

entertaining clients, and Mrs. D would wait up for him to return

or to call. She said Clara was a poor sleeper but this may

reflect some resonance with her own tension during this period.

A story the family frequently told that occurred when Clara was

one year old was felt by Clara to reflect where she stood with

them. The family was taking a trip and went off in a cab when

they remembered that they had left Clara behind. That the

incident occurred was remarkable enough, but that the parents

persisted in retelling it as a funny story showed an even more

remarkable insensitivity to Clara's feelings.

Clara's current misbehavior made it impossible for her parents

to forget her. Vanessa was given more freedom, but neither of

the girls was responded to or accepted in terms of her own needs,

personality, and possibilities.

Although the D's brought the insecurity of their own backgrounds

to their marriage, it was the birth of their children that opened

up their individual problems and created difficulties between

them. During Clara's adolescence, Mr. and Mrs. D's involvement

with her problems might seem to have brought them closer together,

but such closeness was largely illusory and relatively shortlived. The need to deal together with the problems created at

home or in school by Clara's difficulties suppressed only for a

relatively short time the conflicts that were pulling the parents

apart.

37
The split between the good and the bad child was clearly evident

in the D family since it involved both parents and was consistently

maintained from a period early in the lives of both children.

Clara and Vanessa seemed to reflect their parents' picture of

them in their current behavior.

The D's attempt to restrict Clara's freedom to a degree not

appropriate to her age was an expression of their mistrust of

her, which to some degree Clara's provocativeness had surely

earned. Yet the parents' restrictions and punishments were

also carried out in a provocative way that invited Clara's

rebellion.

Clara was unrelenting in her anger toward her parents, expressed

affectionate feelings toward them rarely, and was bitterly unforgiving of their deficiencies. Vanessa had feelings of admiration

and affection toward both of her parents, accommodated to the

difficult aspects of their personalities, and made a successful

adjustment at home. Vanessa managed to adjust to the family's

rules while Clara fought them in ways that frustrated everyone.

Clara's severe problems at school went back to her early years,

but her stealing and behavioral problems at school, which began

in the first grade, indicated that emotional difficulties were

largely responsible. She was perceptive and articulate, but her

lack of general information (her psychological tests revealed

that she did not know how many weeks are in a year, located

Brazil in Europe, and gave the population of the U.S. as three

billion) affected her IQ score (92) and suggested that the degree

to which she blocked out learning experiences was more critical

in her school difficulties than any lack of intelligence.

Vanessa was as markedly different from Clara in school as she

was at home. She had good grades all through school and was

liked by her teachers and classmates. Although she had little

interest in her work, she tried to do well to please her parents

and for the better jobs and greater income an education would

bring. Vanessa's marked tension over the need to do well at

school seemed to derive from a sense that her acceptance at

home was conditional on her good behavior and good performance.

A similar tension pervaded her interviews, where she was far more

tense and less emotionally free than Clara. As she opened up

the resentment that was underneath her "good girl" adaptation,

she became uncomfortable and reluctant to continue.

Both Clara and Vanessa were aware of the blind spots in their

parents' perception of them. Clara was disdainful of Vanessa's

need to hide her misbehavior from their parents' awareness. And

Vanessa felt both uncomfortable with her parents' open favoritism

and tense at feeling compelled to try to behave in accord with

her parents' picture of her,

38
Although Clara spoke at first of her drug use in general and

marijuana in particular as a conflict-free source of pleasure,

in time she expressed more ambivalence about it. She related

her use of marijuana to her desire to relax from the tension

and anger of her difficulties at home. Eventually she also

expressed the feeling that while others probably took drugs

for pleasure she took them with something of a self-destructive

attitude.

vanessa was witness to the unfortunate effects of Clara’s marijuana

abuse on her relationship with their parents and on Clara’s life

in general. Clara was a role model that she was determined not

to follow.

If marijuana made more tolerable the anger and frustration Clara

felt in her relations with her family, it did so by encouraging

passivity and illusion instead of any effective attempt to improve

the situation. Clara used marijuana to reinforce a kind of

masochistic passivity. It helped her to feel detached from

her anxiety over whether she could change her situation and

permitted her to believe she did not care what happened to

her or whether she got hurt.

Tim H

Tim H was a slightly built youngster of 17 with attractive facial

features, thick, wavy hair, and a casual but neat appearance.

Since the age of 14 Tim had been a heavy drug user and had had

experience with LSD, amphetamines, barbiturates, cocaine, alcohol,

and tranquilizers. Marijuana, however, had consistently been

his drug of choice. His pattern of heavy daily smoking was

occasionally punctuated with “binges” in which he smoked to the

point where he felt totally “burned out.”

The past several years had been marked by almost constant conflict

between Tim and his parents, centering on his refusal to perform

routine household chores, to keep agreed-upon curfews, or to

obtain permission for frequent overnight trips, especially to

out-of-town rock concerts.

Beginning in 9th grade, Tim’s previously excellent performance

in school took an abrupt change. He began coming unprepared to

class, then started cutting particular classes, and soon began

skipping whole days. Eventually this behavior resulted in his

failing and having to repeat the 12th grade. He was referred

to the study by his high school principal who correctly suspected

that Tim’s school troubles were related to marijuana abuse.

Tim’s only sibling, 19-year-old Dennis, provided a stark contrast

to Tim, both physically and behaviorally. A six-foot tall,

stocky, and conservatively dressed young man, Dennis when first

seen was finishing a year of preparatory work after high school

39
prior to entering a military academy. Although he and his parents

said he was less intelligent than Tim, Dennis was ambitious,

demanding, and usually successful in getting what he wanted.

Within the family he had assumed a position of control, dominating conversations and taking over the family sailboat to

become an accomplished racing competitor. Dennis’ attitude

toward Tim was generally protective and reflected concern over

Tim’s problems, which he attributed to a lack of motivation and

drive and to Tim’s unwillingness to take advantage of his capacities and abilities.

Mr. and Mrs. H lived in and were part of a fashionable uppermiddle class, predominantly white Protestant, suburban community.

Both worked hard, Mr. H as a stockbroker and Mrs. H as a nurse,

and both expected hard work and achievement from their children.

They were concerned with being seen by their neighbors as a

respectable family. For several years before Tim discovered

marijuana, however, Mr. H had had a serious drinking problem

which was accompanied by frequent, openly displayed physical

abuse of his wife. Mr. H described his relationship with Mrs.

H as not having worked even before he had started drinking,

and stated that he had remained in the marriage out of convenience and because he associated divorce with failure.

Almost from the beginning of their relationship, he began having

extramarital affairs, the latest one lasting for the past five

years. Mr. H attributed this to sexual incompatibility with

his wife which he felt resulted from his more extensive premarital sexual experience. Although describing Mrs. H as an

intelligent and well-educated young woman at the time they met,

he acknowledged that he had never been truly in love with her

but thought they shared enough common intellectual interests

and cultural values to justify the marriage. His early perception

of their sexual incompatibility was further exacerbated by Mrs.

H’s difficulty in conceiving children and her two cesarean

deliveries. Mr. H was repulsed by the physical disfigurement

resulting from these operations and withdrew even further.

Subsequently, Mr. H had been able to have sex with his wife

only when he was intoxicated.

Mr. H regarded himself as isolated from his sons as a result of

his wife’s having “taken over” during his frequent businessrelated absences from home. At the same time he admitted he

had allowed the isolation to develop out of his own desire to

be relieved of the burden of child care;

In Mr. H’s eyes, Dennis was an aggressive, take-charge person

who used his considerable temper to get what he wanted and gain

control over the family. The clash between them had resulted

for several years in frequent “knock down and drag out” fist

fights, stemming primarily from Dennis’ attempt to defend his

mother and Tim from his father’s abusiveness. In contrast to

his feelings toward Dennis, Mr. H identified with what he perceived

40
in Tim as a drive toward perfection and a terror at the idea of

failure.

He described his own father as a successful but domineering and

frightened man who placed his children under constant pressure

to excel. The stories he recounted of Tim as a young child

studying to learn the alphabet and becoming terribly upset at

each mistake, or of Tim becoming “jammed up” on his homework

in elementary school, spending so much time trying to make a

perfect cover for a report that he had no time left for writing

the report, appeared to contain a familiar pain for Mr. H. He

spoke of his own shyness, insecurity, and unhappiness which he

tried to hide from others through his excessive drinking. He

described his life as meaningless and hopeless, and for many

years he had thoughts of suicide.

While instinctively understanding the roots of much of Tim’s

behavior, Mr. H did not make the connection with marijuana abuse.

His proposed solution to Tim’s problems was to get him accepted

into an excellent college by submitting Dennis’ superior high

school records and simply having Tim pretend to be Dennis while

at school. Mr. H indicated little awareness of how such a plan

would contribute to the way Tim had suffered since childhood

from being overshadowed and dominated by Dennis, which Mr. H

acknowledged and described in some detail.

Mrs. H, although similarly avoiding recognition of Tim’s heavy

marijuana use, was generally less compassionate toward him. The

oldest child of Dutch immigrant parents? Mrs. H, from an early

age, had been expected to perform a variety of tasks for her

parents who lacked English literacy, and this seemed to have

formed the basis for her high expectations of her own children.

Although Mrs. H had not felt particularly close to her parents,

she attributed her success in pursuing her education to their

strong emphasis on academic achievement, and this too was mirrored

in her relationship with her sons.

She described her relationship with Mr. H as having been emotionally distant from the beginning and felt this had been the cause

of their longstanding sexual difficulties. She had wanted to

seek help for their sexual problems, but her sense of her own

inexperience and her fear of her husband’s “put downs” prevented

her from taking any action.

During her first difficult pregnancy and Dennis’ birth, Mr. H’s

indifference and lack of support, she believed, set the tone for

the rest of their relationship. Despite two earlier unsuccessful

attempts to leave her husband, Mrs. H insisted she was now merely

waiting for her sons to be out of the house before she filed for

divorce. Although she had previously been protective of Mr. H

and his drinking problem, she now spoke in a strikingly cold and

dispassionate way of waiting for him to so incapacitate himself

through drinking that she could “dump him” at a nursing home to

41

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die by himself. Unable to confront the pain, anguish, and disappointment she felt in her marriage, Mrs. H resorted to “blotting

out” the problems and emotionally withdrawing from her husband.

Although a second child was unplanned, Mrs. H regarded with some

pride the fact that she had had both Dennis and Tim during a

single two-year maternity leave. Following Tim’s birth, she

immediately returned to her job as a nurse, leaving the boys

in the care of two young foreign women. Mr. H. believed

that his wife felt considerable guilt over not remaining at home

during Tim’s infancy, in light of her strong sense of duty and

her need to abide by the rules of her Dutch upbringing.

Mrs. H was particularly proud of both boys when they were young

because of their good looks, which were frequently complimented.

Her recollections of them as they grew older, however, and of

Tim in particular, were far less positive. She likened Tim to

a “baby orangutan,” attributing his clinginess to his brief

hospital stay for a hernia repair at the age of 13 months.

Following this, she described him as having extreme problems

with separation, especially at bedtime. She also recalled that

Tim was quite jealous of any attention she paid to Dennis and

that he always tried to push his older brother out of the limelight. In addition, Mrs. H indicated that Tim was a poor eater

throughout his childhood, and had to be cajoled and begged to

eat anything. Her continued preoccupation with his eating habits

was reflected again and again in her remarks.

Throughout the interviews, Mrs. H often presented inconsistent

or contradictory pictures of Tim’s early childhood, describing

him alternatively as a good and a poor sleeper, and as both a

sociable and an isolated, withdrawn child. When questioned

about these contradictions she explained that she had trouble

remembering dates and that perhaps her descriptions belonged

to different periods of Tim’s childhood. Despite her negative

remarks about him she described Tim as a “charming, winsome”

child and insisted that she regarded him as the “favorite” of

her two sons.

Tim’s recent academic problems were a source of considerable

anguish to Mrs. H. She saw these as stemming from his deliberate

unwillingness to perform up to his abilities. As was the case

with her reaction to her husband, Mrs. H responded to her own

hurt and disappointment at Tim’s failure to meet her expectations

by emotionally withdrawing and convincing herself she had done

all she could to help.

Tim was in considerable turmoil about his family relationships,

seeing himself as cut off from each of his parents and from his

brother. Although he acknowledged the protective role which

his brother Dennis had adopted towards him, Tim saw his relationship with Dennis largely in terms of competition and struggle.

He was acutely conflicted in his feelings toward Dennis, worrying

42
both about being unable to compete successfully with him and

about crushing his brother’s spirit by beating him in some form

of competition.

Because of the proximity of their ages, Tim and Dennis had spent

most of their early years playing together as close friends.

Once Tim was old enough to venture away from home, however, he

quickly made friends with other children, leaving Dennis feeling

left out and deserted. Dennis resented Tim’s greater popularity

among the neighborhood youngsters and recalled painful memories

of being ridiculed about being fat. He reacted by frequently

beating up Tim in an attempt to get from him the friendship

and loyalty he failed to find with other children.

Within the family, Dennis seized every opportunity to take

responsibility and act in a position of authority because o f

the respect and trust this earned with his parents. At school

Dennis successfully drew on his family experience to create

roles for himself which allowed him to exercise responsibility

over other students, in particular by serving throughout high

school as stage manager for a drama club with over 100 members.

Playing a “straight” role was also a key aspect of Dennis’

adaptation, and since this included being vigilant and in

control, he would not experiment with alcohol or drugs.

Through his indulgence in drugs and his adoption of an antiachievement attitude, Tim was able to create an identity and a lifestyle

that was the opposite of his brother’s, and he thus avoided even

a hint of competition or comparison. As Tim described it, “My

brother took the straight road and I took the high road.” Tim’s

heavy marijuana use also helped him escape from the painful and

angry feelings he associated with each of his parents, which

were linked in particular to having witnessed several of his

father’s alcohol-inspired assaults on his mother. As a youngster

Tim recalled having idealized his father. Now he loathed him

and saw him as a “disgusting drunk.” He also had contempt for

his mother whom he saw as weak, passive, and pitiful for having

tolerated his father’s abuse.

Tim’s anger at his parents, and particularly his mother, was

bolstered by what he felt were their inflexible performance

expectations and his inability to meet them. He remembered that

even as a little child he was always expected to be perfectly

well-behaved when his parents had company. Later, as an adolescent,

when he became interested in music and showed considerable talent

in playing the trombone, his parents began pushing him first to

join the school band and then to compete for a position on the

county high school marching band. Although he succeeded in

gaining a position, he dropped out after a short time, feeling

that the once pleasurable activity of playing an instrument had

been robbed of all enjoyment because of the pressure from his

parents and the constant need to meet their expectations. It

was at about this time that Tim began smoking marijuana regularly

and heavily.

43
Tim’s view of himself as unable to meet his parents’ expectations

was linked to his sense of his mother as not buying or preparing

enough food for him throughout his childhood and not feeding him

properly up to the present time. The lack of nuturance he

perceived in his relationship with his mother and the connection

between this and his marijuana use were reflected in a dream

Tim reported in one of his interviews. It occurred shortly after

attending a concert given by the rock band Pink Floyd, in which

the group had used some large puppets as part of their performance.

In the dream, one of the puppets called “Mother Floyd” was coming

after him and he was trying to hide from her. They ended up

having a conversation in which she suggested that he was angry

because someone else had gotten newspaper publicity instead of

him. She then made him a cup of tea, which Tim suspected she

had drugged. The tea was lukewarm and looked disgusting. On

the bottom of the cup Tim saw marijuana seeds which confirmed

his suspicions that “Mother Floyd” had drugged the tea.

In discussing the dream Tim immediately associated “Mother Floyd”

to his mother and the disgusting tea to the food his mother

cooked which he described as inedible and claimed she “just sort

of slops down even though she knows I’m not going to eat it.”

That his mother might be serving him poisoned tea Tim likened

to the way “she starts off hassling me right in the beginning

of the morning,” thus “poisoning” his day, as he had frequently

heard his father describe his wife’s affect on those around her.

The association of marijuana with poison was also suggested by

Tim’s connection of the word “tea” as slang for marijuana, and

his sense of how he was poisoning himself through his frequent

binges and burnouts which rendered him unable to think or function.

Tim admitted that although it often seemed that it was his mother

who was poisoning him, he realized he was actually poisoning

himself. As in the dream where the tea-drinking occured in the

context of anger over newspaper publicity given to another person,

he recognized that his feelings toward his mother were partially

rooted in his jealousy of the greater attention and recognition

she gave to Dennis.

Despite the considerable differences in their behavior, both

Tim and Dennis were quite similar in the insecurity, selfconsciousness, and discomfort each felt in interpersonal relationships and particularly in relationships with girls. Dennis

spoke quite freely of his exaggerated inhibitions about making

sexual overtures toward the girls he dated and his concern that

this might lead them to question his masculinity. On one occasion he became so upset over his suspicion that two girls were

talking about him behind his back that he assaulted one of them

and almost broke her arm. In a later, more serious relationship,

Dennis talked of worrying constantly that his girlfriend was

being unfaithful to him and had recurrent dreams of attacking

another young man for making sexual advances to her.

Tim was also extremely troubled in his relationships with his

44
friends, seeing himself as inadequate and physically “deformed.”

His preoccupation with and devaluation of his physical characteristics, including his small size, a fully corrected childhood

lisp, and his hernia surgery as an infant, reflected a sense

of himself as damaged and debased. He also indicated considerable confusion and fragmentation in his sexual identity. In

his early teens he had one homosexual experience involving mutual

fellatio. Although he had not repeated it, his enjoyment of

the experience and his recurrent homosexual fantasies troubled

him deeply.

During the period in which he was interviewed, Tim became briefly

involved in two sexual relationships with young women. In both

he experienced intense anxiety about his ability to perform at

what he imagined to be acceptable standards, which resulted in

either impotence or premature ejaculation.

The sharp behavioral contrast between these two siblings resulted

from their differing experiences in, and different adaptations to,

an unhappy family. Probably as a result of the greater maternal

care and attention he received during infancy, Dennis was able

to deal with his subsequent doubts and fears by taking charge

and being in command. Finding a place for himself in the family

and in school where he could gain respect through exercising

control and responsibility allowed him to cope relatively well

with his underlying feelings of insecurity and his fears concerning other people’s caring and loyalty.

Tim, on the other hand, was badly damaged by the lack of nurturance

he experienced in the family. His preoccupation with his mother’s

poor cooking, and her concern with his poor eating, were concrete,

ongoing reflections of the difficulties between them. His "Mother

Floyd” dream was a symbolic reflection of his perception of his

mother as having forced him to poison himself with marijuana as

a substitute for emotional nourishment.

The sense of inadequacy he developed from his early experiences

left him ill-prepared to compete with his older brother, let

alone to meet his mother’s and father’s expectations of him.

Instead, he identified with his father’s conflicts and anxieties

around achievement and retreated into a private “fogged out”

world.

Mrs. H’s confused picture of Tim’s early life, her need to insist

he was her favorite despite the lack of evidence to support this,

suggested how troubled she was by, and how much she wanted to deny,

what actually happened.

Both Mr. and Mrs. H insisted that Tim was smarter than Dennis

and that Tim received less from them in the way of attention and

involvement only because, in contrast to Dennis, he asked for

little. Persuading themselves that Tim had greater intellectual

endowment than Dennis (the psychological tests confirmed that

45
they were wrong in this assessment) permitted them to feel justified in their expectations of him and to blame him for failing

to live up to them. In the same vein, seeing him as having

asked for little permitted them to avoid having to see that

his bitterness and discouragement at having received so little

from them had led him to stop asking for anything.

