Chapter One “Who could imagine that they would freak out somewhere in Kansas” - Frank Zappa
We had been bar hopping, a typical weeknight activity in Lawrence, Kansas, in the summer of 1977, as Harry and I were leaving Quantrill’s Saloon. The bar was located on the town’s busy main street. We had just finished a pitcher of Bud beer. There wasn’t much going on in Quantrill’s this hot sticky night. As we headed off through the parking lot, Harry stopped to talk to someone I didn’t know. After about a minute, Harry, a tall thin 25-year-old with long dark hair, walked back over my way.
“Hey Mark! Do you want to buy some MDA?”
“How much?”
“Fifty dollars a gram,” Harry answered.
“Sure.”
I gave him some money I had in my pocket and he came back with a little piece of paper folded up with a pile of light brown colored powder in the middle of it.
Methylenedioxyamphetamine was more of a mid western drug trend. It was rarely mentioned in the news media and was not well known to the east or west coast drug scene. It may have been similar to ecstasy. I really don’t know since I’ve never tried ecstasy. Some people said it is a type of speed, some claimed it was an aphrodisiac, but for me it was a hallucinogen when I shot it up. And injecting was the only way I’d ever tried it.
We walked to my upstairs apartment by climbing the rickety wooden stairs on the side of a large white house that had been split into apartments. We walked though the living room, which was cluttered with boxes of my things that I had never unpacked and shelves that held my political science
and philosophy books. The walls were sparsely decorated with a few posters, such as the one from the Beatles’ white album and a Coca Cola parody that said “Cocaine.”
We went into the tiny kitchen that had bare yellow walls, a white sink with a few dirty dishes and an old white gas stove. There was a large brown wooden table in the middle of the room, surrounded by four simple wooden chairs. I had to leave my door open to let some of the cooler night air in, since I didn’t have an air conditioner.
I put the paper with the dope on the table and got out some spoons. I also got out my shoebox of syringes. This substance called for a 1-cubic-centimeter diabetic syringe with a 26-gauge needle. I filled a glass with some warm water, got out a few Q-tips and we were ready to begin.
By now, Vic, one of my down stairs neighbors, came in. He noticed I had just arrived with some drugs. Vic and I often got high together. Vic was a tall stocky man with long stringy hair, who usually wore a T-shirt with a leather vest over it. He looked a little like a biker. He had a wallet with a chain attached to his belt, which was standard wear for bikers.
“What have you got?” Vic said.
“MDA,” I answered.
“Can I do a small pinch?”
“Sure.”
“You want some don’t you Harry?”
“Sure!”
I took a razor blade and cut a small line for Harry to snort, since he didn’t like needles. Vic had his own syringe. Vic and I each put a few pinches in a spoon, added a little less than a cc of warm water and mixed it with the plastic red needle cover caps that came with our syringes. We stuck small pieces of cotton we pulled from the Q-tips over the tips of our needles and drew in the liquid. Then we tapped
the syringes to get all the bubbles out and pushed the plunger to get the liquid to the tip of the needle.
Next I took an old sock to make a tourniquet around my arm so my vein would stick out. I used my mouth and my knee to hold the tourniquet in place. I stuck the needle in and pulled the plunger, which immediately drew some blood into the syringe. I knew I had hit the vein. I released the sock, pushed the plunger, injecting the drug straight into my bloodstream. I pulled the plunger again, which pulled in more blood, so I could push any left over drugs that were still in the syringe into my veins.
The rush hit me immediately after I pulled out the needle. I felt the pulsating effects of the MDA. It felt like a surge of electricity or energy of some type. It tingled and I could hear a slight buzzing in my ears. Orange, red and yellow spiral patterns appeared to spring from the wall and rainbow like crystals seemed to flow from the light bulb on my ceiling. It resembled a psychedelic light show or one of those old psychedelic posters from a head shop. This was all typical of an MDA rush. I felt something else. It was a warm euphoric glow flowing all over my body. This was more typical of a narcotic high. The combination was so intense that I threw up on the floor. It was the kind of throwing up a person might do while flying upside down in an airplane for the first time. It wasn’t a bad feeling and the high I had was worth every bit of it.
“That must be pretty good stuff,” Vic said. “It takes a powerful rush to make you lose your cookies.”
“That’s why I don’t shoot that stuff,” Harry said. “It is real good though.”
