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betterbooktitles · 2 months

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"I’m certain I’m not the only millennial who feels we as a nation have taken a dizzying turn when it comes to drugs. I remember a uniformed police officer showing up once a week in 5th Grade (a year before Sex Ed) to explain how to avoid buying and taking drugs. Luckily, I already knew the dangers of the drug trade because I had seen The Usual Suspects. I knew cocaine was a bad thing to buy, sell, or steal, especially from a drug kingpin. The D.A.R.E. program, however, let me know how important it was to say no to anything fun, including alcohol. At least until I understood a little algebra first. We did role-playing exercises where we walked one by one toward the portly police officer and he casually asked if we wanted to hit a mimed joint with him. All we had to do was say “no” and walk to the other side of the room, defying the only rule I knew about improv. We wrote essays about how important it was to preserve our pristine bodies and minds, obviously unsullied since we had yet to take the class teaching us how puberty was going to defile them both. I’m still mad that my friend Nicole’s essay beat mine in a contest, and she got to read hers in front of the whole school all because she had the benefit of an older brother who took too much acid and sat in her room all night talking about why the existence of light proved God was real. My essay about a time I saw my friend’s dad drink a beer and then drive his truck somewhere was also good! We signed pledges to enter the new millennium drug-free. We took the red pencils that said “Friends Don’t Let Friends Do Drugs” and sharpened all of them down to say “Let Friends Do Drugs,” “Friends Do Drugs,” “Do Drugs,” and simply “Drugs.” Despite that little rebellious act, my friends and I spent a solid six months swearing we’d never put any harmful substance into our bodies besides every form of candy available.

Imagine how I feel now as a D.A.R.E. graduate becoming my dad’s drug dealer. It’s less thrilling than I thought it would be. Between my father’s warning not to hang around one specific neighborhood in Cleveland as a kid and nearly every TV show about drugs, I thought I’d always be buying marijuana from an intimidating dude who definitely had a gun and would use it immediately if he thought I was wearing a wire. Instead, I now buy marijuana from a well-lit storefront that looks like the Apple Store. I’ve even gone to a place where a guy with an iPad explained what each available strain would do to me. I buy what sounds good with all the confidence of a man pointing at items on a menu written in a language he can’t read. I put it all in a cardboard box. I place a book on top. I mail the box to my dad from my local post office. I tell myself the book is to hide the contraband crossing state lines, but in truth, the book is what clears my conscience. I want to send my dad something edifying while also sending him the drug that all of America worried would make me unable to read if I tried it once. The unrequested book is a red herring to distract from the vice, like when you were young and didn’t want to buy condoms outright at the store so you cushioned them between a pack of peanut M&Ms and a magazine. Hmm, what else did I need, — right, while I’m here — might as well pick up a few condoms.

Right as marijuana becomes legal in most states, I’m about done with the drug. I’ve had three good times on edibles, and one of them was when I felt nothing and fell asleep at 9:30 PM. I’m flabbergasted that my dad likes edibles. He seems to be a man free of anxiety. Case in point, I once brought him some THC lozenges to our summer holiday in Chautauqua, and around dinner time I told him “You might want to only take half of what I gave you” to which he replied, “I took it hours ago.” He was stoned and no one noticed.

While I’m stuck in my head, stoned or sober, wondering why I didn’t take some acting gig 15 years ago, wondering if I’ll ever make enough money, worrying I’m doing everything wrong including in this moment as I write this sentence, my dad is enjoying himself.

Judith Grisel, the author of Never Enough: The Neuroscience And Experience of Addiction, describes using marijuana as throwing “a bucket of red paint” on your brain. She was approaching the stimulant clinically in terms of how it differed from the laser focus of other drugs (THC reacts with many receptors in the brain, cocaine focuses on one), but now every time I smoke, I think of the red paint metaphor. While other people seem able to crank an entire joint and do insanely complicated stuff like function at their jobs, I am reduced to a gelatinous blob, on top of which my eyes and brain are navigating a dream state that, like many dreams, isn’t all that interesting the next day. Mostly, I get high and can’t decide what I want to watch on TV or what video game I want to play, I realize how hungry I am, and then I fall asleep with cereal still stuck to my teeth. Pot, for me, is like the squid ink hitting the screen in Mario Kart: I can still see where I’m going, but everything gets a little harder to do, and the panicked half-blindness makes everything slightly more chaotically fun."

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Other articles include:

An essay on Claire Dederer's book Monsters and movies made by monsters.

Writing inside a Toyota Service Center.

Writing mistresses.

#writing #essay #essays #lit #literary #funny #lol #drugs #books #humor #reading #better book titles #dan wilbur #bibliophile #pot #d.a.r.e #just say no #comedy

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crying-over-really-dumb-things · 7 months

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D.A.R.E. not only showed us all the drugs, what they look like, what their effects are, and what their street names are, they also helped create an entire new generation of furries

#d.a.r.e

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skyrim-forever · 6 months

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thanks to @dirty-bosmer for the idea

#skyrim #the elder scrolls #tes #tesblr #meme #d.a.r.e #dare but for Tamriel #this is so silly

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existennialmemes · 7 months

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Of course Millennials love drugs. When we were kids there was an entire program set up through the schools, to DARE us to do them, and obviously we are not chickens

#shitpost #shitposting #d.a.r.e #drug memes #millennial memes #millennials #tw drugs

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arctic-hands · 7 months

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Nineties to Two thousands drug hysteria really did a number on people. I was riding my bike with my neighbor in the alley behind our houses when I came across those plastic filter tips mouth piece thing for joints and not knowing what it was but knowing it was litter I began to pick them up to throw away when my dad just happened to look over and see what I was doing, I showed him the trash and he blew up at me saying that it was for drugs and now the scent is on my hands and if a cop comes by they'll be able to detect it and I'll go to jail and I began to get really scared and also this memory I'm Nine Years Old

#drug hysteria #90s kid #d.a.r.e

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blanketburritotoro · 1 month

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Yeah sure, the D.A.R.E. program is okay I guess.

Wanna know what ACTUALLY left a lasting impact on me and made me want to NEVER go anywhere near drugs as a child? Had a major developmental impact?

The Ranger's Apprentice ya book series by John Flanagan.

There's a good length of time in there where a character's consciousness just goes bye-bye because of a drug he was tricked into taking and let me tell you. For little 12year old me, the length of the story before that character was weened off the drug and came back to himself was like I had personally lost an actual real and dear friend. Lil bebe me was so distraught. Grief stricken as I could be and still appear "normal". At that point in my life I didn't have friends, I had books. Broke me a little bit until the character got better.

Anyway, D.A.R.E. who?

#john flanagan #rangers apprentice #ya books #no friends just books #d.a.r.e #dont do drugs kids

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webdiggerxxx · 5 months

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