Greetings fellow students! Louis Rose here, Class of ’71. Sorry I’m forty years late. Maybe they’ll write me a pass. I want to tell you about the drugs I used at Sleepy Hollow. I never planned to use drugs, it just happened. I started smoking hashish in 1969, my junior year, up on the aqueduct behind the band room, and didn’t stop using drugs until 1981. Twelve years is a long time to be high, don’t you think? When I first got high, the feeling was better than anything I had ever experienced. People who don’t do drugs often won’t consider the fact that the driving force behind drug use is that it feels great! Some people in high school hardly ever feel great. So why shouldn’t they use drugs? After forty years I have a few reasons I’d like to share.

I never learned to deal with pain or stress or problems until I stopped using drugs.

Whenever I hurt inside, or was involved in a stressful situation, or had a problem, I would get high. I felt better for a couple hours, or days depending on how high I was, but when I came down my problems were still there, and were a little bit worse. Sometimes my friends or family helped me out with a problem, but I was never grateful for their help. I was too high!

Often my problems overtook me and I suffered for it because I was too high to function.

I did not finish college until I was fifty, have lost several dozen jobs, lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, been divorced twice, have a fully grown son I have never seen, two other sons who had to overcome similar problems, and a daughter who is dead because of a drug overdose. Most of this can be linked to my lack of maturity or inability to function effectively because of my drug use.

Time is running out.

I am sure you know that if you miss the first few weeks of a difficult class like chemistry or algebra, it is almost impossible to catch up, and there is a good chance you will fail. Life is like that too. It has been almost forty years since I stopped using drugs and alcohol. It took over ten years for me to mature emotionally. I have hopes, I have dreams, just like you, but I don’t know if I will ever see some of them come true.

Still, life is good. My mind is clear and sharp. I enjoy my life, and I have a chance to live it. I hope you will think that what I had to say was worth something, and that you won’t use drugs. If you know someone who uses drugs, you can be sure that they couldn’t care less about what I have to say. They are just too high, and it feels too good. I hope that you will go and tell someone about them, so that they can receive help now, before it is too late.