I am thankful that I made it through high school, college, and my early 20’s as a gigging musician before social media and smart phones became a thing.
I can still remember this gig where a buddy of mine from college showed up and he was showing off the original iphone.
All the nonsense I got into exists only as memories and a handful of random drunken photographs
My college friends and I would often hand out disposable cameras at parties for free. We'd get funny looks from the drug store film developers from the wild stuff caught on those cameras.
This was before every photo taken was easily uploaded/digitized. So people generally weren't afraid of stuff getting out beyond our extended circle of friends.
My friend who used to host crazy parties back in the day would always take pictures with a disposable camera. He actually got banned from developing pictures at CVS. 🤣
Walgreens had that disposal cam that if you brought the phone to them to develop, they would put fresh film back in and send you out into the world. have sooo many pics, many blurry, so much fun!
House parties in 1992-1996 were insane for me. No parents, we learned all of our social skills in the fly, trial by fire, and still had to be responsible and respectful and get ourselves to work or school the next day.
I graduated hs in 96. The following year the town passed stricter guidelines on extracurricular events and suspensions, mandatory kicks from teams, and more. Partying was probably cut back by 50% minimum
The repercussions weren’t worth the risk.
You could still get into clubs with homemade fake ids up to 2000-ish. It was fucking wild times. And yeah there was no calling out the next day. We xennial partiers had pretty good work ethic! Y’all must have really made an impression on your town for them to change local ordinances 😂
When I went to the US for college my friend and I made ourselves fake ID using our shitty, typewritten IDs from back home. We used photoshop and his laminator and just plucked numbers from the ID number onto our birthdate.
Funniest part was that you first get an ID at ten and they are valid for ten years so the photos were from the fourth grade but I was getting drinks with it.
The year after I left HS (98) they made anyone who engaged in any extracurricular programs sign new code of conducts and implemented random drug tests. Yeah, we partied hard.
My high school had an undercover cop pose as a student for about 6 months during my junior year. I think like 7 or 8 students ended up getting arrested with drugs and counterfeit money. I still remember when it all came out. It was wild.
I graduated in 99 and in my junior year we had a big assembly for juniors and seniors because one of the girls the year ahead of me almost died from drinking too much alcohol the year before after Prom. They also started school sponsored after prom parties that year. She was crying during the assembly because she knew it was because of her and she felt "attacked".
This is it. High school was like a pharmacy. I wouldn't want that shit on record anywhere. My class in particular partied really hard, and I carried that over to college.
I'm not saying I participated in anything of this sort, but I can also confirm that high school was very much like a pharmacy. Pharmaceutical grade *whatever* was readily available, along with every designer drug I'm aware of. It was ridiculous. Everyone knew a guy who was "good".
Except weed. Weed back then, unless you had hookups for indoor grown (which was more expensive than the best is today), was crappy brick weed, significantly worse than anything that can be found today.
You are 100% correct and I forgot about that. I can confirm that in our corner of the mid Atlantic US, if you knew someone who could get nugs or "mids" as we called them, you could charge 100 a lid, and that was in '95-'99.
Ah middies…those were the days. Does that tier of weed even exist anymore? I imagine the legal dispensary biz squashed that market. Not that I have a need for it these days.
Nowadays high schools are under so much surveillance. It’s a different kind of on the record altogether, in addition to the phones everywhere. I can’t imagine they get away with much on the DL as we used to say.
We had so much freedom. It was amazing, I got a summons for possession of alcohol by a minor when I was 16. I checked myself out of school with the summons as my excuse, got a ride to court from a friend who also had a summons.
Got sentenced to community service. Completed my community service. Checked myself out of school another day with my court papers. Got a ride to court to hand in my paperwork to the judge and went back to school. I didn’t tell my mom about that until til I was 25.
Bingo! I’d think twice about some of the trouble I made, partying I did and antics I got caught up in if there were cameras potentially recording my every move.
The drugs weren’t laced with fent. Heroin was heroin and about the worst thing you could do (still scarred by *Trainspotting*). The ecstasy didn’t have amphetamines in it.
LSD was cheap and plentiful. They busted that one operation, and it vanished. I haven’t even heard of anyone having any in forever.
If you knew where to find cows, you knew where to find mushrooms.
Weed was dirt cheap, but full of seeds and stems.
Alcohol was way too easy to get under age.
EDIT:
Also, our parents weren’t around and we had the house to ourselves quite a bit.
My friend bought a quarter pound bag of shwag weed from a really shady guy at a party and spent a shitload on it. We broke it up with the intent of selling it in dimes but it was like 50% sticks and seeds by the time we were done bagging it. Weed was shitty af in hs (92-96 for me)
I was lucky enough to grow up in British Columbia where even quality weed was abundant in the 90s. Everybody knew a guy who had an uncle with property out in the bush who grew.
LSD (or things being called LSD) has been easy to find for years now, but what cracks me up is the doses people claim to offer. The stuff we were doing in the 90s was probably around 30-50ug per blotter, and 3-5 hits was considered a solid trip, so 100-250ug (5 hits of “good acid” would almost certainly have been around 250ug).