Dave M

Dave M was only 17 but for the past two years much or most of

his life had revolved around buying, selling, growing, and

smoking marijuana. A tall, handsome young man with a pallid

complexion and curly, uncombed, shoulder-length hair, he was

invariably dressed in torn, dirty jeans and T-shirt. Dave's

appearance was almost as irritating to his parents as was his

constant use of marijuana. They also quarrelled with him over

his not going to school, his use and abuse of the family car,

and his demands for money. He would-say he needed money for the

car for one purpose (for example, looking for a job or going

to a school function) but would use the money to buy pot and the

car to drive around with his friends while high.

Dave had had violent fights with his family, particularly with

his mother. In addition to destroying things in the house, he

was verbally abusive to his mother and had hit her on occasion.

The police had been called twice by his mother during their

fights and once by Dave when he feared he would hurt her (in

fact he had not). He was never abusive nor destructive when

stoned.

Fred, Dave's 15-year-old brother, was tall and nice-looking with

long, light blond hair. He was somewhat similar in appearance

to Dave, although not as handsome. His hair was not as long

or curly, and he had a more alert expression, appearing less

detached and removed than Dave. Fred had been in no difficulties

with his family or his school. He had a close relationship

with his mother but a strained relationship with his father,

who saw Fred as coming between his wife and himself. Although

Fred had done well in school, he was tense about his achievement

and performance there. He was motivated not by any particular

educational interest, but by the desire to be rich and the

belief that education was necessary to reach that goal.

Fred saw Dave as impossibly tense and irritable when he was not

smoking marijuana. He was not close to Dave; at times he thought

he hated him and felt, like his mother, that it would be better

if Dave were out of the house. He saw his parents, and his

father in particular, as inconsistent in their treatment of Dave

and as letting him have his way to avoid a fight. He saw his

father as silly and childish in his need to be alone with his

mother. He empathized with his mother and believed she was right

about most disagreements that occurred in the family. He dealt

46
with his parents differently than did Dave. Although he was open

with them about most things, he did not tell them of his occasional

use of marijuana. He said his parents were not hard on him

because he was helpful around the house.

The M's were a middle class, suburban, Jewish family. Mr. M's

work as a salesman for an electronics firm took him away from

home several days a week. Mrs. M was concerned and ambitious

about her career as a social worker and had recently been made

a supervisor.

Mrs. M, an attractive, well-dressed woman in her mid-forties,

had an intense, nervous quality, and talked almost compulsively.

She saw Dave as always doing things to annoy or irritate her.

She dreaded coming home from the agency where she worked; she

hoped Dave would not be home when she got there. She said

she hated him and that he made her feel miserable, but that

unlike her husband, she was no longer guilty about anything

concerning Dave. She saw her husband as resenting the children

for taking too much of her time. She described herself and Fred

as talkers, while saying that Dave and her husband were usually

silent.

In the detached, intellectual, yet tense way that was characteristic of her, Mrs. M was objective about her contribution to

Dave's difficulties from his earliest years. Dave had been a

special baby. The M's had wanted a boy and he was born on

New Year's Day. He was handsome, friendly, bright, and responsible, much more so than Fred who as a small child was fat,

clumsy, and not as smart. Dave was inventive in his play and

used his toys in imaginative ways. Mrs. M recalled friction

between them since she wished him to do things in the prescribed

way. He was proud of his accomplishments. At the age of four

he made his own bed, but she reacted critically because he had

not made it as she liked it to be made. Somewhere between the

ages of 5 and 12, he became detached and was no longer excited

by his triumphs nor bothered by his failures. His view of his

mother's behavior and its effect on him were suggested by

recurrent dreams in his childhood of the wicked witch from the

Wizard of Oz.

Mrs. M believed she was like her father was with his children

in the way she never gave Dave a chance to talk. Now Dave

retaliated by expressing an opinion and saying he did not wish

to hear what she thought. If Mrs. M was like her father, a

strong, domineering person whom she clearly admired more than

she did her husband, she was like her mother in having a favorite

child. She had always felt that she was given less and that more

was expected from her by her mother in comparison to her younger

sister who was the mother's favorite.

Mr. M, a tall, stocky, nice-looking, well dressed man of 47,

spoke with feeling, at times laughing and at times sorrowful.

47
He felt he had failed as a father. He was uninvolved with the

children in a way that reminded him of his own father's lack of

involvement with him and with his sister. Mr. M was impatient

and irritable with both his children. He saw Dave as someone

who could not accept a "no" answer and he alternately felt fury

and pity toward him. Mr. M complained that his wife took Fred's

side in any arguments he had with Fred; he felt he and Fred got

along better when they were alone.

Early in their marriage Mr. M had problems with his wife's

father, whom he perceived as attempting to dominate their lives.

When the children were young, the family moved to California,

where Mr. M had been given a managerial position. He was happy

there but when Dave was 12 and Fred 10 the family came back

east because Mrs. M was so discontented at being away from her

parents.

Marriage deflated him because his wife made her father, and

later Fred, more important than him. He believed he played

"second fiddle" to Fred in the same way he had to his older

sister who was the apple of his mother's eye. His mother dominated and overprotected him, leaving him with "hangups" about

his children's cleanliness and eating habits. He identified

with the hero in the novel Portnoy's Complaint. He described

himself as fat and clumsy while growing up until he lost weight

in the service. His service experience was one of the few periods in his life when he felt important.

The M's presented Dave as the source of their frustrations. As

the interviews went on, however, it was clear that difficulties

in their marriage were masked by their mutual concern over Dave.

Each at this point had gravitated toward a life with minimal

emotional involvement with the other.. Since being made a

supervisory social worker, Mrs. M had become absorbed in her

career, acknowledging she might be using it to withdraw from

her husband. Mr. M was removed from his wife and enjoyed the

travel on his job that took him away from home. He had fantasies

that Dave and Fred would end up as derelicts, which related to his

own fantasies of winding up as an emotional derelict.

Mr. M identified with and cared for Dave and defended him when

he felt his wife was unfair to him. Dave was relatively indifferent to his father's solicitousness, except insofar as he could

take advantage of it. He said he had few recollections of his

father when he was little. He described as pleasant an early

memory in which he did something that irritated his father who

tried to hit him but struck the wall instead when Dave ducked.

This recollection suggested an early pleasure in being provocative,

perhaps as a way of getting attention that was otherwise unavailable

to him.

Dave's provocativeness had a long history. He had learned to

drive by himself at 13 by sneaking out and practicing with the

48
car after the family was asleep. By the time he was discovered

he already knew how to drive. Fights with his parents over his

use of the car, however, had become constant. Dave would say

he was using it to go to school and would use it to go away

for the day. His mother would then deny him use of it for weeks

or months. Or she would take away his right to use the car

because he annoyed her in some other way. Mrs. M was generally

inconsistent in her treatment of Dave and provocative in the

arbitrary ways she would punish him. The provocations and

retaliations between them went back and forth repeatedly.

Over the past year marijuana had been part of their struggle.

Dave attempted to grow marijuana plants secretly in the basement of his house. After his mother discovered them and he

agreed to throw them out, he tried to hide them elsewhere in

the house. During the period where they were arguing over the

plants, he used money that she had given him to attend a school

party to buy marijuana instead.

Dave’s school behavior paralleled his life at home. He was

bright and did well in school until high school. At this point

the authority of the teachers and the demands of school both

became intolerable in ways that he connected with the difficulties he had with his parents. At the end of his junior

year he dropped out of school and some months later he moved

out of the house.

Dave’s friends were primarily the young men from whom he bought,

to whom he sold, and with whom he smoked marijuana. He had one

brief homosexual relationship with a teacher in high school and

although most of his sexual desires and fantasies were about

women he said he was at times attracted to young men his own

age. He had had casual sexual relationships with women but

his only sustained relationship with a woman was with someone

he was not sexually involved with and who was herself involved

with someone else.

Although Dave, like most of the young drug abusers, claimed he

wished to be out of school and working so he would have money,

in practice he found it difficult to sustain interest even in

jobs that attracted him. After quitting school, Dave worked

when he had to as a cab driver, a job he said he liked because

he could do it while stoned and could quit when he felt like it.

His attitude toward marijuana varied. At times he said he wanted

it, enjoyed it, and had no conflict about its use. At other

times he said he was wasting away his life being stoned. He

said marijuana took away his ambition and drive and made him

unable to express himself. He felt he needed marijuana,

however, to relax and particularly to sleep.

Dave justified doing nothing with his life because of his doomsday predictions that either pollution or war would cause the end

49
of everything. At the same time, he felt destined for some

special fate. He used all sorts of coincidences as evidence

of this: he would meet a person he was thinking of or someone

he was about to call would call him. Although he felt that he

was nothing in his family, he felt quite special in his idea

of his unique telepathic powers. In one incident he was trying

to buy a pen in a small town to change the date on his birth

certificate so that he could get into a bar. He was approached

by several people who asked if he had discovered Jesus, that is,

been “reborn.” He saw the episode as illustrative of the special

meaning that surrounded his life.

Dave was hurt at feeling excluded from the family and by his

awareness that his mother had wanted him out of the house. When

he did move out he remained troubled by his mother’s continuing

distaste and contempt for him. He became tear-y-eyed when he

said he did not know or care if his mother favored Fred.

Fred, like his mother and father, believed that the tension in

the family eased once Dave moved out. Fred had not only avoided

patterning himself after Dave but had a negative identification

with him. His observation of the disastrous consequences of

Dave’s involvement with marijuana, particularly how it contributed to destroying Dave’s relationship with their mother, had

played a role in his general distaste for drugs; only on rare

occasions would he smoke a marijuana cigarette.

Without Dave to deal with, Fred became aware that his biggest

weakness was that he was talked into things too readily, putting

other people’s interests ahead of his own. He wanted to be liked

and to please people and felt guilty if he did not succeed in

doing this. These features of his personality were in striking

contrast to Dave, who always put his own needs first and who had

a temper tantrum if he did not get his own way. At the same

time, Fred had developed those traits that permitted him to

get along with a difficult, rigid, inconsistent mother.

In the case of the M’s, their hopes and expectations seemed

to have focused on Dave. Mrs. M’s rigidity with regard to

Dave contributed to his disappointing her and to his sense

that it was futile to try to please her. Fred benefitted

from not having been the original favorite and from the lower

expectations that went with his position.

Neither of Dave’s parents wanted the kind of tense family tie

that was created by their involvement with Dave’s problems.

They argued constantly over Dave with Fred siding with his

mother in opposing any leniency shown by the father. The

M’s relationship as a family clearly improved when Dave left

home. Dave’s situation, if anything, worsened. He was depressed,

was smoking heavily, taking LSD occasionally, and focusing his

life around buying, selling, and smoking marijuana.

50
Dave was never interested in therapy but during this period he

would call to come in when he was particularly disturbed. One

time a “bad acid trip” led him to do so. While in line at a

Grateful Dead Concert, he thought that he heard a voice say

“take a step backward” and that turned out to be the title of

one of their songs. He also related the word “depression” in

another song to himself. The spotlight seemed to be on him,

people seemed to be looking at him, and he felt intensely out

of control. At this point in Dave’s life it indeed appeared

that he had taken a step backwards.

When seen two years after this incident, Dave still needed and

wanted approval from his mother. Although he expressed only

pain and anger in talking of her, his need for her remained

great. He became tearful when discussing his sense of her not

wanting him to be part of the family. In her interviews, Mrs.

M was direct and unemotional in saying she preferred to have

as little to do with Dave as possible.

Marijuana was no longer an issue between Dave and his mother

since he did not smoke it on his infrequent visits home. But

the drug seemed to have become a fixed and essential part of

Dave’s life. Marijuana served to sustain his grandiose fantasies,

to ease the pain and hurt he felt with his family, and to curb

the rage he felt toward life because of his frustration.

Eddie J

Eddie, a six-foot tall, gangly-looking 14-year-old, came to most

of his sessions dressed in blue jeans, T-shirt, boots, sunglasses,

and a bandana around his head. He was often sullen and uncommunicative; at other times he was engaging and humorous and appeared

to enjoy the interviews. On one occasion he came to a session

with a girl’s initials crudely carved into his forearm. This

was consistent with other behavior he often exhibited during

the interviews, such as scratching and digging at his skin with

a paper clip and burning holes into his jeans with a cigarette

lighter.

Eddie had been drinking alcohol since he was 10 years old and

smoking marijuana since the age of 12. His usual pattern was

to smoke marijuana in the morning before school and to continue

smoking throughout the day and evening. Both during the day

and at night he also drank beer and sometimes hard liquor.

When angry or upset, especially at his parents, he often smoked

and drank himself into a stupor. Once his parents had to carry

him into the house after he passed out in the parking lot of

their apartment building.

Eddie was referred to the study by a juvenile probation officer

who met Eddie after his parents had filed a court petition in an

attempt to curtail what they perceived as Eddie’s uncontrollable

51
behavior. Eddie was in constant trouble at school for truancy,

stealing, fighting, coming to class high on marijuana, being

verbally abusive and physically threatening to both teachers

and administrators, and refusing to participate in classroom

activities, to take tests, or to hand in homework assignments.

When he was first seen, he was failing most of his courses and

had already been suspended several times from school.

During the course of his interviews, the court removed Eddie

from his home and placed him in a juvenile detention center and

later in a series of group homes for disturbed youngsters. After

running away from all these facilities, Eddie was sent to a

residential treatment center for an eighteen-month period.

Eddie’s 16-year-old sister, Deborah, was a bright, attractive,

and popular young woman who had maintained-a straight “A” average

throughout school. Although she was clearly aware of a wide

range of family problems, most of which she attributed to Eddie,

she put considerable distance between herself and her family

through her intense involvement in schoolwork and her numerous

extracurricular activities.

Deborah had a steady relationship with a young man with whom she

spent a great deal of time. She saw herself as preparing for a

professional career and, like her boyfriend and most of her other

friends, she planned to go to college immediately after high

school. Over a period of several years she had developed a

particularly close relationship with her maternal aunt, who

lived next door, and spent several afternoons or evenings each

week at her aunt’s house.

While saying that she loved Eddie because he was her brother,

Deborah was intensely angry at him for “messing everything up”

in the family. She resented her parents’ preoccupation with

Eddie’s problems and felt they had paid more attention to his

failing grades than to her A’s. She saw his heavy use of

marijuana and alcohol as another of the “stupid things” he was

always doing because he did not care about everything. While

explaining her reluctance to become involved with drugs in terms

of her concern that this would adversely affect her future,

she described Eddie as feeling he had no future and therefore

had nothing to lose.

Mr. and Mrs. J, an attractive-looking couple in their early 40’s,

lived in a lower middle and working class neighborhood. The J’s,

who came from an Irish Catholic, working class background, both

held nonprofessional positions. Unlike her husband who felt he

was a failure because he was a mechanic, Mrs. J was proud of

her work during the past few years in a responsible and skilled

clerical positron in a business firm. The J’s had begun dating

while in high school and shortly after graduating, Mrs. J had

become pregnant with Deborah. Rather than having an abortion,

they told their parents and got married. Mrs. J’s parents did

52
not consider Mr. J a suitable husband for their daughter, however.

Although Mrs. J said she was aware that Mr. J drank quite heavily,

she had not worried about this since it did not seem to cause any

problems . She recalled that while they were dating they got along

well and never had any fights or arguments.

She felt their relationship had changed rather quickly for the

worse after they were married and had continued to deteriorate

during the period in which Deborah, Eddie, and a third child,

Jenna, were born. Mrs. J remembered her husband as going out

drinking frequently at night with his friends and never taking

any responsibility for the care of the children. She was resentful

about being stuck at home but rarely shared her feelings with Mr.

J or communicated her concern.

Mrs. J related her inability to share her frustration and anger

directly with her husband to a lifelong problem in expressing

her feelings that she attributed to her upbringing. She recalled

how her mother could not tolerate expressions of anger and would

force her to go to her room if she started to get mad. There,

alone and in absolute frustration, she would have temper tantrums.

While feeling helpless to change the situation, Mrs. J recognized

how much her emotional inhibition had affected her relationship

with her husband.

For the last ten years, the J’s marriage had been a battleground

for recurrent fights over money, Mrs. J’s relationship with her

family, and Mr. J’s jealousy over what he felt was his wife’s

attentiveness to the children’s needs rather than his own. These

problems were further complicated by Mrs. J’s frequent hospitalizations for a variety of medical problems, including a severe

back ailment. Mrs. J described these separations as resulting

in further emotional distance from her husband.

She described Mr. J as drinking more and more in recent years,

and becoming increasingly critical of her, constantly telling her

that she was clumsy, nagging, stupid, and sexually unresponsive.

Since she had gone back to work his criticism had become more

intense and included threats to leave.

Any pleasurable experiences which Mrs. J spoke about in her

interviews had almost exclusively to do with Deborah. She

described her oldest daughter as a remarkably gifted child who,

when she was only two years old, was able to speak well and

figure out little puzzles. Mrs. J was so pleased with Deborah’s

precocious behavior that she read a great deal to her and gave

her more difficult puzzles to increase her abilities. When

Deborah was in kindergarten, she was able to write little poems

which delighted Mrs. J.

In contrast, Mrs. J remembered Eddie as very slow in developing

and learning. She described him as having difficulties making

friends and frequently complaining, as a very young child, that

53
other children were ignoring him. She recounted how as a youngster

Eddie often made up stories about imaginary exploits in an effort

to impress people and gain friends. He used to brag, for example,

about make-believe criminal activities and about the police coming

to his house to handcuff and arrest him.

Mrs. J noted that as a child Eddie became very upset if he

suspected he was being “crossed.” He would become quite angry,

for instance, if he did not receive a particular Christmas

present he had expected.

Mrs. J described her relationship with Eddie in overwhelmingly

guilt-ridden terms. She felt guilty about not having paid enough

attention to him, especially when he was younger and she was in

and out of the hospital. She blamed herself for his academic

problems because she was not more involved in helping him with

his early school difficulties. She was particularly troubled

that she had not followed the recommendations for counseling

and special educational instruction which came from an early

diagnostic evaluation indicating that Eddie had a learning

disorder, a slight hearing impairment, and emotional problems.

She felt that had she “stuck up” for Eddie more when he was

criticized by his father, he would not have had lost so much

of his self-confidence. Finally, Mrs. J felt she neglected

Eddie and left him too much on his own by going to work when

he was 12.

Mrs. J also felt that her marital difficulties were particularly

injurious to Eddie. She said that Mr. J had always accused her

of creating unnecessary financial pressures by taking Eddie to

the hospital every time he bumped or scratched himself. As

a result, once when Eddie hurt his finger she did not take him

to a doctor, allowing the injury to heal by itself. She regretted

that Eddie now has a permanently crooked finger.

The painful guilt Mrs. J felt around such incidents prevented

her from disciplining Eddie or helping him learn appropriate

social behavior. Mr. J on the other hand, felt his wife’s

“leniency” with Eddie made it necessary for him to assume the

entire burden of Eddie’s discipline, and he was resentful about

being forced to assume this role.

Mr. J’s resentment toward his wife was deeply rooted, going

back to the circumstances surrounding their marriage. He saw

her as having been unwilling to stand up to her parents, who

opposed her marrying him on the grounds that he was a mechanic

rather than the doctor or lawyer they had wanted for their

daughter. He had wanted to elope while they were still in

school, and interpreted her refusal to go along as an indication

that she put her parents’ desires above his.

