in the early or mid-’80s, when Abbie tried to talk to me about his manic-depressive illness, I wouldn’t listen. I might have been scared, or I simply didn’t know enough about the illness to make sense of what he was telling me. It was as if he were talking about a sport they played in a foreign country, with new rules and an inscrutable score-keeping method. The game might be as exciting as basketball, but that wouldn’t stop my eyes from glazing over. In the same way, I just couldn’t connect to Abbie’s own awareness of his manic-depressive condition.
Then, some years later, I began to understand. Through my experiences with Abbie and with another member of my family, through talking to friends, physicians, and acquaintances, my definition of life expanded to include mental illness as part of it.
As I became more familiar with manic-depressive illness, I gradually came to piece together the nature of Abbie’s personal struggle in the last years of his life. As I did so, two very extraordinary things happened. First, I discovered that Abbie was a classic, textbook-perfect manic-depressive. When I came across checklists of the typical signs or symptoms of manic-depressive illness, I found that Abbie had them all. Second, I began to be able to separate in my own mind the symptoms of his disease from elements of his personality. The symptoms can usually be managed biochemically, with drug treatments. But I had gone to school too late, of course. By now Abbie was gone.
Psychiatrists consider manic depression to be a mood disorder, as distinguished from schizophrenia, which is a thought disorder. Manic depression is also essentially different from unipolar major depression, and generally the treatments that can successfully treat manic depression, such as lithium, are different from the antidepressant medication used to treat major depression, which affects roughly ten times as many people as does manic depression. In fact, response to lithium is one of the indicators that a person is suffering from manic depression.1
The seven symptoms that characterize a manic episode, according to the American Psychiatric Association’s revised Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III-R, 1987), are inflated self-esteem or grandiosity, decreased need for sleep, excessive talkativeness, racing thoughts or ideas, distractibility, increased goal-oriented activity, intense involvement in pleasurable activities which may have a high risk of painful consequences. At least three of the symptoms need to be present for a diagnosis. When Abbie was manic, I think he scored seven out of seven every time.2
But that was only the beginning. Abbie’s was a classic case, but in some ways was also unique. It is typical of a manic-depressive to make boastful, wildly ambitious work plans. But in Abbie’s case, repeatedly, I’d seen him accomplish those plans. It is typical for a manic-depressive to talk for hours on end. But Abbie could do so brilliantly, and he was doing so before crowds numbering in the thousands, and they expected him to do so—and they listened! Calling old friends at any hour of the day or night, regardless of the cost and regardless as well of the inconvenience to the person receiving the call, as Abbie had done repeatedly during the fugitive years, was typical manic behavior, but it was also pure Abbie. Delusions are classic manic-depressive symptoms—the sincere belief that a person has special gifts or skills, or is famous. The problem was that Abbie really had all these qualities. Reading a book on the subject, I came across this sentence: “A [manic-depressive during a manic phase] might believe that [he] is the object of attention and whispers by friends and strangers, or that Dan Rather is sending [him] special messages during his newscast.”3 It reminded me of the time in 1971 when Walter Cronkite had telephoned Abbie out of the blue right in the middle of the evening newscast (which at the time was on delayed broadcast in much of the country).4
When he was depressed, Abbie was also a classic case. Typical symptoms include a loss of interest in people and activities one cares about, and feelings of great sadness and emptiness. When on occasion Abbie expressed such feelings to me, I’d been stumped. Now I began to see them as the signs of a biochemical disturbance that he shared with between one and ten percent of the U.S. population, and which frequently led to suicide attempts.5
So the more I learned about manic-depressive illness after Abbie’s death, the more I felt I was getting to know Abbie all over again—both as a manic-depressive and as someone I began to be able to recognise apart from his disease. But by far the most striking connection I found between Abbie and his illness had to do with self-medication.
Drugs of various types have long been known to trigger manic depression—steroids, for example, can prompt manic depression in athletes who “stack” the drugs. More recently, researchers have hypothesized that cocaine can trigger manic depression. Biologically, cocaine and other drugs can also mimic the mania—bringing about states of euphoria and intense thoughts and feelings that resemble the incredible high that manic-depressives feel during their manic episodes.