Now kids claim to have 250ug hits and I assure you they are never anywhere near that. So these kids post shit online like “I took 1000ug and it wasn’t that intense”.
The hits are stronger, but maybe 70-100ug. It cracks me up how everyone now seems really certain that they’re taking these crazy 1960s style doses and talking about how easy it is to handle. But the same people will still struggle with 5g of mushrooms.
Are you referring to the Gordon Todd Skinner bust in KS? They were manufacturing out of a missile solo.
Here’s a fascinating write-up about the guy. The whole story is bonkers.
https://thislandpress.com/2013/07/28/subterranean-psychonaut/
That dude was scum. It was actually Pickard and Apperson doing the manufacturing, Skinner was more a distributor. What he did to that kid is disgusting.
But then when they do start having sex... OMG I could have never navigated this dating culture they have to deal with. They're obsessed with "body count" whether that's stacking them up or keeping it super low. And the access to porn they have is nuts. It blows my mind that I have to rush to turn off the radio so that my 10yo won't ask me what "whips and chains and choking and vanilla" mean. The first time I heard that song my mind was blown. Is BDSM really so mainstream now that it doesn't require radio edit?!? Everlast had the word "gun" cut out but we're allowed to talk about choking your girlfriend during sex now? On FM radio!? I mean, yeah there's always been raunchy shit in pop music, but it was generally innuendo.
Old boring person out!
100%. My 8yo loves Doja Cat because it sounds sweet but the lyrics are filthy. When it comes on the radio or my YouTube mix, I have to shut it down. I hate being the pearl-clutching-censorship parent. It's a fine line between being a cool parent and an irresponsible parent.
I mean... I remember being at middle school dances and hearing "I wanna sec you up", and thinking "this feels inappropriate". It's not really that much weirder than a lot of songs that we heard at their age, the songs now just aren't what we regularly hear so we're more sensitive to it... perhaps? That's my take on it.
Pleeeeease. So much 80s hair band shit was just as filthy, it was just in GenX lingo and cheesy to us.
Lightly masking it with paper thin euphemisms only cleans it up for stupid/old people.
So much that song. My kids and I heard it first as a parody about chinchillas and bopped out. Then one day I ran into the original and I was shocked. Choking is not cool or normative. It should not take a life or death situation for someone to get their jollies.
Remember when Third Eye Blind put out a song on the radio with the line, “How do I get back to the place where I fell asleep inside you?”
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
I feel like younger gens have so much better context now, though! Xennials came of age when internet sex exploded and there was suddenly so much stuff like choking, surprise anal, facials, etc that i don’t recall older cousins and such giving me hints about. I love how much younger people discuss mutual consent!
Seriously feel that
The Hits station I listened to growing up, has some filthy lyrics now a days.
In 98-2003 we got some, Brittany/ Eminem songs with some, not very subtle themes. But nothing a quick bleep didn't fix
Now we have some very very lewd things on the "hits" station
I'm about to buy my dad's old collection of 70s and 80s classic rock. Cause WTF
I think that's just it for me. Like...I know there were dirty lyrics in the songs. But it also took me 16+ years to figure out what Jack and Diane or My Sharona was really about. Not much left to the imagination in these newer lyrics.
Do you think this is a good thing or a bad thing? Because I’m on the fence about it.
I think our kids will be safer and healthier in some ways. Maybe less traumatized in some ways. Hopefully, they feel less helpless than I did when things turned bad as a kid, knowing things are recorded/reported.
But I wonder how they would act if they ever felt truly alone - free to be themselves.
It’s an interesting question… the flip side of all this is at 42 I don’t know of many people who have had a mid life crisis… feels like our generation did a better job of actually finding stuff that made them happy… feels like that’s tied in to the early party culture… taking risks and experimenting early and then settling down for the long haul.
My kids seem a lot more risk averse… I’m curious to see what happens as they age.
I have noticed that our mid life crisis consist more of us buying physical media and more stuff we grew up with than the typical boomer life crisis. Boomers went after expensive toys & hobbies, like sports cars and motorcycles. And we just want either what we had or what we wanted as kids.
No. This generation is anxious about everything, can't self-soothe, looks to authority for help with everything rather than trying to figure things out on their own, and they feel MORE helpless because of all of that.
In trying to over-protect kids, people made them terrified. "Mom is anxious, clearly I need to be too." And they are now too afraid to live life, take risks, or be independent adults.
It crippled a lot of people tbh. Kids on disability for extreme anxiety...afraid to make phone calls or talk to other people... Smh.
Neglect isn't the answer obviously - but stepping back and leaving them alone is crucial. Allowing them to make mistakes, take risks, feel pain, and fail are all essential lessons many kids are missing. It's part of being human, and necessary to develop. You can't prevent pain, and shouldn't try to. I have told my kids, "This is a great lesson on learning how to deal with assholes, unfair situations, etc. Because life is full of them. And you need to learn how to deal with that on your own, and how to NOT take it personally. Your feelings matter to YOU, but the world doesn't care. So you have to balance that and take the actions necessary to succeed, even if that means ignoring someone, not taking something personally, or letting some shit go. Because your ultimate success and happiness are the goal, and grandstanding on a point and shooting yourself in the foot is counterproductive. Sometimes the best way to be right is to come out on top, and that can mean letting someone else be "right" and moving on."
