Self Analysis Paper

    One of the first times I remember being talked to about drugs, my father and grandmother were telling my older brother and I not to smoke marijuana. They said, “If people call you a square when you say no, you just tell them that you’re gonna be a rich square.” Being a very young child, I believed them and took the message to heart. It was a long time before I realized the hypocrisy that came with the anti-drug messages I received.
    I was born in 1968, and my parents were as hip as most of the hippies back then. They divorced when I was four, my brother six. As we saw my father one weekend a month, it was easy for him not to smoke cigarettes and pot while we were visiting him, so I had an impression of him as being drug free. In reality he was a recreational pot user throughout the seventies. My mother smoked cigarettes daily, which she now feels contributed to my brother’s asthma. I really hated the second hand smoke and remember horrible trips in the back seat of the car trying to breathe. Her boyfriend had a younger brother in high school, and often on a Saturday night he and his friends would come over and all the adults would sit in our living room and pass around a bong while we watched Saturday Night Live. The funny thing is, I didn’t realize that what they were smoking was marijuana. It never occurred to me. I just thought, “They’re smoking the bong.” Then, when I was finishing sixth grade, the rumor was that people sold pot on “The shortcut”, a sidewalk connecting Main Street to Miller Junior High. I told my brother, “Gee, I didn’t think there were drugs in our town” (Marshalltown, Iowa, about 28,000 people).  He then told me that what they had been smoking in the bong was marijuana. I was shocked.
    When my great-grandmother died, my mother was very upset and got really drunk at her funeral. I tried to comfort her. I was thirteen and it was the first time I had seen my mother really drunk. There have been a couple other times, at a Fourth of July party when I was about 15 and at my wedding. She gets very talkative when she is drunk. Regarding my family, my mother told me when I was about 19, “It’s good that you didn’t start to smoke, because you like things so much that you get hooked real fast.” I have an uncle on both sides of the family who is or has been alcoholic. On my dad’s side it was hidden from me. When uncle Craig had a nasty scar on his forehead, it was because he “fell asleep while driving” instead of being in a drunk driving accident.
     Then we moved out of town and into an extremely small, rural school district (256 K – 12, 15 in my class) populated mostly by WASP farm kids. There were a couple of the high school kids who were rumored to do pot, but not many. Alcohol was the drug of choice there. For some reason, I was still very goody-goody and the anti-drug message I was getting from my parents stuck. I would not drink, and I did not want to drink. However, many of my classmates did. There were many times when I had to ride home with someone who was drunk. However, I never felt any peer pressure to drink. I remember at one of my brother’s classmates graduation party, there was a bunch of beer available, and one of my classmates asked me if I wanted one. I said no, and he said, “That’s cool.”
    Once a drug abuse program came to our school for an all school assembly. There was the requisite former teenage junkie who told all about her past abuses and how we should avoid her fate. Then we all took a survey on our drug use. After the assembly, our English teacher asked us what we thought of when they talked about drugs. We all thought of cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and other hard drugs. She told us that she felt alcohol was the most prevalent in our school. When the survey results came back showing that many of the students in our school had a big drug problem, the guidance counselor/history teacher said, “These surveys aren’t worth crap. All the students lie on them.” I didn’t really think about it much, because I was totally alcohol and drug free.
    Then I got a scholarship to go to Germany as an exchange student for a year. I was seventeen and still did not drink when I got there. Guess how long that lasted. A few weeks after being there my host-father asked me if I’d like to try a Radler, half beer and half sprite. It takes the bitterness out of it. It is quite good. I soon graduated to straight beer, wine, and occasionally other liquors. My older host-brother was nineteen, and we often went to great parties with his friends. I don’t think that I ever got to the puking point during that year, but I definitely knocked back quite a few.
    Then I came back to the U.S. and to my senior year of high school. My family hosted a German girl for that year. My original class had graduated while I was in Germany, so I was now in a class with 12 girls and 3 other boys. We didn’t have much of a choice about who to socialize with. My best friend from down the road, who was in the Marshalltown school district, was also a senior. My attitudes towards drinking alcohol had changed completely. I was a drinker, and I felt it was unfair for the government to restrict me from drinking based on my age. My attitude towards other drug use had yet to change. Most of our parties involved getting very drunk. One of our classmates worked at a grocery store and could buy alcohol for us. We spent a lot of nights in cornfields, abandoned farm houses, and the gravel pit. I was more conscious of the dangers of drunken driving, and tried to avoid it as much as possible. However, there were many times when I rode with someone who was drunk, and probably a few times when I drove with maybe a few too many. As my mother told me recently about those days, “There were a lot of times where we didn’t ask you guys what you were doing, and it was probably better for us that way.”
