THE TOMARKEN INTERVIEW SERIES Higher Learning 11.15.02-Midwestern States University

The following interview was conducted electronically, identities have been altered, yet no context has changed…the following is just one dude’s perspective on the phenomenon of the romantic relationship between drugs and college.

TOMARKEN.COM: Thanks for participating in this abbreviated, yet initial tomarken interview…they say it will be a series… You are a Junior at a famous Midwestern States University. For many, college and drugs are synonomous nouns. Coke appears to have made a comeback, before that it was arguably, ecstacy and before that a long line of others. Tell me what you think they actually do–why at certain times, certain people go to the blow?

Mr. ROGER FREDS: I could talk about drugs for a while, I have a lot to say about them as they are often something I observe myself refraining and asking myself why I feel so inspired to do so. I guess it would be best to start out with the origin of my drug and substance using. Alcohol doesn’t really count, it was fun-I did it in fifth grade with my boy Cecil. At the end of our drinking session I biked off to soccer practice and he said he would see me fall off my bike without even putting my arms out to protect my crashing body. This is nothing poetic, I went to soccer practice and promptly began to vomit. My friend Patrick Robertson told my coach that I had been drinking and he told my parents. I firmly denied any usage as I lay for eight hours on the blue couch in our den. I never really ate corn muffins again.

The marijuana was a somewhat rebellious endevor. I liked having contraband in my sock as I first bought it from Hershey the black playboy and drug rebel at our school. I smoke for six times without getting high and then in seventh grade, soon after my girlfriend dumped me I smoked with Hershey and he left me to my own affairs. These consisted of sitting at a tree and realizing that I could move my arm up and down automatically, bypassing the the muscular action and doing it by the power of imagining my arm going upwards. This phenomenon is explained easily by hypnotists who can spontaneously in a hypnotic rapport use this technique as a sign of deepening trance. Well, needless to say this prospect excited me. It opened me up to a lot of possibilities of the mind. But, magically, when the high was gone, the abilities of dissassociation that I thought were permanent vanished with the THC absorption of the smoke in my lungs. Marijuana created a dichotomy for me. This dichotomy resulted later with all the drugs I had done after this, LSD, mushrooms, cocaine, and ecstacy. These altered consciousnesses of suspended belief allowed me to explore realms of myself that I would only get frustrated too quickly at doing when I was sober. The social factors were present. It was the cool rebellious thing to do as an insecure and aspiring “cool” teenager I wanted to show firstly that I was not scared of anything especially acting like a pussy on drugs and secondly it helped me forge a world separate from my parents beliefs which did not exist on a drug plane. I could slip in to a reverie of quasi-objectivity with respect to my disagreements with my parents about school and how to spend one’s time and the guilt slipped into the drug abyss. This abyss swallowed things up and I could explore these feelings without having them racking my brains. I could tap into them at will-but-only under the influence of marijuana. This craving found me roaming the streets of my town looking for ghetto kids to sell me some shwag which I paid for with my parents money.

I started cocaine with my buddy senior year and this was a very different addiction then the subtle marijuana type. I basically was very hesistant at first. I started driving down into the ghetto of the city because I was the only one of my boys with a car and I was dependable with not getting pulled over. In fact up to this day I have still not gotten pulled over. So my boy started selling this shit and doing it a lot. I began to get a bit more interested and tried it. It was fun. It was not like alcohol due to the kind of intense pounding running from one thing to the next. I think drugs in general amplify one’s mental set, whatever that be. Under the feelings of mushrooms the you that separates you from others is what you feel, in all its beauties and imperfections. This magnification for me usually ended up on the more unpleasant end of the spectrum like “Am I gay.” I would look around and any male I looked at I thought they thought I was gay. If I was projecting that on them because I thought that about myself I am not sure. I am heterosexual but I don’t think it is easy for one to figure out their sexuality under the veil of an intense and self-conscious drug experience. What I mean though is questions that you have trouble with or things that you have trouble with will be amplified. I think that certain drugs amplify different mental sets of your current state of being. In the end of high school I rushed form one thing to the next, at a party I would run from talking to one person to the next, smoke one blunt and then promptly roll another, and wear myself out in the first fifteen minutes of a soccer practice. Cocaine amplified that part of myself and made me extra flippant, running from one thing to the next and being very anxious about what was about to happen. These intensely unpleasant experiences happened just about every time. i had a party once and I was so worried about people leaving my house because I thought the cops might come that I was yelling at people. It also makes me want to have coke a lot more. It made me feel very social on the drug but less social off of it. Coming down was very unpleasant, I either wanted to just go to sleep or I wanted to do more. I never paid for it and that was part of my justification for doing I drug that I felt 45% against doing. That other 55% was enough to tip the scales. The kinds of people it brought in to my sphere was not very comforting. These were very ghetto kids who had been in jail and were not only thiefs but had gotten in knife fights among other things. So I would do it but not pay for it. I also didn’t like having to ask my boy for it but I didn’t anyway and I think he got a bit frustrated about the free ride. I mean he ripped the hell off people and got a lot of free drugs. The main things that made me stop was the coming down, the unhappiness with my sober self and what I saw it doing to my friends. I am scared of being controlled by things and I saw this as something with pretty solid potential. I also find it rather easy to rationalize doing a drug. People can always say I kind of want to do something just because I feel like doing it. When you prod them they will say, who are you to tell me what is good or what is not good for me. That argument is hard to be empirically logical about explaining to someone not to mention hurting someone’s ego. The best thing I could really do was not do it but still support the people who do iut and try to understand why they do it so I could excplain to them why the best thing I learned about drugs is that you don’t need them to figure out everything and be as happy as possible
-Tomarken Flashback-
4.29.02 College Chemcial Culture in Ambivilen-Mark G. Nugent

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