On the 21st of June 1981, I got high for the very first time. It was the night of my high school graduation back in New Jersey . I wrote about it in my book, “Personal Use”, it’s the first chapter.
As today is 21st June 2021, it marks the 40th anniversary of this very significant event in my then, young life. Here is that first chapter of my book, reproduced in full.
If you dig it, you could always pick up a copy, you glorious mofos!
All the best,
Doug, the northlondonhippy
Chapter One
A Toe in the Water
Picture it, the late 1970s.
Hair was long, queues for petrol were even longer and disco music was king.
I was a dumb kid, living in a small beach town on the east coast of America.
Burt Reynolds was the biggest film star in the world, Jaws and Star Wars were immensely popular and the BeeGees were dominating the music charts.
The 70s were weird.
I went to a small high school, there were only 200 students in my year. I wasn’t one of the cool kids, which I am sure will shock you. I wasn’t one of the uncool kids either. I was just a kid, trying to figure out my place in the world.
I‘m still trying to figure out my place in the world. Some things don’t change.
The very first drug I experimented with was tobacco.
Legal, readily available and used by just about every adult I knew at the time, tobacco was the socially acceptable drug of choice for millions. Smoking was cool, smoking was popular, smoking was a favourite pastime for many people when I was a child. Smoking is also potentially fatal, but no one seemed to care back then.
Smokers today still don’t.
Getting hold of cigarettes was easy, one of my friends acquired a pack of Marlboro Reds and a group of us went out into the woods near a local park. I was probably about 12 years old at the time. That would make it 1975.
We gathered in the woods, this small group of pre-teens, and we all lit up.
None of us really knew how to smoke, so we inhaled into our mouths and quickly exhaled. The unlucky amongst us, drew the thick smoke deeper into their lungs and were rewarded with convulsing coughs.
The taste was disgusting, but look how cool and grown up we all were! I wouldn’t smoke a cigarette again for seven years. This experience was not enjoyable.
I started smoking cigarettes properly at the age of nineteen and didn’t stop until a few years ago, at the tender age of fifty.
Cigarettes are stupid and I regretted getting hooked on them, but I still looked cool smoking them. Everyone does and that’s one of the reasons why anti-smoking campaigns don’t work. Smoking is cool, smoking is sexy. Emphysema and cancer, much less so, but they are decades away from your first smoke, so it’s a hard sell.
These days, I am still hooked on nicotine, but I use an electronic cigarette, which is a much safer, healthier way to get that sweet nicotine buzz.
The next drug I experimented with was alcohol.
My parents, like the parents of all my friends, kept well- stocked bars in their homes, so we were all exposed to liquor at an early age. Booze was normal, acceptable and readily available, much like tobacco.
I used and abused liquor for years, but I don’t drink any more.
I was 13 years old, the first time I got properly drunk. It was at a party at a friend’s house.
I learned a couple of valuable lessons that night. One: that booze can make you sick. And two, if you swiped a small amount from every bottle in your parents’ liquor cabinet, no one would notice.
Bug juice. That’s what we called it. Bug juice. You would mix a small amount of every liquor in your parents’ bar, into a bottle or jug, add something to kill the taste, like orange juice or fizzy pop and away you go.
One of the ingredients was always Creme de Menthe, a foul, minty mouthwash-like liqueur with a deep green colour. It was a popular gift, so everyone had a bottle of this, practically untouched. It became a staple ingredient in our bug juice. It always ensured a bright green colour that was the trademark of this foul swill.
A small group of us polished off a large pitcher of bug juice and proceeded to get loud and lairy. We went outside to smoke cigarettes and run around. That’s what drunken 13 year-olds do.
At some point between going outside and getting collected by my parents, I realised I was unpleasantly drunk and a bit dizzy. And then I threw up and magically felt better.
I would repeat this routine on and off, for decades. Drink too much, throw up, and feel better.
As an adult, I drank like I meant it and could polish off copious amounts of spirits. Vodka, tequila and cognac were my favourites.
I stopped drinking completely, well, around 26 years later, in 2002. And I don’t regret stopping at all, though it shocks me it took as long as it did to realise what a bad drug booze is. Live and learn. Eventually.
