"I tried it and I liked it."

I was writing today about an incident that revolved around a journalism class I took in high school. The class was an English elective and whoever took it became responsible for publishing — editing, writing, taking photos, typing the copy, and laying everything out using a machine with rollers that coat the back of paper with wax to send to the shop class that printed it using giant offset printers — the school newspaper for that semester. I was the editor.

My high school was as clique-ish as the next but I never fit neatly into any of them. I was alternately a theater kid, a pothead, a brain, a troublemaker, a teacher’s pet. I smoked a lot of pot in high school but I was conflicted about it and would give it up for periods of time, like say when we were rehearsing a play, then start again. Smoking marijuana had a deeper stigma than it does now but because it was such a serious transgression it could stay hidden in plain sight. Homosexuality was like that too, most people didn’t know what they were looking at. The risk of being caught was lower while the consequences were more serious. Now everybody is all up in everybody else’s subculture and you can’t hide anything.

I don’t remember getting any real resistance from faculty to my non-judgmental survey of students’ attitudes toward marijuana. (I did have to include a sidebar expressing a negative view.) I used the school mimeograph machine to print the blank surveys and I kept the filled-out sheets with their purple typed questions and answers scrawled in pencil for years but don’t have them anymore. I remember being really impressed by how openly and thoughtfully most of the kids answered the questions. And we ran out of copies of “the pot edition” much more quickly than usual.