Alright, let me jump into the drug discussion. There are two things that should be probably said right up front just for full disclosure:
1) I am a foaming-at-the-mouth Libertarian which means I believe that the Government has no business whatsoever telling someone what they can and can't put in their body. I believe the war on drugs should be ended immediately and anyone in jail for non-violent, drug-only related offenses should be released with a sincere apology.
2) I don't do drugs. Hell, I don't even drink enough to be worth mentioning. A six pack of beer lasts six months in my fridge.
It wasn't always like that though. I used to party hard. I tried everything that got put in front of me and hung with people who did the same. I was on under the influence of something almost every single day. It was very rare for me to go to bed at night completely sober. I had a lot of good times, I have very few regrets, and I lived through it just fine.
Not all of my friends did though.
I guess about '91 I started realizing I really wasn't being too smart. That if I continued to do what I was doing, I'd probably end up dead or in jail. So I started making a series of decisions that distanced me from that life. Some of those decisions were drastic, some not so drastic, but the end result was that by oh.... '94ish I was completely removed from the 'scene' I had been running in and I never went back. My friends didn't necessarily follow my path and our lives are very different now. For example:
I had this girlfriend when I was 18. She was beautiful. She was also an amazingly talented artist, was smart and funny, and basically just a blast to be around.
Then she got into heroin.
The last time I saw her she was living in a shit hole apartment, had a cup full of needles soaking in bleach on the back of her toilet, was dating/fucking a cab driver just so she could get rides, and was working in a Korean massage parlor giving $30 hand jobs to make her money. Is she dead? In jail? Got AIDS? Get clean and straighten her life out? I've got no idea. No one has heard from her in years.
I had another friend who got hit by a drunk driver and it messed him up. A year and a half later the court case finally settled and he got a check for about $25k which was supposed to be used for some plastic surgery to fix some scars he had from the accident. To celebrate finally getting the money, he bought an eight ball of coke from his scum bag cousin. We had a good time. I tooted lines of an Armored Saint album cover with him for a week.
Six, maybe eight months later he had spent every penny of that check, had sold everything he owned, and was living in a sleeping bag in the woods. He got his money for more coke by mugging people. That's when I lost touch with him. I have another friend though that said he showed up around '98 claiming he was clean and trying to put his life back together. So my buddy let him crash at his place. The next day he stole everything in the apartment while my buddy was at work and disappeared.
Another friend has never stopped smoking pot. To be fair... he's got plenty of issues that have nothing to do with smoking weed. The last email I got from him said "Hey... I got married and bought a house." He was very excited about 'finally starting to act like an adult' and working 'a real job'. He's 36. Now... I'm not going to pin his lifestyle solely on weed, nor am I even going to suggest that there is something wrong with staying single and not owning property. Different strokes for different folks. But you got to admit, by 36 most people have accepted the fact that they live in the really real grown-up world.
Then there is my best friend. He actually did the fewest drugs of all of us. BUT... He got a little desperate for money and agreed to assist with a little interstate crystal meth commerce. What he didn't know was that it was a setup from the beginning arranged by a guy we knew who turned snitch to get out of a one year sentence for third time pot possession. The guy who delivered the meth was a DEA agent. He ended up with a sentence for 8 years federal on a felony drug rap for a first time offense, while another friend ended up getting ten due to some prior misdemeanor convictions. He pleaded that down to two years in a 'boot camp' but got popped on probation violation almost as soon as he was released and ended up picking up a second felony conviction and doing the rest of his time. Now, I'm told he's living with his parents, working some shit-hole minimum wage job, terrified of picking up a third strike, hanging out with Mom and Dad every night. He turns 40 this year.
There are other stories too: Guys who dropped or flunked out of school (I probably need to raise my own hand in that group), ruined relationships, jail time, hospitalizations, material loss, girls who turned to stripping or tricking, and even a guy who became convinced that trash cans were bugged because the government was spying on him so he would cross the street to avoid them. None of us grew up in the hood, we're all middle class white kids. Every problem any one of us had, we brought on ourselves, no doubt about it.
Now, I'm not trying to preach or lecture. Seriously, have a good time doing whatever it is your doing. I just want to share what youthful drug use looks like with 15 or so years of perspective on it. You fuck around with any of it long enough and someone is going to have something bad happen. So be careful with it, ok?