It turns out that “dual-diagnosis” patients—those suffering from both mental illness and drug or alcohol abuse—comprise the majority of mental illness patients! But the nature of the connection isn’t necessarily what you might expect. Many of these people are using chemical substances, both consciously and unknowingly, to tame their mental illness. It is in fact true that certain narcotic painkillers, like morphine and heroin, will help calm erratic and violent behavior, and can clear the mind of disorganized and chaotic thought processes. It is also true that stimulants such as cocaine and speed will overcome the fatigue and apathy of depression, and can enhance concentration. Even alcohol can help relieve anxiety and hyperactivity. For a person with manic depression, these effects can be more dramatic and more welcome than for the rest of us. They aren’t using the chemical substances to get high, but rather to be relieved of abnormally low, anxious, or nervous states.6
You could say Abbie had been self-medicating since the early ’60s when he first started experimenting with grass and LSD, and I don’t think Abbie would have contradicted you. Increasingly, I even believe he saw the drug culture as a defense against the widespread, low-grade depression brought on by the meaninglessness and inhumanity of the status quo in contemporary society.
But after he went off lithium in late 1985—he felt he could control his manic symptoms without it, and hated the side effects—and without a psychiatrist he felt he could trust as he had Kline, Abbie began self-medicating more wildly to control his moods. Antidepressants were frequently prescribed for him by various doctors, as were a variety of strong antihistamines, antibiotics and anti-wheezing drugs. He regularly took Ativan, a highly addictive antianxiety medication.
One curious footnote to Abbie’s interaction with Kline had to do with Abbie’s interest in Kline’s earlier experimental work of treating alcoholics with lithium. Abbie felt that Kline had been moving toward a theory of addiction as a symptom of depression. Throughout the ’80s, first with Kline leading the way, and then on his own, Abbie increasingly saw a connection between his own drug use and his mental illness. On the one hand, he had become interested in using drugs as a means of self-medication. And on the other hand, he was willing to consider the possibility that his attraction to drugs was a symptom of his manic depression. And as he pursued both paths of inquiry, these two sides—his increasing dependency and his expanding knowledge—progressively seemed to merge in a kind of macabre dance on the brink of the unknown.7
Nineteen eighty-six was the year Abbie would turn fifty, and confronting his aging reflection in the mirror had become somewhat difficult for him. His hunger for life was as voracious as it had ever been. Yet he needed to slow down and felt a profound need to redefine his public image.
He experienced the usual age-related disturbances, sudden reminders of one’s own mortality in the form of health complaints and worries about the future. But there was little of the stability and comfort one usually expects at his age to help offset the worry. And this brought an unyielding intensity to his complaints.
“What do I do about health insurance, Jack? Who’s going to pay for it?” he would say to me, outraged at the indignity of it all.
He still called me out of the blue and at all hours to start right in about last night’s game: “Ten points! Ten fucking points!” No opener. No etiquette. Just the point spread. And timing. Because there was no time to waste. He still wanted me to believe he’d always be there, a few steps ahead, making sure everything was safe, and so I did. But other things were no longer the same at all.
I’d always felt that Abbie had been self-created: The critic, iconoclast, bad boy, shit-kicker, road warrior he’d been most of his life had sprung full-grown out of his own head. But here that person was changing before my eyes. A humbler, quieter man was emerging, as if to acknowledge that while part of him was indeed self-created, another part was not.
Between the antic performer and the hermit, the street tough and the intellectual, the political scientist and the flower child, the middle-class child and the revolutionary, Abbie, in all his brilliant contradictions, was attempting to face himself. In this way, 1986 was both a high point and a breaking point.
I suggested that he open an IRA account. He surprised me by not being completely against the idea. Then he wavered. In order to convince him, I suggested he think of it as the Irish Republican Army. That worked. Of course he knew it was only a joke, but the imaginary association made the reality go down a little easier.
He saw himself as a middle-aged man facing an unknown future. That’s what he was, but it was never all he was. The danger now, as he focused on that image, was that he might lose sight of the rest—of his enormous and ongoing contribution. The pain of sight now became as great as the joy of sight had been at other times. My brother’s great gift—his vision—was turning mercilessly inward.
The brave and optimistic words he still spoke on the campus lecture circuit and in interviews were for other people now. As a Jew, Abbie had always said you either go for the gelt (the money) or you go for broke. He’d gone for broke. Now, like most of us as we grow older, he found living to be a more complicated proposition than he had ever imagined.