It was the best MDA I had ever had. It was cut with some type of narcotic. I suspected heroin, since it was brown in color and Mexican heroin looks like brown sugar after it’s been cut a few times. I hadn’t drunk much beer at Quantrill’s and I was glad I hadn’t. Narcotics work best
when starting out sober. I had bought a 4-ounce bottle of Novahistine DH when I got off work. It could be purchased in a pharmacy without a prescription. All I had to do was sign a ledger. There were restrictions on how often a person could buy it. It had codeine phosphate and a mixture of anti-histamines that created small rushes, through the back of my head and up and down my spine, as well as the euphoria that I got from using any narcotic. I couldn’t shoot this stuff and get a rush as with heroin or other narcotics, but it would last between six to eight hours and the high wouldn’t totally wear off for about a day. Because I was high on codeine, while at Quantrill’s, I only sipped my beer slowly. I considered a narcotic high superior to alcohol, so I didn’t want the booze I was drinking to overcome the narcotic high.
The codeine was in the process of wearing off by the time I shot the MDA. The little that was left in my bloodstream surely contributed to the powerful narcotic high I experienced as the MDA rush wore off, which usually took about 20 minutes. Narcotics were my drugs of choice. I wasn’t choosy. Whether codeine, heroin, Dilaudid, Demerol or Talwin, I enjoyed them all. When I was high on narcotics, I felt great. Nothing could bother me and I felt on top of the world. I always felt a great feeling of joy, or euphoria as I called it. When I first got off, I felt intense energy, especially when I shot something. Some rushes, from shooting hard narcotics, felt almost like an orgasm. I felt relaxed for a period of time after the narcotics started to wear off.
After everyone left, I sat back on my bed and nodded in and out of a dream-like trance. I nodded off and saw typewriters floating by and a sea of monkeys that looked like something out of a cartoon. I sat around all night in an opiate stupor. There was only one problem. It was getting close to 5 a.m. and I needed to get to work. What would I do? How would I sober up after such a night? Finally it
came to me. I would do a little more MDA and go to work with a buzz. I loaded another hit in my syringe. I shot it. I threw up again, but this time I was able to make it to the toilet. I cleaned up in the bathtub, put on my work clothes and headed off to work.
I worked as a daytime janitor at Murphy Hall, the music and theater department of Kansas University. I walked across the grassy campus to the red brick maintenance shed that sat partially out of site at the southern end of the campus. It was there that I punch the time clock and got my keys. My boss, Mr. Jenks, a short, white haired 50 year old man with dark rimmed glasses, handed me my round metal ring filled with silver and brass keys. He appeared to me as if he were wobbling around like the image someone would see who was walking past a funhouse mirror at a circus. His shape just kept changing. I have no idea if he noticed anything different about me. My eyes may have been dilated or even red. He never said anything out of the ordinary.
I walked toward Murphy Hall, a large U-shaped brown brick building built into the side of Mount Oread. Most of the campus’ buildings sat on this huge hill or along its side. As I passed a parking lot I saw four people in a red GM Chevelle. There were two guys, one with a hat, and two girls. After a few seconds they just faded away and disappeared. The car had been empty all along. When I got to my building I unlocked the door. All my equipment was in a janitor’s closet that sat across the entryway. As I walked into the pale tan hallway I heard voices from the lower floor. When I walked down there, the voices faded. There was no one there. The rest of the day went fairly normal. I went about my routine as the drugs slowly wore off.
I rarely hallucinated from using drugs. When I first started getting high, altering reality seemed to be a goal. I’m not sure what we drug users originally expected to get out of hallucinations. They only served to amuse to me. The
drugs I took brought me great pleasure. The ancient Greek school of the Cyrenaic philosophers argued that pleasure is not simply the absence of pain, for that would be similar to being asleep. Pleasure needed motion, they argued. It came from sensations of the flesh and physical world. At the time I didn’t know what a Cyrenaic was, but I definitely knew what pleasure was and I was deriving it from physical sensation. But my drug culture days did not start out that way. Hallucinogens were supposed to open the doors of the mind. They were a key to a divine inspiration and supposed to expand the mind.
I didn’t start out getting high on narcotics. My drug use started with a toke of hashish, in the fall of 1969. I had just started my freshman year at Bishop Carroll High School, an all-boys Catholic school, in Wichita. I was a short skinny dark-haired kid and just beginning to make some friends, after moving from St. Louis, Missouri. A lot of my socializing took place during my second hour study hall. We went to the commons area, in the middle of the building. Several green hallways lined with lockers and classroom doors fed into this room. There were about three sets of steps that a student had to go down to get to the commons area. It was filled with round white Formica tables and cheap plastic chairs with silver-colored metal legs. I always stopped to get a drink from the soda pop machines lined up along the north wall, near a hallway door.
