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    Instructions To Candidates

    Uploaded by

    Eremu Thomas
    The passage discusses the author's history with drug use in the 1960s and 1970s and their current views on drug policy. It begins by explaining that the author stopped using marijuana in the mid-1970s because they grew bored with it, not for moral reasons. The author expresses nostalgia for their drug experiences in the 1960s but also acknowledges that their generation shares some responsibility for normalizing drug culture and the current drug epidemic. The author admits guilt for contributing to drug problems but argues that many other groups also share the blame, including politicians, anti-drug crusaders, the media, and others.

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    Instructions To Candidates

    Uploaded by

    Eremu Thomas
    48 views6 pages
    The passage discusses the author's history with drug use in the 1960s and 1970s and their current views on drug policy. It begins by explaining that the author stopped using marijuana in the mid-1970s because they grew bored with it, not for moral reasons. The author expresses nostalgia for their drug experiences in the 1960s but also acknowledges that their generation shares some responsibility for normalizing drug culture and the current drug epidemic. The author admits guilt for contributing to drug problems but argues that many other groups also share the blame, including politicians, anti-drug crusaders, the media, and others.

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    The passage discusses the author's history with drug use in the 1960s and 1970s and their current views on drug policy. It begins by explaining that the author stopped using marijuana in the mid-1970s because they grew bored with it, not for moral reasons. The author expresses nostalgia for their drug experiences in the 1960s but also acknowledges that their generation shares some responsibility for normalizing drug culture and the current drug epidemic. The author admits guilt for contributing to drug problems but argues that many other groups also share the blame, including politicians, anti-drug crusaders, the media, and others.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    48 views6 pages

    Instructions To Candidates

    Uploaded by

    Eremu Thomas
    The passage discusses the author's history with drug use in the 1960s and 1970s and their current views on drug policy. It begins by explaining that the author stopped using marijuana in the mid-1970s because they grew bored with it, not for moral reasons. The author expresses nostalgia for their drug experiences in the 1960s but also acknowledges that their generation shares some responsibility for normalizing drug culture and the current drug epidemic. The author admits guilt for contributing to drug problems but argues that many other groups also share the blame, including politicians, anti-drug crusaders, the media, and others.

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    SENIOR SIX

    END OF TERM ONE EXAMINATIONS, 2015

    GENERAL PAPER

    S101

    TIME: 2 HOURS 40 MINUTES

    Instructions to Candidates:

    Answer two questions which must be chosen as follows: One question from section A
    and one question from section B.

    All questions carry equal marks.

    SECTION A

    1. Account for the negative attitude towards practical subjects in secondary schools
    in Uganda.
    2. Assess the role of liberalised mass media in your community

    3. To what extent can rural electrification solve Uganda’s environmental problems?

    4. “The University loan scheme is the only hope for Uganda’s University Education”
    Discuss.

    1
    2
    3
    6. Read the passage below and answer the questions that follow:

    For the most part, I stopped smoking marijuana in the mid 1970s because I grew
    bored with ending too many social evenings lying on somebody’s living-room rug,
    staring at the ceiling and savings “Oh wow!”. This renunciation was not a wrenching
    moral decision, but rather an aesthetic rite of passage as my palate began to savour
    California Chardonnay with the aridity I once reserved for Acopulco Gold. Yet as aging
    baby boomer, my attitudes remain emblematic of that hightimes generation that once
    freely used soft drugs and still feels more nostalgic repentant about the experience.

    This permissive mind-set colours my instinctive response to current drug


    problems. The initial breathless media reports of the crack epidemic aroused all my
    journalistic scepticism and I groused that the anti-drug frenzy seemed like Reefer
    Madness revisited. On those infrequent occasions when friends and acquaintances still
    pass around a bootleg joint, my reaction remains benign tolerance. Just a few weeks
    ago, when marijuana made a furtive appearance at my wife’s 20th high school reunion
    in upstate New York, I viewed this throwback gesture as a quant affectation, almost as if
    the class of ’69 had all shown up in tie-dye T-shirts instead of business suits and
    cocktail dressed.