In late March 1986, Abbie and I attended the funeral of Dad’s brother, our uncle Al, in Worcester. Since our uncle was to be buried in the Hoffman family plot, this would mean visiting Dad’s grave too. Abbie and I walked into the Perlman Funeral Parlor, and then into the private room, where ten or fifteen of our relatives were gathered. The last surviving brother, our uncle Sam, came over to us after a moment and, without even saying hello, asked Abbie, “Wasn’t it bad enough that you killed one of my brothers? What are you doing here?”
Abbie didn’t answer, and didn’t move at first either. I took his hand and led him back into the main sanctuary. All that day at the funeral service and burial afterward, Abbie made no mention of Uncle Sam’s outburst, which led me to believe that it had hurt him beyond words.
People like Uncle Sam, in thinking Abbie to be irresponsible or worse, misread him completely. Abbie’s problem was that he felt too great a sense of responsibility for his own actions, even though at times—and particularly during his manic episodes—he could not control them. There was a part of Abbie that judged himself more harshly than his harshest critics. Had Uncle Sam known how, during his depressions, Abbie sat in judgment against his own arrogance and egotism, then Sam probably would not have said those words.
My brother no longer had many friends, not really. He knew so many people, but when you picture him sitting in a phone booth somewhere—he used to call them his private offices, which was very funny considering his thirty-year war with Ma Bell—having to make that one call to a friend, to somebody he could count on, who would know how to interpret the silences at the other end of the line. . . . Well, there just weren’t many numbers. In his moments of greatest need, Abbie had to rely on himself. He had Johanna at his side. He knew he could call me and a few others at all hours and pretty often he did, but as you listened to him ramble on—from sex, to Celtics, to Iran-Contra, then back to basketball—you couldn’t help feeling he was a drowning man, talking to save himself, and all you could do was listen, knowing that wasn’t enough, but he wouldn’t let you do more.
There was in my brother a kind of meta-hunger, a gaping need. Inseparable from his need to see justice in the world, or his need to be famous, to be recognized in his individuality the world over, there was his gargantuan appetite for life. But Abbie was too afraid of letting people down to really lean on them. Once I suggested to him that he had no true friends. The answer he shot back, although posed as a question, sounded final: “Aren’t you my friend?” he asked.
A deeply ingrained sense of respectability in Abbie often made him turn away from confidences. His inner life was so out there, his public life revolved so powerfully around the things that mattered most to him, that in a way Abbie’s most private life was the one he led publicly, and he had no time for another.
His loneliness was one aspect of his life that always has and always will deeply disturb me. He loved and was loved in return. Thousands upon thousands, maybe millions of people felt an important personal connection to him. You could even say that the measure of my brother’s greatness was his ability to befriend so many. He used to say he successfully eluded the FBI for six-and-a-half years only because of the help he received from 35,000 “close friends,” any one of whom could have betrayed him, none of whom did. He inspired loyalty. And more than that, he inspired in those loyal to him a strange and glorious sense of fun and mischief.
Consider Jerry Lefcourt, who acted as Abbie’s attorney through the years and never charged him a penny; or Noah Kimmerling, the accountant who kept the IRS at bay year after year (Abbie always paid his taxes, and paid them on time, even while he was a fugitive!); or Johanna Lawrenson, who shared life on the run with few comforts and substantial hardship and danger; or family members who put up with his exhibitionism, egotism, and notoriety. In sharing parts of his life we were brought inside the ecstasy of it somehow. He took you where you didn’t want to be taken. Then he’d make you pay the cab fare. And in the end, you still felt in your heart that it was where you wanted to be.
On November 24, 1986, Abbie participated in a sit-in at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst to protest CIA recruitment on campus. During the demonstration, some of the protesters, including Abbie, occupied a campus building and were arrested. Abbie was six days shy of his fiftieth birthday. Also arrested that day was Amy Carter, who had come up from Brown University in Providence and crawled in through a window. No one knew in advance that she was coming.
It pleased Abbie to have a president’s daughter on board. And he just plain liked Amy Carter. She had courage, a good sense of humor, and didn’t waste words. She wasn’t shy and she had the same attitude as Abbie, the one that says, “I don’t care if you like me or not, but let’s face it, you like me a lot.” And then too, in his gravitation to Amy’s side, I felt once again, but in a different way, his weariness. He wanted desperately to retire but would never do so unless he felt there were sufficient numbers and, more important, the right people, to carry the Movement forward. And they had to be young. A little more than two years later, and only two months before his death, on February 9, 1989, Abbie would say he could name “10, 15, 20 people from [the ’60s] who are still very active, just in the same way that I am. I don’t feel like I’m the last Japanese warrior in the caves of the Philippines fighting the war. . . . [But] it’s kind of strange not to see yourself replaced.”8 He was on the lookout for members of the next generation who might be able to bring the Movement forward into the twenty-first century.
