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Show KATHLEEN NORRIS It's Time That Parents Awaken bodies, then and then only will the death peddlers be done out of their criminal racket. Protect the Young We save the fingers of our babies from matches, from the pink pills with the death head on them. We save them from violent childish rages, from gluttony, from physical and mental uncleanliness, we save their teeth, their skins, we fight laziness and selfishness and dirty fingernails. We study expensive books on the subject of youthful jealousies and fixations. , But only to the extent that they trust us and believe us are our efforts ef-forts successful. Children are all, of course, born with trying personal habits, with no sense of the sacred-ness sacred-ness of truth or of the possessions of others; they snatch, they hate, they spit, they kick, they scream, they lie, they steal. We coax and scold and train them to do better. The example of good parents, the counsel coun-sel of a reasonable father, the serious se-rious warning of an intelligent mother these are all they need to make them regard the filthy business busi-ness of dope-peddling for what it is. The child's protection is at home. But to the young man or woman the moment comes when that protection pro-tection must be transferred to his own soul and mind. If then his tendency is toward weak, childish indulgence in what he has been told is dangerous and injurious, why, the more's the pityl But this matter mat-ter should be strictly up to his parents par-ents primarily, and to himself as he grows into adult life. ANOTHER SCANDAL concerning teen-agers and drug-taking has broken loose in my native city of San Francisco recently, and the fathers and mothers of a certain group of high-school students are in the usual state of amazement and anger. "Why on earth can't the authorities authori-ties protect our children from this fearful thing?" they demand. And then, "How do they get it? Who gets it for them?" Meanwhile, the guilty youngsters, with shamefaced pride, admit that they have been buying and consuming con-suming habit-forming poisons, and the two oldest members of the group, boys of 17, assert with winning win-ning frankness that drug-taking makes the girls more amenable to sexual approaches. All this on our front pages this week. Now I would like to counterpoise two other questions to the two mentioned men-tioned above. I would like to ask, first, what sort of parents are so delinquent that their children haven't been efficiently warned against marihuana and heroin, and second, where do the children get the money for drugs? Drugs are preposterously pre-posterously costly, because of the dangers of illicit peddling; 20 dollars dol-lars do not go far in supplying even one addict. Where do those dollars come from? Great Problem Well, it's a great problem. What If all barriers were removed from the sale of these drugs? I am not advocating this but if such a proposal pro-posal were made to end, once and for all, the smuggling and secrecy, much of the temptation of certain thrill-seeking teen-agers to violate the law would be removed, and it , would certainly startle American parents into a state of mind where ". . . boys of 17 .. they themselves would have to strike at this evil at its very roots. Certain mental conditions and even physical illnesses are remedied by shock, and a proposal of this kind from a serious source would certainly cer-tainly be a shock. The uproar unrestricted drug traffic traf-fic would cause in this nation would make men and women realize that children are children, and they get their morals and their money from their parents. To turn a thousand rattlesnakes loose in a small country coun-try town would be to put every parent par-ent on the alert, and to subject every youngster to a drilling in self-protection self-protection that he never would forget. for-get. And In the same way, when American Amer-ican parents decide that their children chil-dren shall have neither the money nor the inclination to dump lethal poisons Into their clean young |