Non-Existent Harvard Group Sends Marijuana to Andover

Postal authorities impounded 800 marijuana cigarettes sent to the students at Phillips Academy in Andover Monday by as unknown person listing a Holyoke Center return address.

A student employee in the Academy's post office uncovered the host when he opened an envelope addressed to his post office box. The school pulled similar envelopes out of other students' mail boxes and notified the police.

All First Class

Inspector Robert G. Hale of the U.S. Postal Service said yesterday that 800 envelopes--all sent first class--had been collected, each containing one cigarette. Phillips Academy has 930 students.

Hale placed the values of the high-grade Acapulco Gold marijuana at $1.50 to $2 a cigarette, with the total values coming to over $1000.

A local dope dealer called Hale's price estimates greatly inflated. He put the value of a single Acapulco Gold cigarette at a maximum of 50 cents.

The envelopes carried a fictitious Cambridge address and were postmarked in Boston on December 3. He declined to be more specific, but explained that a letter sent from Cambridge is always postmarked Boston.

The return address on the envelopes--made by a rubber stamp--was to Harvard Polls, Inc., $14 Holyoke Center, Archie C. Epps dean of students, said yesterday, Dr. Warren E. C. Wacker director of the University Health Services, said yesterday that the room is non-existent but would be located in the area of Stillman Infirmary.

Theodore R. Sizer '59, headmaster of the academy and former dean of the Faculty of Education, said yesterday that the students who received joints "will know what to do with them." They'll either give it back or destroy it," he said.

Sizer added that it was "obscene" that "somebody has that kind of money to spend on a practical joke."

The Andover police will not attempt to retrieve any delivered joints, Donald G. Moores, an Andover police inspector, said yesterday. "A lot of them (the Academy's students) have more than that is their possession he added.

Mailing marijuana is a felony punishable under federal law by four years imprisonment and-or a 830,000 fine.