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Go Ask Alice

I just finished that book in a day. That happens very rarely, but it was an easy read and it was so interesting. I've had a very similar experience, of course not as haunting and serious as Alice's, but I have slipped through the cracks into a shady, drug-ridden world once. Now I'm thinking whether it would have been better to have stayed in that world, since now I always feel depressed.
 
I read Go Ask Alice when I was in middle school, back 1973-75. Real or not, it scared the daylights out of me and I never did drugs. Ok, I took antihistamines, but you know what I mean. Not that there wasn't plenty of opportunity if I'd chosen to do so. While drug use was rampant around here, not everyone partook.
I'm not too suprised to find that it was a work of fiction, but I don't think that takes away from its value. It would have been better if the publisher and author had been honest about it. Either way, the book has been out there and controversial for years. In fact, I think its been banned in a few places. I'm still glad I read it. I knew people who COULD have written this book.
 
I read Go Ask Alice when it was first published, and saw the movie that was made about two years later. Both were really excellent. I don't think it mattered who wrote it, or whether or not the story was literally true because it was absolutely on target as far as what I was seeing around me at the time.
 
novella said:
Times were so different then. I went to a private school, wore a little plaid uniform, took AP math, was at the top of my class . . . but it still didn't stop me from doing acid and quaaludes every weekend. It was so pervasive, it's really hard to describe. I'm truly horrified at the thought of how much danger I put myself in. Alice didn't seem so different from a lot of people I knew, she just pushed the envelope a little.

(My little plaid uniform was green. What color was yours???)

Those were truly scary times because the whole situation was unprecedented. Grownups didn't recognize drug use, nor did they know how to deal with it. Kids were convinced that warnings against drugs were just a ploy. I mean, look at Reefer Madness. Who could believe anything after watching that?

I was one of the few (read "only") people in my circle who didn't do drugs, and that was because my first boyfriend died of an overdose. Four other kids at my school had died of overdoses within the previous six months. I was still reeling from the death of my boyfriend when I was in a car with a group of people who found a friend unconscious and convulsing in a park from heroin. So they packed him in the car and drove him to the fire station where they left him on the front lawn (they were afraid of being arrested if they stepped forward). I can still remember the grunts and the convulsions during the drive to the fire station. He died a few hours later. He was 16.

Needless to say I was a) suffering from a serious case of post traumatic stress syndrome and b) terrified of drugs. I'd have freak out panic attacks if I was around anyone who did them...and everyone did them.

Other highlights from that era include: My mother going to the morgue to identify a body they thought was mine. Holding the belt for junkies when they shot up (they tried to teach me how to insert the needle, but I wasn't any good at it). Having a plate piled high with powdered mescaline in front of me, and a box of capsules, and tapping the capsules into the mescaline to fill them up for a drug dealer (everyone else licked their fingers, while I carefully washed my hands afterward, and hoped it didn't leach through the skin). Getting raided, and hiding under a bed while the drug dealer and his cohorts hid the drugs in the gutter outside the window, and told their very untrue stories to the police.

It went on and on and on. Horrible times, really. I would never go back.

And during this period, I read Go Ask Alice and made a mental note to myself while I was watching the movie: "This is just exactly the way it is." I can't find the movie anywhere, but would be interested in seeing it again from a different perspective.

So, my son is totally straight. We started the lectures when he was three: don't do drugs. And he doesn't. He's always the designated driver, and has never come home even smelling of booze.
 
i read it when i was 12. i'd like to re-read it someday since i was left confused at some points - i was only 12. i've read articles how that "anonymous" thing was just a stunt for more attention. if its not a specificly true story, i'm sure theres been lots of times where it's actually happened without being documented in a diary.
 
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