I didn’t always study. I spent a lot of time hanging around with two classmates, Bob and Charles. Charles looked like any other high school freshman; tall and skinny with short sandy colored hair. Bob looked similar except he had darker hair and was a little shorter. We had a dress code so we had to wear a tie. Most of us were wearing bell-bottom pants at the time. It was the “in” thing to wear. We often talked about our latest rock albums. We all talked about growing our hair long. At that time none of us had
hair over our shoulders. A few times we talked about girls that Bob and Charles knew. We talked about drugs. We all wanted to be more like the hippies and freaks we all read about in the news.
I was only 14 in the summer of 1969.
For quite some time Bob and Charles told me about the marijuana they were getting and smoking. They may have appeared to other people as just a couple of squirrelly high school freshman, just like me, but to me they seemed as if they were big time dope dealers. Then one day, as I sat down at our usual Formica table, Bob and Charles walked up to me.
“We’ve got some hash,” Bob said. “You’ve wanted to try it. This is your chance.”
We headed out the front door of the rock-covered building, across the grassy lawn to Charles’ blue Olds Cutlass, which was parked on the street. It wasn’t that hard to slip off to the parking lot, which many students did, to grab a cigarette.
We all climbed into Charles’s car. He pulled out a small foil-wrapped square no more than a quarter-inch by a half-inch. He unwrapped what looked like a small cube of dog food. I was both nervous and excited. How would this affect me? Would I like it? Charles put the hash in a small homemade wooden pipe and lit it up. The smoke reminded me of those punks we used to light firecrackers with on the Fourth of July. The car was filled with smoke.
“Remember, if anyone comes out here, we get suddenly hungry and eat all of this,” Charles said.
This was my first time smoking illegal dope. Hashish is a dried resin extract of the hemp plant, otherwise known as marijuana. It was suppose to be the Champaign of marijuana. It cost $8 a gram at the time, while a one-ounce bag of marijuana cost $10.
There was much secrecy, as if we were using heroin or smoking crack in the 1980s. This was 1969 and in Kansas you could still get in a lot of trouble for smoking the evil weed. Within a decade, such paranoia would seem archaic. But at that time the legal dangers were real.
It was sometime after I started hanging out with Bob and Charles that I decided it was time I tried pot for myself. I was tired of my clean-cut image and I wanted to experiment. I didn’t smoke cigarettes so I felt like a square. I wanted a vice. Both Bob and Charles knew I wanted to get high.
“How do you like it?” Charles asked.
“I felt something, but I’m not sure what it was.”
“How do you feel?!” said Sid, a short, curly-haired kid with glasses, as we walked in the door.
“I feel something,” I told him.
Several of my friends told me people rarely feel much on their first time. I felt something, but I wasn’t sure what it was. But there would be plenty of other times, and plenty of drugs to try. This was just the beginning. A lot of things changed for me after that first hit of hash. My political perspectives changed. My social life changed. I had entered a culture that I would eventually get immersed in. I spent much of the next few years under the influence of marijuana and I experimented with various hallucinogenic drugs. Years later, I drifted toward shooting cocaine, heroin and other narcotics. I learned to deal, and occasionally make and grow drugs. By the end of high school, I would become a full-fledged “freak,” the 1970s version of a hippie. By my mid 20s, I would go from being a peace-loving hippie freak to a gun-toting-street thug. Not until my late 20s did I finally quit the drug trade for a career as a left-wing journalist.
I wasn’t very athletic and I wasn’t all that popular. I wanted to be one of the “bad kids.” I didn’t get in much trouble, except for a few acts of vandalism in my junior high
years. Getting high was my opportunity to do something bad. I also wanted to be able to say, “Yes I’ve tried that.” I didn’t expect to get into drugs over my head. I didn’t even support legalizing marijuana at the time. I wanted to have some basic knowledge about the subject of drugs and in that effort, I succeeded.
The Woodstock Music Festival was in August of 1969. After it was over people began calling it “the event that named a generation.” When the movie and album were released in 1970, the rest of us saw what only those who were there knew about it. There were open drug markets, sex and nudity. On the other hand, it was a peaceful event without any violence. Then there was the music by some of the top groups of that time and which helped define the time period.
