Jackson’s No-Dope Tirade Goes to School

The chant started meekly, as many of the 2,500 San Diego high school students glanced about furtively, wondering what the Rev. Jesse Jackson was up to. “Please stand and repeat after me,” Jackson implored.

“I am somebody.” The reply, in the wind-whipped amphitheater, was weak and mumbled.

“Respect me.” The response was clear now.

“Protect me.” They shouted.

“Don’t neglect me.” They thundered.

“Down with dope, up with hope.” The cheers and applause rained down.

By the time he was through with his one-hour no-dope, no-booze pep rally, delivered with his revivalist fervor, Jackson had them crying, confessing and repenting. The climax came when Jackson asked those in his young audience who had tried drugs to come forward.

And they did, by the hundreds, backing into the aisles. Jackson watched, then turned behind him, to the guests and friends seated behind the rostrum, and asked them the same thing. “This isn’t about politics . . . this is about life.” They didn’t move.

Jackson, who ran for the presidency in 1984 and who may seek the Democratic nomination in 1988, was at his campaign-style best Tuesday as he talked to the students of Patrick Henry High School, a multiracial school nestled in the middle-class comfort of San Carlos.

His message was really a declaration. “The war of the opiate,” is how he described it later at a press conference. “To be a proponent of freedom . . . we must be sober.”

Jackson is spreading his anti-drug message frequently these days, at schools across the country. Today he will be in Phoenix, the next day in New Mexico. His visit in San Diego was arranged through Bill Shack, owner of a San Diego car dealership and a member of Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, the political organization.

Henry Lawrence, principal at Patrick Henry, said he received a call from Assistant Supt. Albert Cook on Sunday--two years to the day after 63 students were arrested at the school for allegedly selling drugs to an undercover officer posing as a student. Cook told him Jackson was expected in town and that he “wanted to talk about drugs at a large, multiracial school. And we fit the bill.”

About 40% of the students are members of minorities, most of them bused in.

“We’ll take a message on drugs at every opportunity,” said Lawrence, who was elated after Jackson’s presentation. “Drugs are a heavy community problem in every community in the country.”

In a rambling talk to the enraptured students, Jackson touched on his own fatherless upbringing, his experience with a drug-induced “twilight zone,” in which he received pain-killers for a football knee injury that made him so dependent he considered stealing his mother’s jewelry, and how drug and alcohol use among young people has reached “epidemic proportions.”

“Taking drugs is morally wrong. It is ungodly. It is not right. Taking drugs is physically destructive . . . it will kill you,” Jackson said. “Your generation must say ‘no’ to drugs and give life a chance.”

Time and again he had the students on their feet, asking them questions like, “How many of you know someone who is dead because of drugs? How many of you know someone who is in jail because of drugs? How many of you know someone at Patrick Henry who takes drugs?”

At the end of his speech, scores of students crowded around Jackson, posing for photographs and asking for autographs.

“I thought it was great. It was for real and from the heart,” said Chris Sheppard, a 17-year-old senior. Will Jackson’s message really make a difference after this day is past? he was asked. “It will with me,” Sheppard replied. “I saw a few students crying . . . so it got to others too. It makes a difference because no one of that caliber ever came here before.”

At a press conference later, Jackson said he hasn’t decided yet whether he’ll run for the presidency again. The Rainbow Coalition will hold a convention in April in Washington, he said, and he should have a better idea after that.

As for Colorado Sen. Gary Hart, who announced Saturday that he won’t run for reelection, a first step toward a Democratic presidential bid, Jackson said he isn’t impressed with Hart’s call for a new patriotism among Americans.

“Gary Hart protested the Vietnam War . . . it sounds like he has a guilt complex because he didn’t spend enough time in the military,” Jackson said.

“There is no crisis in patriotism. This is a crisis in affordable housing, job development . . . people on fixed income.”

Asked whether he supports sanctions against Libya for its alleged role in harboring terrorists, Jackson sidestepped the question. He said he supports economic sanctions against terrorism, but only if they are applied equally to other nations, such as South Africa, which he accused of waging state terrorism against its black population.

And he cited the CIA-sponsored assassination manuals, which advised opponents to the Sandinista government in Nicaragua how to assassinate government officials, as evidence of U.S.-sponsored terrorism.

“We ought to be consistent,” Jackson said.

As for a recent New York Times poll, which said more blacks now give President Reagan and his policies the higest rating of his Administration, Jackson called the survey “invalid.” Questions that should have been asked, he said, were “Do you approve of Ronald Reagan implying that Dr. (Martin Luther) King was a communist?” and “Do you approve of Ronald Reagan not encouraging renewal of the Voting Rights Act?”

Jackson said Reagan is “at least as mean as Herod and as insensitive as the innkeeper.”