Two Views: 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.

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