The counter-culture band Jefferson Airplane sang “Saturday Afternoon/Won’t You Try.” The song mentions giving people “sunshine,” a brand of LSD or acid. The song’s lyrics gave us such images as acid being used along with incense and balloons. They sang:
“People dancing everywhere,
Loudly shouting I don’t care!”
The song created an image of anarchy, of people being set free by the use of lysergic acid diethylamide, known as LSD.
Richie Havens sang “Freedom,” which seemed to be one of the themes of the event. There was political protest music, such as Country Joe McDonald’s “I-Feel-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag” making fun of the Vietnam War and Joan Baez sang “Joe Hill,” a song about a martyred radical Industrial Workers if the World union organizer from the turn of the century.
If there was one thread that held the event together and made it stand out from other music concerts, it was the idealism of the time. Many young people there, and
many who learned about it, afterward, saw a new cultural and political renaissance emerging. Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman wrote a book called Woodstock Nation. The noticed the world was changing and we might be a part of that. The future promised us peace and freedom.
We had all seen news stories about Woodstock. We knew what had gone on there. But that was in New York State and I was in Kansas. Woodstock was a world away from me and I could only imagine being there.
I continued to hang around with Bob and Charles, although I spent more time with Bob. We had more in common. We liked a lot of the same music. We had both bought some John Lennon Albums. He was one of my favorite singers and musicians. I had bought Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band’s “Live Peace in Toronto 1969” and he had bought “Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the Lions.” We both complained about the singing and influence of Yoko Ono, whom we did not like.
“She sings awful, like screeching noises,” Bob said. “They have a song called ‘Radio Play’ where all they do is switch stations on a radio. They have a song called ‘Two Minutes Silence’ which is just two minutes of silence.”
One day Bob brought in a copy of the Wichita Free Press to read during study hall. This was one of my first encounters with an underground newspaper. The paper ran from about 1968 through 1970 and had a column called “Grass Roots” with drug prices. In the issue he had brought that day, it listed Purple Flats, a brand of LSD, for $4 a tab. It gave prices for amphetamines, black and reds, which are downers, and even the price for “smack” and codeine. It gave prices for Afghanistan hashish at $7 a gram, Mexican marijuana at $12 an ounce and $7 an ounce for Kansas pot.
Bob was interested in the acid it listed. He claimed to have used acid, but I’m not sure he ever did any that was really good.
“Purple flats, that’s supposed to be real good,” Bob said. “I’ve heard of blue tabs. They’re supposed to be good, also.”
He also enjoyed the ads for local rock bands.
“Ha! Ha! Look at this,” Bob laughed as he read the ad out loud. “Freakier than white socks.”
I continued to buy pot from Bob and Charles although I rarely went out to smoke it with them. Much of my dope smoking was done at home. I often used a corncob pipe I bought at a TG&Y discount store and I had to cover the top with aluminum foil with holes poked in it. We had plenty of wooded areas, around my home, where I could wander off to in order to smoke the pot. I didn’t get a lot out of smoking pot for the first few times. I gradually noticed the high. I’m sure part of the problem was that most of the pot I was buying was inferior, or even fake. When I did start to notice it, I liked it.
I remember smoking some pot, one day, in the wooded area across the street from my parent’s house. I walked back to our red brick ranch house and went down stairs to my basement room. I had a cheap Panasonic stereo and I put on the Beatle’s “Abbey Road.” Pot made things slow down. I could listen to the record album and the music seemed to last for hours. I noticed that a pleasant day would last much longer with some pot smoke. It seemed relaxing. At the same time, I would think deep thoughts about religion, philosophy or political issues. My room was decorated with rock music posters, such as the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. It had two green beds along the back wall and two dressers by the door. I had to share my room with my brother. The stereo was by my bed. It was on a stand with my albums stacked below it. We had two small windows that my brother and I learned we could take out and sneak out of the house at night.
There were days when I was high that I would find otherwise ordinary things to be extremely funny, or even bizarre. I remember sitting with some friends, one day, and all of us laughing hysterically at a dog food commercial with a cartoon-talking dog.
I kept some seeds from the pot I bought and grew a little plant on my windowsill. Most of the bags of pot had an ample supply of seeds, along with the leaves and stems. I put a seed in a small paper pot with mud and I got a small seedling. The plants never got very big. They would start out with two leaves and then six and then ten. The plants rarely got more than a foot tall. But it was kind of exciting to see what these plants actually looked like.
