Apparently, if you write about drugs when you're young, then try to become a political leader, people might, uh, use that against you, as British politician Chris Huhne, contender for leader of the Liberal Democrats, discovered:
The piece, which bears [Huhne's] name as an 18-year-old student at Oxford University in the 1970s, states that drugs such as opium, LSD, and amphetamines should be an “accepted facet of our society”.
Most notable is the author’s apparent familiarity with class A substances and their effect when taken. “Opium is available in Oxford and, in its natural form can be safely experimented with,” the article states. Opium and the class A drug heroin are both opiates. “Colours, movements and shapes are serenely beautiful, as beautiful as a dream and as realistic as George’s [a cafe frequented by students] at 7.30 on a Monday morning.
“Acid [LSD] is manufactured in the labs and is the only drug which is getting cheaper . . . The considerable number of students at this university who drop acid are well-balanced highly intelligent people . . . if one is able to live with oneself . . . then acid holds no surprises.”
Although he wrote this back in 1973, it seems like a whole genre unto itself: the proselytizing college newspaper article, in which some subset of students, having discovered drugs for the first time and also having keys to the printing presses, decide to try to convert their dorm room chums. I can't actually remember if I wrote an article like this back in school; I did have a fictional weekly column in which the main characters included "my good friend Crank Boy" and we certainly went on drug-induced binges in those columns, but I suspect the average person on my college campus back in Iowa would not have considered those pieces all that inspirational. (I'll see if I can dig up a good example of one of these...) Of course, the equivalent these days is actually posting videos of your drug trips on YouTube and pictures of your bong collection on your MySpace profile.
At any rate, it's sad to see that this kind of college age goofiness means you can't run for office. I better shut down my exploratory committee...
"Reality is not stranger than you suppose, it is stranger than you can suppose."
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