Kid-killers

It wasn’t until I had spent a night at a police station in West Hollywood that the figures I had read on drug addiction among the young in America were translated into human tragedy.

I would have thought that things would be slow at night at a police station. What I found was the tension of a fort under military attack. Three years earlier, I was told, this same precinct had three cars patrolling the streets on weekend nights. Today there are twenty, with forty policemen and detectives on night duty—all the result of the hippie phenomenon and the rise in drug use. And the police are overworked despite a fivefold increase in personnel in three years.

SL

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Suzanne Labin

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It wasn’t until I had spent a night at a police station in West Hollywood that the figures I had read on drug addiction among the young in America were translated into human tragedy.

I would have thought that things would be slow at night at a police station. What I found was the tension of a fort under military attack. Three years earlier, I was told, this same precinct had three cars patrolling the streets on weekend nights. Today there are twenty, with forty policemen and detectives on night duty—all the result of the hippie phenomenon and the rise in drug use. And the police are overworked despite a fivefold increase in personnel in three years.