Throughout the marriage, Mr. J had resented the fact that he was

“forced” to attend Sunday dinners at his wife’s parents’ home

54
where he felt he was treated like hired help. He also felt Mrs.

J had pressured him into staying with his mechanic’s job, which

he felt demeaned him, instead of starting his own automobile

parts shop as he had wanted. In addition, Mr. J was bitter

over the fact that, although he had always provided materially

for his family, no one appreciated his sacrifices. He described

himself as the “pack mule” of the family who worked himself “silly”

at a job he hated for a ‘bunch of ingrates.”

During the initial interviews, Mr. J spoke of Eddie with barely

control led rage. He insisted that he had always treated Eddie

and Deborah exactly alike, allowing each considerable latitude

concerning such things as hours and the friends they kept. The

fact that Deborah was highly responsible in these areas while

Eddie constantly abused his freedom by coming home drunk and

stoned at all hours of the night proved to Mr. J that Eddie simply

brought his problems on himself. Mr. J’s anger at his son made

him fly off the handle at the slightest provocation and in recent

years he was given to violent verbal and physical outbursts about

Eddie’s behavior. Although acknowledging that he had always

felt uncomfortable around Eddie and had spent almost no time

playing with him or teaching him things during his childhood,

Mr. J continually blamed Eddie, rather than himself, for all

of Eddie’s problems.

During the course of the interviews, Mr. and Mrs. J separated

for a period which coincided roughly with Eddie’s stay at the

residential treatment center. During their separation Mr. J

joined Alcoholics Anonymous in order to get help for his drinking

problem which he recognized had worsened considerably over the

years. As a result of his experiences in AA, he began to view

his role in the family with greater honesty.

Most significantly, Mr. J came to see that underlying his behavior

toward both his wife and Eddie was a deep sense of his own inadequacy. He realized that he had used them as "whipping posts"

because of his own frustration and disappointment over what he

had failed to achieve in life. Whereas Deborah’s academic and

social success made Mr. J feel more adequate about himself, he

began to recognize that he had for many years “shut out” Eddie

because so many of his problems -- his learning difficulties,

his lack of friends, his insecurity and sense of inferiority --

reminded Mr. J of his own shortcomings. He likened his relationship with Eddie to that he had had with his own father,

and saw Eddie’s recent behavior as a reflection of his own deeply

troubled adolescence, which had included a stay at the very

same juvenile institution to which Eddie had been sent.

Eddie’s version of his childhood and his place within the family

was consistent with his parents’ picture of him. He suspected

for a long time before his father came to see it that Mr. J’s

continual criticism of him was a reflection of self-dissatisfaction. His awareness did not ease the pain of his numerous

55
memories of his father belittling him in front of other people,

calling him stupid and dumb, or insisting that Eddie could do

something and then, when he failed, lashing out at his incompetence.

Eddie was considerably less in touch with his feelings toward

his mother, although his descriptions of several incidents during

his childhood indicated an intense fear of her abandoning him.

He recalled, for instance, that his father had frequently beaten

him when his mother was in the hospital, and attributed this to

what he imagined was his father's worry that his wife would die.

One of his clearest childhood memories was of his mother taking

him and his sisters for a drive in the car, following a particularly upsetting fight she had had with Eddie's father. He

remembered being terrified that she was going to get back at

his father by dropping off the children in a deserted, isolated

spot in the country. Eddie was frequently preoccupied with

fantasies of suffocating, drowning, or starving, and having no

one come to his aid.

The pain and anguish he felt at not having been given to by his

parents was most often concealed behind an angry, belligerent,

and defensively independent stance. He put considerable effort

into presenting himself as a "tough guy" who would beat up anyone

who tried to push him around, and took pains to distinguish himself

from what he referred to as "goody-goody wimps," "fairies," or

"faggots."

His anger at his family came through in his frequent references

to the things they did not do for him or give him and he harbored

deep-seated grudges around the Christmas or birthday presents his

mother had failed to provide. Eddie dealt with his anger toward

his parents by spending most of his time avoiding them, staying

out late and getting stoned in or&r to calm down. Since he

was 12, Eddie said, he had felt life was pointless and not worth

living. Although he admitted to having frequent thoughts of

suicide, dating back to the time he was in kindergarten, most

of the time he reacted to the meaninglessness of his life by

getting drunk and high and "partying."

The link between Eddie's anger at his family, his emotional

isolation from them, and his own self-destructiveness was

reflected in a dream he described. He approached his apartment

building, saw that it had been totally destroyed, and discovered

that his entire family had been killed. A stranger came up to

him and told him the United States was at war with Russia and

that the Russians had just dropped a nuclear bomb. Refusing the

stranger's advice to take cover, he threw himself into the fight

with the Russians, feeling that one way or another he too was

going to be killed.

The only emotion Eddie related to the dream was surprise about

the nuclear war. He claimed to feel no sorrow or remorse about

the death of the members of his family. He linked this dream

56
to a fantasy he often had of escaping from the residential

treatment center, going home, shooting everyone in his family,

and then dying himself in a gun battle with police.

The relation between Eddie’s heavy use of marijuana and his

angry separation from his family was vividly portrayed in another

dream. He was leaving a party at which he hadgotten very high

on marijuana. As he got into the car and began to drive off

he noticed his mother and grandmother in the back seat. He

suddenly lost control of the car and it smashed into a telephone

pole, injuring Eddie and killing the passengers.

Eddie had this dream in the course of making several attempts

to persuade his mother to help him gain an early release from

the residential treatment center. During the interview in

which he reported the dream, he indicated that if his mother

did not get him out early, it would be a message that she did

not want him. He said that he had already gotten the same

message from his father and now was waiting to see where his

mother stood.

Talking about the dream, Eddie related his mother’s death in

the car accident, which resulted from his being high, to his

feeling that he was, in effect, killing her through the worry

caused by his marijuana smoking. He appeared conflicted about

this insight, alternating between self-righteous anger at his

mother for not coming through for him and concern over his

destructive behavior.

Of all Eddie’s family relationships, he appeared to be least

conflicted with Deborah. Although indicating considerable

emotional distance from her; Eddie frequently spoke of Deborah

in a highly idealized manner, reflecting his parents’ view of

her as the pride of the family. In one of Eddie’s fantasies

of the future he is a bum, looking to his highly successful

older sister for assistance. Since Eddie spent most of his

time with older youths, joining them in drinking and smoking

marijuana, he and Deborah occasionally interacted within the

same circle of acquaintances. The gulf between their behavior

and values, however, paralleled the contrast in Eddie’s fantasy

of the bum being rescued by the successful professional woman.

Although at times Deborah expressed concern for Eddie, for the

most part she was distant toward him.

Although Deborah’s behavior appeared to be that of a model child,

she indicated in her interviews that behind her successful, Popular outward appearance she was deeply troubled. She complained

of recurrent bouts of depression, most commonly set off by fights

between Eddie and her parents, and spoke of becoming very upset

whenever anyone raised a voice to her because of all the yelling

that had gone on within her family. Mrs. J confirmed Deborah’s

fears in this regard, noting that Deborah had been unable to

get a part-time job because she was frightened that someone

would yell at her.

57
When depressed or upset, Deborah typically turned to her aunt,

or threw herself even more into her studies, school activities,

and her relationships with friends. At one point during her

interviews, Deborah had a serious fight with her boyfriend

which resulted in a temporary breakup. Without this relationship,

she experienced her family's problems more intensely and for

a brief time, experimented with alcohol and marijuana. During

this period she also had fantasies of killing herself and

imagined how hurt and guilty her boyfriend would be about her

death. She quickly decided that her continued use of drugs

would have serious negative consequences in terms of the things

she wanted for herself, discontinued this behavior, and shortly

thereafter reunited with her boyfriend.

The sharp difference between Deborah's and Eddie's attitudes

toward marijuana was in large measure a function of the difference between them in their views of their futures. Deborah's

place in the family had allowed her from a very early age to

develop a sense of herself as competent and valued and to see

in herself a potential for financial and social success.

Although her mother's strong identification with her had many

positive features, it also resulted in Deborah's developing

many of her mother's fears and inhibitions. In addition, her

father's drinking, and the ongoing struggles between her parents

had had disruptive and troubling consequences. Her thoughts

of suicide in response to loss indicated problems with attachment that appeared to go back to the rather tenuous security she

experienced in the family. Deborah, however, had learned to

cope with these problems by concentrating on activities and

relationships which brought her respect and gratification,

and her conflicts appeared to have been contained within an

overall successful adaptation built on high achievement

aspirations.

Mr. and Mrs. J's limitations, which Deborah experienced, were

considerably heightened for Eddie due to his father's negative

identification with him and subsequent retreat, and his mother's

total inability to provide the nurturance, support, and understanding which Eddie needed. The motivation which Deborah

provided for her mother's continued investment in her was

lacking altogether with Eddie. Instead of pleasure and pride,

Eddie's behavior had always evoked disappointment in his mother,

causing her, as well as her husband, to withdraw from Eddie as

a way of avoiding further pain. Much of Mrs. J's disappointment

with Eddie appeared to be a reflection of her feelings toward her

husband whose behavior and personality paralleled Eddie's in

so many ways.

Bobby G

"Burnt out Bobby," a nickname given this young man by his classmates because of his heavy use of marijuana, was 16 when he was

58
first seen. He was thin with a sallow complexion, and long

hair. He hated his appearance because of his hair, which he

regarded as “kinky and gross,” but by keeping it down to his

shoulders he maximized its effect. He listed “great hair,”

along with money and happiness, as the three things he would

wish for. He had been smoking marijuana for three years,

heavily for the last two. He frequently came home stoned,

which his older sister was aware of but which his parents managed

not to notice.

Their concerns with him centered on his school difficulties, difficulties he had had from the earliest grades and which had intensified in recent years. He and his family also fought over his

sloppy appearance, his messy room, and his failure to carry out

his share of the responsibilities at home. He handled the friction

by staying out at night and occasionally running away from home.

He also saw his use of marijuana as helping him to deal with the

tensions at home and said he smoked it less when he was away.

Bobby’s sister Diane, two years older than he, was an attractive

young woman who usually dressed in blue denims, She had long

red hair which she disliked and described as frizzy. She spoke

of her resentment of Bobby, saying it was probably immature of

her but she felt her parents favored him and catered to him.

He was not expected to take his share of the responsibilities

in the house. She said her parents treated Bobby as if he were

a “time bomb” ready to explode and sometimes he did. She made

clear, as did Bobby, that she and Bobby got along well when

their parents were not around.

Diane was friends with and confided in her mother. She wanted

to please both her parents and was conscious of having disappointed

them when she fell behind in her school work and did not graduate

from high school with her class, She finished a term late and was

working while waiting to start college.

She said of her father that he tended to contradict her and was

critical of what she said and how she looked. He was similarly

critical, Diane felt, with Bobby and with their 10-year-old

sister, Susan. She felt he loved them but preferred to be

alone with her mother.

The G’s were a middle class family living in the suburbs. Mr.

G, although trained as an accountant, worked for the fire department. He intended to go into business as an accountant after

he had completed enough time with the fire department to be

eligible for a pension. His wife had not worked until the past

few years when she took a job in a nursery school. Mr. B was

Jewish and his wife was Catholic.

Although Mr. and Mrs. G got along reasonably well, this was not

true early in their marriage, particularly in the period after

Bobby’s birth. Mr. G had agreed to have the children raised

59
in the Catholic Church, but when Bobby was born Mr. G changed

his mind. The dispute became so serious that Mrs. G returned

to live with her mother and was there for two years before

reconciling with her husband. They agreed that the child

would be raised as a Catholic, but his name was changed from

Christopher to Bobby.

Mr. G said he had always loved his wife, pointing out that he

never drank after work with other firemen and did not fool

around with other women. He did not enjoy being with his

children, saw them as too demanding, and was pleased when they

were out of the house. He felt ashamed that he did not feel

closer to them. He described himself as angry, irritable, and

upset when the family was together.

Mr. G complained that Bobby was dirty, messy, and poorly groomed;

that he borrowed his tools and never returned them; and that he

ate compulsively, raiding the refrigerator and leaving nothing

for anyone else. He saw nothing good about Bobby, expressed a

good deal of anger and contempt for him, and tried to avoid

talking to him because he felt he would only be critical.

Despite this, he said he felt closer to Bobby than to his

daughters, at times enjoyed his company, and would miss him if

he left home.

Mr. G. was irritable with the whole family because they were not

frugal. He did not like the children’s taking long showers and

frequently checked their rooms to make sure they had turned the

thermostats down. He said his wife often told him he was too

hard on everyone and too irritable.

Mr. G’s attitudes toward his children were shaped by his own

childhood. His father had been a salesman, was away from home

a lot, and was not interested in his children. Mr. G saw him

as a bore who said negative and depressing things. His mother

had worked as a bookkeeper when he was a child and he was cared

for by an older woman who was mean to him and beat him all the

time. He begged his mother not to leave him with this woman,

but she did not believe what he said about her. He said his

mother was a good person, but that he did not like to be

around her because she talked compulsively and made him

nervous. His parents also fought with each other all the time.

Despite his upbringing, Mr. G had been ambitious as a youngster.

Unlike Bobby, he said, he had always worked from the time he was

13, either selling papers or doing odd jobs. He was also an

excellent athlete on a state championship basketball team.

He disappointed his family, however, by not becoming a doctor

or lawyer and by marrying someone who was not Jewish.

When he met his wife he hid his being Jewish for several years

because he feared she would reject him. He said her father

seemed to be “a Nazi type” in looks and manner. He had not

60
wished to marry when they did, but his wife was pregnant with

their first daughter. He was bitter that he had to go through

a Catholic religious ceremony and had to agree to have his

children raised as Catholics. He was particularly bitter

towards his mother-in-law because of the two years his wife had

lived with her after bobby was born.

Mrs. G saw Bobby as a difficult, cranky, demanding child in

contrast to his older and younger sisters. She thought her

tension and depression due to her separation from her husband

when Bobby was an infant may have contributed to his behavior

and to her perception of him. When he was a year old she had

to tie a rope around him and tie him to a tree when they went

to the park because he always ran around and got into trouble.

All her children were toilet trained by the age of two, but

Bobby had wet his bed frequently until he was 10.

Mrs. G spoke of Bobby as not doing his chores around the house

and of “buttering” her up so she would do them for him. She

said she was sympathetic and wanted to believe his stories and

excuses, but that her daughters were resentful that Bobby got

away with so much. Yet she was aware that her annoyance with

his school performance was responsible for Bobby’s feeling that

he could not live at home. She fought with Bobby because he

would not take a shower, get a haircut, or clean his room.

She also objected to his dressing in torn clothes and to his

not going to school, but unlike her husband, she expressed some

sympathy and compassion for him.

Mrs. G said she loved her husband, but described him as a little

babyish and possessive in his attitude toward her relationship

with her parents and with the children. She was aware of Mr.

G’s resentment over her closeness to her parents and his feeling

that she put them and the children ahead of him.

Mrs. G and her husband had gone together for six years,

but she was not sure she would have married him if she had not

become pregnant. She still felt ashamed and bad for her parents

at having to get married that way. She stated that she would

not have married him even though she was pregnant had he not

agreed to bring the children up as Catholics. To avoid his

resentment, Mrs. G had always gone to church at 7 o’clock on

Sunday mornings in order not to interfere with his plans for

the day.

Although often reluctant to come for his interviews, Bobby was

friendly and fairly open when he came. He had a sense of humor

reflected in his bending down close to the microphone after one

of his sessions had been tape recorded and saying goodbye to the

interviewer by name.

Bobby said he had all sorts of material things, such as a stereo

and a motorbike, but that he would trade them all if he could be

61
happy with his family. He said his parents broke him down with

their criticisms and that his father saw him as a “long-haired

pot-smoking freak.” He had heard his father mutter a profanity

at him after Bobby had slammed the door following an argument

with his parents .

After one particularly unpleasant fight in in which Mr. and Mrs. G

had screamed at Bobby about his poor performance in school, he

ran away for several weeks. A dream he had when he returned

in which his parents were waiting for him with knives, ran

after him, and threw him out the window, expressed his feelings

about the situation. He related the dream to his feeling "cut

up" and forced to leave by his parents’ attacks.

Bobby felt his father was more involved with him than with his

sisters only because he carried the family name. Although he

reassured himself that his father would stand in front of him

if someone were going to shoot him, he suspected that if he

and another boy were drowning, and the other boy had short hair,

his father would save the other boy.

He saw his mother as fair in her criticisms of him and believed

she said what she did for his own good. He said he hid his use

of marijuana from her because he felt she would hold it against

him and because he did not wish to hurt or worry her.

Bobby saw himself as someone who blocked out things that bothered

him. He said he could not deal effectively with situations in

which people got angry at him. He gave as an example an instance

in which he stood up a girl he was seeing without calling her

because he had something else he wanted to do and felt she would

be mad if he told her that. Once after he had changed schools

and was not yet in difficulty at the new school, some kids at

school asked him for a dollar to buy beer. He did not want to

go along with them, but did because he did not want to be disliked.

They all drank the beer and got into trouble.

Bobby believed that special things, both good and bad, happened

to him. He referred to a motorbike accident when he was 14 in

which his scrotum had been torn off, but his mother had had the

presence of mind to retrieve the scrotum and bring it to the

hospital where it was sewn back on. He saw himself as finding

or being given what he needed. If he wanted a quarter for a

pinball machine, he might find one; if he wanted: ice cream,

the owner of the ice cream parlor might offer him some. He saw

his being handy as the product of luck rather than skill.

His passivity and hope for magical and effortless transformation

were reflected in dreams that involved his relationship with

the interviewer. In the first dream a man with a mustache had

burned the tail and backside of the family dog, Benny. He and

his mother and sisters were shooting at the house of the man

whom Bobby described as a “Mafia type.” They went in to see

him and magically he made the dog all right again.

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In his associations to the dream, he began by saying that he

knew it was not his father in the dream even though his father

had a mustache, since his father in reality loved Benny. When

it was pointed out to him that he had felt the family had “been

on his tail,” he agreed he was representing himself as Benny

and that the man with the mustache certainly was his father.

He saw the interviewer as the Mafia man who was threatening

the relationships in his family but who he hoped would do something magical to make Bobby better. He then talked about what

he wanted from the interviewer, mentioning in this context his

frequent thoughts about finding “a bottle with a genie in it.”

Discussion of this dream seemed to stimulate the following dream:

He was an outfielder playing professional baseball. A man in

the stands gave him a special glove that enabled him to catch

every ball. The ball by itself would just come into the glove.

He became a star overnight. His magical wishes that the interviewer should transform him without the need for effort on his

part were similar to his attitude that he would get his diploma

without having to study or that he would like to be paid for his

part-time job without working.

Diane was eager to come for the interviews and used them to discuss

her difficulties with her family and with Bobby. She believed

that her parents favored him because of their guilt over the

circumstances of their marriage when he was born. It also had

to do, she felt, with his being a boy. Diane felt that her

father did not favor her, but that he did not put the pressure

on her that he put on Bobby.

When she was 15, she smoked marijuana for a period of several

months but then lost interest in it. She said she had friends

who were good students, others who were not, some who were never

involved in drugs, and one girl who was in an institution because

of drug abuse. She had told her mother about her involvement

with marijuana, but she had lied to her about Bobby, saying he

did not use it.

She related a recent dream that affected her deeply and appeared

to capture her adaptive difficulties in dealing with her family.

