The Rules

1. Don’t get caught.
   1. Use a stash.
   2. Paraphernalia is a bust.
   3. Don’t wear labels.
2. Be true to your drug.
3. Don’t get killed.
   1. Don’t snitch.
   2. Don’t cop.
   3. Give it up.
4. Dive the plan; plan the dive.
5. Don’t do stupid drugs.
   1. Tic, dust, PCP
   2. Heroin
   3. LSD
   4. Tobacco
   5. Ludes
   6. crack
6. Don’t operate heavy machinery.
7. Don’t be the drug.

If I have this discussion with a child, I’m in violation of the law. I am contributing to the delinquency of a minor.  We have all lost friends and associates.  Any eight year old will tell you that they are never going to do drugs; they don’t even like the taste of beer or cigarettes. Just say no works great with eight year-olds. I am proposing to instruct them in how to do drugs. If they refrain even better, but doing drugs has rules just like anything else. The point is to survive the experience, grow bored with it and move on to their careers as lawyers, judges, doctors and presidents.  You may feel that eight is too young, don’t wait until someone more influential than you tells them how great drugs are.

Rule number one: Don’t get caught. Part one: use a stash.  A stash is where you put all your drugs.  The important word is all.  Why do you do that? So you can get rid of it easily.  You don’t scatter them all over the house saying:

-they won’t find all of it.

If they find any of it, you are busted. How do you get rid of your stash? Not the toilet, too slow, the disposal, you fire up the dishwasher get the water running and be sure to rinse the container.  You can always get more drugs; you can’t get a new life.

Part two of don’t get caught: say Joe Man obtains a warrant to your domicile and finds the severed heads of three of your classmates in the freezer, what’s the charge?  Delinquency, say he finds a brass hash pipe, what’s the charge? That’s right, delinquency. The point is that juveniles do not have rights and it’s embarrassing trying to tell the judge you spent fifty dollars on a hash pipe because you thought it was pretty.

Part three: Have you ever seen anyone wearing a pin that has HM, or PP, or SL on it? Even the craziest homicidal maniac, pickpocket or shoplifter doesn’t want to be caught. You have become a criminal.  We pay the police a lot of money to catch you and put you in jail. That is their job.  Imagine Joe Man staked out on the 7-Eleven around 11:30.  He sees his sergeant once in the evening on roll call and occasionally at the double d, and his review is coming up.  Here comes pretty Polly wearing her most outrageous or her Goth scoring a super slurp and a flaming Cheetos.  This is his opportunity to conduct an intervention into a troubled adolescent and demonstrate his concern for the community.  Polly is so busted.

-What if she’s clean?

Polly has identified herself as a criminal.  It is Joe Man’s job to arrest and convict her.  If all that stands between Joe Man’s duty is a small quantity of cannabis do you believe that those five grams will not appear?

-He can lose his job for that.

Whatever else you may say about the police, they are very brave.  They intervene in domestic disturbances; they stop strangers and give them traffic citations.  They risk their lives; do you believe that they are afraid for their jobs?  They may lose their jobs for not making enough arrests.  Once they know you are a criminal, their job is to put you in jail.  If you tell them you are a criminal, they are likely to believe you, and then dear children, the police officer is no longer your friend.

Rule number two: BE TRUE TO YOUR DRUG. If you learn nothing else, dear children please remember this.  Leave with the one that brought you. Do not mix your drugs.  When you fill your prescription the first thing they should ask you is what else are you taking.  What is the worst drug to mix with any other? Alcohol, most drugs depress your peristaltic reflex; that makes it harder to vomit, so when you do get sick you choke to death; it happens all the time.  Please, please, please dear children, be true to your drug.

Rule number three: Don’t get killed. Part one: don’t snitch.  It’s difficult to realize when the nice officer is threatening to leave you in a cell with three sex offenders but snitching is self-incrimination.  Unfortunately, when you are operating in a world without legal redress snitching is also fatal.  What should you do when someone snitches on you?  Cut them off.

Part two: If several of your friends and associates approach you with the proposition of combining your purchasing power in a collective enterprise and by achieving quantities of scale reduce your over all expenditure what do you tell them?

-Show me the shit.

Sadly, illegal activity gives you no civil way to enforce your agreement. Copping, an arrangement where one of you is delegated to conduct the actual purchase, can go wrong.  They may be cheated; they may say they were cheated. Drugs are a capitalist activity.  Copping leads to bloodshed

Part three of don’t get killed: If someone gets the drop on you and demands your money and drugs, recognize that the material things of this world are not nearly as important as your continued existence in it.

Rule number four: Dive the plan and plan the dive. If you have ever been scuba diving you might have noticed how euphoric divers seem after the dive. They ramble on about how beautiful it was and the lovely things they have seen.  This is because they are buzzed.  When you are under pressure, nitrous oxide forms in your body and it is intoxicating. One of the dirty secrets of scuba diving is that your judgment is impaired, which is why dive trainers teach you to plan the dive and dive the plan.  The plan is not complicated, it might be to go to the bottom, kick off against the current until your air is half-gone and then let the current bring you back to the boat. If you see something fascinating a little off your route, you remind yourself that you can always come back tomorrow to check it out.

The same thing is true for drugs.  Do not make dosage decisions once your judgment is impaired. Say two beers are not enough.  Tomorrow you can have three. If you split the tab and it’s not quite working, buy another whole one tomorrow.  If you think you need the other half, you’ve already had too much.

Rule number five: All drugs can be misused and lead to disastrous consequences.  Amphetamines for instance have a high and a crash; to avoid the crash some people jag, doing nonstop runs.  Obviously, this prolongs the inevitable making it worse.  Take the good with the bad, all the way up and all the way down.  There are certain drugs that are just plain bad regardless of how they are used. I assume you have enough sense to avoid glue.

 Part one of stupid drugs: Tic, dust, PCP. If you are cursed with excess intelligence, Phencyclidine is the cure. 

Part two: I love opiates. Unfortunately, heroin is the paradigm for addiction.

Part three: The difficulty with LSD is dosage.  A normal dose would be around 100 micromilligrams.  A penny weighs three grams; a micromilligram is a millionth of a gram. The way a chemist ensures the proper dose is to dissolve the crystals in an appropriate amount of water, make sure that it is well distributed, combine the water with binder to make a paste and then tab it up. Hope the chemist hasn’t inhaled any fumes.

Part four Tobacco: Tobacco is insanely addictive and it destroys your gums. Marijuana is a gateway drug to cigarettes. Start on Kools wind up on Pallmalls.

Part five Quaaludes: another way to get stupid fast.

Part six Crack:  Multiple Sclerosis is not well understood, however some of the cases may be due to brain lesions from drug use, see Richard Pryor.  

Rule number six, heavy machinery: Automobiles, farm equipment, presses, email, face book, I remember walking across the street, I had looked to my left, noticed the light was green and then crossed in the other direction.

Rule number seven, don’t become the drug: A good example is cigarette smokers.  Things are going well, have a cigarette, not so hot; have another cigarette.  Over time, the difference between success and failure fades.  You can watch them becoming gray.  If your singular recreation is your only source of discourse and socialization, or if it occurs to you that a little sex might help the drug experience, perhaps you should reassess.