I don’t smoke, I don’t drink and I don’t do drugs. I used to be ashamed to admit that, but I’m 42 now and really don’t care what people think anymore.
But that’s not to say I haven’t done a few of those things in my past. Though my drug use has been practically nil—chances are if I ever bragged about doing drugs, I was probably lying to earn cool points with whoever I was with—but there was a small period of time where I downed the occasional bottle of Mini Thins, mostly as a speed-driven attempt to lose weight in the 90s.
Being an overweight teen wasn’t easy. At that age, if you’re pudgy, portly or stout you typically have two routes to go down: the grotesque bully or the corpulent depressive. Though there were times I wavered between the two—my belated apologies to any underclassmen I picked on—I mostly aimed for a chubbier Moz, sequestering myself from others at school dances and so on, with a hidden penchant for razor slashes up and down my right arm.
I did everything as a teen to lose weight, from bouts of unwavering exercise to regurgitating my dinner on the side of the house. Nothing I did seemed to help, until I found Mini Thins. Back then, this miracle drug was mainly sold behind the counters of the long-gone filling stations that were scattered around my high school, Classen School of Advanced Studies; they were also the ones that sold individual cigarettes, nudie magazines and God knows what else to kids.
I had heard about this wonder-drug from the excessively attractive alternative girls that secretly ran the arts program of my high school, on one of the rare moments when they granted me a sweet taste of benign coolness to actually hang out with them. Although, back then, it had a now-withdrawn drug (I think it was phen-phen, but don’t quote me) that gave my young body a speedy high that would get me through the day as the pounds mercifully sloughed off.