Living the High Life : No longer a youthful rebellion, pot is a lifelong habit for some boomers. Even those with kids and careers.

One day 14 years ago, Zelda put away her youth and her traveling shoes and decided the time had come to settle down. So she dressed in borrowed finery from her mother and headed for a singles bar in Brentwood.

At first, Zelda was unmoved by one guy who offered her a drink and told her right out of the box that he wanted to get married and make babies. There didn’t seem to be anything particularly interesting about him.

Until he offered her a joint.

“I thought, ‘At least we have something in common.’ We were engaged three months later and married six months later,” says Zelda, 44, a Hancock Park homemaker, artist and mother of two. “The fact that he smoked and I smoked was really the main thing in the relationship. I couldn’t have married someone who didn’t smoke because even though it was recreational, it was still my first choice of entertainment.”

Lo these many years later, Zelda and her husband, Chip, 45, (not their real names) are still toasting their union a few times a week with a marijuana cigarette.

“It just puts me out of the everyday humdrum for a brief time,” she says. “And it doesn’t affect me in any way that I can’t deal with anything that comes up.”

The boomers who once brandished pot as a rebellious emblem of their generation have finally inherited the Earth. A mere six years after legal scholar Douglas Ginsburg was forced to drop his U.S. Supreme Court bid after acknowledging he’d smoked marijuana, two admitted pot experimenters occupy the top jobs in the land.

What’s more, they picked a surgeon general, Dr. Joycelyn Elders, who says patients who need pot for medical purposes should be able to get it (marijuana is espoused for treating glaucoma and alleviating nausea in AIDS and cancer patients). And while President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore and others say their interest in pot was minimal and abandoned long ago, many of their contemporaries have continued to puff their way into middle age.

In fact, a federal survey released in June showed that Americans age 35 and older comprised the only group that isn’t thinning its ranks of illegal drug users. According to an annual drug survey conducted by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), those older Americans now make up 23% of illegal drug users, far more than their 10% share in 1979.

And marijuana remains the illicit drug of choice, not just for middle-aged druggies, but the country. Pot is making a comeback in music and fashion, with rap groups like Cypress Hill singing its praises and fellow travelers sporting weed emblems on hats and T-shirts.

More Americans have tried pot than haven’t--a whopping 60%, according to the current edition of Scientific American Medicine. Twenty million Americans regularly smoke marijuana. And 1.9 million people over 34 have used marijuana or hashish in the past month, the SAMHSA survey found.

Indeed, film director Robert Altman, 68, told Time magazine last year that he’d stopped drinking for his health but continued to enjoy the occasional toke. “I do smoke pot. I sit on the front porch like a grandpa and try to enjoy the weather.”

Still, the landscape for those pot smokers has changed since the insouciant ‘60s and ‘70s, when most were initiated into the recreational uses of Cannabis sativa. Many shoulder the midlife responsibilities of work and home, with children nearing the age the parents were when they started smoking grass.

Parents cope in a variety of ways, some turning on their kids in the hope that pot will help bring them together. Some shield their activity, mindful of a few publicized cases of parents who have been turned in to police, primarily by children who have gone through the DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program.

DARE, launched 10 years ago in about 50 L.A. elementary schools, has grown into the country’s most popular drug-education program, offered in a quarter of all grade schools. The federally funded course sends police officers into the classrooms to turn kids off to drugs before they get started.

Critics say some officers go too far by using information that children provide in DARE classes to arrest their parents. Six months ago, an anti-DARE parents’ group in Fort Collins, Colo., pushed through a requirement that students obtain parental permission before they take part in the program.

LAPD Sgt. Hugh Decker, a DARE supervisor, says DARE has not resulted in any arrests of L.A. parents. “Goodness knows we have plenty more to do than worry about what parents are doing as long as they’re not harming their children,” he says.

Chip is in the odd position of being a sixth-grade teacher in the L.A. school district and a pot smoker. Although he’s mum about his leisure activity at school, he says he sometimes challenges the DARE officers’ statements. “When they try to use scare tactics, that if you smoke marijuana, you will automatically do something else, i.e. smoking pot leads to heroin, I ask them, ‘What’s your source?’

“But I have to be very sensitive to the needs of the community, too. Even though I think marijuana should be legalized, for the most part people don’t think it should be, and I have to be sensitive to that.”

Chip started smoking pot in 1969 as an Army officer stationed in San Francisco. His job was handling a pot-sniffing German shepherd. “When I’d find anything, they’d say, ‘Keep it. Use it to train your dog.’

“I had this dresser full of dope that I was authorized to have. I’d take a bunch of stuff to the Fillmore West (rock concert hall). I was the dope guru. I had a coat full of dope and I’d pass it around. That was my awakening.”

Now, with two kids--an 11-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl, both of them DARE students--Chip and Zelda are relatively circumspect about their illegal pastime.

“We have never smoked in front of our kids, ever,” Zelda says. “It’s a totally separate part of our adult life. Especially because of all the training they get at school, we don’t want them to think you can’t listen to a teacher or an officer. So we don’t want to send out mixed messages, that we are right and they are wrong.”

At home, the kids are also discouraged from using any consciousness-altering substance, including alcohol, before they turn 18, Zelda says. But when they become adults, Chip says, he’d like to smoke with them occasionally, as he does with his father.

