I was 13 the first time I got super-high. I call that out because my idiot friends and I had attempted to get high before that but had been so fiercely uneducated about drugs that we didn’t actually feel anything until about a year later.
We would pretend to laugh hysterically because we had too much pride to say that we didn’t know how to do it. We would roll the saddest looking joints, take a quick breath in and immediately exhale.
We needed practice. So, we practiced getting high.
As every real, first pot smoking story starts in ::insert upper-middle class neighborhood here::, we were sitting on someone’s massive deck, overlooking the water and their parents weren’t home.
We had made some truly vile vodka and juice combo and giggled about how badass we thought we were. We’d be able to go into school on Monday and tell the less cool people in our lives that we spent our weekend “so fucked up” even though we were able to get right into our parent’s luxury SUVs around 10:30 and go home completely undetected.
That’s how “fucked up” we were.
We bought that shitty weed from another rich, white kid that we went to school with. He stole it from his dad.
I’ve never written about my experience with drugs before because, truly, it’s not all that interesting.
Girl meets boy, boy gives her dirt weed, boy starts to sell slightly better weed, girl moves on to other drugs and starts dating women. Until recently, I hadn’t put much thought into the perception of how rich, white kids get into bad habits.
Sitting on my bejeweled throne of privilege, I assumed that everyone took the same ownership of their poor choices when they grew up and moved on (Please read through that sentence, I’m obviously kidding).
Recently though, I saw a comment on a Facebook post from a mom of a certain age that made me cringe.
It went something like this:
Drugs don’t find children. Bad people find children. Keep our community safe.
I scratched my head for a second and thought “Well, that’s certainly not true.” Like, at all.
Before we move on, let’s take a second to re-write that comment using the intent behind the words and also take a moment of collective, disgusted silence for the racist as fuck replies that followed it.
What she actually meant to say was:
People of color are coming into our exclusive town and force-feeding our incredibly well-bred, white children drugs.
Rich, white kids don’t get into drugs because “bad people” influence them. Rich, white kids get into drugs because they’re bored.
I was 17 the first time I tried “shrooms.” When you have unlimited quantities of pot at your disposal, it gets boring. Even in conjunction with my antidepressants (Which, for the record, cannot be abused because they’re prescribed by doctors. So, that settles that once and for all – again, obviously kidding), boring.
So, I sought out something more interesting. In that moment, that new shiny thing was shrooms.
My friends and I showed up to my 12th grade English class high off of our asses almost every day. My teacher knew. She wasn’t an idiot. She was the exact opposite of an idiot, actually.
It just wasn’t worth anyone’s time to try to discipline us because rich, white kids are never wrong. Just ask their parents.
We were good kids from a good neighborhood.
If we were getting in trouble, it was because someone led us there. We certainly couldn’t have found that path ourselves.
We got the shrooms from my very rich, very white boyfriend. He got them from his sister. She got them from her even richer, even whiter boyfriend.
Drugs don’t find children.
I was 19 the first I tried “K”. You know, horse tranquilizers. We thought it was really hilarious to sit on the couch and literally not be able to move. K, or Ketamine makes horses stop dead in their tracks, so I’ll let your imagination run wild with that feels like for a human.
It’s a gross feeling that only the most bored people on the planet would seek out. Because the effects wore off so fast, I could easily drive myself home at the end of the night. What a bonus.
We got the ingredients almost exclusively from Waldbaum’s and the rest from my friend’s parent’s two-car garage.
We invited our other friends over to try it, too. We. Invited. Them.
Bad people find children.
By the time I was 21, I was doing cocaine almost every, single day.
If I missed a day, it’s because I was driving my alcoholic girlfriend somewhere because she lost her license to a brutal DWI and we couldn’t afford for us both to not be able to drive. I was waitressing at night and going to college during the day.
I lived in a house with my friends that my parents paid for. I had no financial responsibilities and waitressed, essentially, for fun.
We used to get our coke from a house we felt scared to go to because it was in a “bad neighborhood.” So, we paid extra for delivery.
That “bad” house was rented by 4 white boys. Sometimes they would stay and party in our suburban neighborhood instead of going back home.
Keep our neighborhood safe.
No one made me make those decisions, just like no one made me take ownership of them and grow up.
People can always find what they’re looking for, good and bad. Our kids are not infallible, they will mess up. How hard and long they mess up for depends on how willing we are to call the baby ugly before the baby is unrecognizable.
Naivety and parenting mix just about as well as vodka, crappy weed and a house full of unattended teenagers.