In spite of having lived in and visited over a dozen countries by the time that I turned 18, I still lived a pretty sheltered life. Sure, I had lived in what some people would call third-world countries (although I never really agreed with that term), but I always moved within the upper circles in those countries – living in the best neighborhoods, going to a private school, eating in the best restaurants, going to the best clubs, etc. So, my life was pretty good.
My experience with drugs had been very limited. There were some kids in my high school that were pretty heavy pot smokers, and some professed to having tried cocaine, but they were definitely the minority in my school and circles, and I pretty much stayed away from them. When I arrived at college, however, I was in for a rude awakening.
Walking the halls of the dorm on my first day, I went by one room with the door open where a kid had a large pile of marihuana on his desk and was separating out the sticks and the seeds, and dividing into smaller bags. A few doors down, there was another room with the door open where a group of 3 or 4 students were doing lines of cocaine off of the mirror that they had removed from the wall. There were other kids in the bathroom stalls snorting up, as well. And the kid next door was lost on a bad mushroom trip. And all of this was before lunch.
And then I met my roommate.
Back then, there was no thought of introducing you to your roommate beforehand. We had no social media or WhatsApp groups to learn about potential roommates ahead of time. So, we pretty much had to rely on the efforts of the admissions office to pair us, and the luck of the draw.
My assigned roommate was not a bad guy, but we definitely did not see eye-to-eye. He was a spoiled kid from Pennsylvania whose only reason for being in Colorado was for the weekend skiing. Now, having already admitted that I had lived a sheltered and somewhat spoiled life, his was at a totally different level.
Twice per week, someone would come by the dorm, pick up his dirty clothing, and return it that same day, dry cleaned and pressed. I recall one conversation that he had with the service where he was annoyed because they returned his clothing on hangers, where he had specifically requested that they be folded and placed in individual boxes which were to be labeled, so that he knew what was inside.
He did not have a car with him on campus as he had left his classic Porsche back in Pennsylvania, but he had the number of a limousine service that he would call whenever he wanted to go out – even if it was just to the store a couple of blocks away.
Weekends were in Vail and Aspen, and I don’t believe that he set foot in the dorm dining hall ever. He tried to hire a maid to come in and clean the room twice per week, but the university put a stop to that. In hindsight, it may be that I was a tad bit jealous of his lifestyle, but he was not the norm at the university – or at least, not the norm at the dorm.
And while he was not a heavy drug user, he surrounded himself by friends that definitely were. Marihuana, cocaine, hash, LSD, mushrooms, codeine and just about anything else that they could get their hands on. And while they never did or stored the drugs in our room – I had made it abundantly clear that I would not stand for that – they always returned to the room all messed up, making being in the same room impossible. I put up with it for about two weeks before requesting a transfer to a different room.
But it wasn’t only the dorm – there were drugs everywhere. Every party, every gathering and even at one of the sorority’s “milk & cookies” parties. Drugs were almost more prevalent than alcohol. And never having been around such a scene, I felt very much like a duck out of water.
And while most of the students survived relatively unscathed, there were others that didn’t. There were a few cases of overdoses, and other cases of kids dropping out for too much partying, and even a few deaths.
One of the students at the university was an Arab prince. He flew in on his father’s private 727 aircraft, had a Jaguar driven by his bodyguard and more money than I could probably imagine. He was also a bit of an asshole. We had a run-in with him when he tried to invite my best friend’s girlfriend to France for lunch one day. We stepped in and almost had a go with his bodyguard before the prince got bored and decided to hit on another woman. The scary part was that my friend’s girlfriend actually looked like she was considering going.
A few weeks after that incident, the prince and his bodyguard were killed in a car accident. They had been driving the Jaguar at a high rate of speed along a city street with two girls from the university in the back. The bodyguard somehow lost control and hit a telephone pole doing close to 70 miles per hour, killing both the prince and the bodyguard. The girls in the back miraculously survived, but not without significant injuries.
Autopsies of the prince and bodyguard’s bodies revealed high levels of cocaine and heroin in their bodies. The girls later stated that they had been doing speedballs – injections of a mixture of cocaine and heroin – for the better part of 24 hours. While both girls survived, neither returned to the university.
This experience, which can only be described as culture shock, played a great part in affirming my already solid disdain for drugs. It also played a significant role in my later decision to join the DEA.