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Edited on Sun Feb-27-05 01:05 AM by mike_c
I went to a rural high school in Virginia during the early seventies. This was the sort of place where "risky behavior" usually meant smuggling booze into sock hops-- remember those?-- or having sex in steamy out of the way parking spots.
I was a freak, back in the day when the term had meaning. I didn't actually finish high school, and while that's another story, it's still kind of germane to this one. It was bad chemistry from the start. 30 years later I would have definitely been one of those kids in black trench coats.
Now, you have to understand that I started using drugs at an early age, and by the time I was in high school I was a hardcore stoner with a real penchent for halucinogenics. I once calculated that during 10th grade-- my last full year in high school, at 15-- I dropped acid two or three times a week for the entire year. I bought and sold sheets of blotter (mostly NOT in school- the customer base there was still pretty small at that time), so the primary determinant of how frequently I "did my paperwork" was the length of the refractory period between trips.
So during that sophomore year in high school the assistant principal began to catch hints and whispers that the school might have a nascent "drug problem," so he began an investigation. He spent most of the year digging into it, interviewing students (myself included, several times), and even spending the day cruising headshops in Washington D.C. "undercover," looking for students he recognized. I kid you not-- that's how I came to be first interviewed-- he saw me skipping school in Georgetown, or at least that's what he told me. Since there were so few of us actually doing that, I must have been one of his only catches. Or maybe he lied.
The result of the investigation was a list of students who were believed to be involved in the school's "drug problem." Years later I learned that the list became an official county document, a watch list that ultimately contained over a thousand names. During its first year however-- my sophomore and last year in high school-- it was initiated with only eight names-- the extent of the "drug problem" at my high school-- which I presume are still enshrined in a file or microfiche somewhere in Loudoun County, Virginia, unless the FBI ultimately inherited it when the secretaries tired of typing all the names in later years when there were LOTS of stoners.
My name was number three on the initial list of eight. Thirty-five years later I am still proud of that accomplishment.
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