Your waitress. Your colleagues at work. Your doctor. Maybe even your parents. They’re all high. All the time. That’s what it feels like anyway. This week, stories in which drug use and daily life intersect – and in which people get high in secret and then do their best to function in the non-high world. Also, we hear some “I Was So High” stories from our very own listeners.
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Prologue
High on the Corporate Ladder
You Were So High
Our listeners sent us 2,600 emails with their own getting high stories. Contributor Elna Baker read a ton of them (other staffers read the rest). Elna then interviewed several people who wrote in, and determined that the "I Was So High" story is a particularly difficult genre to get right. One listener comes through with flying, psychedelic colors — telling us about the time he took mushrooms before appearing as a contestant on The Price is Right. (7 minutes)
Bottom of the Eighth
Comedian Wyatt Cenac tells the story of the first time he ever tried marijuana. He didn't smoke it. He ate a pot brownie. He then managed to convince himself that he had now acquired adult onset Down Syndrome. (And no, that does not exist.) (6 minutes)
Straight Man
DEA Agent Takes a Hit
Producer Brian Reed recounts one of the more riveting arguments he's ever heard about whether marijuana is dangerous or relatively benign. It takes place in Congress. On one side, a congressman who isn't even on the committee that organized the hearing. On the other side, a DEA official who says that pot insults our common values as Americans. (5 minutes)
Related
Act One: The Family That Flees Together, Trees Together
Act One: Error at First Base
Act One
Staff Recommendations
Sissies
A family where the father was one kind of sissy and the son was another kind, and how the family was destroyed despite the fact that no one wanted it to be.
Petty Tyrant
The rise and fall of a school maintenance man in Schenectady, New York who terrorized his staff and got away with it for decades.