Indulging in a wide variety of illegal drugs.Through the diary entries we see this girl quickly escalate from her first drug experience (LSD was surreptitiously slipped into her Coke at a party) to all manner of disaster, including: The most famous of these literary works was 1971's Go Ask Alice, presented as the diary of an anonymous teen girl who began her career as a stoner at age 15 and died of an overdose just weeks after her 17th birthday. now I'm twenty-four, just found my old copy and started reading it for old time's sake and it REALLY seems ridiculous. I read it when I was a kid and even then it really didn't seem like stuff a fifteen year old would write. Even the selection of recreational reading materials intended for them was booby-trapped with literary offerings purporting to be true life stories of real kids yet which were no more than 'This is what could happen to you' sermonizings.ĭo you know anything about the book 'Go Ask Alice'? In case you aren't familiar with it, it's supposedly an anonymous diary found by the parents of a fifteen year old drug user after she overdosed and died.

Paternalistic concern about the burgeoning drug culture led to the youth of that day being heavily indoctrinated with anti-drug propaganda at almost every turn - particularly in school, where they were subjected to health classes which were little more than 'don't get high' lectures. Drugs were on the minds of everyone in the late 1960s and early 1970s, even those who weren't partaking of illegal substances or harboring plans to ever do so.

Beatrice sparks author