    On September 26, 1986, Mike and Dick Caldwell, two brothers from Marshalltown who I had played with as a child because they were my neighbors but who I hadn’t really seen much of since moving out of town, were killed in a drunk-driving crash. Dick had just turned 21, Mike was still 19. Dick bought a bottle of Jim Beam and they went out to the country with a friend to get drunk. On the way back, a forty-year-old alcoholic drunk man ran into their car. It went into the ditch. The other driver got out and was trying to help them get out of the car. They were conscious and desperately trying to get out of the car, but before they could it burst into flames. Mike’s keys that were in his pocket melted to his hip bone. The next day, their father called us and asked me to be a pallbearer for Mike. Dick had been in the Army National Guard, and would have a six of his comrades bear him, but there weren’t enough people for Mike. Of course it was a closed casket ceremony. The whole experience really effected me. A few years later when I was in a hard rock band I wrote a song about it. I was of course more aware of the dangers of drunk driving, but I was also very angry at the law that I felt contributed to their necessity of driving out to the country to get drunk.
     The parties I started going to with my best friend in Marshalltown were where I was first really exposed to marijuana. The group was the cool, intellectual, drama group from Marshalltown high school. Of course we got drunk, but we had a lot of very interesting conversations as well. I became good friends with a lot of people. Then I found out that most of them were smoking pot. If I had known that aforehand, I probably would not have associated with them, because even though I was a fairly heavy beer drinker, I was still very prejudiced against other illegal drugs. But now that I knew these people were pretty cool people, I couldn’t judge them otherwise just because they were smoking dope every now and then. It was always done in a separate room from the main party, and I was never pressured to do it.
     The summer after my graduation from high school, my parents, grandmother, the German exchange student and I went up to the cabin by Lake Washburn, which is close to Outing, Minnesota. My second-cousin and her friend were up there too, and the four of us young people spent the nights getting drunk and playing cards. One night we started playing a game where you had to guess the next card that would be turned up, and if you got it right you would have to go jump in the lake. Towards the end of the deck, my cousin’s friend guessed the two of clubs and got it right. Of course she didn’t want to go through with it, but we wouldn’t hear of that. So she went halfway out on the dock and jumped in. She should have went all the way, because that lake is very shallow, and it was only about two or three feet where she jumped in, and she is quite obese. She broke her ankle. I mean really broke it, a compound fracture. So there she is, sitting in the water screaming in pain, yelling for us to help her, and we didn’t believe her. We thought she was faking. Two sailors who happened to be on the beach that night came down and helped us get her out. Just about everyone of the cabins on that beach belongs to one of our relatives, and before long they were out in force advising on what should be done. An ambulance came and took my cousin and her friend to a hospital in Outing where she had surgery. I remember taking a taxi after the ambulance to be with my cousin, but I don’t remember when we got back.
     You think we would have learned our lesson after that, but a day or two after that there we were again, drinking and playing cards, this time with the sailors. They had brought of bottle of Southern Comfort along, and some blackberry schnapps too. Boy did we have a good time that night. Sometime in the a.m. hours I came back to our cabin and went to bed on a mattress on the floor, right beside my mother and step-father’s bed. I remember thinking, “I feel like I’m going to puke, but I never puke, I won’t puke.” Sure enough, I sat up and vomited on my blanket, then I lay back down and went to sleep. My mother, poked me awake and said, “Scot, clean that mess up.” My grandmother was asleep in the next room and my aunt and uncle were upstairs. Luckily, I was beyond caring. I rolled my blanket up and took it outside, came back in and passed out. The next morning I washed the blanket in the lake, and pieces of doritos floated amongst the weeds and were eaten by the minnows. I guess my family must have thought that I had learned my lesson, because nobody said a thing.
     Then I went to college. Being underage meant that you couldn’t go to a bar, but somehow that wasn’t a big problem. A lot of the people from the Marshalltown high school crowd that I had partied with were at the University of Iowa. The ones with their own apartment were the primary party hosts. I learned to control my drinking somewhat better, and very rarely drank to the point of vomiting. Still, when I was applying for the Defense Language Institute with the Army, I was turned down because they thought I drank too much. I had overestimated when answering the question, “How often do you get drunk?” I thought, my birthday, New Years, several parties, about once a month. They asked, what does “get drunk” mean to you. I said, “When I get the feeling that I better stop drinking now or I will probably throw up.” In actuality, I didn’t get to that point twelve times a year, but given their suspicious questioning it seemed impossible to revise my estimate. Luckily it was a good thing that I didn’t join the Army.
