The Greatest Lie Part 12

My Own Worst Enemy

Let’s face facts. The so-called the "War On Drugs," "Just Say No," and all the other anti-drug campaigns are complete failures because they ignore reality: getting high is fun.

College students drink and take drugs to break a boring routine; the poor do it to escape from intolerable misery; esthetes to explore a new place in their minds or bodies. Whatever the immediate impetus, the impulse to get high is about as primordial as that of propagation or perpetuation.

And the dangers are overstated: unless you are shooting heroin or smoking lots of crack, you’re really not in immediate danger of killing yourself. If recreational drugs were so dangerous, then half of my parents generation would be dead, right?

But when you wake up in the condition that I was in after my night out at Quest, you might well wish that you were dead. If the Feds really want to curb drug or alcohol abuse, they shouldn’t waste their time telling people how bad it is to get high. They should remind people about shitty it feels to crash, to be strung out, or to wake up really, really hung over.

The drug warriors would have been preaching to the choir when I awoke the Sunday morning after my night out with Alec.

When the first shafts of glittering winter light drove through my eyelids I pulled an unfamiliar down duvet over my head and shut my eyes tight against the light. The sun’s sparkling rays seemed only to increase the intensity of the throbbing behind my eye sockets. My tongue was swollen, dry, and seemingly glued to my parched and rough palate. My eyes squinted through a crust of dried tears and mascara. I was unwilling and a bit afraid to open my eyes and see where my binge had landed me.

But my mind whirred back through the fragmented images and impressions of the night before. Eyes still firmly shut, I collated them into a coherent memory and deduced where I was.

My suspicions were confirmed when I peeked and saw my classmate Alec snoring nearby, smiling contentedly in his dreams.