She was being offered a job that she had actually had the previous

summer in which she worked for a family, taking care of their

two-year-old daughter. In the dream the family’s house was

haunted. The woman she was working for told her she would have

to share a room with the child. Diane said she did not mind but

she actually did. The woman then told her not to go upstairs

because there was someone up there in a room that she was not

supposed to see. Diane went up anyhow and saw a very pretty

girl with a veil, staring out the window.

Diane spoke of having liked this job and said she was hoping

to get it again the following summer. In actuality she had had

a lovely room all to herself. The girl by the window reminded

her of the central character of the movie “Sybil” who had many

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different personalities. The particular personality represented

in the dream was the unkind and critical Sybil, sour about

everything, and feeling that nothing ever turned out right.

Diane wondered if Sybil could be a representation of the different sides of her own personality. She said she seldom showed

the side that might be critical, sour, or pessimistic. She

described herself as someone who seemed pleasant and went along

with people, but hid what she felt when what she felt was

unpleasant.

She related the two-year-old child in the dream to Bobby, whom

she felt her mother treated as a baby. After she was told she

would share her room with the little child, the girl with the

sour disposition entered the dream. Diane had been speaking

in her interviews of the ways in which Bobby spoiled her mood.

She would be happily talking to her mother and if Bobby came

in her mother got tense, waiting for the conversation to shift

to Bobby which Bobby took for granted.

A year after Diane was first seen, she was in college and had

become involved with a young man from her neighborhood who drank

a lot and could not hold a job. He also treated her poorly, did

not consider her needs, tried to make her jealous, and often

stood her up without calling. In his self-centeredness he reminded

her of Bobby. Her willingness to put up with his treatment seemed

to derive from years of resigning herself to her father’s indifference and playing “second fiddle” to Bobby with her mother.

Although the B’s were satisfied with their present relationship

both Bobby and Diane grew up feeling their parents might separate.

Bobby considered that the tension he created might contribute

to his parent’s breakup. When Diane became sexually involved

with her recent boyfriend whom her parents strongly disapproved

of, it put a strain on her relationship with them and led to her

having nightmares in which the whole family was destroyed. Both

Bobby and Diane had the feeling that the family stability was

sufficiently fragile that wrong actions on their part jeopardized

everything.

Bobby’s problems were exacerbated by the fact that his earliest

attachment to his mother had been marred by the separation of

his parents and his mother’s depression. His mother’s affection

for Bobby was tinged by guilt over what happened, guilt that

did not permit her to set proper limits and conditions on Bobby’s

behavior. His father’s identification with Bobby led him to

expectations that Bobby could not fulfill.

Marijuana helped Bobby deal with the tension and anger of his

relations with his family and fostered the passivity and sense

of magical transformation reflected in his dreams. Bobby's

fantasies of grandiose success without effort, which were aided

by his use of marijuana, were hard to influence as long as his

parents’ expectations of him were so unrealistic.

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Chapter 5

Family Psychodynamics

Although all of the families who participated in this study were

structurally intact, there were significant conflicts between the

parents in virtually every family. Yet, except for a few families

such as the H’s in which the marriage appeared to have been bad

from the beginning, most of the couples had had reasonably

satisfying relationships prior to the births of their children.

Without exception, parenthood appears to have strained the marital

relationships by exacerbating problems that each parent brought

to the marriage.

The problems in the interaction between parent and child usually

appeared to go back into the early childhood of the drug abuser.

In some cases, parents had resolved the original problems that

troubled their marriage or interfered with their interaction with

a particular child, but the youngster had suffered the consequences

and in a sense made the parents continue to pay for old injuries.

Seeing the marijuana-abusing youngster during adolescence and not

knowing the detailed history of the family, concern for this child

could be said to have brought the family closer together, if only

in a tense, troubled way. It is simplistic, however, to assume

that the family’s need for such a child was responsible for the

marijuana abuse. Although Mrs. D, for example, encouraged her

husband’s concern over Clara as a way of tying him to her, neither

of the M’s wanted such a tie and the M family got along considerably

better after Dave had left home. The ways in which parents reacted

to their marijuana-abusing children were quite varied, with some

aggravating the situation beyond what it otherwise would have been.

FAMILY PATTERNS

Clearly, no single family pattern was found to be responsible for

some youngsters’ becoming marijuana abusers while their siblings

do not. Yet certain characteristic patterns did emerge and were

repeated among the families.

In some of the larger families the parents continued to have

children although they were less able to cope with each succeeding

child. In one such Catholic family, the mother finally persuaded

her doctor to ligate her fallopian tubes after her fourth child

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was born, although she had wanted such a procedure earlier. She

saw her fourth child as excessively demanding from birth and

dreamed of him repeatedly as a hungry rat. Typically in such

families the husband needed a second job to support the family;

this required him to work evenings, cut off his contact with the

family, and left his wife feeling abandoned and overwhelmed at

having to cope with the children by himself.

The A’s reflected such a pattern although they only had three

children and several families had four or five. Lisa was older

when the family started to come apart. Although her shoplifting

and sexual behavior reflected some of the impact of the family’s

difficulties, she graduated from high school, held a job, and

eventually married the father of her child. Angela was more

severely damaged, was acutely aware of what she had lost, and was

on a course that seemed likely to destroy her life with drugs and

alcohol. Her younger brother, who had spent virtually all his

life in the period of family disruption and tension, was the most

disturbed. He had retreated into a solitary, friendless life and

was preoccupied with suicide and fears of bodily dissolution,

In another relatively simple family pattern observed, one of two

children of the same sex was labelled good and the other bad. The

division was made early in life, and both parents participated in

it. The difference in the D’s attitudes toward each of their two

daughters was almost predictable. Mrs. D was pleased to be married;

that she and her husband were looking forward to their first child

is suggested by their description of Vanessa as a “wonderful, beautiful baby.” By the time the D’s were expecting their second child,

they were quarreling over Mr. D’s frequent absences on business.

After Clara’s birth Mrs. D recalled waiting up at night hoping he

would return or at least call. She did not connect her description

of Clara as a “poor sleeper” with her own anxiety or sleeplessness

during this period. The family’s longstanding ambivalence toward

Clara is underlined by a story they frequently told of starting on

a trip and remembering only in a cab on the way to the airport that

they had forgotten one-year-old Clara at home.

Currently the difference in the parents’ reaction to the misbehavior of their two daughters was revealed in the incident when

Vanessa forged her mother’s signature to a bad report card.

Although they were not really upset at this behavior, they admitted

they would have been quite furious had Clara done the same thing.

Since neither Mr. nor Mrs. D wanted to recognize that Vanessa had

problems, Vanessa was left with the strain of having to hide those

she had.

The H’s provide an illustration of a good child-bad child split

occurring early in the lives of male siblings. The lack of nurturance which Tim, the marijuana-abusing sibling, perceived in

his relationship with his mother originated almost immediately

following his birth when she returned to work at the completion

of a Z-year maternity leave begun at the birth of his older brother,

Dennis. While neither Dennis or Tim had experienced real security

or love in relation to either their mother or their alcoholic

66
father, Dennis, as a result of the greater attention he received

in in fancy, was better equipped to defend against his feelings of

insecurity by developing a take-charge, domineering role within

the family. Playing the straight, responsible role earned Dennis

respect and affirmation in the eyes of his parents which further

motivated him to fulfill their expectations. Tim, on the other

hand, perceived himself as lacking in any real capacity to meet

his parents’ expectations or to measure up to Dennis, and he

withdrew into marijuana as a way of easing his sense of inadequacy.

Tim became an exceptionally heavy user of marijuana and in his

frequent smoking binges reduced himself to a functionless state.

As reflected in the dream in which “Mother Floyd” pave him a cup

of poisoned tea, Tim connected his marijuana abuse directly to

his lack of maternal nurturance.

The good child-bad child split takes on somewhat more complex

dimensions in the cases involving opposite sex siblings. Both

Mr. and Mrs. J, for example, defined Deborah as the good child who

brought them nothing hut pleasure and satisfaction while Eddie

was regarded as the longstanding trouble-maker who had created

nothing but difficulty for the entire family. In this case,

Mr . J’s identification with Eddie and the anxiety this engendered

in him resulted in emotional distance between father and son which

isolated Eddie from the family more and more as he grew older. In

particular, the difficulty Eddie had in school and his angry antisocial behavior duplicated the patterns of Mr. J’s own youth, and

resonated with his own sense of being a failure. Unable directly

to confront these issues in himself , he lashed out at Eddie in an

attempt to create distance from him. Deborah did not arouse such

identification in her father, both because of her sex and her much

more successful adaptation, so her relationship with him was very

different.

Mrs. J was also motivated away from Eddie because of the guilt

she felt at her own inability to meet his special needs. In

addition, the similarities between Eddie and his father appear

to have caused Mrs. J to express with Eddie many of the longstanding negative feelings she had toward her husband. Deborah

did not need nearly so much from either of her parents and was

able to give a great deal to them, especially to her mother. The

identification between Mrs. J and Deborah was a source of satisfaction

to Mrs. J and resulted in Deborah’s receiving her mother’s support

and affection from infancy. Although Deborah benefited from this

identification, it also involved her developing her mother’s inhibitions, emotional constriction, and frequent bouts of depression.

Starting life wanted and favored as Deborah did is no guarantee,

however, against future difficulties. Dave, the M’s marijuanaabusing older son, whose provocative behavior led the family to

want him out of the home, had clearly begun life as the family

favorite. By late adolescence he was fighting with his parents

constantly over his not going to school, his use and abuse of the

67
family car, and his demands for money.

Mr. and Mrs. M described Dave as having been a special child. He

had looks, intelligence, and charm that they found lacking in his

younger brother. Dave’s imagination, intelligence, and inventiveness had clashed with his mother’s need to have him do things in

exactly the way she wanted. His mother related the incident

where, instead of praising him for making his own bed at the age

of four, she criticized him for not having done it in the manner

she liked, with some realization of the destructive effect she

had had on him. She suspected that she had some responsibility

for his having detached himself from the pleasure of success and

the pain of failure. Dave’s recurrent childhood dream image of

her as the wicked witch from the Wizard of Oz provides confirmation

of her views.

Clearly Dave suffered from being the object of his mother’s high

expectations and rigid demands. His younger brother, Fred, the

beneficiary of lesser expectations, was doing well in school and

in his social relations, and had become his mother’s confidante.

Although the effort to get along with his mother had resulted

in Fred’s sometimes withholding feelings he felt would not please

her, he was genuinely fond of her and expressed this in his behavior.

In several of the families, although the relationship between the

parents was reasonably good at the time they were interviewed,

there had been serious problems earlier in the marijuana-abusing

child’s life, problems which had ongoing effects on the youngster.

The G’s were one such family.

To see the G family during recent years, one would have to say

that Bobby was favored by both his parents. They thought so,

his sister thought so, and he thought so. But Bobby was the

victim of the early separation of his parents, occasioned by

their conflict over his being raised as a Catholic. That insecure period of his life left him less able than his older sister

Diane to deal with school and with the conflicts of adolescence.

Mr. G’s interest in and identification with Bobby resulted in his

treating Bobby with anger when he failed to meet his father’s

expectations. Diane suffered from his indifference, but it was

less painful than his contempt. Mrs. G’s guilt over the early

problems created for Bobby by her leaving her husband made it

harder for her to set appropriate limits for his behavior.

Although Bobby came first in his mother’s priorities, she was

tense, troubled, and angry with him; Diane’s company she genuinely

enjoyed .

Whether a marijuana-abusing youngster was seen as a problem child

from the beginning or only became one with time, by adolescence

and usually before drug abuse had become an issue, he or she had

become the “bad” or “difficult” child in contrast to a nondrugabusing sibling. The net result was that the abusers often seemed

68
not to be a part of their families. The more integrated families

would enjoy doing things together but were no more comfortable

than the marijuana-abusing youngster in having him or her take

part in their activities.

ROLE DIVISION

The marijuana abusers and their nondrug-abusing siblings appeared

to have incorporated their parents’ image of each of them and to

express that image in their behavior. If the abuser resented the

image, he or she lived up to it with the consolation that marijuana abuse made possible a measure of retaliation against the

parents. In almost all of the families, one youngster defined

himself or herself as the drug abuser and appropriated that role.

Clara, for example, was proud that in the area of drugs she had

done more and knew more than Vanessa.

Within many of the families, one youngster’s becoming the drug

abuser seemed to diminish the chances of the sibling’s developing

the same problem. Fred, Vanessa, and Deborah, for example, saw

the disastrous consequences of Dave’s, Clara’s, and Eddie’s

involvement with drugs and its effect on their relationship with

their parents. In a sense they formed a negative identification

with their marijuana-abusing sibling.

The role division among the siblings tends to have wider ramifications than were reflected simply in the use or avoidance of

drugs. In one family where the family’s problems increased with

each successive child, the eldest son was never in trouble, and,

although depressed and unhappy, functioned well and was on his

way to medical school. A second son, a football player, was

enraged with his family and expressed it in violent behavior. The

third and youngest son never fought with his parents, nor was he

aware of any anger toward them. The parents discovered by accident that this youngest son had been heavily involved with marijuana for years without their having ever suspected it.

A dream of the second son at age 18 suggested the degree to which

such varying ways of dealing with family frustration can become

fixed . The dreamer’s marijuana-abusing younger brother, neatly

dressed, was going to a football game. The dreamer, sloppily

dressed, tried to buy a Playboy magazine at a newsstand. The

proprietor did not want to sell it to him unless he had proof

that he was 21 years old.

In reality, this young man saw himself as clean-cut, well-dressed,

and athletic, and had contempt for his sloppily dressed, marijuanaabusing younger brother who would never go to a football game. At

the same time, he envied his brother’s active social and sexual

life. In relating the dream he was apologetic about his interest

in Playboy saying he did not buy it often and was always uncomfortable when asking for it at the newsstand.

Drugs, sex, and sloppiness were his brother’s prerogatives; being

69
clean-cut and athletic were his. His dream appeared to be an

attempt to break down these roles. If his brother were only more

clean-cut and athletic, he imagined that perhaps he could permit

himself to have more of a sexual life.

Overt expressions of rage toward parents were usually the province

of the marijuana abuser. In this family, however, the abuser was

known as the “clam” of the family and was not, in fact, in touch

with any anger toward his parents. Consistent with this, he kept

his marijuana abuse a secret, and his general behavior toward his

parents was not provocative.

Although sexual activity was also usually more frequent on the

part of the marijuana-abusing child in the family, as it was in

this case and with Clara in contrast to Vanessa, this was not

always true. Angela A’s nondrug-abusing sister, Lisa, centered

her life on being attractive to young men, and her shoplifting

primarily involved clothes that she felt contributed to her image

of herself in this regard. While Angela had a boyfriend and had

been sexually involved with him, her adaptation was far more that

of a tomboy.

Regardless of its specific form the good child-bad child split

within these families clearly came to represent a wedge driven

between the marijuana abuser and his or her sibling. Although

some of the siblings, like Vanessa D, had protective feelings

toward the marijuana-abusing brother or sister, they tended to

feel, as did Vanessa, that the parents were not strict enough and

that the abuser was allowed to get away with too much. Since many

of the parents, like the D’s, were actually over-controlling in

many respects, the siblings seemed to be expressing feelings of

resentment toward the marijuana abuser and toward their parents

for not being able to deal with the situation. Such resentment

toward their brother or sister, in most cases, was direct and

conscious; all of the siblings sided with their parents in their

anger with the marijuana-abusing youngster and all of them resented

the disruptive effect of the abuser on the family.

The rigid division of roles created between the marijuana-abusing

adolescents and their nondrug-abusing siblings had harmful psychological consequences for both youngsters. Even the siblings who

were favored paid a price for the favoritism. Angela A was

acutely upset at her sister’s constant anger toward her, anger

which stemmed largely from their mother’s partiality to Angela,

Siblings like Vanessa, Fred, Deborah, and Dennis saw their

favored positions as contingent upon their good behavior, and as

a result, often felt compelled not to show their problems or even

be aware of them. As a consequence the nondrug-abusing siblings

as a group seemed more guarded and emotionally constricted than

their less well-defended brothers and sisters.

In such families both the marijuana abuser and the nondrug-abusing

sibling seemed more aware than the parents that the differences

between them were not as sharp as they appeared. The marijuana

70
abusers often saw their siblings as deceptive or hypocritical

for misbehavior that they managed to keep from their parents’

awareness. The nondrug-abusing siblings in almost every case

experienced both guilt for their favored position and the strain

of having to live up to an image they knew was not completely true.

In concluding this discussion of the families of the adolescent

marijuana abusers, it should be noted that both the family patterns

and sibling role divisions which were observed were seen as

dynamic configurations rather than static characteristics of these

families. In each of the families studied, numerous characteristics

were identified which appeared to be related to adolescent marijuana abuse. The meaning of such relationships, however, was

derived only through viewing the entire family from a psychodynamic

perspective. Several of the youngsters, for example, had at least

one parent who was alcoholic, a characteristic which has been shown

to be significantly correlated with adolescent substance abuse

(Brook et al. 1977, 1978; Kandel et al. 1978). As seen in the

cases of Angela A, Eddie J, and Tim H, however, the nature of the

relationship between the presence of an alcoholic parent and the

youngster’s heavy use of marijuana was understandable only with

reference to the overall picture of the family relationships,

patterns of interactions, role expectations, attachments and

aversions among the various family members. That each of Angela’s

parents had a drinking problem was certainly less significant in

understanding her marijuana abuse than was the recognition of her

depression at the loss of the closeness she had once experienced

with her family -- depression which she attempted to mask and repress through her marijuana-inspired light-heartedness. Importantly,

Mr. A’s problems with alcohol did not cause, but rather reflected,

the difficulties he experienced in dealing with the intimacy and

responsibility of family life and which led him in time to turn

his attention outside the family. Mrs. A also turned to alcohol

to console herself over the sense of loss she experienced in her

relationship with her husband.

Similarly, for Eddie J it was much more his father’s direct rejection of him than his father’s alcoholism which was connected to

Eddie’s heavy marijuana use. Even for Tim H, who used marijuana

at least partially as an attempt to escape from his father’s

drunkenness and abusiveness, other aspects of the family dynamics,

and especially the lack of nurturance he experienced in his relationship with his mother, emerged as far more significant in

understanding his marijuana abuse than did his father’s alcoholism.

While it may be true that some youngsters learn from alcoholabusing parents the practice of seeking relief from one’s

problems through drugs, such an observation is not a universal

one, as was demonstrated by the nondrug-abusing sibling in each

of the three families just mentioned. In fact, for these

siblings, and particularly for Deborah J and Dennis H, there was

a negative identification with the substance-abusing parent and

sibling. In addition, in 12 of the 17 families studied, neither

parent had a drinking problem, yet each family had a marijuana71
abusing adolescent. Thus while certain static family characteristics may suggest explanatory linkages with adolescent

marijuana abuse, the families seen in this study demonstrated that

such linkages are truly meaningful only when viewed within the

overall context of the family psychodynamics.

REFERENCES

Brook, J.S., Lukoff, I.F., and Whiteman, M. Correlates of

adolescent marijuana use as related to age, sex and ethnicity.

Yale J Biology Med, 50: 303-390, 1977.

Brook, J.S., Lukoff, I.F., and Whiteman, M. Family socialization

and adolescent personality and their association with adolescent

use of marijuana. J Genetic Psychol, 133: 261-271, 1978.

