Encountering Frances FitzGerald’s new edition of Fire in the Lake brought back all sorts of unpleasant memories: memories of burning buildings set ablaze by student protestors, of burning draft cards, of burning cannabis. For Fire in the Lake was very much the product of an era that idolized not only protest and anti-Americanism, but also the consumption of mind-altering drugs.

There has lately been a renewal of the debate over whether at least one of those drugs, namely marijuana, should be legalized. We do not propose to enter into that debate, exactly, though we would, in a kind of amicus curiae role, like to present the following report from an August number of The New York Times. It comes from a story about a six-month experiment in easing the laws against marijuana in parts of London. People caught smoking marijuana were to be let off with a warning instead of suffering arrest, ...

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