PREP schools follow the colleges--especially Exeter and Andover, which feed more people into Harvard each year than any other school. Now the slack on the cultural lag has pulled tight for those two schools; and while they glimpse the development of political activism on their campuses, their students are trying out the tragi-comic scene of dropping, blowing, and shooting pot, acid, hash, speed, belladonna, sunflower seeds, airplane glue, freon, Benzedrex Inhaler tubes, Paragoric Pall Malls, Romilar, and Dr. Schein's Asmador Powder.

Exeter first caught one of its students sniffing glue about six or seven years ago. They investigated, called up a Harvard expert and found out it was a dangerous trip. The student was expelled.

Four years ago a housemaster of an Andover dormitory smelled something unusual as he walked upstairs. He then walked into a room where three sophomores were lying around spaced out on some ether they had stolen from the infirmary. All three were put on probation; and each eventually was kicked out, asked to leave (which people can and do say no to), or driven to quit by added restrictions.

For the first time the use of drugs, mostly marijuana, became significantly widespread among students at Exeter and Andover in the last two years. Exeter and Andover are very similar schools started one year apart by a pair of brothers about 200 years ago. They have gratefully less tradition than an institution like Harvard; they pride themselves on turning out lots of people who later turn up in key positions in the American business, educational, and governmental establishment; and they still drastically restrict the activities of their students eight months of the year because that is the system that has worked for them in the past. Andover, at last, seems to be evolving into a program of fairly rapid, if overdue, change. Exeter doesn't seem to be.

The main influence of the emergence of drugs on their prep school scenes is a widened gap in the understanding the faculties and students of the two schools have of each other. The big secret students used to hide from their housemasters was drinking. It meant automatic boot. And there was almost always some of it around especially among the big, non-team-captain type athletes. People would get caught passed out in their rooms over Spring Weekend. A few would get kicked out each year. Dozens would come in on the bus every Saturday to tank up in the rooms of Harvard freshmen. Your usual scene.

But the important qualitative difference about drinking was that alcohol was something you could do in a couple more years and it was something some of the faculty were soaked in most of the time. Drinking is socially expected in the world prep school was aiming for while drugs were for hippies. (Of course if prep school administrators knew what the jocks at Harvard did on Saturday night or peeked into a fraternity party at Amherst, they'd find grass is the new substitute for a hangover.)

DRUGS breed tremendous distrust. At Exeter there's a story going round that a student had his mail opened by the academy who found some grass. He wasn't prosecuted because he couldn't be assumed responsible for what someone sent him.

Exeter first instituted its regulation against drugs and substitute highs with penalty of expulsion in the fall of 1966. It followed an incident in which two students who had eaten some of Dr. Schlein's Asmador Powder were, as one student who heard them, said, "Watching TV on the wall and seeing snakes on the shower floor." A friend brought them over to the infirmary to a doctor on the condiiton that the administration not be told. In a prep school community of about a thousand where everyone talks about everyone else, this was risky. The administration found out and in the room searches that followed, faculty members found a number of Benzedrex Inhaler tubes, that had been chewed, in a student's wastebasket.

That was Exeter's first big bust. Randy Smith, a writer for the student newspaper, The Exonian, tipped off U.P.I. for whom he was a stringer. U.P.I. found out independently that Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach's son was involved in the Benzedrex Inhalers. The deans got angry at Smith because he hadn't checked out the story with them. Next year in an interview for his college application a dean told him to "keep clean."

The biggest bust was this year. And it's the one that hinted to the administration that there is a significant amount of drugs on its campus. In explaining that four people were expelled for use of marijuana in this incident, Exeter's Dean Robert Kessler said, "You never find all those who are doing it."

A boy's room was searched, he said, on the basis of his advisor's report and other unspecified suspicious activities. The searchers found pipes and marijuana seeds and some papers he had written about his experiences. (Students say what they found was his diary.) The papers indicted three others; all four were expelled.

The using of what was said to be the boy's diary caused considerable anger among the students, and precipitated an editorial about it in The Exonian, which hadn't mentioned drugs all year. Dean Kessler said, "A faculty member may search a student's room only when it concerns the regulations of the academy."

Andover, as a matter of policy, doesn't search students' private rooms, explained Dean of Students John Richards in an interview. They have had two incidents involving drugs this year; but in neither case did the school initiate an attempt to discover the users.

Two seniors are said by students to have brought back some marijuana with them at the beginning of the winter term. The two would smoke it in their dormitory room which was lit by colored lights and often filled with the smoke of incense. Most of the dormitory and the rest of the senior class were on to their secret up to the time when they were discovered. One senior said that "hundreds of people, even the flits" were joining them for a smoke. In February one of the two left his laundry bag on a staircase. His housemaster, finding it, brought it up to their room where he discovered them smoking. They were both dismissed.

In April two freshmen bought three tubes of airplane glue in a store downtown. When asked to sign for it, they wrote their real names. The store called up the police that afternoon. The police called the school And their housemaster found them sniffing it when he went upstairs. They were put on probation.