    Many may scorn these confessions as evidence of immaturity, unreliability and


    even moral laxity. But we are all the product of our life experiences, and I, like so many
    of my peers, cannot entirely abandon this Lucy in the sky with Diamonds heritage.
    Normally I only share these slightly outré sentiments with close friends. But such views
    have become a public issue with drug Zar William Bennett’s attacks on my generation’s
    self-indulgence, coupled with George Bush’s prime-time address to the nation on drugs.
    For in identifying those responsible for the cocaine crisis, the President pointedly
    included “everyone who looks the other way”. Am I really a fellow traveller in his
    epidemic of addiction? Do my affectionate, albeit distant, ties to 1960s-style
    permissiveness render me as culpable as Bennett claims? Or is my comfortable,
    middle-class life so far removed from inner-city crack houses and the Colombian drug
    cartel that any allegation of causal nexus represents little more than political motivated
    hyperbole?

    The honest answer, which both surprises me and makes me squirm, is that to
    some degree Bennet and Co. are right. My generation, with its all too facile distinctions
    between soft drugs (marijuana, mild hallucinogens) and hard drugs (heroin and now
    crack), does share responsibility for creating an environment that legitimised and even,
    until recently, lionised the cocaine culture. This wink-and-a-nod acceptance, this implicit
    endorsement of illicit thrills, has been a continuing motif in movies, late-night television
    and rock music. My personal life may rarely intersect with impoverished drug addicts,
    but the entertainment media created in the image of people like me easily transcend
    these barriers of class, race and geography.

    And what should the Woodstock alumni association tell its offspring?
    Conversations with friends, especially those raising teenagers, suggest that adults with

    4
    colourful pharmacological histories face unique problems in following the President’s
    exhortation to “talk to your children about drugs.” For such parents, family-style drug
    education often comes down to awkward choices like lying about their own past,
    feigning a remorse that they do not feel or piously ordering their children to read lips
    rather than re-enact deeds. More subtle message can get lost in the adolescent fog.
    One 17-year-old I know well seems to misinterpret his parents’ preachments about the
    particularly addictive nature of cocaine to mean, choose prudently from the cornucopia
    of other drugs available at your local high school. How much easier the burden must be
    for a parent who can honestly instruct his children, “Don’t tell me about peer pressure.
    Remember. I got through the ‘60s without drugs.”

    Such self-righteousness is inappropriate for those of us with a less sterling record


    of resisting temptation. Thus I stand, a bit belatedly to concede my guilt in contributing
    in a small way to the drug crisis. Maybe the ‘60s were a mistake, maybe I too frequently
    condoned the self-destructive behaviour of others, maybe I was obtuse in not seeing a
    linkage between the marijuana of yesterday and the crack of today. I hope that this
    admission, which does not come easily, will animate my behaviour. But while I am
    willing to shoulder some of the blame on behalf of my generation, I trust that the other
    equally respectable conspirators in America’s two-faced war on drugs will acknowledge
    their own complicity.

    The list, alas, is long. Begin with public officials who have exploited the issue for
    20 years, advocating phony feel-good nostrums like the current fad for drug testing in
    the workplace, as if mid-level bureaucrats were society’s prime offenders Joining the
    politicians in the dock are those anti-drug crusaders who have either squandered
    credibility with exaggerated scare talk or strained credulity with prissy
    pronouncements. The media are culpable as well, for sensationalised coverage that has
    often served to glamourize the menace they are decrying. Then there are the social-
    policy conservations who purport to see no connection between the flagrant neglect of
    the economic problems of the underclass and the current crack epidemic. And sad to
    say, well-intentioned parents can also contribute to the hysteria by viewing drugs as the
    sole cause of their children’s’ problems rather that as a symptom of family-wide crisis.

    For drug use, as Bernnett argues, is indeed a reflection of the nation’s values.
    And as long American society continues to place a higher premium on titillation than
    truth and on callousness than compassion, the latest attack on drugs may prove, like all
    the failed battle plans of the past, to be mostly futile flag waving.

    Questions:

    (a) Suggest a suitable title for the passage.

    (b) What does the author mean by:


    (i) “.... was not a wrenching moral decision”.........
    (ii) “.... nostalgic than repentant about the experience”?

    5
    (c) In not more than 100 words, summarise the problems former drug users face in
    fighting drug use.

    (d) Explain the meaning of the following words and phrases as used in the passage,
    using your own words wherever possible.

    (i) renunciation
    (ii) emblematic
    (iii) furtive appearance
    (iv) moral laxity
    (v) epidemic of addiction
    (vi) culpable
    (vii) adolescent fog
    (viii) belatedly
    (ix) squandered credibility
    (x) futile flag waving

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