Abbie in the 1980s had become a little like a country doctor or itinerant rabbi of the Movement, arriving to perform the rituals of democracy as requested of him, in the form of sit-ins and civil disobedience actions. In a decade when the media, especially TV, was notorious for ignoring the real issues affecting people in their everyday lives, Abbie got local issues covered again and again. He didn’t do it with theatrics, but through solid organizing skills and grueling work. But by 1986 he was also beginning to fight for a new sense of himself in the world, something a little more in keeping with his age.
So when he arrived in Amherst on November 24, 1986, to be arrested, it was in some ways just another stop on the road. But in other ways the Amherst action was uncanny. They brought out the dogs that day, and helmets and gas. And for a day it seemed that all that had happened in America since the ’60s was that the scary sophistication of Mayor Daley’s Chicago police force had reached the small town of Amherst.
And then in the buses used by the police to transport the arrested protesters into town for booking, there was another odd note. As the protesters were pressed into the buses, Abbie strode up and down the aisles to make sure morale held. He wanted to come up with some songs of struggle they could sing together. The response was deeply disturbing to him—enough so for him to incorporate it henceforth into his campus speeches as a kind of minor mode, a despairing strain:
“You need music,” he would say by way of introduction, and then:
When we were all arrested at the University of Massachusetts, it was the first time they had brought the police on in seventeen years, with attack dogs, helmets and everything, because civil disobedience has become a very polite sport in the last four or five years. But here they were very seriously beating up people, breaking legs and everything. People were being carted off to jail, handcuffed for hours. I went on the darkened buses and I said, “You folks know any freedom songs or anything?” And they said, “Oh yeah.” They knew every song from “Hair.” They start singing all these songs from “Hair.” And I’m saying, “What the hell are you singing? “Hair” was a Broadway show. It was a rip-off, a fake; they were wearing wigs.” They’re saying, “What’re you talking about, Abbie, it’s a movie, it’s a good movie.” I thought it was kind of sad, because you do have to have your own songs and this was something they didn’t have.9
All Abbie was really discovering was that he had lived long enough to meet yet another generation of college students. The civil disobedience action at the University of Massachusetts represented, for the most part, an overwhelmingly upbeat and promising trend: young people ready to take on some old enemies while welcoming some old friends.
Abbie didn’t stay in Massachusetts for his birthday on November 30. Returning to New Hope with Johanna right after Thanksgiving, he concentrated his energies increasingly on the upcoming trial for the Amherst civil disobedience. He decided that his presentation at this trial would be different. He went out and bought a new Harris tweed jacket, and decided to conduct his defense pro se, acting as his own attorney. He was determined not to be dismissed this time as just a clown.
Abbie had always been willing to take his chances in the courtroom. With the exception of his flight after the drug bust, the law was the democratic institution he trusted most. Not always, or even most of the time—but sometimes—in a courtroom you could buck the odds and get a fair shake. It was a place where justice could triumph.
And he relished the opportunity to go up against the CIA on neutral turf. He believed this was a battle that could be won, using the little known necessity defense, which argued that the trespass against the CIA was required to prevent another, greater crime from being committed against the American people—in this case, that of the CIA’s illegal wars in the Third World.
The trial lasted ten days and was held in Northampton, Massachusetts. As witnesses, the defense called a number of distinguished leftist luminaries, including Howard Zinn, Daniel Ellsberg, and Ramsey Clark, as well as a number of reformed government men, like ex-CIA agent Ralph McGehee, and former contra leader Edgar Chamorro. These witness gave example after example of documented CIA deceptions and crimes. Somehow the CIA seemed outnumbered in that courtroom. The enemy was in disarray, while friends seemed to be everywhere. The DA had prepared his case badly, and the defendants seemed to have the CIA on the run. Media coverage was pretty heavy throughout the trial. For Abbie and me, the difference between the atmosphere in Northampton and the atmosphere in Chicago nineteen years earlier was actually disturbing, since we didn’t know what accounted for it or what it meant. There Abbie had been treated by local working people for the most part as a criminal and traitor. Here, we were local heroes. No lunch spot in town would let us pay for a meal. They each wanted to think of us as their guests. What exactly had changed? we wondered. Had we entered history?