Tobacco and alcohol were part of my life, directly and indirectly, from my formative years right through to adulthood and middle age. And they are two of the worst drugs around in terms of harms to an individual and society.
While tobacco use has fallen, it still accounts for a shocking number of preventable deaths every year. And alcohol is one of the most damaging substances around, with many experts proclaiming it worse than heroin and cocaine due to the immense damage it continues to cause to individuals and society as a whole.
And it might have been the 1980s when the anti-drug hysteria reached its peak, but even back in the hippy- dippy 70s, the message was still clear: Drugs are bad, m’kay.
My mother was terrified by drugs, even though she was a heavy cigarette smoker and social drinker. She didn’t see herself for the drug user she really was. She tried to pass this mixed message on to me, and it was surprisingly effective. I thought booze and cigarettes were acceptable, but drugs definitely not.
Only losers were users, I once thought. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
My parents, like the parents of my friends, didn’t discourage teenage drinking. In their view, drinking was OK, because ‘at least it wasn’t drugs’. Except it was a drug, but that distinction was lost on them back then. Just as it is now.
Alcohol and cigarettes are drugs, no doubt about that that, but they’re legal, so that’s OK. And they’re deadly, which is also apparently just fine too.
Back then, keg parties were the done thing. Your parents would get half a keg of cheap beer and let you have your friends over. They enabled under-age drinking as a defence to drugs. Clever, eh?
At around the age of 16, I tried weed for the first time. I didn’t get high, I didn’t come even close, but the experience taught me a lot about my own fears and perceptions.
It was early evening, after school and post extra- curricular activities. I was invited to join a few of my friends on the school playing field, to sample the devil’s weed for the very first time.
I remember being extremely nervous, worried that I would be out of control and stinking of dope, but I overcame my fears by asking my friends questions. What is it like? What does it taste like? Would people know immediately that I was high? They were all very reassuring.
We sat in a small circle, maybe half a dozen of us. A small, single skin joint was lit and passed around the circle. When my turn came, I really didn’t know what to do, so I took a puff and passed it on. I coughed a lot and everyone laughed at the newbie.
I had several turns on the joint and I didn’t feel any different. I had no idea how to smoke or how to get the smoke into my lungs. And I had no idea what I should be feeling, but I was fairly certain I wasn’t feeling anything.
But I had finally tried weed and that was the main thing. I was part of a peer group, and my green cherry was well and truly popped… except I wasn’t even slightly high.
They say weed doesn’t make you paranoid, it’s the illegality that does and that was certainly true for my first experience. I was absolutely terrified of being arrested, or worse my parents finding out I had dabbled in drugs.
We smoked another doobie, or rather my friends did, while I wasted more smoke and coughed. And when we were done, we all went home.
I remember walking into my house convinced my mother would take one look at me and know I was on drugs.
You don’t just take drugs, or rather, once you take them, you are ‘on drugs’, presumably, for life.
I said a quick hello and went straight upstairs to my bedroom. I took off all my clothes, which I was convinced reeked of weed and stuffed them into a bag. I got dressed again in clean clothes and quietly took the bag of old, stinky weed-clothes out to the trash and threw my them away. Better to have one less outfit than have my shameful secret uncovered, now that I was ‘on drugs’.
I didn’t go back downstairs after that. I can remember, even now, lying in bed, in the dark, worrying about the risk I took. I wasn’t even high, just scared.
Would I be craving acid next, or smack? Would I be stealing to support my new habit? Would I be grounded until I was 25, because I was dumb enough to take a few puffs from a joint only to end up ‘on drugs’?
Of course not! But in my less than worldly wise, 16-year- old brain, a series of horrible outcomes awaited me.
Weed was very popular in my high school. This was the late 70s, in a beach town on the east coast of America. Weed was everywhere.
I remember watching a burnout surfer kid in one of my classes, rolling joints inside a textbook, our teacher completely oblivious to it. I saw kids, stoned out of their gourds, eyes red, lids drooping, attending other classes. And there were rumours about teachers, getting high in their cars before class. They were probably all true.