Kandel, D.B., Kessler, R.C., and Margulies, R. Z. Antecedents of

adolescent initiation into stages of drug use: A developmental

analyses. In: Kandel, D.B., ed. Longitudinal Research on Drug

Use: Empirical Findings and Methodological Issues. New York:

John Wiley Sons, 1978.

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Chapter 6

The Functions of Marijuana

For adolescents the heavy use and abuse of all drugs involves the

significance of the act of taking the drug as well as the specific

functions of a particular drug for the youngster. It is reasonable

to assume that any adolescent behavior strongly disapproved of by

parents, teachers, and community leaders will reflect certain

“antiauthority” overtones; certainly this appeared true of the

representative cases of marijuana abusers. At the same time, our

research indicated that past emphasis on heavy marijuana use as

part of a lifestyle choice involving role modeling and affiliation with proponents of alternative social values, attitudes,

and mores is unidimensional and overly simplistic. These adolescents’ involvement with drug-abusing peers waxed and waned in

accordance with their changing need to smoke large amounts of

marijuana. This need, while expressed in interaction with drugabusing peers, related essentially to the psychodynamics of the

youngsters’ family relationships.

DEFIANCE AND PROVOCATION

With someone like Dave, who grew marijuana plants in his basement,

and who fought constantly with his parents over his right to smoke

as much marijuana as he pleased, the provocativeness is apparent.

Marijuana for adolescents like Dave represented an assertion of

their independence and their desire to be free from parental control. The ambivalent nature of this desire, however, is suggested

by the fact that such provocative use of marijuana elicits parental

reaction and intervention in ways that more covert use does not.

Some of the heaviest of the marijuana users such as Clara, Tim, and

Bobby, managed to keep their usage from their parents’ awareness

for years despite coming home stoned nearly every day. Although

the parents’ need not to know is involved here as well, these

youngsters used this need to their advantage, while others like

Dave and Eddie were determined to force their marijuana abuse on

their parents’ consciousness. Clara, Tim, and Bobby were provocative or defiant in other ways, however, from refusing to do household chores to staying out at night without informing their parents.

The defiance which almost all of the adolescent marijuana abusers

demonstrated in behavior toward their parents was also evident in

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their relationships with other authorities, in particular their

teachers, principals, and school counselors. Since most of the

youngsters were cutting class to smoke, and since their marijuana

abuse was often related to an attempt to escape from the pressures

of school, at times school authorities appeared to be more aware

of such abuse and more in conflict with youngsters over it than

were their parents. In almost every case, however, the marijuanaabusing adolescent’s school behavior was a reflection of longstanding patterns of provocative interaction with adults that had

developed in the family.

The attraction to the criminal aspects of drug abuse -- the illicit

cops-and-robbers excitement seen among young marijuana abusers in

the early 70’s and still typically seen in young heroin abusers --

was not present to a significant degree in any of the marijuanaabusing youngsters in the present study. Although several in the

group often had large quantities of marijuana in their possession

and routinely sold amounts involving hundreds of dollars, they

evidenced little concern about being arrested. Even Dave, who had

been arrested for growing marijuana, and was careful about whom he

sold it to, did not see marijuana as a criminal act for which he

anticipated punishment.

SELF-DESTRUCTIVENESS

It is important to recognize that not all behavior that is selfdestructive in its consequences is self-destructively motivated.

With drug abuse, the consequences may be the price that one is

willing to risk for the effect of the drug. Yet among these adolescent marijuana abusers, as with drug abusers in general, selfdestructiveness was often an integral part of the motivation for

their drug behavior.

Although most of the adolescents initially talked of their drug

use in general and marijuana in particular as a conflict-free

source of pleasure, in time almost all expressed greater ambivalence. Dave, who claimed to be joyfully high on marijuana whenever he could, eventually admitted that he felt he was wasting

his life by being constantly stoned, and spoke of marijuana as

taking away his ambition and drive, and thwarting his ability to

express himself. Clara, who initially presented her marijuana

use as harmless, later admitted that while others probably took

drugs for pleasure she often approached this behavior with a “let

something bad happen to me” attitude. Several of the youngsters,

like Tim, were stoned to the degree of being nonfunctional for

significant periods of time, while others, like Eddie, combined

marijuana and alcohol in order to drug themselves into unconsciousness. The suicide attempts, both in our larger preliminary

sample and among the cases selected for intensive study, were invariably made with drugs.

The representative cases often provided psychodynamic evidence both

of the self-destructive nature of the marijuana abuse and of the

sources of that self-destructiveness. Tim, for example, who used

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marijuana largely in an attempt to obliterate the pain and frustration of his relationship with his mother, dreamed that his

mother was offering him a cup of tea (slang for marijuana) which

was poisoned. He perceived his mother as having poisoned his life

by failing to meet his needs while seeming to be offering to do so,

and marijuana appeared to be serving a similar function.

ANGER

If marijuana abuse was often seen as a defiant or self-destructive

act, it functioned more importantly in attempts to modify unpleasant, disturbing feelings and emotions, and in particular, to diminish the experience of anger.

For some youngsters, the anger they experienced toward their families was often felt to be uncontrollable and was part of a frequently felt, deeper, and more disturbing feeling that they hated

their parents. Some dreamed or daydreamed of killing or otherwise

eliminating all their family members. Same became extremely frightened by the extent of the violence they engaged in when angry.

Marijuana helped these youngsters subdue their rage and control

their violent impulses. Over and over, these adolescents talked

about their use of marijuana as an attempt to relax from their

tension and anger at home.

Dave, for example, had violent fights with his family in which he

had destroyed things in the house, been verbally abusive, and hit

his mother on occasion. His entire family, including Dave, was

aware that he was never abusive nor destructive when stoned. Dave

was particularly conscious that marijuana enabled him to relax

enough from the tension of his anger with his family so that he

could fall asleep at night.

On two occasions after fights with her family, Clara dreamed that

the devil would get inside her and cut her off from her friends.

Marijuana served to relieve her anger and tension and made it

possible for her to be more comfortable with her friends as well

as with her family.

in reality he used the magic of marijuana to keep his feelings

contained on the level of dreams or fantasies rather than acting

on them.

Another young man used marijuana to withdraw into an almost chronic

stupor to contain the rage he felt toward his parents over their

confining expectations of him. He dreamed of being locked in a

coffin from which he escaped with a magic button and then proceeded

to beat up a teacher. The teacher he linked with his father. and

Psychodynamic evidence of a link between these youngsters’ overwhelming anger toward their families and their self-destructiveness was invariably present. Eddie, for example, was preoccupied

with thoughts of suicide. He had recurrent fantasies of escaping

from the residential treatment center in which he had been placed,

going home and shooting all the members of his family, and then

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dying in a gun battle with police. In a similar vein, it will be

recalled, he dreamed his whole family was killed in a nuclear

attack and he decided to fight rather than take shelter since he

was going to die anyway. Another young man who feared his potential for violence toward his family when he was not high and felt

marijuana gave him control over his anger, talked frequently of

blowing himself away with a shotgun which he linked with “getting

blown away” by smoking marijuana. His imagery suggests how marijuana can be the link between containment of anger and selfdestructiveness.

GRANDIOSITY

Many of the marijuana-abusing adolescents seen felt that they

amounted to nothing within the context of their own families. In

the case of many of the young men, feelings of grandiosity helped

alleviate the depression they experienced in this regard and encouraged their sense that magical transformation without effort

was possible. Their use of marijuana to transform their mood was

consistent with this aspect of their personalities. Several seemed

to feel they were intended for some special destiny that would

eventually became apparent. Dave’s sense of his unimportance to

his mother was in sharp contrast to the sense of self-importance

he felt over his telepathic powers, demonstrated for him by such

circumstances as meeting a person about whom he had been thinking.

The incident he related in which he was trying to buy a pen to

change the date on his birth certificate so that he could get into a bar, and was approached by several young men who asked if he

had been "reborn" to Christ, confirmed, in Dave’s view, the special

meaning that surrounds his life.

Bobby also talked frequently of his special luck, believing that

unusual things happened to him: If he needed something he would

find it, or, without his asking, someone would give it to him.

These rather grandiose feelings were reflected in Bobby’s dream

in which he was an outfielder playing professional baseball, was

given a special glove that made every ball come into it, and became an immediate star.

He had this dream the night following an interview in which, after

raising the question of what he was getting from the interview sessions, he talked about his recurrent thoughts of finding “a bottle

with a genie in it.” His attitude that he should get his high

school diploma without having to study, his desire to be paid for

his job without having to work, and his dream of being a star in

a sport that he did not actually play, all reflect the attitude

he brought to the interviews that in some magical way, without

effort on his part, they should transform him. Marijuana helped

sustain such illusions in youngsters like Bobby.

None of the young women marijuana abusers showed the type of grandiose fantasy found to be common among the young men, although they

likewise tended to be highly unrealistic in their expectations

of themselves and others. Particularly common among these young

76
women was a feeling of invulnerability to any consequences of

their behavior. They would talk of going on to college even

though they were at the time flunking out of high school. They

would describe impossible relationships with boyfriends who consistently abused them as somehow destined to end up well. Chances

taken in their sexual relationships, they felt, would not end in

pregnancy, and they would escape any harmful consequences of reckless marijuana abuse.

As discussed in an earlier chapter, a comparable attitude of invulnerability was often reflected in the risks and chances the

young men took with cars and motorbikes. Among both the young

men and young women there was clearly a psychological link between

invulnerability and depression, between damaged self-esteem and

grandiosity, between the idea that “nothing can happen to me”

and the idea that “if it does, what’s the difference.”

ESCAPING COMPETITIVE PRESSURE

Marijuana abuse seen among college youngsters was often associated

with attempts to resolve conflicts around achievement and performance (Hendin 1973, 1975, 1980). College students have usually

accepted the value of competition and achievement, at least long

enough to get to college, where many of them come to find competitive pressures intolerable. Feeling alternatively destructive

when successful and humiliated when not, these young people frequently use marijuana to ease the intensity of this conflict.

The high-school-aged marijuana abusers had generally rejected competitive success through effort and acheivement early in life,

long before they were interviewed. Because this group was younger,

they were closer to the pain and anger of their early family relationships in which they had lost out in a more basic competition

for their parents’ affection. This loss left most of them unable

to attain successful achievement through sustained effort or in

competition with others. Yet marijuana abuse for these youngsters,

as for many college students, clearly served a less achievementoriented, less competitive adaptation.

Many of the adolescents reflected the pattern so much in evidence

in Dave, who was living out the pain of his inability to meet his

mother’s rigid expectations through a withdrawal from competitive

achievement that had begun at quite an early age. Others like Tim

began to give up their aspirations in high school. In Tim’s case,

the use of marijuana as part of his desire to avoid competition was

focused on his high-achieving, domineering older brother Dennis,

whom Tim saw as having taken “the straight road” while he had taken

“the high road.”

As will be discussed in the concluding chapter, the connection between these adolescents’ heavy use of marijuana and competitive

pressures rooted in the family was further illustrated by several

youngsters’ improved adaptation, including a reduction in marijuana

use, which accompanied their own and their parents’ acceptance of

77
their need for a less pressured, less competitive academic environment. Although in such environments these youngsters were

much better able to cope with their difficulties with achievement

and competition, and thus their need for marijuana significantly

diminished, it was clear that their early family experiences had

created problems with which they would be struggling long into

their adult lives.

While marijuana abuse may seem to serve different functions for

these youngsters, they are interrelated. Dave’s use of marijuana,

for example, alleviated the tension of his rage toward his family,

rage that originated in the feeling that he could not please them.

His inability to do so led him to withdraw from competition and

achievement and to attempt to console himself with grandiose fantasies of wonderful things happening to him. Variations of this

interrelationship were present in almost all the youngsters studied.

Overall, marijuana served to strengthen the imperfect defenses

these adolescents used to deal with their experience. While it

appeared to make more tolerable the anger and frustration the

youngsters felt in their relationships with their families, it

did so by encouraging passivity and illusion instead of any effective attempts to improve the situation. For many of the young

women, marijuana seemed to reinforce a kind of masochistic passivity, helping them to feel detached from their anxiety over whether

they could change their situations and permitting them to believe

they did not care what happened to them or whether they got hurt.

The young men often used marijuana to sustain grandiose fantasies

and to alleviate the pain of the awareness that they were wasting

their lives. Both the young men and the young women, through their

marijuana abuse, substituted an imagined, unrealistic gain for

the anxiety-arousing situations in which other young people try to

achieve something real. Marijuana in these young people did not

produce a lack of ambition. Rather, marijuana abuse expressed in

illusory ways the adolescents’ desire for power, achievement, and

control.

REFERENCES

Hendin, H. Marijuana abuse among college students. J Nerv Ment

Dis, 156: 259-270, 1973.

Hendin, H.

1975.

The Age of Sensation. New York: W.W. Norton Co.,

Hendin, H. Psychosocial theory of drug abuse: A psychodynamic

approach. In: Lettieri, D.J., Sayers, M., and Pearson, H.W., eds.

Theories on Drug Abuse: Selected Contemporary Perspectives.

National Institute on Drug Abuse Research Monograph 30. DHHS

Pub. no. (AIM) 80-967. Washington, D.C.: Supt. of Docs., U.S.

Govt. Print. Off., 1980. pp. 195-200.

78
Ill. Psychological Test Results

Chapter 7

An Overview of Psychological

Test Results

Psychological tests offered independent support and confirmation

for much of what was learned through the interviews about the

difficulties of the adolescent marijuana abusers. In this chapter,

the most significant results obtained through these tests are summarized for the 17 abusers as a group. In keeping with the primary

goal of the testing to obtain an assessment of the adolescents’

cognitive functioning and key personality disturbances, this overview is organized into these two broad sections. Because of the

study’s. emphasis on the family as the critical context for understanding the youngsters’ abuse of marijuana, a final section is

included in which the test results pertaining specifically to the

family are briefly discussed.

COGNITIVE FUNCTIONING

The psychological test results supported the impression that these

adolescents would have difficulty with school. Although the tests

were not specifically chosen to detect learning disorders, test

reports frequently raised the possibility of their existence in

these youngsters. This inference was often speculative, since

toxic effects accompanying heavy marijuana use can be difficult

to distinguish from longstanding learning disorders, as reflected

in concentration and attention deficits, word-finding difficulties,

and poor recent memory. Functioning at the bright normal level,

one young man, for example, nevertheless could recall only three

digits backwards on the Digit Span subtest of the Wechsler Adult

Intelligence Scale (WAIS) and showed strikingly poor spelling

ability (e.g., “hight”, “beutiful,” “nessity”). He had a learning

disorder that had been documented at an early age.

Test reports frequently stressed the lacunae in the range of information as reflected in the youngsters’ functioning on the WAIS.

While the individual intelligence quotients (IQ's) were all within

normal limits and seemingly represented a normal distribution of

the general population (full scale IQ’s ranged from 90 to 124),

the Information subtest scores were among the lowest of the WAIS

subscores. Even where this was not the case, there was great

variability in functioning on this subtest, where many of the

adolescents failed easy items while knowing more difficult ones.

For example, the adolescent with the highest full scale IQ [at

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the superior level) showed striking gaps in his factual knowledge.

While knowing the meaning of “ethnology” and who wrote Faust

(questions at the highest level), he guessed that the average

American woman is 5 feet 8 l/2 inches tall, that “Milano” is

the capital of Italy, and that Washington’s birthday is February

14.

Other marijuana abusers had more striking deficits in terms of

their factual knowledge. One girl of average IQ did not know the

number of weeks in the year, or the direction of Panama from

Chicago, and guessed that Brazil is in Europe. One boy (with an

IQ in the high average range) had no idea who Longfellow was and

guessed that the direction of Panama from Chicago is west, while

a girl of similar overall IQ guessed that there are 56 weeks in

the year and that Panama is west from Chicago. Another had no

idea where rubber comes from, could not name four men who have

been president of the United States since 1900, and guessed that

there are 316 weeks in the year and that Brazil is in Africa. It

is to be stressed again that these examples, and others equally

striking, all occurred in the context of overall intellectual

functioning that was at least average or above.

The marijuana abusers’ limitations in the area of factual information are undoubtedly related to their attitudes toward school and

formal learning opportunities. It is not surprising that school

learning would suffer with youngsters who throughout the day may

be stoned on marijuana or other drugs, even if their attitudes

toward school were generally positive.

To view the deficiency in factual knowledge simply as the result

of drug usage, however, is to oversimplify its potential significance. Basic to the assumed significance of this finding is the

awareness that teachers and parents judge a child’s intelligence

by how much he or she knows (that is, by his or her range of

information). Although intelligence is actually a global concept

represented on the WAIS by 11 different subtests, presumably

tapping 11 different but equally important abilities or aspects

of intelligence, it is to accumulated factual knowledge (“information”) that teachers and parents invariably are referring when

making the judgment that a child is “brilliant,” “average,” or

“stupid.” Thus, by being deficient in this particular area, the

marijuana abusers, regardless of their adequate IQ’s, are losing

an important means of demonstrating their acceptability as persons

and of having it confirmed and reconfirmed. It is at adolescence

that intellectualization as a defense generally comes into

prominence, so that its unavailability for the marijuana abuser

means that an important subliminatory channel is absent at a time

when other stresses, quite apart from those of maintaining high

levels of marijuana use, are in the ascendency. The ultimate

effects of this loss on self-image may transcend in importance

any presumed “objective” damage that drug usage may directly

cause.

Since Card 1 on the Thematic Apperception ‘Test (TAT) (“boy-violin”

82
scene) is frequently assumed to elicit stories that reflect

attitudes toward achievement, special attention was paid to the

stories fold to this stimulus. Stories were evaluated specifically

for evidence of the youngster’s presumed attitude towards achieving

competence at the task posed either overtly (playing the violin)

or covertly [sex-role identification) by the picture. At least half

of the marijuana abusers told stories reflecting resistance and

disinterest in achieving the presumed task. Typical of such stories

were the following:

His mother made him learn to play the violin...he dreads it.

So he’s just sitting there looking at it; saying, “Oh, God,

I hate this thing.” (Outcome?) He’ll probably sit there

another four hours without practicing.

His mother said he had to take violin lessons and he said

“I’m not going to,” but his mother said he has to...He

won’t do it and his mother will give up.

A young kid whose mother wants him to play the violin.

She always makes him practice and he doesn’t like to play

the violin. So he tries to think of excuses of why he

shouldn’t play. And then he just refused to play. (Outcome?) His mother will finally give up.

The kid is forced to take violin lessons and he doesn’t

like it at all. Nothing else to say. (Outcome?) Be

mad at his parents or whoever’s making him take lessons.

When he was very young he was forced, well, not forced

but his parents wanted him to play an instrument. He had

no choice ...Now he thinks he shouldn’t play something he

doesn’t want to. And in the future he won’t play it...

He probably played for a while until he’s 15 and then he

won’t play it anymore.

A boy learning to play the violin and the other kids were

a lot better than he was ...He doesn’t want to play it.

That’s it.

His mother forced him to take violin lessons and he can’t

be successful and finally talked his mother into letting

him give it up.

Perhaps most striking in these and other stories are the adolescents’ sense of pressure to conform to parental wishes rather

than to their own aspirations. Of equal importance is their

awareness of their ability to frustrate those parental goals.

KEY PERSONALITY DISTURBANCES

Two significant types of personality disturbances which consistently emerged in the psychological tests given to the 17

marijuana abusers were problems of impulse control and disturbances

83
related to self-concept.

