Drugs Are Really Enticing - Chapter 1

When I was a kid, I swore up and down that I would never do drugs or drink alcohol. I was raised to think they were evil, addictive substances that would ruin your life. I didn't know anything about them, but I knew they were bad. Life went on this way until the 5th grade, when the D.A.R.E.(Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program came to my school. For those of you who may not be familiar with the program, it involves a police office coming to your school and telling you everything you can imagine about drugs. It was like learning any other course. The officer came in a couple times a week for an hour or so, and devoted the course to a particular subject. Stimulants, Depressants, Hallucinogens, Addiction, you name it, they taught it. I loved every bit of it. At the end of the course, we all had to write an essay on how D.A.R.E. helped us. Whoever wrote the best essay got to read it in front of the whole school, kids' parents, other D.A.R.E. officers, and whoever else attends those kinds of things. Well, yours truly won the essay contest. I still have my D.A.R.E. bear around somewhere.

The problem with all of this is, while I knew I was supposed to be learning the dangers of drug abuse, what I really learned was that I really wanted to try some of these drugs. Putting drugs under an umbrella category and calling them bad is easy. But when you start describing the effects of LSD, I'm sorry, but it's hard to see how any 11 year could not think that it sounds like fun. I remember them giving us a warning that if any stranger gives you a 'stamp' with a funny pattern on it, don't eat it. It could be laced with LSD. Well, I felt a bit jilted, as no stranger had ever offered me a tab of blotter.

Getting drugs as a fifth grader is not an easy task. I had to wait two whole years before my first experiment with drugs. My friend's all went over to this kid that lived down the street's house, and he had some pot and a aluminum can. I took one drag and pretended that I was high as a kite. I don't think I really felt anything from it, though. I didn't get another chance to smoke pot until the last day of eighth grade. A girl in my class was selling joints for her brother for five bucks a pop. I bought one off of her, figuring it would be a good day to celebrate getting out of middle school. Well, me and my neighbor John snuck out into the woods after school and smoked that fucker, but neither of us got high off of it. I think I got robbed. This whole drug thing wasn't as cool as I thought it would be, so far.

Two weeks later, John and I were at his dad's house, and we went upstairs for some reason or another(we had been told the upstairs was off limits). We both smelled smoke, and as John's dad didn't smoke cigarettes, we had to investigate. On his dad's dresser laid a smoldering roach in an ashtray. If we hadn't smoked that shitty joint that fateful last day of middle school, we might have been more naive about what we were looking at. We started rifling through his room looking for his stash. And in the last drawer we opened, we hit paydirt. Serious paydirt. 8 or 9 ziplock bags full to the brim of cannabis sativa. It was like every Christmas I'd ever had packed into one spectacular moment. We took a bag, thinking his dad would never notice, and fashioned a pipe out of a can like I had used before. That night, we smoked ourselves retarded. We walked for hours, laughing hysterically at anything and everything. We stole mail out of peoples mailboxes. I threw a car battery at someones fucking house. Nothing was going to stop us. Things went on like this for weeks. When our supply ran out, we'd just swipe another bag. I went to the beach with John, his mom and his aunt for a week, and we brought the pot with us. Two 14 year old kids in Myrtle Beach with little to no supervision and a shitload of pot. We were on top of the world. One night, we were going to sneak out to smoke a bowl or four, when John's faced turned white. It was gone. He had stashed it away in the back of a drawer, where he thought no one would look. We were freaking out. The whole day, no one said a word about it to us, so we were pretty confused. Then, after dinner, John's aunt pulls us aside. "Oh Shit. Here it comes. My mom is going to fucking kill me," I thought. She smiled at us, tossed the bag in John's lap, and said "Thanks, but it wasn't that good." I couldn't make that shit up, folks.

By the end of the summer, I was a total burnout. Me and John's whole relationship had become centered around getting high together. I was becoming extremely paranoid, to the point that I really thought my parents had installed hidden cameras in my house. I avoided home like the plague. My concentration and memory had detoriated drastically, and John was probably worse off than I was. Then, one day, it happened. John got caught. His dad figured out where his pot was disappearing to, and confronted him about it. He wasn't about to tolerate that kind of crap, and he enrolled John into a boarding school across the state. In my last conversation with John before he left, he told me that his dad had told him "that pot is for me and my customers only." I've run into John only a couple times since then, which is weird because his mom lives like 4 doors from my old house. Last I heard, he was into some hardcore drugs. When you've got role models like dad and aunt, I guess you're pretty much destined to be a fuck-up.

(To be continued...)