Although she has only studied "cultures addicted to betel nut," America's most famous anthropologist shows no hesitation in voicing her opinions at this 1970 symposium on the Social Implication of Drug Abuse. She first describes a country in disarray. Crime is on the rise. Taxi drivers are being "slaughtered." Respectable people go shoplifting for sport. The entire community is becoming corrupt much as it did during Prohibition. The reason? Drugs, which are seen as "wicked," and drug users, who are regarded as "sinners." She calls for addicts not to be stigmatized but seen as "casualties of a badly organized society" and for treatment programs run by young ex-addicts as the Generation Gap has yawned so wide that counseling by elders is useless. Interestingly, she also calls for better pay for the police and complains that they are treated with "contempt." Her speech seems less a political plea than a prophet's dire warning as she paints a picture of a morally corrupt culture in which "people are being lied to."

Mead's talk is followed by a more nuts-and-bolts presentation by Alfred Crisci, from the New York State Attorney General's office. Crisci takes issue with much of Mead's position, claiming that the state does, in fact, treat addiction as a disease. He details the legal process for attempting to detoxify and rehabilitate heroin addicts, pointedly adding that "society is not sleeping." During a contentious question and answer session, the two sides seem to be speaking at cross-purposes, each not hearing the other. Crisci refuses to discuss the criminal aspect of the war on drugs, stating somewhat disingenuously that "it is not a crime in this state to be an addict," only to be caught possessing drugs. Mead and other audience members attempt to place the problem in a larger context.

These talks provide an excellent snapshot of the cultural divide in the late Sixties and early Seventies. The two sides seem to speak completely different languages. Both are well-intentioned, yet neither can find common ground with the other. The problem they describe is real…and extends even to the dueling approaches used in addressing it. Indeed the ostensible subject of this symposium, "drug abuse" seems only the tip of the iceberg.

Margaret Mead (1901-1978) put cultural anthropology on the map. Her groundbreaking study Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) described young Samoan girls' passage from adolescence to adulthood as being far less stressful and damaging than in our supposedly more advanced culture. Her implicit endorsement of non-monogamous sexual relations and her focus on women as being the source of true power within the culture resonated with early movements for women's rights in this country. Mead was not a cloistered academic but a tireless field researcher, popularizer, and (some critics complained) self-promoter. The New York Times in its obituary noted:

The American Museum of Natural History, with which she was associated for most of her professional life, once drew up a list of subjects in which she was "a specialist." The list read: "Education and culture; relationship between character structure and social forms; personality and culture; cultural aspects of problems of nutrition; mental health; family life; ecology; ekistics; transnational relations; national character; cultural change, and cultural building." The museum might well have added "et cetera," for Dr. Mead was not only an anthropologist and ethnologist of the first rank but also something of a national oracle on other subjects ranging from atomic politics to feminism. She took on (and dismissed with disdain) Dr. Edward Teller, the hydrogen bomb advocate, and she was once described as "a general among the foot soldiers of modern feminism." Insofar as anyone can be a polymath, Dr. Mead was widely regarded as one.

As can be heard in this talk, Mead became as famous a social critic as she was an anthropologist, bringing that discipline's methods of analysis to bear on contemporary Western problems. This idea, that so-called "primitive cultures" have something to teach us, was controversial. The website of the Institute for Intercultural Studies recalls: 

She affirmed the possibility of learning from other groups, above all by applying the knowledge she brought back from the field to issues of modern life. Thus, she insisted that human diversity is a resource, not a handicap, that all human beings have the capacity to learn from and teach each other.

After her death, much of Mead's work with the Samoans was challenged. It was claimed her research was faulty and her conclusions invalid. This led to a sharp decline in her posthumous reputation. However, recently this charge has since been refuted. Alice Dreger, writing in The Atlantic, reports:

Paul Shankman, a professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado-Boulder, has for several years been doggedly investigating the smearing of Margaret Mead by the anthropologist Derek Freeman. As Shankman writes in his latest piece, "Freeman's flawed caricature of Mead and her Samoan fieldwork has become conventional wisdom in many circles and, as a result, her reputation has been deeply if not irreparably damaged."… But Shankman's new analysis -- following his excellent 2009 book, The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy -- shows that Freeman manipulated "data" in ways so egregious that it might be time for Freeman's publishers to issue formal retractions.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 151029
Municipal archives id: T7623 - T7627, T7630