by Peter Wilkinson

About the author: Peter Wilkinson is a contributing editor of Rolling Stone magazine.

Today, as they have since 1967, young people in San Francisco who get too far into drugs climb unsteadily up the wooden steps of the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinics. On the third floor of 409 Clayton Street, they find a tall, absent-minded fellow blinking behind a pile of medical journals and lab reports—Dr. David Smith, the clinics’ founder.

Evidence of a New Wave of Drug Use

“We’re starting to see another upswing in drug use,” Smith says wearily one recent afternoon. “And another whole new generation is experimenting with hallucinogens.” In the clinic hospital were three adolescents who’d been smoking marijuana compulsively. “They’d become dependent on it in relation...