“I didn’t know you could grow your own grass,” Chip, one of the rough kids, said during study hour.
Apparently he had heard about my plant from Bob. I kept Bob informed on most of my drug adventures.
“You can,” I answered. “I just planted a seed in a cup of dirt and the plants grew.”
Suddenly I was one of the cool kids. I could now hang around with the tough kids, instead of being their victims.
Charles had the connections. He wasn’t really tough like Chip and his friend Ed. Charles planned on growing his hair long, but never did. But he could get the dope. It was not high quality, compared to what we have today, but it was the real thing--- most of the time.
I didn’t talk much about politics back then, but it was in Brother Drew’s class that we discussed the Vietnam War. It was my first hour class at Bishop Carroll.
“Does a peasant in Vietnam really understand the concept of capitalism vs. communism?” Brother Drew said.
He was a young, dark, slick-haired priest with dark rimmed glasses, who taught us history. His classroom, with its pea-green walls, had a few decorations of historical
events he got from newspapers along with the usual pictures of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. It was clear to us that he was skeptical of our need to fight in Vietnam. It was a war that some of us feared we would have to take part in. It was here that I first heard about a country called Cambodia.
“It’s getting to the point where they will ask you if you want to go to Vietnam to fight or Cambodia,” Ed told the teacher, in an assertive voice.
He was clearly concerned with this turn of events. He was referring to the US invasion of Cambodia. President Richard Nixon undermined and eventually removed from power Cambodia’s leader Prince Norodom Sihanouk. In March of 1970, the pro-US General Lon Nol took power in a coup. By April 1970, the US had launched an all out invasion of eastern Cambodia with 30,000 US troops and 40,000 South Vietnamese troops. Cambodia’s new leader, Lon Nol, gave permission for this invasion. The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong moved to eastern Vietnam to avoid the troops. The justification for this action was reconnaissance photos that showed Vietnamese activities inside Cambodia. It was big news at the time and all I really knew was that we were involving Cambodia in the Vietnam War.
I made friends with a couple of kids in the neighborhood, who were about my age; Arny and Clark. Arny was about as tall and thin as I was, with real blond hair. He liked brightly colored clothes. Clark was taller, thin and had dark hair. They went to the public school in Goddard, so I only saw them after school. They didn’t smoke pot at the time. They did a few years later, but not while I was going to Bishop Carroll. We would get together and walk around the neighborhood looking for things to do.
“What do you want to do today?” Arny would ask us.
“I don’t know,” Clark would say.
I would say the same thing. There really wasn’t much for us to do at that age. We did have a few parties. One was at Arny’s parents’ house, which was a street over from my place. It was a yellow wood paneled house, about the same size as ours.
“Do you know any girls we can invite?” I asked Bob on the phone.
“Sure. Try Teresa Atman and Cindy Watts. They know a lot of girls who like to party.”
“Can you make it?”
“Sure, I’ll be there.”
So I called Teresa.
“Sure! I’ll come. Bob is coming you say?”
“Sure. And he said you know lots of girls to invite.”
“I’ll bring a whole car full.”
“This will be great!” Arny said, when I told him about the girls. “We can steal a little booze from my dad’s liquor cabinet. The girls will be impressed that we have some liquor.”
“I’ll bet I can get some too,” I said. “My folks have some liquor they won’t miss.”
We set up for the party in his basement, which was fixed with modern furniture and brown wooden shelving, to look like a guest room. It had a blue sofa and a large brown coffee table. I called some girls from Bishop Carroll. Arny invited some guys from Goddard High.
When Teresa showed up she only brought one girl with her, Ellen a homely overweight gal with blond curly hair. Teresa was tall, had a thin face, long brown hair and dressed in jeans and a long sleeve brown suede shirt.
“I thought you were bringing more girls?” I said with astonishment.
“Why is it my responsibility to get you all women?”
We ended up with ten guys and only two girls. Cindy Watts didn’t show up and neither did Bob. Then the guys started in on me.
“So where are all the women you promised us Mark?” said Clark.
“Hey! I did my best.”
“If this is the best you can do, your parties SUCK!” said Allen, a short nerdy looking dark-haired kid with glasses.
“I risked stealing booze for this!” Arny added in.
This seemed to be typical of all the parties we had that year. We were only freshman and it was hard to get the girl’s interest at that age.
I only went to Bishop Carroll that first year. I transferred to the public school in Goddard the following year. I got to know both Arny and Clark better once I started attending their school. Clark and I ended up being friends long after high school.
