Don'T Do Drugs

wrote this for my school paper after the administration distributed agenda books with drug facts on every page:

I find that as I journey down the highways and byways of life, I often end up in seedy parts of town, where I find all of my peers stumbling around in a drug-induced haze, vomiting in trash bins and lying face down in gutters. I was surprised to find even the top students, the most involved, leading secret double lives! I knew that I could trust no one.

From time to time I rolled one of them over and asked what caused them to go so wrong, so terribly, terribly wrong. After all, they had the DARE program in fifth grade, the instructions on saying no, the funny skits by the Teens as Teachers, the 'very special' episodes of every sitcom on television, and convicts from jail coming to speak them about the dangers of drugs.

More often than not they merely drooled and mumbled incoherently. When I did catch some capable of speech they invariably warned me about the dangers of ignoring the cardinal wisdom of the agenda book.

"If only," said one student, "I could have made out the words that the agenda book told me. They were all blurry. But if only I could have made out the words, then I would have known that drinking alcohol would result in my weight gain and bad breath. Now I'm doomed. I will never find a girlfriend."

The student, who wished to remain anonymous, could barely move. The corpulent mass of his body spilled over the edges of his couch, and flooded onto the floor. All he could possibly do was lie prone in his dank basement, surrounded by beer bottles and the detritus of a wasted life.

This encounter opened my eyes. What other horrors would lurk in my future if I failed to read the drugs facts in the agenda book? I tore out of that student's pathetic hovel, panic in my eyes, and