Impulse Control Problems

That these adolescents had serious impulse control problems was

supported by four types of test evidence that frequently led to

inferences about impulsivity, acting-out, and inadequate delaying

defenses:

1. Higher performance IQ’s than verbal IQ’s. As evidence

of their tendency to act out motorically, discharging or

reacting against depression or anxiety by action rather

than by verbal means, 12 of the 17 adolescents showed a

performance IQ approximately equal to or greater than their

verbal IQ. In this respect they failed to show the inhibition of action that frequently accompanies psychological impairment or distress.

2. High Pd (psychopathic deviate) scores on the Minnesota

Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). Of the 14

youngsters who completed the MMPI, 13 received one of

their three highest scale scores on the psychopathic

deviate scale, and 8 of the adolescents had this scale as

their highest score. High scores on this scale are

interpreted as reflecting negativism toward authority

and unconventionality of behavior, often thought to reflect character problems not easily altered by psychotherapy.

3. Emphasis on color-dominated Rorschach responses.

Almost all the marijuana abusers showed a large number

of color-dominated responses on the Rorschach which are

suggestive of affect-driven responsivity. In most cases

such responses were not counterbalanced by a significant

number of human movement responses (suggestive of mature

fantasy that might serve to delay or inhibit action) or

by significant form-dominated perceptions (suggestive

of controlled responsivity).

4. Absence of intellectuality as a defense. As was

discussed earlier in relation to the generally low Information subtest scores received by most of the youngsters

on the WAIS, they did not give evidence to any significant

extent of either intellectuality or other obsessivecompulsive defenses, which might serve to inhibit or delay

motoric action.

From such psychological test evidence, the overall impression of

the marijuana abusers was that of an action-oriented group, not

prone to inhibit or delay responses, and as a result likely to be

in conflict with others, whether peers or family.

84
Disturbances Related to Self-Concept

Consistent with the view that the marijuana abusers were actionoriented individuals whose difficulties were acted out on the

environment, few expressed much discrepancy between their actual

self-concept and their ideal self-concept. When asked on the

psychological questionnaire the nature or cause of their problems

and what they felt would help them get over these difficulties,

the youngsters reported little about themselves they wanted to

change or be changed. In spite of their often serious difficulties with law enforcement agencies, school, and the family,

they usually reported that they had no problems or that the

solution to their problems was as simple as “freedom,” “moving

away,” “leaving home,” “finding a job,” “moving in with a boyfriend,” “getting hypnotized,” “losing weight,” and so on.

Both the causes of and the solution to their problems were almost

invariably viewed as something outside themselves. Regardless of

whatever problems marijuana was causing, many frankly said they

did not want to change this practice. In this regard, psychological reports stressed the probable difficulty in engaging the

youngsters in psychotherapy or any change process, since they

seemed to have little motivation for personality change, and saw

their psychological difficulties, if any, as generally caused by

external factors. For example, to such sentence stems on the

Sentence Completion Test (SCT) as “He (she) often wished he (she)

could...,” “Most of all I want...,”

he (she) needed...,

and “More than anything else

stems presumably tapping dominant drives, the

youngsters’ verbalized wishes generally involved possessions (“a

cigarette,” “a car,” "a minibike," "a horse,") or intangibles

(“love, ” “freedom,” “flying away”). Desire for “friends,” “boyfriends,” and “girlfriends” was also indicated frequently. These

responses, however, never appeared in the context of any expressed

desire to change much about themselves -- fulfillment generally

meant or was dependent upon someone or something outside the self.

Tests reflecting more unconscious self-attitudes or underlying

difficulties (particularly the evidence from the Rorschach test)

suggested several reasons for the marijuana abusers’ being much

less complacent about themselves than they actually were willing

or able to report consciously. For example, in contrast to their

functioning on the WAIS, where cues for appropriate action are

clearly indicated and where all the youngsters functioned at the

average to superior levels, they all showed moderate to serious

personality disturbance on the Rorschach, a test that offers little

structure and that forces the subject to rely more on internal cues

for making an appropriate response.

Five kinds of Rorschach test evidence supported the impression

that the adolescents had more difficulties than their conscious

reports revealed:

1. Fabulized combination (fab comb) responses. Rorschach

responses scored fab comb are instances in which disparate

85

354-187 0 - 81 - 7
aspects of the blots are integrated in an unusual way,

either contrary to usually perceived reality or inappropriate as to size relationships. Such responses

presumably reflect a struggle to integrate disparate

aspects of the self-concept and are consistent with

inferred identity conflicts or identity diffusion.

Examples of such responses which were given by 12 of

the 17 youngsters, include:

“A rabbit with green hair”

“A spider with a butterfly on his stomach”

“A lady with a mustache with some kind of bat sitting

on her head”

“A little person with wings”

“Flying monkey”

“A monster wearing a bowtie on his back”

“A body with lungs”

“Something sitting on a tree...mouse or something.. .

mountain, not a tree”

“A robot. . . it has branches, and can see its heart...

heart and bowtie, too”

2. Responses conveying a sense of damage or derogation,

whether of the self or of others. Examples of such responses which were given by 11 of the 17 adolescents,

include:

“Looks like a clown”

"A crab that’s been torn apart”

“Some sort of little people”

“Some kind of monster...eyes pushed in”

“Two heads ...like necks are connecting together...old

man with big nose”

“A deformed person looking out from some bushes”

“A negro... got hit in the mouth...very stoned”

“A cat squashed by a mack truck”

“Bug. . . squashed”

“Something with three legs, doesn’t look human”

“A beetle . . .he’s bleeding”

“Looks like a little midget”

3. Human responses including sexual characteristics of

both sexes, or responses in which symetrical figures are

viewed as being of opposite sexes. Such responses are

suggestive of confused sexual identification, Examples

of such responses, given by 3 of the 17 youngsters include:

“Two people, man and woman”

“Small boy and a girl”

“Two people facing each other, one male and one female”

4. Absence of the usually perceived “popular” human

percepts, suggestive of defective empathic linkages and

difficulty in identifying with other humans. Eight of

the 17 adolescents failed to produce the usually seen

human percepts.

86
5. Unusual emphasis on disjointed body parts without

sufficient emphasis on whole-detail responses, suggestive

of unusual anxiety about the body. Examples of such

records, given by 3 or the 17 marijuana abusers include:

Record 1

“Someone’s nose. . . end of it, nostrils”

“Two eyes”

“Nose of a raccoon”

“Fingers sticking out”

Record 2

“Collar bone”

‘Two hands”

‘Vagina”

“Feet”

“Penis”

“Some kind of anatomy”

Record 3

"Skeleton . . . just the head”

“Brain”

“Two legs”

"Two breasts”

“Two hands”

‘Two feet”

All of the marijuana abusers showed a deficiency in at least one

of these five areas, with 15 showing a deficiency in at least two,

and 4 of these 15 showing a deficiency in three or more of the

areas. The contrast between the relatively adequate functioning

of the adolescents in the structured tasks posed by the WAIS and

these evidences of thought and perceptual difficulties in the unstructured tasks posed by the Rorschach test is similar to that

reported for the borderline personality organization (Carr 1979;

Singer 1977). Regardless of clinical label, however, the impression from test evidence is that all of these youngsters had

moderate to serious personality disturbances.

Test Results Pertaining to the Family

Evidence from psychological tests most directly related to parental

figures were the responses to the self-report background questionnaire (Carr 1972) on which each youngster was asked to “Describe

the kind of person your mother is and your relation to her,” and

“Describe the kind of person your father is and your relation to

him.” When each description was classified in terms of whether

the parent was described in positive, ambivalent, or negative

terms, 15 of the 17 adolescents described the relationship with

at least one parent as ambivalent at best. The two youngsters

who presented a positive view of each parent gave extremely

circumscribed descriptions: “She is nice and we have a good

relationship...(father) same as mother.” “A good person, friendly

person. . . (father) works hard, good to people.”

Mothers were generally described in more positive terms than were

fathers. In only one case, a girl, was the description of the

87
mother clearly less positive than that of the father. ‘This

finding is perhaps not unusual with an adolescent population,

since it is the father who generally is the authority figure in

the family, presumed to be responsible for controlling the behavior of the child. Nevertheless, too much should not be made

of these conscious reports, nor should they necessarily be taken

at face value. As reported elsewhere (Carr 1980), evidence

suggests that hostility is often expressed to the safer parental

figure rather than to the more threatening one. The impression

gained from contrasting conscious descriptions of parental figures

with relevant Rorschach imagery is consistent with the finding of

Harris (1948) that a large number of persons who report dreams

presumably reflecting a fear of loss of love and support (a threat

in our culture generally emanating from the mother-figure) more

frequently report conscious hostility to the father. Likewise,

those who report dreams presumably reflecting fear of castration

and bodily harm (a threat generally emanating from the fatherfigure) more frequently report conscious hostility to the mother.

Such evidence dramatizes the limitations of studies that rely

solely on questionnaires and conscious reports without application

of psychodynamic understanding.

On the SCT, most of the marijuana abusers provided completions

about parents which were either openly hostile evaluative statements (Most fathers “are jerks”; when he thought of his mother he

“got sick”), or factual statements assumed to reflect denial (Most

mothers “are women”; My mother “was a female”; My mother “always

cooks dinner”). About the most positive completions provided by

any of the youngsters were comments on the parents’ sense of

justice or fairness (My father always “taught me wrong from right”;

My father always “was fair”). Little consistency appeared among

the various completions of any youngster, however, a finding

stemming at least partly from the fact that SCT items may alternate

between serving as projective test stimuli or direct-response

items. This inconsistency may also relate to shifting, unstable

views by the marijuana abusers of their parents.

Unconscious attitudes can perhaps be assumed to be reflected more

consistently in TAT stories. The “family-farm” scene of the TAT

is often assumed to elicit attitudes about and within the family,

since it depicts figures most often viewed as a family triangle:

mother, father, and daughter. While the older characters were

sometimes described in negative terms, more frequently the stories

told by the adolescents to this card showed little real interaction

or relatedness between the characters, and often depicted the

central female character at an emotional distance from the other

figures or in conflict with their goals. Bleak resolutions were

also frequent in the developed themes. Examples of such stories

were the following:

Looks like the girl’s been going to school, become educated

while the guy still works on the farm. She seems to be disillusioned with the shallowness of their hopes in life and

although she once loved the guy working with the horse, she’ll

88
end up marrying some college guy.

Girl who works on a farm. And her father doesn’t want

her to go to school -- wants her to work on the farm.

Said it was a waste and he needed her to work on the

farm. So she enrolls in school behind his back and then

he finds out and he wouldn’t let her go. So then she --

I don’t know -- she left, went downtown, got married

and went to school.

She lives where people are farming and, well, she wants

to be educated and learn. Don’t think she wants to be

a farmer, the girl with the books. (Outcome?) I don’t

la-low. She’s gonna go to school. I don’t know.

Looks like a young girl going to school and she’s

thinking or something and her parents are working in

the field. Her father is . . . I don’t know what mother

is doing. That’s it.

I’d say a girl returning from school and on way home

passes by this farm run by wife and husband with their

horse. I guess she’s watching them and she goes on her

merry way home.

Girl is on -- by the shadow looks like she’s on way

home from school. And she’s passing a guy working in

the fields and she’s sort of looking at him. Thinking

of what a good worker he is looking over at his wife.

Looks as if she’s pregnant. Kind of saying, “Oh, he’s

married, forget it.” That’s about it. Nothing happened

between him and her.

The one story that most reflected a mutuality of goals within the

family, perhaps significantly, involved a bleak resolution as its

outcome:

Once upon a time a girl named Emma. She lived on a

farm with her mother and brother. Every springtime

they would have to plant the fields. But this time

they planted too early. Her mother, brother, and her

were very hungry because they didn’t have any’ crops

to sell.

Thus in their unconscious attitudes, as well as in their directly

expressed feelings and their behavior, the marijuana-abusing

adolescents evidenced considerable distance, ambivalence, anger,

and, at times, helplessness, in their relationships within the

family. Additional insight into this finding is provided in the

following chapter through a comparison of the psychological test

results of five pairs of abusers and their siblings.

89
REFERENCES

Carr, A.. A self-report questionnaire. J Personal Assess, 36:

525-533, 1972.

Carr, A.C. Psychological testing of personality. In: Kaplan,

H.I., Freedman, A.M., and Sadock, B.J., eds. Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry. 3rd Edition, Volume 1. Baltimore, MD:

Williams and Wilkins, 1980. pp. 940-965.

Carr, A.C., Goldstein, E.G., Hunt, H.F., and Kernberg, O.F.

Psychological tests and borderline patients. J Personal Assess,

43: 582-590, 1979.

Singer, M.T. The borderline diagnosis and psychological tests.

In: Hartocallis, P., ed., Borderline Personality Disorders.

New York: International Universities Press, 1977.

90
Chapter 8

Psychological Contrast of

Marijuana Abusers and Their

Siblings

When the psychological test findings of the marijuana-abusing

adolescents were compared with those of their siblings, interesting

similarities and differences were found. Brief summaries of these

comparisons are presented for the five pairs of youngsters described

in Chapter 4.

Clara and Vanessa D

On psychological testing, both Clara and Vanessa were functioning

at the average level of intelligence, with IQ’s as indicated:

Clara (Marijuana Abuser) Vanessa

Verbal IQ 93 Vernal IQ 99

Performance IQ 92 Performance IQ 112

Full Scale IQ 92 Full Scale IQ 105

Although both girls said they wanted to go to college, neither

one seemed to rely on intellectualization as a defense nor to

profit sufficiently from new learning experiences. For example,

the Information subtest for each showed glaring limitations of

factual knowledge, as each missed such easy items as the number

of weeks in a year, and the direction of Chicago to Panama. In

view of Clara’s limitations, her aspirations appeared somewhat

grandiose. For example, on the SCT stem “She felt she couldn’t

succeed unless...," Clara added, “she went to colledge (sic).”

Responding to TAT Card 2 (“family-farm scene”), she said, “This

chick belongs to a hard-working family that works in the farm and

everything. And she’s a writer and she’s very successful, but

she hasn’t published any of her books yet. And she just finished

writing a book. And that’s it.” To TAT Card 8BM (“boy-operation

scene”) she replied, “This guy is daydreaming about being a famous

surgeon. That’s it.” Neither TAT story revealed any explicit or

implicit awareness of the effort and work necessary to achieve the

aspirations indicated.

Clara directly reported the resentment and anger she felt toward

her mother and father, describing her mother on the self-report

questionnaire as “immature” and her father as “stupid.” Her chip91
on-the-shoulder attitude appeared to camouflage deep-rooted needs

for nurturance.

Vanessa presented herself in her questionnaire responses as the

“good” girl, describing her mother as "very considerate" and her

father as “hard-working and considerate of others.” She gave

evidence of being much more overtly dependent than Clara. Her

conscious anger was directed toward Clara whom she saw as the

cause of her problems. To a question asking about her present

psychological problems, she stated, “My present psychological

problem is my sister.” This suggested that Clara may be the

target for anger and resentment that Vanessa was unable to express

toward her parents. Vanessa was more depressed than was apparent

in her behavior, reflected in such Rorschach responses as “a

weeping willow,” “a mummy’s tomb,” and “a sunset.”

Clara saw “freedom!” as the solution to all of her own problems;

Vanessa saw the solution to her problems as having Clara sent to

a boarding school. The insight of both girls thus appeared poor,

and Clara, in particular, gave little evidence of any motivation

for personality change, wanting only to be free to do as she

wanted.

On the Rorschach test, both girls showed sufficient evidence of

thought disturbance to suggest borderline features with actingout tendencies. Both girls also gave responses of people or

animals engaged in “arguing” and “fighting." Test responses

indicated that Vanessa probably experienced greater guilt and

feelings of inferiority than did Clara. Vanessa’s capacity for

withdrawal (inferred from such Rorschach responses as “a mouse

going into a hole in the wall,” “entrance to a building,”

“tunnel,” and “entrance into a library”) suggested that, while

Clara presently presented the greater behavior problems in the

view of her parents and community, Vanessa may have actually been

more disturbed and more likely to have difficulties in future

adjustment.

Tim and Dennis H

On psychological testing, Tim was functioning at the bright normal

level of intelligence, while Dennis was functioning at the superior

level. IQ’s were as indicated below:

Tim (Marijuana Abuser) Dennis

Verbal IQ 112 Verbal IQ 124

Performance IQ 113 Performance IQ 128

Full Scale IQ 113 Full Scale IQ 128

Tim was a pleasant! albeit anxious, subject to test. He gave a

highly idiosyncratic Rorschach record, perseverating the response

“vagina” on every card, sometimes in more than one location. While

seeing “a penis” on a few occasions, the plethora of “vagina”

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responses was interpreted as a reactive defense against fears of

homosexuality, in terms of the possible protest, “You see how

really interested in women I am!” Evidence of a sexual disturbance

was substantiated by his own report on the self-report questionnaire

that, along with drug dependency, his problems included “unsure

sexuality.” The apparent degree of his disturbance revealed on the

Rorschach suggested the possibility of future decompensation unless

pressures on him were relieved.

Neither brother was particularly insightful. Tim felt that getting

hypnotized might help him get over his difficulties, reflecting a

wish for a magical solution to all his problems while he played a

passive role. From Dennis’ own description of himself on the

questionnaire, one would assume that he was a model of adjustment.

His other test results showed a quite different picture. His

testing was scheduled under a time pressure since he was soon

leaving town, having been accepted at a military academy on the

basis of his outstanding recommendations and evidences of achievement. Nevertheless, his Rorschach record had numerous examples of

thought-disordered responses. For example, to Card 1 he gave the

following responses:

“I see an insect looking straight at me...four eyes, sort

slanty evil eyes, looking straight at you.”

“Almost looks like two winged men over here clinging onto

a central thing... almost looks like trying to pull it apart,

separate it.”

“Sort of like an elephant almost...no real trunk or body,

like an armored elephant, wearing armament with spikes.”

His interpretation of the frequently perceived figures on Card III

as having “both male and female qualities,” and his attributing

“sickly” and “undeveloped” qualities to other perceived figures,

were interpreted as reflecting unresolved sexual ambivalence,

confused sexual identification, and body-image difficulties. He

also reported that he worried about sex.

Both Tim and Dennis confirmed the example of borderline personality

organization, since both showed intact functioning on the WAIS in

spite of the primary process or thought-disordered responses

reflected in their Rorschach tests. Dennis appeared to seek and

be more dependent upon structure than did Tim, and thus appeared

much more conforming and conventional. He had an almost perfect

score on the Comprehension subtest of the WAIS, suggestive of

compensatory attempts to rely on social convention and external

structure. Individuals with high scores on this subtest (both

actual and relative to their other scores) tend to be inflexible

and to dichotomize life’s problems into right versus wrong alternatives. Such persons can sometimes be punitive to anyone who

violates their moral code which they precisely define. Al though

this approach to life could work well in a military context, it

also offers the potential for Dennis’ becoming depressed and

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disillusioned when life does not prove to be as simple as he has

structured it to be.

