A TeenAger's Trip

Eerie visions, horror, and a real or imagined new awareness of self crowd a teen-ager's mind when he gets on the drug kick. With chilling casualness, a 17-year-old, starting college this fall, describes for TIME his three years of drug taking. Brought up in the East in a middle-class suburban family, he was sent to a private school in Colorado because his parents hoped the experience would buck up his sagging attitudes and grades. He obviously knows some of the perils inherent in drugs, but is alarmingly heedless of others, notably LSD, which can be extremely dangerous. He graduated last June in good academic standing with a B average. When he turned on for the first time:

THIS guy down the hall happened to give me 500 ground-up morning glory seeds and he told me to eat them. He said I'd get stoned. I really didn't know what drugs were all about then, but I took them and waited about two hours and I couldn't feel very much. Then I walked over to one of the school buildings and the same cat was up in a loft blowing grass. I didn't know what that was then either. I thought it was like heroin. I thought it was really bad. This chick who was a friend of his said, "Why don't you come up and smoke some?" So I went up there and started smoking it out of this Chinese opium pipe. We smoked it for a long time. Finally I climbed down.

The doors have glass windows with chicken-wire in them. I looked out the windows and I saw two suns in the sky. They were opposite each other and one was purple and one was some other color which I can't really describe. And they both were shooting down these long, thin poles made of light. When the poles hit the snow they broke like ice or glass and then the pieces melted like mercury and disappeared. I started to smile and I thought how strange everything was. This was something that never had happened to me before.

That was the first time. Only about five people at the whole school smoked any grass. It felt good to be one of them. That was one of the main reasons that I smoked, I think, and because I really wanted to try it. It was a nice thing. I probably smoked about 20 or 30 times that school year. Pretty soon about 85% of the kids smoked. It got to be a really statusy thing. A lot of the kids who smoked would come and tell you when they were stoned just to impress you. The school kind of overlooked all the grass smoking.

I stopped taking ground-up seeds, though, because once I took them be fore a vacation and had a bad trip [frightening experience]. I had to take a six-hour bus ride and then a plane. I took about 550 seeds just before the bus left. A lot of kids from school on the bus were stoned too. Some had grass and one guy drank two bottles of cough syrup. And it was really good for about an hour but then I started to freak. I felt like jumping off the bus. I just had to move. There were pine trees along the road and they all started to move really fast. They were moving too fast for me so I closed my eyes. But I had to open them all the time because if I didn't, I couldn't tell where I was.

I thought I was going insane and would have to be committed. When I finally got on the jet, I really started to freak because there was no one to talk to. I really wanted to talk to someone I knew. So I just sat there gripping the seat when the hallucinations got bad. The next day I was feeling really strange. I was psychotically paranoid. I thought people were trying to kill me and that they were behind huge plots against me. When I got back to school about two weeks later, I was pretty normal except that I never wanted to take seeds again.

Just before I left school that spring, two cats got a kilo of grass in the mail. They sold lids [packages containing roughly one ounce] and I bought two. I put them in my suitcase and the first night home, I smoked and left the bag under the bed instead of hiding it. One of my brothers found it and brought it to my parents. They were really horrified and they thought I was a real drug addict. They threw all of it down the toilet. They are really paranoid about drugs. They suspect me of being stoned when I am not.

The next summer I smoked only about three times a month because I didn't want to spend much money on it, and also because I fell in love and then I hardly smoked at all. For me, I think, grass is a substitute for love.

At the end of my senior year, everything was relaxed and nobody suspected me, and one weekend this cat came from Alaska and he offered me some acid [LSD]. I was pretty uptight. I didn't think it would wreck my mind, but I was still scared. Then when it started to come on, I thought, "How could such beautiful stuff hurt me?" I really dig acid raps. That's when you talk to the cat you took acid with about anything that comes into your mind. Once a big Day-Glo ribbon materialized and hovered three or four inches above the ground. It was about 7 ft. long and 2 ft. thick. Everything that I was going to say was written on that ribbon in pink letters before I was going to say it, so I just read the ribbon to talk. Acid has taught me a new way. You have to dig anything that happens to you, even if it's not what you wanted. And it taught me to appreciate more things. Things are really beautiful if you look at them or think about them enough.

After I took acid, I told my parents I had dropped [taken it]. They got really really uptight and said acid could make you go insane. But at least they didn't care about grass any more. They're just worried about grass because it's against the law. They never threatened to call the heat [police] or anything. They never even told me never to use drugs again. They just said: "Not in the house."

I haven't been stoned on anything for about a month, and I don't plan to take anything in the near future. Just to groove on reality for a change. I was born straight, so I think I should be straight for most of my life. But I will take acid again. When I'm on acid, I am as stoned as I could ever hope to be. The heavy drugs, like acid or mescaline, totally destroy reality. If I want to get the hell out, I'll just drop some of that good old LSD.

But some people can have a bad time with dope. Acid can make you flip out. One classmate of mine was disowned by his wealthy parents after he got busted from school for using grass. He started to do acid every day by shooting [with a hypodermic needle] and snorting [inhaling the powder], and he started to deal [push it, sell it] too. His parents thought he was going insane, and they talked of committing him. So he ran away from home. Nobody knows where he is now. Also, another cat I know got busted in Carmel [Calif.] for using weed. He couldn't leave the town for a year and had to spend every Saturday in jail.

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