My brief brush with marijuana didn’t put me off, exactly, but nor did it inspire me to try it again, at least not soon. I was still curious, but my curiosity was somewhat sated, because I could say with confidence that I had tried weed. I wouldn’t smoke again for a couple of years.
In my senior year of high school, I fell in with a different group and they were proper, hardcore stoners. They were always high and while there was never any pressure to try it again, they certainly made it look more enjoyable.
They bought it by the quarter ounce, half ounce or ounce. It was what I would now call Mexican dirt weed: darkish brown, full of twigs and seeds and dry and dusty. This was known as commercial weed at the time. It came in by the plane or boatload, from south of the border. Some people called it Colombian Gold, but those in the know said it was from Mexico.
It never looked like much in the bag, that’s for sure, nothing like the beautiful, manicured green buds we’ve grown accustom to today.
I observed the rituals of dope smoking, 1970s style. You would start with a gatefold, double album cover, opened and spread out in front of you. Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti was always a popular choice.
You would take the dirt weed and crumble it between your fingers on to the album cover, reducing it to dust. You would pull out the twigs and sticks, then sift with the edge of a pack of rolling papers, usually EZ-Widers, so the seeds would collect in the hinge of the album cover. You didn’t want the seeds in your joint, as they would explode like popcorn with a loud snap.
Joints back then were thin, single skinners, rolled neat without tobacco. In America, we always smoked it neat, mixing with tobacco was something I would pick up when I moved to the UK and started smoking hash.
Headshops were everywhere, selling pipes, bongs, power hitters, doob-tubes, roach clips and any other bit of paraphernalia you can think of and more. My friends had a wide selection to try.
On the night of my high school graduation in 1981, I ended up at a pool party with my stoner friends. They were passing around joints, hitting bongs and generally having a very good time. We were also drinking.
One of my friends had a power hitter, a piece of paraphernalia that was popular at the time. It was a squeezee plastic bottle, with a screw cap on the end and a draw hole in the side. You unscrewed the cap, inserted a lit joint into the cap, then screwed it back on the bottle. When you squeezed the bottle while covering the draw hole, smoke was forced out the end of the cap in a steady, heavy stream. Hence putting the power into a power hitter.
My friends explained to me that I needed to get the smoke into my lungs and hold it, if I wanted to get high.
I did. I did want to get high, so I followed their advice.
I took a couple of long draws from the power hitter, getting the smoke deep down into my lungs and then I coughed. The smoke was harsh and burned my throat, but I was persistent and got used to it quickly.
Before long, I was taking great lungfuls of smoke and holding it for ages.
And then it happened,
I was high.
For. The. Very. First. Time.
Wow!
Wow! WOW!
It was as if for the first time in my life, I actually felt normal. I felt complete. I felt like I had found the one thing that my life was missing. All of my existential angst and creeping anxiety just melted away. The world made sense, the universe made sense.
I made sense.
I knew in that moment that my life was about to get much better. I knew in that moment I had found something special, something that would help me to become the person I am today.
And I knew that I needed to have more of this wonderful substance. Lots more.
I turned to my friend and asked if he could help me get some for myself?
He said: ‘Yes.’
After a 30 year career as a journalist, working for some of the largest news organisations in the world, including Associated Press, and Reuters, and 15 years as an overnight duty news editor for BBC News, Doug – the northlondonhippy is now a full time writer, hippy, and drug law reform campaigner.
Doug is also the author of “Personal Use by the northlondonhippy.” “Personal Use” chronicles Doug’s first 35 years of drug use, while calling for urgent drug law reform. It’s a cracking read, you will laugh, you will cry, and you can bet your ass that you will wish you were a hippy too!
Doug’s next book, “High Hopes” should have been published by now, but it is hard to write a book about remaining optimistic in the face of adversity, during a global pandemic. Try it yourself!
For the last year, Doug has spent most of his time hiding away from a killer virus. Bet many of you have too.
You can find Doug – the northlondonhippy on Twitter: @nthlondonhippy, but only if you look really hard.