Wichita was not as old as St. Louis. It was founded by white settlers in the 1860s as an old cowboy town and displaced a Wichita Indian settlement that was located there. The cow town days lasted only a few years, after which the new town developed an agricultural economic base. In the early part of the 20th century, the aircraft industry developed in Wichita. After that Wichita was the largest city in Kansas.
The Wichita Indians, originally living in the area, had homes made with grass woven on poles. The lodges were about 25 feet in diameter. Each person living in them had a raised bunk, covered with buffalo hide, which resembled a white man’s couch. I can only imagine what they said, in the mid 1800s, when white people started coming to live at the fork where the Arkansas and Little Arkansas Rivers meet:
“There goes the neighborhood.”
St. Louis probably wasn’t the most liberal place in the country, but it was far more liberal than Wichita. My parents
were amazed at the silly laws restricting the use of liquor. There was no liquor by the drink, at that time, in Kansas. Beer bars could serve only 3.2% alcoholic beverages and were open to anyone over 18 years old. The clubs that served mixed drinks were limited to 21-year-olds and their customers had to buy memberships. All the clubs were private by law.
I knew many kids in St. Louis whose fathers read Playboy and went to the Playboy Clubs.
“My dad has a key to the Playboy Club,” a schoolmate said more than once.
Many of my friends swiped their father’s Playboy to sneak a peak. By contrast Wichita city officials seemed obsessed with stamping out nudity and sexually explicit entertainment of any kind. Local politicians and prosecutors went after movie houses and bookstores they deemed “pornographic.” There were the groups with “moral” or “decency” in their constantly changing names. They fought against seemingly harmless nudity. The play “Hair” couldn’t get a showing in Wichita because of a few seconds of nudity in it. St. Louis was a Catholic town. In St. Louis Catholics were looked upon as being more conservative than those of other religions. The opposite was true in Wichita.
Although I wouldn’t know it until I was well into my 40s, I had Attention Deficit Disorder. By the third grade, my academic scores began to drop and never improved until I entered my third year of college. The worst part is that for much of my life, I knew something was wrong, but no one seemed to know what it was. My teachers told me I just needed to work harder or pay more attention. No one could explain to me why I had so much trouble with schoolwork
I don’t regret having been raised a Catholic. The church gave me plenty of rituals and a strong sense of right and wrong. I appreciated that. At some point during my freshman high school year, I began to doubt the existence of God. I hadn’t read anything. I just had a few feelings that God was like Santa Claus. If you’re good, he gives nice things. If you’re bad, he punishes you. I began to wonder if he was just a myth that a lot of adults just never quit believing in. It seemed as if they were told about the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, but never got around to discussing God. I was an agnostic before I knew what that word meant. Even after I realized what I was, I still considered myself a Catholic. That is... a Catholic Agnostic.
In the fifth grade I saw one of those scare films educators used to show about drug use. A policeman came to the school to emcee the showing. Loreto, my catholic grade school, had a large cafeteria building that doubled as a meeting hall, across the street. It was brown, although a shade lighter than the main building. There was a stage in the front of the building and we were all sitting on brown medal folding chairs. There was a projector in the back of the building. The hall was used for summer movies, usually a Jerry Lewis flick, so the projector was always there.
“Listen carefully,” the policeman said. “This is what can happen to you if you try marijuana.”
The film showed a guy who went to a party.
“The girl tests him with beer,” the narrator said. “Then she introduces him to marijuana.”
The film’s “pusher” used all types of tricks.
“The pusher tells his victim that it is childish to be afraid of needles,” the narrator continued.
So he tried heroin. Later it showed him going through withdrawals. The pusher arrived to give him his shot and explain that he will keep him supplied but it will cost him some money. The young man ended up selling his mom’s silverware to pay for his habit.
After the movie they showed us a display of drug using equipment. Drug use seemed so remote to me at the time.
I had never met anyone who used drugs or even talked of using them. It was like something out of a horror movie. I never imagined that I would ever come across anything like that.
The movies on TV always portrayed drug pushers as evil killers. They shot their own workers to keep from having to pay them. They killed anyone they got suspicious of. It all seemed so terrifying. As I later found out, much of this was propaganda. The film in school and the movies on TV didn’t tell us that the pushers were more likely to be our friends at school than some evil character who looked like Snidely Whiplash and lurked outside a schoolyard fence or some dark alleyway.