Sitting in the Northhampton courtroom on April 15, 1987, waiting for the jury to return from its deliberations, with Johanna seated on my left and Ma on my right, I felt my old pride in Abbie. For Ma, this moment was reparation for the old injury she had suffered by deferring to Dad’s wish that she not attend the Chicago Conspiracy trial. She thought that her place was in the courtroom, that it was only proper for a mother to share in her son’s fate, be it misfortune or triumph, and she had suffered Dad’s order with deep resentment. Now she held her head high—but I could see how nervous she was—as Abbie began his summation, speaking in a strong and righteous voice about the case, and then, quietly and to my surprise, about Dad:
When I was growing up in Worcester, Massachusetts, my father was very proud of democracy. He often took me to town hall meetings in Clinton, Athol and Hudson. He would say, “See how the people participate, see how they participate in decisions that affect their lives—that’s democracy.” I grew up with the idea that democracy is not something you believe in, or a place you hang your hat, but it’s something you do. You participate. If you stop doing it, democracy crumbles and falls apart. It was very sad to read last month that the New England town hall meetings are dying off, and in a large sense, the spirit of this trial is that grassroots participation in democracy must not die. If matters such as we have been discussing here are left only to be discussed behind closed-door hearings in Washington, then we would cease to have a government of the people.
There was an honesty and decency to my brother at this moment, pacing back and forth in front of the jury in the Harris Tweed jacket and the tie, looking serious as hell:
This trial is about many things, from trespassing to questioning acts by the most powerful agency in the government. And here we are in Hampshire District Court. You have seen the defendants act with dignity and decorum. You have seen our lawyers try hard to defend our position. Witnesses, many of whom occupied high positions of power, have come before you and have told you the CIA often breaks the law, often lies. The prosecutor has worked hard but has not challenged their sincerity. The judge is here, the public, the press. I ask you, Is it we, the defendants, who are operating outside the system? Or does what you have heard about CIA activities in Nicaragua and elsewhere mean it is they that have strayed outside the limits of democracy and law?
I watched my brother and thought how he could have had his pick of lives, but chose this peculiar kind of public service that to him is the most important work in the world. Abbie had plenty of reason to be cynical and suspicious standing in that courtroom. But he chose not to be. He’d decided that he could win this way, playing it very straight. And in his whole life, he may not ever have fully considered that possibility before. It was still revolution for the hell of it. Abbie hadn’t changed his goals one iota, but he’d figured out that you can take the fight to places the enemy thought they owned.
As the members of the jury filed back in—all were over the age of thirty—none looked at the defendants. They had deliberated for less than two hours. In response to the judge’s question, the forelady answered unhesitatingly, “Yes, we have,” and then, “Not guilty.”
All twelve defendants being tried for trespassing, including Abbie, were acquitted of all charges, as were the three defendants, including Amy Carter, who were being tried on charges of disorderly conduct. Abbie was jubilant. Raising his arms in the victory sign, he embraced one of his codefendants and then came over to where we were sitting. He hugged Ma first, then each of us.
There had been no compromise, no meeting halfway. The case had been won within the judicial system, by the rules. Ma was here.
And Northampton was just forty miles from Worcester, where Abbie and I were born. We were on home ground.
Dad really had brought us along to those town hall meetings in Clinton and Athol when we were kids, as Abbie had said in his summation. He really had instilled in us his passion for democracy—for going freely to temple, for tolerance, and voting, which to Dad was sufficient proof, because he’d seen it work at a local level, and because in the old country, as Dad would remind us, Jews had no rights.
At the close of his summation, Abbie quoted Thomas Paine on the subject of freedom, saying, “Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself . . . as the ages and generations which preceded it. Man has no property in man. . . .” I think Dad would have understood that, would have sensed Abbie’s victory at hand and felt an immigrant’s pride in an American son after his own heart, who cherished the very freedoms he himself cherished—and then he would have groaned with pain for all the years they hadn’t seen eye to eye.
