65-73+Eric

During this time period, our country was experiencing many social changes and social issues. Our country was involved in the Vietnam War conflict that many of our young citizens were against and protested our involvement. We had a military draft that all males were included by law. Soldiers that returned home from Vietnam had war trauma and drug problems to overcome. The music scene was changing with many groups addressing the social issues with their lyrics. People gathered together at large college universities to protest this war, such as the shootings at Kent State University in Ohio on May 4, 1970. Youth gangs were a problem in larger cities as well as the acceptance of integration of blacks and whites.

Your assignment is to pick one of these social issues, research it and create a report that tells how it affected our country as a whole and what was done to overcome/correct the issue. This is the same time period that S. E.Hinton wrote the novels "The Outsiders" and "That Was Then, This Is Now". You should see a relationship between the what was going on in our country and the social settings she used in the novels.

The men who were young during the Vietnam War are now in their 40s and 50s. They dealt with drug problems when they where in the war and they still do now. Back then, in the 1960's & 70's, drugs were everywhere and were very easy to get. In reality, the drug habit among U.S. military personnel was "alarmingly increasing," so much so that its occurrence was an agenda item at the 1963 meeting of the American Pharmaceutical Association. Many men were kicked out of the Army for doing and selling drugs.

In the spring of 1971, two members of Congress released an alarming report alleging that 15 percent of U.S. servicemen in Vietnam were addicted to heroin. The military was attempting to cope with the drug problem by combining military discipline with "amnesty." Anyone found using or possessing illicit drugs was subject to court martial and dishonorable discharge from the service.This policy apparently was having little impact, since heroin use had increased dramatically over the next year and a half.

Marijuana was the main drug of choice for most soldiers. Marijuana was present in Vietnam before the arrival of the Americans. Drug laws were not well defined and their enforcement had little priority in the Vietnamese criminal justice system. There was no central Vietnamese drug enforcement agency and no government control over marijuana. The Vietnamese had little control over what the Americans wanted to do.

Drug problems have greatly decreased over the years but they is still plenty of them around. Soldiers from the Vietnam war still to this day deal with the drug problems that they dealtwith back when they were in their 20's. It still is a problem that needs to be dealt with profesionally. These brave veterans deserve to be able to go about there days and not have to worry about drugs. Very good details about this time period. You took a different approach. 9-CP