My lifelong curiosity concerning all things pharmaceutical goes all the way back to third or fourth grade. Standing outside, outback of the three room building I called school for most of my elementary schooling, beautiful spring day, sun shining, grass green, Frank telling me and Cornie a story about somebody his brother new, a cousin or family friend. “yeah, he snorted 3 tablets of acid and had to go to the hospital, he went totally crazy. If you take acid 11 times, you are considered medically insane for the rest of your life. ” We stood there in awe of his street smarts and his knowledge of the forbideen world of street drugs and insanity, the dark side. For us kids going to a K to 8 school with less than eighty kids in it, living in a small village, hundreds of miles from the closest street level drug dealer, this was heady stuff. Then the clincher “…did you know that there is acid in Aspirin, take a look at the ingredients on the bottle…”
That was enough of an introduction to whet my curiousity, and what followed was this life that I am the owner of, with a history of most every abused pharmacuetical preparation, and many multiple and serious addictions, close calls with death, malnutrion, rehab and relapse, withdrawal and the euphoria of getting high. I did indeed go home and look at our bottle of Aspirin, thank God I was smart enough to realize that there was more than one type of acid, and that acetylsalisylic acid was not the same as LSD (after all, it is ASA).
July 4 2010