“I turned my dad on when he was 64,” he says. “There were 100 to 200 people at a party with beer, and this big doobie goes around. My dad tried it and liked it. So after that, when my brothers and I visited home, we’d get high with my dad. We’d go out because my mother didn’t like the smell of smoke.

“Not that I want my kids to be dopers, but I want that experience with the kids. That was one way to bring us closer.”

But marijuana and parenthood can be uneasy partners. A San Luis Obispo mother resigned as president of an elementary school PTA last year after a local newspaper reported her appearance at a rally touting marijuana use--for medicine, industry and leisure.

Christine Peralta, 42, says she told the reporter that “what adults do for recreation in the privacy of their homes is nobody’s business,” but notes that she hasn’t publicly acknowledged smoking pot.

“Emotionally, it was like having a miscarriage,” Peralta says of the community uproar over the incident. “I went through a period of grieving. I had my energy focused and suddenly it was all gone.

“But when I took on the presidency of the PTA, I did not abdicate all other areas of my life. I did not accept that I would not speak out on other issues. . . . We basically deny ourselves our own constitutional freedom of speech out of a very real fear of losing our job and position.”

At a recent party of San Luis Obispo professionals involved in politics, education and the environment, many guests were openly smoking pot because they “like to experience altered states of consciousness, and it happens to be their drug of choice,” she says.

“There was someone from one of our county’s city councils. This person said that for that evening, she had taken off the mantle, if you will, and was obviously just another person at a party.”

Still, it’s a pleasure they indulge only in select company.

“I’m sure it’s risky,” Peralta says. “It’s risky for teachers. It’s risky for anybody in a lot of professions. That’s why it was so unusual that I spoke out. People do fear the loss of their jobs and their position and it’s a real fear, as I found out for myself.”

But when it comes to legal trouble, it’s “very, very unlikely” that middle-aged smokers will get caught in Los Angeles, says LAPD narcotics Detective John Beimer. Unlike most people arrested for possession, middle-aged pot users are likely to smoke in the privacy of their home and to buy through personal contacts.

In New York, they can purchase marijuana at corner markets or avail themselves of pot-delivery services that bring high-grade weed to one’s door as easily as Chinese food. Prices range from $100 for an ounce of low-to-average-grade Mexican marijuana to hundreds for high-grade domestic.

Californians who grow their own have been forced to hide their crops by state and federal laws that allow the seizure of assets--homes, cash, cars and jewelry--acquired through drug sales, Beimer says. Some local growers shield the plants in deep, covered pits and others cultivate plots in national forests such as Cleveland and Angeles.

In the unlikely event someone is snagged for possession of less than an ounce, he or she will get a $100 ticket. California is among 11 states to have decriminalized possession of small amounts during the past 20 years, although Alaska voters recriminalized it in 1990--an initiative that is being challenged in the courts.

It is Jack Herer’s mission in life to see that police worry less about pot smokers. The Van Nuys activist has been battling to legalize marijuana for 20 years, ever since he and his friend, Ed Adair, had a “vision” of the omnipotence of the hemp plant, whose leaves and flowers carry THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), the mind-altering ingredient in marijuana.

“The idea came into our mind that it was the No. 1 plant for paper, for fuel, for protein,” says Herer, 54. “Even though we were stoned, we thought we might be right.”

They started a group called HEMP (Help End Marijuana Prohibition), which embodies one thrust of the pro-marijuana movement since the mid-’80s. HEMP folk campaign daily from a Venice Beach Boardwalk booth to overturn the 1937 outlawing of marijuana. And they’re gearing up to get legalization back on the ballot.

Their bible is Herer’s 1985 manifesto, “The Emperor Wears No Clothes,” which touts uses of the hemp plant beyond the recreational--as paper, fiber, fuel, food and medicine, to crib from the booth display. Herer’s book contains such fun facts as: George Bush bailed out of a burning airplane in World War II in a parachute with cannabis webbing; George Washington and Thomas Jefferson grew cannabis on their plantations; and covered wagons were made with cannabis cloth--in fact, the word canvas stems from the Dutch for cannabis.

But the hemp-as-miracle-plant movement has critics even among some who support legalization for medical uses. “It comes across as, ‘This is the wonder drug that can save the world, the environment, the trees, the fuel supply, it can heal the blind and crippled,’ ” Kevin Zeese, vice president of the Drug Policy Foundation think tank, told the Libertarian-leaning Reason magazine. “It really sounds like a snake-oil salesman, even though there’s a lot of truth to it.”

As for Herer, an abiding hippie who began smoking pot in 1969, he’s finding a mushrooming audience for his missionary work for hemp.

“Now we’re teaching millionaires in Beverly Hills and Bel Air, where I’m invited to dinner several times a week,” he says. “I sit down with the richest, most famous people in show business, and they know this information cold.”

Like Zelda, they persist in their undercover pleasure despite decades of pressure to stop.

“To me, alcohol is poison,” she says. “I drink a glass of wine and I get a headache. And who is to judge what is good and what is not good for you?

“It’s always when you’re doing something not totally within the mainstream, there’s always an edge to it. But it’s a choice of living with that edge.”