    My drug using friends started being much more open about their drug use. Now it was common for them to smoke pot out where everyone else was drinking beer. Sometimes they would talk about getting some other drugs, like LSD and cocaine. That’s when I would leave the party. Their academic life started to suffer greatly. Most of these guys were extremely intelligent, but most of them flunked out of school within two years. One of them became a dealer to support his habit. He was getting “baked” everyday on pot. Apparently that takes a lot of it. They got the munchies one night and ordered some pizza. When the delivery man came and they opened the door, surprise! It was the cops. I remember one time I was talking to one of them who was tripping on LSD. I wanted to find out what he was doing it for and what he was experiencing. He told me, “I’m enjoying talking to you, but I could sit here and look at my hand for the next five hours and have just as much fun.” Then a couple of them who had already dropped out decided that they would start a band. They figured that they would need around $500 to get the equipment to start out. They had about $100, so they planned that they would go to a Grateful Dead concert in Wisconsin, buy a sheet of acid and bring it back to Iowa to sell it. They thought that they would get enough profit for what they needed. I’m not sure, but I don’t think that they ever got around to it.
    Then I went to Germany for another year, this time in college. Many of the people I knew there that year smoked hash quite often. It was very common. By this time I no longer was so prejudiced against drug users that I would not associate with them. I was living with the family of the German exchange student who had stayed with my family a few years earlier, Henny. She probably smoked hash almost everyday. In the group of people that we hung out with, there were some people, like myself, who did not smoke hash. Again, that was accepted by the people who did, and I felt no pressure to do so. Henny finally graduated from high school and spent many years in and out of the university. Now she is part owner of a bar, and with that ownership has come some responsibility.
    Then there is my brother. He did not smoke because of his asthma, and for several years he professed to be very anti-drug use. In his later college years he began to smoke marijuana. My parents were quite upset, but what could they do? He got a job at Hewlett-Packard and moved to the Bay Area. My mother says, “Except for him having a high tech job, he and his girlfriend are really living the hippy lifestyle. After we were married, my wife and I moved to California and lived with them for a year. It was very difficult for my wife, who had had no contact with drugs before. I had known that my brother was using pot, but to see it on a daily basis was different. He is enjoying his life, but I sometimes wonder about how much he really is.
 As for myself, I have stuck with alcohol. During my college years I would get pretty drunk on the weekends. In Germany I drank lots of beer and in France and Hungary it was wine. Now that I have a family I don’t drink very often, but I still enjoy a few beers occasionally. I don’t drink coffee everyday, but will drink it sometimes. At times I have played video and computer games to a point which could definitely be called an addiction. So I have kind of answered part two of this essay before part one, but I think that will make it easier to understand my attitudes toward drug use.
    I think that the “feeling of intoxication” is what people are often striving for. Drugs can offer a way of getting there that might be easier than others. All things in moderation is my motto. Obsessive anything can get you in trouble. Mind altering drugs can be more dangerous than other forms of obtaining this state. I have seen alcohol have really bad effects on people, and I have seen people smoke pot for a long time and not have any extremely negative effects. However, in my experience, pot, and other drugs that are illegal in our society more often have extremely negative effects on people who use them. Many of my high school and college friends who were into pot didn’t go very far in life. A few of them are dead. I wouldn’t trade places with them at any rate. Other drugs, such as inhalants, are so dangerous that I have a hard time understanding why anyone would use them. Since pot use is so prevalent in our society, I have come to accept people who use it, but I will always have some prejudices against them. Sometimes I will encounter someone who has a certain smell that I associate with people who smoke pot. I don’t know if it is the actual smell of pot or incense that pot users use to cloak that smell, or maybe I’m totally wrong. Still, I look at people a little differently when I smell that smell.
    As a teacher I will support education that will lessen the possibility that my students will use drugs in a negative manner. I feel that some drugs are so dangerous that they can only be used in a negative manner unless used under a doctor’s supervision. I think that teaching students about the real effects of drugs has the best chance of getting them to think responsibly about drugs. Given my personal experience with alcohol, I believe that some people need to experience things first hand for themselves. For others, hopefully second hand knowledge will be enough for them to learn responsibility.