mmendation is debatable. It is an old adage that people only hear what they want to hear. Many audience members and record buyers wanted to hear that getting stoned was good; it was a means of having their drug usage validated by an authority. Audiences cheered and applauded lyrics that dealt with how good drugs made you feel. On the other hand they booed at words they did not want to hear. Rock concert promoter Bill Graham went onstage at the Woodstock rock festival in 1969 to warn the crowd that there was bad acid going around which should be avoided. The audience just laughed at him (Woodstock).
It is true that "drugs were a matter of course in the life and the songs of rock performers in the late sixties. Heroin remained underground, but marijuana and the newly discovered LSD were a popular idea" (Pavletich 130). Drug users in the audience felt a kinship with the rock performers who were believed to be drug users as well. This promoted a fraternal feeling. It does not seem likely, however, that rock music of the 1960s led to drug use except in the most minimal sense.
In a paper prepared for the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse, 1973, S. J. Feinglass concluded that the "drug lyrics" of popular rock songs were a "scapegoat." Feinglass' study showed that the records which were banned by radio stations in the late 1960s and early 1970s usually had nothing to do with drug use, and many of the songs were actually anti-drugs: "Many other banned recordings were simply descriptive, and clearly distinguished among various kinds of drug-related behavior" (Feinglass 362).
The Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse was created by Co
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