A few years before I attended my (private boarding) high school, some rich kids gathered cash, flew to Columbia, and tried to smuggle cocaine home in a hollow surf board. It made 60 Minutes. (And, oh look, someone is making a movie: [link] )

There were some pot smokers and assorted hallucinogen ingesters, and a few reputed coke heads, when I was there, but since getting caught with drugs got you kicked out, less than you'd think. I'm sure a lot of people smoked pot at home/in the summer, though. Rich kids with money and connections.

I hate calling in to work a month into a new job, but I don't see ay choices.

Calling in apocalypsed is going to fall on the totally reasonable and understandable side of things, I suspect.

There were drugs in my high school in the 80s/90s, and in my sister's in the 70s. For more datapoints.

The 'cheese' thing made me flash to this classic Monty Python sketch: [link]

CAPTION: 'THE WORLD AROUND US'
Photo of newspaper headlines: Pop Stars In Mouse Scandal; Peer Faces Rodent Charges. A man in a mouse skin running into police station with bag over head.

CAPTION: 'THE MOUSE PROBLEM'
Cut to a policeman leading a man in mouse costume into a police station. Photo of headline: Mouse Clubs On Increase.
Cut to: photos of neon signs of clubs: Eek Eek Club; The Little White Rodent Room; Caerphilly A Go-Go.
Cut to studio: ordinary grey-suited linkman.
Linkman: Yes. The Mouse Problem. This week 'The World Around Us' looks at the growing social phenomenon of Mice and Men. What makes a man want to be a mouse.
Interviewer, Harold Voice, sitting facing a confessor. The confessor is badly lit and is turned away from camera.
Man: (very slowly and painfully) Well it's not a question of wanting to be a mouse... it just sort of happens to you. All of a sudden you realize... that's what you want to be.
Interviewer: And when did you first notice these... shall we say... tendencies?
Man: Well... I was about seventeen and some mates and me went to a party, and, er... we had quite a lot to drink... and then some of the fellows there ... started handing ... cheese around ... and well just out of curiosity I tried a bit ... and well that was that.
Interviewer: And what else did these fellows do?
Man: Well some of them started dressing up as mice a bit ... and then when they'd got the costumes on they started ... squeaking.
Interviewer: Yes. And was that all?
Man: That was all.
Interviewer: And what was your reaction to this?
Man: Well I was shocked. But, er... gradually I came to feel that I was more at ease ... with other mice.

I know there was alcohol, and I assume there was pot and maybe a little coke at my rural high school in the 80's/90's-- but apparantly when a family friend was going to the same school in the late 90's, students were dropping acid in study hall.

There were definitely drugs around both my junior high and high schools, but I was rather oblivious to it unless I overheard a transaction in the bathroom or hallway. Overheard in junior high was a 'shroom buy (it was 1979, after all), and in high school, one of the most prominent of the rich bitches at the all-girls Catholic school I went to--she was the Chicago St. Patrick's Day Parade Queen the year after graduation--was a notorious pill dealer (uppers were very popular for losing weight; eating disorders were very "eewwww!" inducing and not talked about).

Our school was so agricultural that we were all pretty much baffled by the anti-drug campaigns at the time. We were all, well, we wouldn't know drugs if you handed them to us. We'd probably try to bake something with them. So I wouldn't worry if I were you. Lots of pot, though.

Now? The local schools I'd call "riddled" with drugs. For a while there were dealers just walking into the school. There's a new principal now, and he's locked it down a lot, but at the cost of a lot of personal freedoms. But it's a real problem.

Particularly with meth.

Late '70s. Lots of alcohol, so much that those of us who didn't drink (at least on weekends) were seen as odd. I think there was a fair amount of pot and at least a little cocaine. But I'm not sure how much (either during school hours or afterward/on weekends) because I was way, way out of the social mainstream.

Good to know, tommyrot. I'll never put it into practice, except perhaps fictionally.

First thought - Hey, shrift's gonna write SPN/O11. Excellent!

I'm not sure it is hysteria. I look at the section of the cemetery where my father is buried. Way too many of the people in that section were born in the 1980s. There have been a ton of heroin deaths.

Late '70s. Lots of alcohol, so much that those of us who didn't drink (at least on weekends) were seen as odd.

Yeah. That was my high school. My girlfriend used to give me shit because I didn't smoke or drink - she said it made me look like I thought I was "better" than everyone.

Basically, I didn't drink in high school because I had to drive everywhere I went and I was paranoid about drunk driving.