Riding home with Ma after the trial, it was thrilling to think about what I had just seen. Instead of Abbie’s lonely isolation, here he was in all his glory. A man who risks his life for things, for his vision of social justice for example, does so out of necessity, because these are things he needs in order to live—in order to create an environment that will be habitable for him. When, rarely, his conditions are met, as they were for Abbie on April 15 in Northampton, there can be joy enough to go around. It wasn’t just Abbie that day, it was all of us. And winning was, as Abbie used to say, “the greatest high of all.”
A few weeks later, in May, Abbie returned to Worcester to receive the key to the city for his work with a community center called Prospect House in the 1960s, and for a gala twenty-fifth anniversary celebration for the center. Dad would never have believed it possible that the key to the city would go to his meshuggener son. Ma came to both ceremonies.
Del-AWARE’S 1983 victory for “Dump the Pump” hadn’t held. PECO had sued, and now, four years later, in the spring of 1987, a judge ruled in favor of the PECO pump. Abbie had by now been arrested three times defending the river, once with america, and he took the defeat very personally. In July 1987 he resigned from Del-AWARE.
That summer Abbie started working with National Student Action (NSA), an attempt to galvanize students nationally through a network of young campus organizers. I was promoting concerts, including one starring our childhood hero Fats Domino. Backstage, I asked Fats to sign one of his promotional photos for my brother. Fats said, “Yeah, I know about Abbie.” Fats had been a fan of the Black Panthers at the time of the Chicago trial and knew my brother as Bobby Seale’s codefendant.
And whenever something good happened to Abbie—like winning the Amherst case, or receiving the key to the city of Worcester—it would get him thinking again about being pardoned. Abbie didn’t like to talk to me directly about it. Since it was something he invested with ultimate meaning, he didn’t like to talk to anyone about it—in the same way that sometimes people of faith don’t like to talk about their God, even to others of the same faith, out of the superstition that speaking of something dilutes it. But he would drop hints. With Dukakis already an unofficial candidate for president, Abbie would turn to me at the mention of Dukakis and ask me if I thought Dukakis and Cuomo were close. He wouldn’t say why he was asking, but I knew why. Since we knew people with access to Dukakis, Abbie was wondering if we could get Dukakis to speak to the New York governor about pardoning him on the drug charges. He was proud to be an outlaw, proud of his more than fifty arrests for political actions, ashamed only of this one criminal offense. Naively, he still expected that those in power could be made to acknowledge that his banishing the CIA from the U. Mass campus, just like attacking the judicial system in Chicago and beating back the Army Corps of Engineers, were acts of community service. And, uncharacteristically humble when it came to this one issue, Abbie was perfectly ready to let a Governor Cuomo or a President Dukakis, voices of mainstream democracy, absolve him of his sins.
After the triumph of the CIA trial, Abbie had returned to New Hope feeling like a weary world-class champion. Four days later, on April 19, 1987, he had finished his introduction to Steal This Urine Test. In the introduction, you can still hear something of the strength and plainspeaking pride of the Northampton summation—Abbie as orator, as leader, Abbie all grown up, finally. Now the subject was the politics of drug testing, but there was a newfound maturity in the arguments he used and the manner in which he expressed them:
Drugs are being scapegoated in an attempt to avoid making badly needed social and economic changes in a disintegrating society. . . . I believe society would be best served by abandoning the reigning turbulence and moving to a calmer plateau from which we could engage in drug education, research, and treatment programs with a decent chance of success. It’s easier to work on solutions without people shouting in your ear.
Without minimizing the problem of drug abuse, our attention should focus on equally serious problems, such as poverty, homelessness, unemployment, and inadequate medical care. I don’t believe we can cope with drug abuse on a meaningful scale until we are willing to tackle these more general and pressing issues.
The central issue of Steal This Urine Test, of course, isn’t drug use but the invasion of privacy represented by corporate and governmental urine testing. Abbie’s argument is that it is wrong to see urine testing as a situation where the goal is a drug-free America with invasion of privacy as a small, necessary accompanying evil. The way Abbie saw it, the goal was the ability to monitor, control, and punish people for what they do on and off the job; getting rid of drugs was just the excuse. Steal This Urine Test may be Abbie’s most credible book. And perhaps partly because it was coauthored by Jonathan Silvers, it is the first book by Abbie Hoffman that isn’t primarily also about Abbie Hoffman, or even exclusively about the counterculture. It holds up a mirror for all Americans—not just fellow citizens of Woodstock Nation.