Dope Quote by William Finnegan

““It was marijuana that drew the line between us and them, that bright generational line between the cool and the uncool. My timidity about pot, as I first encountered it in Hawaii, vanished when, a few months later, during my first year of high school, it hit Woodland Hills. We scored our first joints from a friend of Pete's. The quality of the dope was terrible -- Mexican rag weed, people called it -- but the quality of the high was so wondrous, so nerve-end-opening, so cerebral compared to wine's effects, that I don't think we ever cracked another Purex jug. The laughs were harder and finer. And music that had been merely good, the rock and roll soundtrack of our lives, turned into rapture and prophecy. Jimi Hendrix, Dylan, the Doors, Cream, late Beatles, Janis Joplin, the Stones, Paul Butterfield -- the music they were making, with its impact and beauty amplified a hundredfold by dope, became a sacramental rite, simply inexplicable to noninitiates. And the ceremonial aspects of smoking pot -- scoring from the million-strong network of small-time dealers, cleaning "lids," rolling joints, sneaking off to places (hilltops, beaches, empty fields) where it seemed safe to smoke, in tight little outlaw groups of three or four, and then giggling and grooving together -- all of this took on a strong tribal color. There was the "counterculture" out in the greater world, with all its affinities and inspirations, but there were also, more immediately, the realignments in our personal lives. Kids, including girls, who were "straight" became strangers. What the hell was a debutante, anyway? As for adults -- it became increasingly difficult not to buy that awful Yippie line about not trusting anyone over thirty. How could parents, teachers, coaches, possibly understand the ineluctable weirdness of every moment, fully perceived? None of them had been out on Highway 61.””

— William Finnegan