I was in the third grade when I had my first encounter with drugs.

My mother had been giving us the NO DRUGS talk for years, and so we knew every single way to say no to drugs.

Being nine though, we had to practice saying no to drugs by playing. So, my brother and i would take turns being the dealers and the unsuspecting or suspecting buyer. Our games usually went like this:

Dealer: Hey man! Want to buy some Grass or Weeds man?

Customer:  Oh, you sell lawn supplies?

Dealer: No man, I sell the green stuff!

Customer: Grass?

Dealer: Yeah! Grass!

Customer: Well, my lawn does look a llittle yellow..

Dealer: Allright man, here’s some grass!

(Dealer puts a bag into customers hand)

Customer: ARE THESE DRUGS!?!

Dealer: Yeah man, they are! Man.

Customer: I am not going to do these, I have better ways to spend my time, and drugs ruin your life!

(Customer throws bag at dealer, runs away)

 

So yeah, this was how we spent our afternoons while our mother was asleep.

It also didn’t help that we went to a school in the “Ghetto” of Kansas City. We went to this Italian cultural school, but the neighborhood was kind of shady. At recess there were always guys hanging around willing to pay any random student to hold their paper bag and wait for a man named ‘Roscoe’ to come by and get it.  Occasionally we would find needles and tourniquets lying around, until eventually recess was permanently cancelled.

One day my brother and his friend found two bags of this powdery stuff. My brother’s was white, his friends was orange, and they decided it was marijuana.

So they went to lunch, and made a big show of sprinkling it into their food and eating it while the rest of us watched in disgust.

Then someone tattled that two of the boys had brought marijuana in plastic bags to school, and my brother’s friends father (who was the sheriff) came to strip search both boys and do tests.

Turns out the powdery stuff was chalk dust. 

After this my brother became the leading ‘no drugs’ person for a while. Later when we actually moved into the ‘ghetto’ he was always on the lookout for them. We’d go through clouds of pot smoke on our way up to our third story apartment, and we’d sit on the fire escape and watch dealings happen in our parking lot.

He’d always tsk and say with the voice of someone who’s been there, “They shouldn’t do that.”