Drug of choice

For the record, my column was due two days before election day. Instead of trying to predict the unpredictable, I pivoted and chose another topic. The burn-out is real for this little political junkie.

When I was a kid we lived in Woody Creek, at the very end of Twining Flats Road. Well, maybe there was one more house past ours on the other side of the road, but I don’t ever remember venturing down there. I do remember playing for hours by the river under the spruce trees, just a hop, skip, and jump away from where, by all accounts, Hunter S. Thompson was hanging out at the Woody Creek Tavern, imbibing and testing the boundaries of conventional authority.

At that age I wasn’t aware of booze beyond the can of Coors my dad had after work and Mom’s special ‘clear juice’ that she drank at the kitchen table with her friend, Lyndie Gagne. Growing up on the Roaring Fork in the 1970s, my substance of choice was sugar, probably because we never got any, with the obvious exception of Halloween. I gladly walked the entirety of Twining Flats in my Princess Leia costume in the dark with an empty pillowcase to hold all the candy. Of course, Halloween was bittersweet because we had our costumes all ready to go and then inevitably had to cover them up with a down parka when the temperature dropped.

The Shannons, who lived across the road from us, gave out little boxes of raisins on Halloween, which my sister and I always bemoaned as we spread our candy out to take inventory and get down to the business of bartering. Sarah was my trusted comrade in all sugar-gaining efforts. Whenever we went to our grandparents’ ranch in Carbondale, she was my loyal and reliable lookout, positioned at the pantry door to alert me of anyone’s approach while I stretched to the top shelf, reaching for the Red Hots. (Red Hots, chocolate chips, basically, sugar used for baking was the only kind we ever found at the ranch.)

Looking back, I’m not sure if it was more about the actual sugar— as addictive as cocaine they say, or the allure of rebelling against the No Snacking Between Meals Rule. Like a moth to flame, I have always been attracted to acts of defiance. As a teenager, I graduated from Red Hots to cigarettes and beer, eventually trying several types of mind-altering substances… Yep, drugs. I’m talking about drugs.

Marijuana was called the “gateway drug” when I was young, nothing like the kid in a candy store vibe we have going today. The powers-that-be claimed it would lead to a degenerate’s life of corruption and peril. I remember watching a film in the auditorium about a young man who took LSD in a sugar cube and then jumped out of the window because he thought he could fly. “We’re never taking LSD!” my fifth-grade friends and I went around saying to each other. But a decade later when someone offered me acid, I thought, “Why not give it a try?” completely unaware that it was the same drug. And that experience only reinforced my instinct to trust myself more than any government issued copy claiming to be the authority.

The true thing about drugs, whether they are street or Big Pharma, is that you really want to be able to trust the source. In my youth, drugs held an aspect of bravado and defiance: breaking free from societal constraints, conventional expectations and preconceived notions. But with age I began to see the revolving door of pharmaceuticals, profit, and legislation, trapping the politicians like bugs in glass. And I was disgusted by the hypocrisy of supporting Lyndon “regular pants don’t fit me” Johnson sending boys who were barely old enough to vote to their violent deaths in the jungle, meanwhile transporting heroin via Air America cargo flights.

The War on Drugs is classic American warfare. Establish public enemy #1, rally the troops with propaganda and fearmongering, then sit back and let the big dog eat, i.e., monitor war profits. Sure, I’m more jaded than that little girl seeking sugar on Twining Flats Road. I took an experimental path, questioned authority, and here I am, still hanging out by the Roaring Fork River: older, wiser, moderately sober. I do enjoy a glass of ‘clear juice’ now and then…