It is winter of '77. My brother Mark is a freshman in HS. On his way to school he took some drugs that left him not only tripping but violently so.
We got a call to come get him. Mom asked Miriam to drive as we loaded up in the station wagon. The principal and another man had to hold Mark as my sister drove us up to the hospital in Vinton.
I brought up this memory to my sister a few weeks ago. (I hadn't remembered that she was the driver.) What neither of us know to this day: What drugs was he on? How on earth did he access those drugs as a freshman at Benton Community? (To those not familiar, BC is a rural very white, very middle class, no gangs school district.)
That Mark impacted my life is an understatement. As he was 8.5 years older than me I didn't know him well but all who knew both of us compared us as being very alike. (The same principal named above was my 8th grade math teacher and called me Mark pretty much every day.)
When I was in HS we all knew a few potheads. Beer was absolutely the drug of choice of my generation. Although I've made up for it since then, the one beer I drank in HS was at our senior skip day when my classmate Jeff insisted.
This brings me to several questions:
What was Mark on that would send him on a bad trip? Did he mix acid with something? What are the drugs that today's teenagers are on?
When I was teaching at Hamilton I had several BC grads in my classes and was surprised that they said they really never drank alcohol; it was pot... pot... and more pot... but that was 15 years ago so🤷?
