Dr. Louis Silverstein was sipping tea in the Columbia College student union, unwinding after his “Education, Culture, and Society” class. “Drugs make people crazy,” said the professor, who bears a slight resemblance to Charles Manson. “Particularly people who don’t have any knowledge of them and don’t use them.”
The 63-year-old soaked up his Brooklyn accent as the second son of eastern European immigrants and the only brother of four to attend college. An adolescent correspondence with Bertrand Russell and an identification with one of his history professors at the City College of New York who had refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee “radicalized” Silverstein and shifted his ambition from accounting to teaching.
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Silverstein also married his fourth and current wife in 1979, and they had a couple of kids. As his children reached adolescence, his enthusiasm for hitting the hay didn’t dampen. Instead he became more outspoken, espousing a harm-reduction approach to drug education in the days of “Just say no.” He figured that kids would use drugs no matter what adults said, and that it was best to teach them responsible use. Additionally, he says, he began to notice a drop in the number of black men in his classes at Columbia and deduced that the drug war was sending them to prison rather than college.
Ganja’s life isn’t all incense and peppermints. On November 11 he observes a fellow traveler in a Bob Marley T-shirt freaking out over a newspaper. “This is crap,” the man shouts. “Where is the real information? Why have trees been made into lies?” The following week Ganja forgives his cold father and the next month bids a tender farewell to his dying brother, both experiences intensified by booting the moocah.
The book appeals to average folks, he says, though many academics hate it–an opinion affirmed by some of his colleagues. “I’ve heard people kind of pooh-pooh it as they don’t see it as being up to the academic or intellectual par of their work,” says Columbia journalism professor and Silverstein admirer Barbara Iverson. “They would say it’s not well written. Personally I think it’s extremely interesting how he’s gotten a lot of publicity for himself. Many of our colleagues should look to that kind of model. That might be something that you laugh at him for now, but in a few years it’s going to be the entrepreneurial professors selling their ideas, and God bless him, Louis was there and saw the potential.”
Alas, times have in fact changed. “Things were not being enforced like they are now,” he says. “You didn’t have the drug-war intensity as you do now. I didn’t have children. We’re in a much more monitored situation.”
