80 Percent of Nashville Jewish Youth Reported Involved in Drug Usage

A Nashville Reform rabbi has asserted that as many as 80 percent of Jewish young people here “have had some personal experience with drug usage,” from a “single experimental sampling to regular usage, from marijuana to LSD.” The figure was given by Rabbi Randall M. Falk in an editorial in the current issue of The Observer, the Jewish weekly in Nashville. He reported that the figures had been “corroborated by some of the young people themselves.” He described as “one of the most hopeful signs, in an otherwise distressing and disturbing situation,” recent evidence that “Nashville Jewry seems ready to come face to face with the reality of drug usage among the junior and senior high school and the college young people within our city.” Among the steps he urged the adult community to consider in reacting to the problem was a recognition “that this widespread use of drugs by our Jewish young people is symptomatic of even more serious underlying problems.”

Rabbi Falk said it was possible that the Jewish young drug users were “shouting, in the most dramatic way they know how, that they are deeply troubled” by “contradictory sets of values by the inconsistency and the hypocrisy of relationships between the generations, by the violence and corruption in their environment.” He added that whatever the Jewish drug users “are trying to tell us needs to be heard and needs to be considered thoughtfully and sensitively by parents, educators, physicians and by the young people themselves.” For all concerned be declared facing the problems of drug usage in the Nashville Jewish community, “as an integral part of the larger community’s problem, and to deal with it on the most mature and the most meaningful level possible,” is one of the greatest challenges we have yet faced together.