Dave and Fred M

On psychological testing Dave was functioning at the bright normal

level of intelligence, while Fred was functioning at the average

level. IQ’s were as indicated below:

Dave (Marijuana Abuser) Fred

Verbal IQ 118 Verbal IQ 106

Performance IQ 106 Performance IQ 91

Full Scale IQ 115 Full Scale IQ 100

Not only did Dave’s intellectual efficiency seem greater than

that of his brother, but Dave also showed fewer objective test

indices of disturbance than did Fred. It was inferred that Fred

was more competitive for achievement and money than was Dave. such

Rorschach responses as “two people holding up some sort of Stanley

trophy,” “two dogs both trying to smell the same thing,” “two

people trying to hang onto something,” “someone doing a commercial

for shoes,” “ someone at a costume party, in a cape,” and “two

elephants racing to get apples,” project significant exhibitionistic, striving, competitive impulses that operate in Fred to a

degree not found in Dave. These impulses may keep Fred more conforming to family and society standards than Dave, although Fred

may have the more ominous prognosis. The possibility of selfdestructive or suicidal impulses in Fred was suggested by such

Rorschach responses as those he gave to Card IV: “Looks like

someone may have come out of the sea and got covered with seaweed...

like a normal person covered with seaweed”; “Looks like someone

might have been hung or something and now there is all the garbage

or moss over the body. . .been hanging there a long time...I guess

mold. ” Such responses are considered to be highly morbid and

idiosyncratic.

It was inferred that Dave had felt hurt and rejected in his family

and may have been retaliating for this. A significant part of his

self-image was believed to be conveyed in his story to the blank

TAT card: “The Mona Lisa. She’s a woman, She’s a real person in

picture. There for many years. She’s unconscious and can’t express

herself. Can’t move. Can’t talk. Trying to shrink, wrinkle.

Figures if no one can understand she’s a real person, she’s not

going to let anyone enjoy her.” To the SCT stem, “I used to feel I

was being held back by..."

them.”

he added “my parents but then I showed

As to what would help him over his difficulties he indicated first,

“quitting or decreasing pot,” and second, “leaving home on good

terms." He reported his key problem, however, was the way society

judges people.

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Like Dave, Fred showed difficulties with impulse control. While

both brothers showed greater than expected indications of sexual

confusion and feelings of vulnerability about the body, Fred

appeared inordinately reluctant to reveal himself or to admit to

psychological weakness. On the SCT, for example, he described

“my sexual desires” as "none of your business." Rorschach content

also raised the possibility of his being sexually conflicted. Fred

saw himself as not having many problems to speak of (“none of which

are serious enough to analyze”), but in this regard presented

himself as very limited in insight or understanding. It was inferred

that both brothers showed moderate to great psychological disturbance

but that overall Fred appeared the more disturbed.

Eddie and Deborah J

On psychological testing, Eddie was functioning at the average level

of intelligence and Deborah was functioning at the bright normal

level with IQ’s as indicated:

Eddie (Marijuana Abuser) Deborah

Verbal IQ 96 Verbal IQ 117

Performance IQ 97 Performance IQ 117

Full Scale IQ 96 Full Scale IQ 118

Eddie’s performance suggested some indications of a learning disability. His personality functioning appeared to be that of a boy

who wanted his own needs met without expectation of reciprocal involvement with others. Although he evidenced role-playing skills

that could initially help create a favorable impression, his immaturity in social judgment showed through in a way that would

lead others ultimately to reject him, leaving him frustrated and

dejected.

On the Rorschach test, he gave no human responses, although his

sense of inner turmoil and fear of loss of control were believed

to be projected in his response, “a tornado..., looks like its

spinning.” He had a marked sense of inadequacy about his school

grades and on the SCT indicated that his first impulse was to

fight (My first reaction to him was “to beat him up”; While he

was speaking to me I “punched him”). He appeared to be very

sensitive to slight. His father was perceived as possibly getting

vicarious gratification out of Eddie’s acting out. At the very

least, Eddie appeared to have great difficulty making a happy and

mature identification with his father who appeared to be a source

of fear and intimidation to him. This was reflected in his

completing the SCT stem, “Whenever he was with his father he

felt...,” with the word, “scared.” While clearly unhappy, Eddie

gave little evidence of motivation for personality change, rather

expecting others to change.

Deborah showed evidence of passive-aggressive conflicts, with excessive dependency needs that probably kept her aggression in

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check. She appeared very sensitive to embarrassment and to criticism and anticipated rejection from others. She seemed likely to

vacillate between withdrawal and overparticipation. Withdrawal

was possibly reflected in statements suggesting that her greatest

pleasure came from activities she could do by herself. Deborah

seemed to use such strategies as a means of avoiding expression of

aggression. She consciously admitted to getting depressed, being

shy and insecure. Sex and aggression were fused and she gave

evidence of entertaining the wish/fear of being taken forcibly.

Her Rorschach responses suggested that her underlying self-image

fluctuated between devaluation (“a clown’s face”; “baby elephants

on a bell”) and idealization (“ballerinas in a pose”), perceptions

that undoubtedly alternate in relation to others as well. Her

self-acceptance at any time appeared to be very dependent on others’

reactions to her. On the SCT she admitted to worrying about getting

old and to feeling less smart than others gave her credit for being.

Strong narcissistic features were also indicated. Deborah, however,

appeared to be fairly amenable to psychotherapy because of her

present unhappiness.

Bobby and Diane G

On psychological testing, Bobby was functioning at the average level

of intelligence while Diane was functioning at the bright normal

level. IQ’s were as indicated below:

Bobby (Marijuana Abuser) Diane

Verbal IQ

Performance IQ

Full Scale IQ

104 Verbal IQ 110

108 Performance IQ 112

106 Full Scale IQ 112

Bobby showed many deficits consistent with a severe learning

disability or a hyperkinetic syndrome: his overall functioning

was most uneven, he misspelled simple words by leaving out letters,

he wrote letters backwards, and showed a very short attention span.

On the WAIS he could recall only three digits backwards. While his

reality testing was considered to be relatively adequate, he showed

considerable identity diffusion and used primitive defensive

operations. The character of his human responses was of quasihuman

“spacemen ...with a weird body,” “a monster,” and “space creatures.”

The only solidly human percept was of “a negro.. . just hit in the

mouth with a tennis ball and he’s very, very stoned.” In light

of his revealed preoccupation with his, kinky hair, this response

undoubtedly reflected aspects of his own demeaned, damaged selfconcept.

His view of any authority, as reflected in his SLT completions,

was quite negative: (Taking orders “stinks”; When I met my boss,

I “puked”; People in authority are “bastards”) . Nevertheless, at

some level he recognized that he did not understand his own

behavior and he wished for greater understanding from others as

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well. (More than anything else he needed “someone to understand

him”; People seem to think “I’m weird”). He seemed to cover his

feelings of fear and inadequacy with a facade of bravado, adding

to the SCT stem,

phrase,

"When I feel that others don’t like me, I...,"the

“put on an act.”

While Diane’s functioning was more intact than Bobby’s, she also

showed evidence of using many primitive defenses; idealization and

devaluation were prominent. To areas on the Rorschach test frequently seen as people, Diane gave such associations as “an angel”

and “two monkeys bowling." She had strong oppositional and projective tendencies. She appeared to have a very active fantasy

life that may have qualities of the autistic. For example, on

the Rorschach test she gave the response, “two badgers or moles...

thing in the middle is grabbing one of their paws and pulling.. .

pulling them up ...the badger God, some spirit or something...

maybe these two things died and are going up to their heaven.”

While she smiled at this percept, suggesting she could detach

herself from it, the response nevertheless reflected a serious

defensive failure. She seemed to experience significant fears

of loss of control. It was inferred that Diane’s relationship

with her parents was fused with oedipal struggles, which she was

acting out in her relationship with a boyfriend whom she may have

been using as a way of upsetting and getting the attention of her

father. It was concluded that the integrative failures revealed

by Diane’s tests were consistent with borderline personality

organization.

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Chapter 9

Discussion of Psychological

Test Findings

As illustrated by the five pairs of youngsters discussed in the

previous chapter, the psychological tests provided evidence of

a significant degree of psychopathology among both the marijuana

abusers and their siblings. In the case of the abusers, these

tests results were quite consistent with the diagnosis one would

be inclined to make on the basis of the material obtained through

the unstructured interviews. The patterns evidenced in the clinical data gathered from these youngsters as a group -- their

identity disturbances; their intense, unstable relationships;

their impulsivity and unpredictability; their inappropriate or

intense anger; their physically self-damaging acts; their affective instability; their chronic feelings of emptiness or boredom;

their underachievement in school and work; and their problems

with being alone -- support a diagnosis of most of the marijuana

abusers as borderline personalities (Gunderson and Kolb 1978;

Perry and Klerman 1980). The psychological test results for

this group likewise point in this direction.

Regarding the siblings of the marijuana abusers, however, a

rather wide discrepancy emerged between the view derived from

the interview material and that suggested by the psychological

test findings. With very few exceptions, the siblings appeared

on the basis of their verbal behavior and general functioning

within the interview situation to be relatively free of significant psychopathology. This is not to say there was no clinical

evidence of serious problems with the siblings; clearly, the

family pathology and the insecurity it generated had in basic

ways affected the siblings as well as the marijuana abusers.

In their patterns of relatively high achievement, as well as in

their lack of impulsiveness, self-destructiveness, and emotional

lability, however, the large majority of the siblings did not

show evidence of borderline pathology.

In contrast, the psychological tests showed this group of youngsters as having no consistent differences in integrative functioning from their marijuana-abusing brothers or sisters. In particular, idiosyncratic and morbid responses to unstructured stimuli

in the tests were as characteristic of the nondrug-abusing siblings as they were of the marijuana abusers.

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This finding held quite consistently across all 11 sibling-abuser

pairs, which, in addition to those cases already described in some

detail, included a marijuana-abusing young man whose delinquency

ultimately put him in jail and his happily married older brother

who was a successful young accountant; and a highly unstable young

female abuser who was involved with a delinquent young man who

mistreated her and her sister who was both happily married and

showing signs of becoming a success in her career.

The psychological tests indicated that the differences in behavior

and achievement between the marijuana abusers and their nondrugabusing siblings were not a function of significant differences

in intellectual endowment or general cognitive functioning. When

each marijuana-abusing subject was compared with his or her sibling

for the 11 pairs in which both youngsters was tested, four were

found to have IQ’s slightly higher than those of their siblings,

six had slightly lower IQ’s, and one was found to have an IQ

identical to that of the sibling.

Further, a comparison of the individual subtest scores for each

of the 11 pairs showed no significant pattern in favor of either

group, except for the Information subtest, on which 10 of the

marijuana abusers did less well than their siblings. The presumed

significance of deficits in accumulated factual knowledge measured

by this subtest has already been discussed in Chapter 7. As indicated in this discussion, it was not considered surprising that

this facet of intelligence would suffer in youngsters who were

often stoned on marijuana throughout the day.

These findings, indicating quite similar intellectual profiles

and equal degrees of disturbance existing in both marijuana-abusing and nondrug-abusing siblings, indicate that family pathology

affects the “adjusted” sibling much more than appears evident on

the surf ace. At the same time, the considerable discrepancies

in behavior between the two groups suggest that one’s ability to

cope with pathology may be more significant than the pathology

itself in determining the outcome for the youngster. Perhaps

most importantly, differences in the abusers’ and siblings’ ability

even to deal with the family itself were clearly determined by

family dynamics.

One interesting example of the way in which family roles and expectations created quite different coping capacities in the marijuana

abusers and their siblings was seen in the case of the H’s where

the entire family considered Tim to be much more intellectually

gifted than his older brother Dennis. On the WAIS, however, Tim’s

full scale IQ score of 113 was 15 points lower than the 128 obtained by his brother Dennis. Even if these scores are adjusted

somewhat to account for Tim’s possibly reduced performance as

a result of his heavy marijuana smoking, they clearly do not

support the longstanding family view. Dennis’ and his parents’

acceptance of his “lesser” ability resulted in a situation of

reduced pressure and expectation within the family, as well as

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highly favorable responses to his considerable achievement. For

Tim, however, this distortion created inappropriately high expectations and a situation in which he was almost guaranteed to fail

in his parents’ eyes no matter what he did. The outcome for both

boys, outside as well as within the family, had far greater significance than any actual differences in ability between them.

The nondrug abusers had generally learned how to get at least a

minimal amount of gratification and support from their relationships with their parents. It is significant that on the selfreport questionnaire they expressed affection for at least one

and often both of their parents, while anger if not outright

hatred for one or both parents was most typically expressed by

the marijuana abusers. In addition, the nondrug-abusing siblings

appeared to have accepted parental goals and values and learned

that compliance at home, at school, and at work had some builtin rewards.

At the same time that they tried to fulfill their parents’ aspirations, however, they had been deeply affected by their parents’

tension and insecurity, and undoubtedly much of this came to light

in their psychological test responses. Although they were conscious of wishing to avoid the conflicts they saw as deriving

from the defiance of their marijuana-abusing brother or sister,

they most often indicated conscious or unconscious guilt about

the unfair treatment afforded them in comparison to their siblings. Moreover, recognizing that the differences between themselves and their siblings were not as great as they appeared, they

seemed to sense that the approval they received from their parents

was conditional, fragile, and worst of all, based on parental

misperceptions of who they really were. Again, such emotional

conflicts and fears clearly had taken a toll on the nondrugabusing group in terms of their psychological well-being.

One final point which should be made is that the psychological

tests indicated that both the marijuana abusers and the nondrug

abusers had comparable difficulties in dealing with unstructured

situations. The interview material, however, suggested that the

nondrug-abusing siblings, in contrast to the marijuana abusers,

knew how to avoid putting themselves in such situations. Indeed,

their avoidance of drug abuse itself was partially related to

their desire for maintaining control and structure in their lives.

If they felt forced to suppress feelings of anxiety or resentment, they seemed to feel that this was not too great a price

to pay for the sense of order and predictability this afforded

them, and which appeared to bring them a considerable measure

of success.

REFERENCES

Gunderson, J., and Kolb, J.E. Discriminating features of borderline patients. Am J Psychiatry, 135: 792-796, 1978.

Perry, J.D., and Klerman, G.L. Clinical features of the borderline personality disorder. Am J Psychiatry, 137: 165-173, 1980.

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IV. Conclusion

Chapter 10

Summary of Findings

This research began with the broad goal of understanding marijuana

abuse among white, middle and working class, high-school-aged

adolescents, by viewing this behavior within the psychodynamic

context of the family. Particular attention was paid to exploring,

through unstructured interviews, what in the adolescent’s adaptation and interaction with his or her family contributed to the

marijuana abuse, and to identifying, through both the interviews

and psychological tests, the functions which marijuana plays

in the adolescent’s overall psychosocial adaptation. The 17

marijuana-abusing adolescents and their families who participated

in the study provided clear and consistent evidence that family

psychodynamics contribute to these youngsters’ abuse of marijuana

and work to shape the specific meaning such abuse has for each of

them. In this chapter, these dynamics are summarized in terms of

several key topics which have been illuminated by the findings

of the study.

FAMILY PATTERNS CONTRIBUTlNG TO ADOLESCENT MARIJUANA ABUSE

A primary focus of this research was on understanding the ways in

which the family had operated early in the lives of these marijuana-abusing youngsters to give them the worst rather than the

best of what their parents had to offer. In some cases this

occurred because the youngster was born after the family’s emotional

reserves had been drained by prior children. In such families, the

overall tensions as well as the individual problems intensified

with each succeeding child. In other families, the marijuanaabusing youngster had long been seen as mirroring the parents’

limitations, anxieties, and insecurities, while his or her sibling

was regarded as having the parents’ best characteristics. Each

child tended to be treated accordingly.

In some families the parents’ exaggerated and rigid expectations

of a favored child, and their subsequent disappointment in that

child, resulted in a shift in their affections to another of the

siblings. Among other families, parental difficulties caused

problems for a particular child when he or she was quite young

and even though the parents had resolved these difficulties the

child’s troubles persisted.

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Among some of the families, the marijuana-abusing adolescent had

been cast in the role of the “difficult” child almost from the

time of birth; in others such typing was made later. By whatever route, each of the youngsters who ended up as a marijuana

abuser had been labelled within the family as “troublesome” or

“bad,” while the brother or sister was considered “good.” Such a

split between siblings did not result from the one youngster’s

marijuana abuse. Rather, it invariably preceded and was an

essential contributor to this behavior. The nondrug-abusing

siblings, in siding with their parents against the marijuanaabusing child, contributed to the abuser’s sense of ostracism

from the family; they also formed a negative identification with

the “problem” child which served to protect them from becoming

drug abusers.

THE FUNCTIONS OF MARIJUANA ABUSE FOR ADOLESCENTS

Marijuana was seen to have a variety of functions for adolescents:

as a defiant or provocative act directed against parents, in

particular, and, by extension, to other authority figures; as

a self-destructive act; as a modifier of disturbing emotions such

as anger; as a reenforcer of fantasies of effortless, grandiose

success; and as a help in withdrawing from conflicts concerning

competition and achievement.

Psychodynamic exploration made possible an understanding of the

relationship of the internal feelings of the marijuana abusers to

both their external behavior and its effects on their families.

For example, Eddie, the young man who dreamed that while high he

accidentally killed his mother and who fantasized shooting his

entire family and then dying in a gun battle with the police,

psychologically fulfilled both wishes with marijuana. Through

his heavy smoking over the past several years? he destroyed the

life of his family while destroying his own life as well. Eddie’s

dream and fantasy life made clear the function of marijuana as a

link between his destructive and self-destructive behavior, and

the origins of this behavior in his relationship with his family.

In all of its functions, marijuana served to detach these adolescents from the problems of the real world -- from their anger

and unhappiness with their parents, and from the need to work and

compete to achieve success. In so doing, it permitted some to

appear casual or light-hearted while inside they felt miserable.

Fantasies of being destined for a special fate, to become rich,

and to excel at a sport they scarcely played were typical of the

parody of success, achievement, and confidence marijuana sustained

in some of the young men. The young female marijuana abusers,

while not usually expecting particular greatness, nevertheless

maintained a magical belief that good things would happen to them:

college acceptance while flunking out of high school or happiness

in love while dating unresponsive or abusive young men, For all

these adolescents marijuana helped sustain, in an unrealistic

way and with self-destructive effects, the desire for power,

control, achievement, and emotional fullness.

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Although marijuana abuse was found to span a spectrum of

meanings for the individuals involved, all of its functions were

related in the abusers’ attempts to deal with longstanding

feelings of being deprived of approval or acceptance within their

families . The abusers’ belief that nothing they could do would

make them loved members of their families served to produce or

intensify a retreat from competitive achievement, and to turn

them toward means of passive consolation in which grandiose dreams

of love or success could be sustained.

PSYCHOLOGICAL DISTURBANCE

The psychological test results independently offered support for

many of the observations and conclusions which were derived from

the psychodynamic interviews with the adolescent marijuana abusers.

Particularly confirmed were conclusions regarding probable school

and learning difficulties of the adolescents in spite of their

adequate intellectual endowments, as well as difficulties with

their families and friends arising from problems with impulse

control and their feelings about themselves. Psychological reports on all the marijuana abusers stressed the integrative

failures apparent in their personality make-up, as reflected

particularly on the Rorschach test, which approximated those

which have been posited for borderline personality organization.

These test results were not surprising in view of the impulsivity,

self-damaging behavior, affective instability, and underachievement

in school and work revealed in the clinical interviews.

More surprisingly, however, the psychological tests in almost all

cases showed equal and sometimes greater disturbance in the

nondrug-abusing siblings. Although the siblings gave evidence that

the disturbances in their families that had affected their marijuana-abusing siblings had also caused problems for them, they

were significantly different from their brothers and sisters in

their patterns of relatively high achievement, as well as in

their lack of impulsiveness, self-destructiveness. and emotional

lability. As a result, the nondrug abusers were better able to

meet parental and societal standards.

