I have been offered drugs exactly once in my life. It was on my former roommate’s 24th birthday. We had gone out to a bar, and then to an after party at the home of a friend of a friend. I was in the bathroom when a guy walked in - without knocking - and asked me if I wanted a key bump.
I had to think for a minute what that was. Coke, my brain said.
Drug lingo is one of my favorite forms of speech. It’s always so hilarious and random; you can almost imagine how any particular phrase came to be. "Oh crap," someone says, pulling a small vial of highly-priced cocaine from his pocket. "I don’t have anything to inhale this off of! I know! I’ll dip my car key in there."
I think I love drug lingo so much because of the early age at which I, and most people I know who were raised in the 1980’s, learned it all. In the public school system of the small western Oklahoma town where I spent my childhood, there seems to have been some kind of drug panic in about 1987, which is how, in the second grade, I and my fellow students were dragged in front of an endless parade of "Just Say No" campaigns.
These included motifs I think anyone in their late 20’s to early 30’s will recognize. There was the cop who came in with his drug-sniffing dog and his tin full of illicit substances, a small box which he’d open up saying something like "I got your goofballs in here, I got your qualudes, I got your Thai stick, your angel dust, your LSD." He’d rattle off a long line of words for us to watch out for - words that, should we hear our friends speak them, would signal to us that we should find the nearest adult and tattle, tattle, tattle.
Brian tells a story of an elementary school class in which the policeman came in and told them all he’d taped a mess of drugs to the underside of one of their chairs, and would now be releasing the drug-sniffing dog to find it. Into a room full of schoolchildren.
And then there was the "Just Say No" bootcamp, the legacy of Nancy Reagan, our nation’s befuddled First Lady. We were trained from a very early age how to avoid getting pulled down into the dark world of drug addiction: by refusing drugs if and when they were offered. "You will be offered drugs," we were told, in the same tone that Dick Cheney now uses to inform the nation that another 9/11 is a matter of when, not if.
All we had to do was to politely decline, to refuse peer pressure, to remember that truly cool people don’t do drugs. Oh, and, of course, to snitch. No way to get the drug monkey off your back than with some good old fashioned snitcheroo. They tried to disguise it as something we were doing to protect ourselves and our hapless friends who were snatched into the dark by the evil hand of the drug world - "Just tell an adult." But we saw it for what it was: turning stoolie.
Around this same time came the advent of the "Very Special Episode," and school teachers and counselors were free from having to learn all this confusing drug lingo, as Hollywood writers, who were no doubt chasing the powdery pony every chance they got, were given the daunting task of weaving moral lessons into the fabric of American culture.
This is how, at the age of 8, I learned about the perils of drinking of alcohol from a "Very Special Episode" of Roseanne, and about eating disorders from a "Very Special Episode" of Growing Pains. As kids, we were mostly just excited to get to watch television instead of doing math, and the teachers, well, the relief was written all over their faces: "We don’t have to talk about this stuff with them."
Mr. Belvedere taught me exactly how and how not to contract AIDS, knowledge that came in useful, for example, when a boy fell on the playground and started bleeding. "Will we catch AIDS if we touch him?" one student cried out.
"No!" I proclaimed, coming to everyone’s intellectual rescue. "You can only catch AIDS if he has AIDS, and only then if the infected blood gets into your bloodstream. That’s why we, none of us, should ever do any needle drugs or engage in unprotected sexual contact, especially with people we don’t know."
I was 8 years old.
Thank God for the "Very Special Episode," a ploy that worked much better than after-school specials. Those were just one-offs, and as enjoyable as it may have been to see Helen Hunt thrash herself out a third-story window, the message was much more effective when it was our favorite prime-time characters who were suddenly imperiled by the things that, adults assumed, were assaulting us at every turn in our daily lives. Who could forget Jessie Spano, who was "so excited … so excited … so …. scared!"
Would you have even remembered that had it been some actress in a random after-school movie you’d never see again? Why, of course not! But when the scourge of drug use hit Jessie - Jessie, of all people, the good girl whose good grades and sense of responsibility were an inspiration to us all - then it really became scary.
I was ready to say no to drugs starting at age 7. Sadly, I was never given the chance to put my strong moral fiber to the test. Like Harry Potter, however, my protection from these dangers was built into the very fiber of my being: I was never cool enough that anyone would ever, ever offer me drugs, or, for that matter, invite me to a party where there might be some drugs, or alcohol, or wine coolers. The first time I got drunk I was alone, and it was with box wine.
My friends in high school would go home at lunch and get high as kites, then come back red-eyed and giggling; I was never invited. They liked me well enough, but the idea of bringing me along to the drug-fest lunch hour never even occurred to them. I was just never the kind of person you’d invite along for something like that.
I did eventually discover weed, more out of a sense of obstinance than any real desire to experience it. Everyone else I knew had tried it, dammit, and I was going to, as well. It was more stubborn, irritated annoyance at having been left out all these years than anything. I never enjoyed it enough to seriously pursue it, or really at all for that matter, and so, on that fateful night, 17 years after first learning what a "key bump" was, I was able to say, "Oh, no thanks, man," just like I’d practiced as a child.