The psychological tests consistently indicated that both the

marijuana abusers and their nondrug-abusing siblings had comparable

difficulty in dealing with unstructured situations. The interview

material, however, suggested that the nondrug abusers knew how to

avoid putting themselves in such situations; their avoidance of

drugs was partly related to their desire to maintain control and

structure in their lives. The ability to find, create, and

operate in structured situations, whether at school or in personal

relationships, was an important attribute these siblings had developed in their families and were able to use outside the family

as well.

The psychological test results clearly indicated that marijuana

abuse cannot be accounted for or explained simply as a manifestation of psychopathology or psychological disturbance. At

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the same time, the fact that each of the marijuana abusers showed

such psychopathology confirmed past research findings that

psychological variables are significantly correlated with heavy

marijuana abuse in adolescents. An important contribution of

this study is that it provided an understanding of the family

context out of which was generated both the youngsters’ psychological problems and their marijuana abuse. Relatedly, through

the comparisons afforded between the marijuana-abusing adolescents

and their nondrug-abusing siblings, the study provided considerable

evidence that the youngsters’ overt expression of their psychopathology -- whether in the form of destructive acting-out behavior, withdrawal, or rigid conformity to the standards of

others -- could be accounted for only by the family psychodynamics

which permitted, directed, and maintained the way the marijuana

abusers and their siblings behaved.

OUTCOMES OF MARIJUANA ABUSE

The fact that family psychodynamics operate as such a clear

determinant of adolescent marijuana abuse raises important issues

not only in terms of understanding this behavior, but also for

treating it and, perhaps most importantly, for preventing its

occurrence. Although these issues are beyond the scope of this

particular monograph, it should be noted that ongoing follow-up

of the marijuana-abusing adolescents who participated in this

study has indicated considerable variation in the outcomes for

these youngsters as they have grown older. Of the six adolescents whose cases have been discussed in detail, one has

almost entirely stopped using marijuana and another has significantly reduced his level of use during the two years since the

research interviews with them were completed. A third youngster

has maintained a fairly high level of use, but with improved

behavior particularly at school, while the remaining three are

smoking as much or more as they did before. These figures

closely represent those found among the total sample of 17 adolescents studied.

Bobby G is an example of the first group of youngsters. After

years of problems with school work, Bobby was finally diagnosed

as having a longstanding learning disorder and placement in a

nonconventional educational environment was recommended. This

information appeared to bring considerable relief to his parents

of the guilt they had long felt over Bobby’s repeated failures, and

enabled them to view their son’s behavior as something other than

merely defiance or rebellion against them. They enrolled Bobby

in a special school for youngsters with learning problems, where

he was able to perform adequately. His behavior within the family

improved considerably and his marijuana smoking dropped dramatically. Following his graduation he enlisted in the service and

when he was last seen, he reported that he was happy and smoking

marijuana only very infrequently. Bobby’s case demonstrates that

even for so-called "burn-outs," marijuana abuse is not inevitably

a one-way street.

106
Clara D. was also able to greatly reduce her marijuana smoking

when her parents accepted that she could not meet their academic

expectations or keep up with the pace her sister Vanessa had set

in school. Clara also enrolled in an alternative school with a

heavy emphasis on practical experience rather than formal academics,

and, as was the case with Bobby, this resulted in a significant

improvement in her feelings about herself.

These two cases as well as several others in the study demonstrate

the relationship of marijuana to the youngsters’ conflict over

performance and achievement. Both Clara and Bobby experienced

in their new school environments the relaxation they had previously

sought through marijuana, which reduced their need for the drug.

Even more critical in these cases, however, was the parents’

response to their youngsters’ changing adaptation. Both the

B’s and the D’s were able to accept their children with the

reduced expectations that accompanied their transfer to the

nontraditional school, and as a result, both youngsters showed

significant improvement in their family relationships.

Tim H, a youngster who has maintained his high level of marijuana

use over the past several years, provides an interesting contrast

to the cases of Bobby and Clara. Tim also transferred to a nontraditional school following his failure to complete his senior

year at his public school. Although he managed to graduate from

this school, and is currently planning to enroll in a local state

college, his family relationships have not shown similar improvement and his marijuana smoking has remained high. The essential

difference in this case is the fact that Tim’s parents have not

altered their expectations of him and continue to make him aware

of their disappointment in his inability to perform at the level

of their expectations.

This pattern was seen in an even more dramatic form with Dave M

and Eddie J, both of whom continue to be regarded by their families

as failures. At the age of 21, Dave, one of the brightest

youngsters seen, is driving a cab irregularly, living on and

off with several different friends, finding little satisfaction

in personal and social relations, and centering his life around

obtaining and smoking marijuana. Although he maintains sporadic

contact with his parents, their interaction has not changed and

Dave’s current life seems merely to reenforce their view that he

will never amount to anything.

Eddie, at the age of 17, has returned to live with his family,

having completed his 18-month period in the residential treatment

center he was sent to because of his difficulties at home and

in school. Although fear of being sent away again has curbed

Eddie somewhat in his behavior toward his parents, his academic

and disciplinary problems at school continue unabated as does

his abuse of both marijuana and alcohol.

Finally, Angela A also seems to have become fixed in a seriously

self-destructive pattern involving a high level of marijuana and

107
alcohol abuse. Now 17 years old, she is still functioning at

school and in her part-time job, but she despairs of achieving

in any other way the sense of stability she had in her family

when she was young, and her longterm prognosis does not seem

good.

One encouraging finding which emerged somewhat serendipitously

from the research was the fact that many of these youngsters and

their families responded quite well to the therapeutic interventions accompanying their participation in the study. It

seems unlikely that, without such intervention, either Bobby’s

or Clara’s parents would have been able to accept their child’s

academic transitions, or that Tim would have successfully completed high school. This is not to say that all the youngsters

or their families were amenable to treatment; in Dave’s, Eddie’s

and Angela’s cases, they were not. It does indicate, however,

that effective treatment strategies can be developed based on a

comprehensive understanding of the overall family dynamics.

These relatively positive outcomes notwithstanding, both the

clinical interview material and the psychological test results

obtained in this study unequivocally indicate the seriousness

of marijuana abuse among adolescents. Although the findings of

this research cannot be extrapolated to casual, occasional

users of marijuana, those adolescents who use the drug at the

level of the 17 youngsters seen clearly constitute a subgroup

worthy of societal concern.

In its most severe and unabating form, marijuana abuse continues,

with devastating intrapsychic and interpersonal effects, for

young people like Dave and Eddie. Even for those who are no

longer marijuana abusers and are now functioning relatively

well, marijuana abuse was part of their effort to scale down their

aspirations markedly. Many of the adolescents seen in this study

were once excellent students who began heavy use of marijuana

as a means of withdrawing from the demands and pressures of

school. In every case where this was seen, school pressures were

intolerably linked with parental demands and expectations which

these youngsters’ family experiences made them feel determined and

entitled not to meet. Such youngsters often appear to be steadfastly holding onto their right not to succeed and pursuing this

pseudo-goal in their behavior toward school and work, as well as in

their relationships. Whether they will continue to function at

a level significantly below their potential as they move into

adulthood is an issue we are addressing in a current study of

adult marijuana abusers, which includes continuing follow-up of

the adolescent sample studied in this project.

108
AUTHORS

Herbert Hendin, M.D.

Director, Center for Psychosocial Studies

VA Medical Center, Montrose, N.Y.

Professor of Psychiatry, New York Medical College

Ann Pollinger, Ph. D.

Research Methodologist. Center for Psychosocial Studies,

VA Medical Center, Montrose, N.Y.

Associate Research Professor of Psychiatry, New York Medical

College

Richard Ulman, Ph.D.

Research Associate. Center for Psychosocial Studies. VA Medical

Center, Montrose, N.Y.

Assistant Research Professor of Psychiatry, New York Medical

College

Arthur Carr, Ph.D.

Professor of Clinical Psychology in Psychiatry, Cornell University

Medical Center

Consultant in Clinical Psychology, Center for Psychosocial Studies,

VA Medical Center, Montrose, N.Y.

109
monograph series

While limited supplies last, single copies of the monographs may

be obtained free of charge from the National Clearinghouse for

Drug Abuse Information (NCDAI). Please contact NCDAI also for

information about availability of coming issues and other

publications of the National Institute on Drug Abuse relevant to

drug abuse research.

Additional copies may be purchased from the U.S. Government

Printing Office (GPO) and/or the National Technical Information

Service (NTIS) as indicated. NTIS prices are for paper copy.

Microfiche copies, at $3.50, are also available from NTIS.

Prices from either source are subject to change.

Addresses are:

NCDAI

National Clearinghouse for Drug Abuse Information

Room 1OA-53

5600 Fishers Lane

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GPO

Superintendent of Documents

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1 FINDINGS OF DRUG ABUSE RESEARCH.

Vol. 1: GPO out of stock

Vol. 2: GPO out of stock

NTIS

National Technical Information

Service

U.S. Department of Commerce

Springfield, Virginia 22161

Not available from NCDAI.

NTIS PB #272 867/AS $27.50

NTIS PB #272 868/AS $27.50

2 OPERATIONAL DEFINITIONS IN SOCIO-BEHAVIORAL DRUG USE RESEARCH

1975. Jack Elinson, Ph.D., and David Nurco, Ph.D., eds. Not

available from NCDAI.

GPO out of stock NTIS PB #246 338/AS $14

3 AMINERGIC HYPOTHESES OF BEHAVIOR: REALITY OR CLICHE? Bruce J.

Bernard, Ph.D., ed.

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4 NARCOTIC ANTAGONISTS: THE SEARCH FOR LONG-ACTING PREPARATIONS.

Robert Willette, Ph.D., ed.

GPO Stock #017-024-00488-O $1.10 NTIS PB #247 096/AS $6.50

5 YOUNG MEN AND DRUGS: A NATIONWIDE SURVEY. John A. O'Donnell,

Ph.D., et al. Not available from NCDAI.

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6 EFFECTS OF LABELING THE "DRUG ABUSER": AN INQUIRY. Jay R.

Williams, Ph.D.

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7 CANNABINOID ASSAYS IN HUMANS. Robert Willette, Ph.D., ed.

GPO Stock #017-024-00510-O $1.95 NTIS PB #251 905/AS $12.50

8 Rx: 3x/WEEK LAAM - ALTERNATIVE TO METHADONE. Jack Elaine, M.D.,

and Pierre Renault, M.D., eds.

Not available from GPO NTIS PB #253 763/AS $12.50

9 NARCOTIC ANTAGONISTS: NALTREXONE PROGRESS REPORT. Demetrios

Julius, M.D., and Pierre Renault, M.D., eds.

GPO Stock #017-024-00521-5 $2.55 NTIS PB #255 833/AS $15.50

10 EPIDEMIOLOGY OF DRUG ABUSE: CURRENT ISSUES. Louise G. Richards,

Ph.D., and Louise B. Blevens, eds. Examines methodological issues

in surveys and data collection. Not available from NCDAI.

GPO Stock #017-024-00571-1 $2.60 NTIS PB #266 691/AS $20

11 DRUGS AND DRIVING. Robert Willette, Ph.D., ed. Reviews

research on effects of drugs on psychomotor performance, focusing

on measures of impairment by different drugs at various levels.

Not available from NCDAI.

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12 PSYCHODYNAMICS OF DRUG DEPENDENCE. Jack D. Blaine, M.D., and

Demetrios A. Julius, M.D., eds. Theoretical and clinical papers

concerned with the intrapsychic determinants of drug addiction.

GPO Stock #017-024-00642-4 $2.75 NTIS PB #276 084/AS $15.50

13 COCAINE: 1977. Robert C. Petersen, Ph.D., and Richard C.

Stillman, M.D., eds. Reports the extent and limits of current

knowledge about cocaine, its use and misuse.

GPO Stock #017-024-00592-4 $3 NTIS PB #269 175/AS $17

14 MARIHUANA RESEARCH FINDINGS: 1976. Robert C. Petersen, Ph.D.,

ed. Technical papers on which the 6th Marihuana and Health report

to Congress was based.

GPO Stock #017-024-00622-O $3 NTIS PB #271 279/AS $20

15 REVIEW OF INHALANTS: EUPHORIA TO DYSFUNCTION. Charles Wm.

Sharp, Ph.D., and Mary Lee Brehm, Ph.D., eds. Review of inhalant

abuse, including an extensive bibliography.

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111
16 THE EPIDEMIOLOGY OF HEROIN AND OTHER NARCOTICS. Joan Dunne

Rittenhouse, Ph.D., ed. Task Force report on research

technologies and implications for studying heroin-narcotic use.

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17 RESEARCH ON SMOKING BEHAVIOR. Murray E. Jarvik, M.D., Ph.D.,

et al., eds. Includes epidemiology, etiology, consequences of

use, and approaches to behavioral change. From a NIDA-supported

UCLA conference.

GPO Stock #017-024-00694-7 $4.50 NTIS PB #276 353/AS $27.50

18 BEHAVIORAL TOLERANCE: RESEARCH AND TREATMENT IMPLICATIONS.

Norman A. Krasnegor, Ph.D., ed. Theoretical and empirical studies

of nonpharmacologic factors in development of drug tolerance.

GPO Stock #017-024-00699-8 $2.75 NTIS PB #276 337/AS $14

19 THE INTERNATIONAL CHALLENGE OF DRUG ABUSE. Robert C. Petersen,

Ph.D., ed. Papers from the VI World Congress of Psychiatry which

deal with drug issues of particular interest worldwide.

GPO Stock #017-024-00822-2 $4.50 NTIS PB #293 807/AS $26

20 SELF-ADMINISTRATION OF ABUSED SUBSTANCES: METHODS FOR STUDY.

Norman A. Krasnegor, Ph.D., ed. Techniques used to study basic

processes underlying abuse of drugs, ethanol, food, and tobacco.

GPO Stock #017-024-00794-3 $3.75 NTIS PB #288 471/AS $20

21 PHENCYCLIDINE (PCP) ABUSE: AN APPRAISAL. Robert C. Petersen,

Ph.D., and Richard C. Stillman, M.D., eds. Pioneering volume for

clinicians and researchers assessing what is known about the

problem of PCP abuse.

GPO Stock #017-024-00785-4 $4.25 NTIS PB #288 472/AS $23

22 QUASAR: QUANTITATIVE STRUCTURE ACTIVITY RELATIONSHIPS OF

ANALGESICS, NARCOTIC ANTAGONISTS, AND HALLUCINOGENS. Gene

Barnett, Ph.D.; Milan Trsic, Ph.D.; and Robert Willette, Ph.D.;

eds. Reports from an interdisciplinary conference on the

molecular nature of drug-receptor interactions. Not available

from NCDAI.

GPO Stock #017-024-00786-2 $5.25 NTIS PB #292 265/AS $33.50

23 CIGARETTE SMOKING AS A DEPENDENCE PROCESS. Norman A.

Krasnegor, Ph.D., ed. Discusses factors involved in the onset,

maintenance, and cessation of the cigarette smoking habit.

Includes an agenda for future research.

GPO Stock #017-024-00895-8 $4.50 NTIS PB #297 721/AS $17

24 SYNTHETIC ESTIMATES FOR SMALL AREAS: STATISTICAL WORKSHOP

PAPERS AND DISCUSSION. Joseph Steinberg, ed. Papers from a workshop cosponsored by NIDA and the National Center for Health Statistics on a class of statistical approaches that yield needed

estimates of data for States and local areas. Not available from

NCDAI.

GPO Stock #017-024-00911-3 $5 NTIS PB #299 009/AS $21.50

112
25 BEHAVIORAL ANALYSIS AND TREATMENT OF SUBSTANCE ABUSE. Norman

A. Krasnegor, Ph.D., ed. Papers present commonalities and

implications for treatment of dependency on drugs, ethanol, food,

and tobacco.

GPO Stock #017-024-00939-3 $4.50 NTIS PB #80-112428 $20

26 THE BEHAVIORAL ASPECTS OF SMOKING. Norman A. Krasnegor, Ph.D.,

ed. Reprint of the behavioral section of the 1979 Report of the

Surgeon General on Smoking and Health; introduction by editor.

GPO Stock #017-024-00947-4 $4.25 NTIS PB #80-118755 $15.50

27 PROBLEMS OF DRUG DEPENDENCE, 1979: PROCEEDINGS OF THE 41ST

ANNUAL SCIENTIFIC MEETING, THE COMMITTEE ON PROBLEMS OF DRUG

DEPENDENCE, INC. Louis S. Harris, Ph.D., ed. Not available from

NCDAI.

GPO Stock #017-024-00981-4 $8 NTIS PB #80-175482 $35

28 NARCOTIC ANTAGONISTS: NALTREXONE PHARMACOCHEMISTRY AND

SUSTAINED-RELEASE PREPARATIONS. Robert Willette, Ph.D., and

Gene Barnett, Ph.D., eds. Papers report research on sustainedrelease and long-acting devices for use with the narcotic antagonist naltrexone.

GPO Stock #017-024-01081-2 $6.00 NTIS PB #81-238875 $21.50

29 DRUG ABUSE DEATHS IN NINE CITIES: A SURVEY REPORT. Louis A.

Gottschalk, M.D., et al. Epidemiologic study providing data on

drug-involved deaths and procedures for their investigations.

Not available from NCDAI.

GPO Stock #017-024-00982-2 $4.25 NTIS PB #80-178882 $15.50

30 THEORIES ON DRUG ABUSE: SELECTED CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES.

Dan J. Lettieri, Ph.D.; Mollie Sayers; and Helen Wallenstein

Pearson, eds. Volume presents summaries of the major contemporary theories of drug abuse by each of 43 leading theorists.

GPO Stock #017-024-00997-1 $8.50 Not available from NTIS

31 MARIJUANA RESEARCH FINDINGS: 1980. Robert C. Petersen, Ph.D.,

ed. The text of the 8th Marijuana and Health report to Congress

and the background scientific papers on which this summary report

was based.

GPO Stock #017-024-01010-3 $5 NTIS PB #80-215171 $18.50

32 GC/MS ASSAYS FOR ABUSED DRUGS IN BODY FLUIDS. Rodger L. Foltz,

Ph.D.; Allison F. Fentiman, Jr., Ph.D.; and Ruth B. Foltz. A

collection of methods for the quantitative analysis of several

important drugs of abuse by the technique of gas chromatographymass spectrometry.

GPO Stock #017-024-01015-4 $5 NTIS PB #81-133246 $17

34 PROBLEMS OF DRUG DEPENDENCE, 1980: PROCEEDINGS OF THE 42ND

ANNUAL SCIENTIFIC MEETING, THE COMMITTEE ON PROBLEMS OF DRUG

DEPENDENCE, INC. Louis S. Harris, Ph.D., ed. Comprehensive

assemblage of ongoing research on drug abuse, addiction, and new

compounds.

GPO Stock #017-024-01061-8 $7 NTIS PB #81-194847 $32

113
35 DEMOGRAPHIC TRENDS AND DRUG ABUSE, 1980-1995. Louise G.

Richards, Ph.D., ed. Estimates of probable extent and nature of

nonmedical drug-use, 1980-1995, based on age structure and other

characteristics of U.S. population.

GPO Stock #017-024-01087-1 $4

36 NEW APPROACHES TO TREATMENT OF CHRONIC PAIN: A REVIEW OF MULTIDISCIPLINARY PAIN CLINICS AND PAIN CENTERS. Lorenz K.Y, Ng, M.D.,

ed. A sharing of ideas among active practitioners in the treatment of pain.

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114

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