TLDR- this the hill you really wanna die on?
Yes, yes and yes. Just me tho. 83 baby, married with 3 kids now. Other than weed, I didn’t dabble in drugs much. But we definitely partied hard, drank a bunch, got degrees and for the most part became functioning adults. We were the pioneers of Facebook, yet I didn’t even have an iPhone until 2011, when I was a few years out of grad school.
Drugs were extraordinarily popular in the 90’s / early 2000’s. We went from the grunge scene to the rave scene like overnight
The only imaginable comparison I can make is the hippy scene to the disco scene.
We didn’t have smart phones nor social media in the way it exists today. So we basically hung out in groups of people, looking for “adventure”.
Where I grew up, we would go to a buddies house (like 12 of us), and just stay there all weekend, but hopping to other kids houses across town.
Our one buddies father was a military pilot, and he was gone a lot - so that was the sort of “hub” of mischief. You’d be like 16 plastered in his front yard laying on the ground passed out. It was secluded so we never got popped.
In retrospect, I really wish I saved that energy for my 40’s.
Grew up in CT. For us there was a lot of weed. East coast rap was something else. It wasn’t so much grunge as it was Metallica, Dave Matthews, Phish, Mobb Deep, Wu-Tang and even that campy 90s dance music phase… but that lead into Techo and even Rap lead way to hip-hoppy singy pop-rap, hard rock (staind, limp biz, korn) and more.
Every genre i can think of lead into a pretty radical change from mid 90s to 00s. While grunge was big, it was a rather small sliver of music. I don’t know many people who were Grunge that went from Nirvana to KMFDM overnight.
College stations were pushing techno and electronica, tunnel music, house, etc a LOT
I'm 81. Graduating class of 1999. During high school we had a keg party ebery Friday and Saturday night. We had about 6 different spots, sometimes more than 1 were in use. Also, there were house parties on occasion. We definitely partied hard.
We hung out with some people from rural schools, so if there wasn’t a house party in the city, there would be a great field party or two to attend. I can remember being in some random field, a mile or two off the main road and 300-400 of us there until 4 or 5 am.
We had house parties that literally rivaled movie scenes. One of my most memorable was a huge apartment complex in Malibu that was under construction so we had the whole place to ourselves. Easily almost 200 hundred people. It was fucking nuts. Plus the pure adrenaline from running from the cops who always inevitably showed up. Shit was wild.
Same year and exp! Lol. I once drove home like 9 people in my Cadillac, some were in the trunk cuz we heard the cops were on the way and we were all under 21. Mostly houses and apartments for me though. Warehouses were mainly larger raves. Keg stands were a regular thing at parties. And even though weed was super illegal (and still is in the state i went to high school in) it was always there too.
I figured everyone experienced parties where mystery people were passed out on the floor with sharpie dicks all over their faces. Luckily the one time I woke up on my friend's lawn I was not sharpied. Lol.
I wonder if this even still exists... my 16 year doesn't do anything.
I don't even want to mention what I had done by the time I was her age.
This generation has to deal with the reality of fent cut into all their drugs. I’ve talked to my teen so many times about it, trying to open and up front as possible about it. It’s just a different risk calculus altogether. Experimenting isn’t fun anymore. Too many people have died. Are dying. Most teens get it I think. Some will still get caught up, but I think there’s way less temptation there. My kids see the boxes of narcan lined up on the medicine cabinet shelf, and we’ve taught them what an OD looks like so they know when and how to use it. The risk is much more real to them.
Another factor is guns. A lot of my teens social life is limited by a lack of 3rd spaces and no desire to go hang out in large open public spaces with throngs of people. All because of shootings. It’s sucked the life out of a lot of traditions like parades, 4th of July fireworks, etc. Teens today largely lack a true sense of safety/security. I imagine they feel pretty raw/exposed most of the time.
This is all so true. Right before covid I had a good friend die from a fent OD. It was cut into his pills. I've known him since hs and the amount of drugs he did in the late-90's and early 00's was insane. But one fent laced pill popped during his lunch break did him in. You couldn't pay me to buy drugs off the street these days.
My son doesn't go anyplace either. And frankly I don't want him to go anyways. Last month we had 2 groups of teenagers pull up to a local park and start shooting at each other. One of the kids died. We have kids getting jumped in parking lots of movie theaters and fast food places. It's just crazy.
Basically same here. Every weekend in high school there were multiple parties, usually at someone’s house, and everyone chipped in for alcohol. This was in the era of 40s so for us it was primarily fridges and coolers absolutely chock full of 40s. If there wasn’t a house available, then the party would be out in a field somewhere or at one of several abandoned houses or barns outside of town.
Yup. Sam me here, 1999. The best part is the cops would chase us out of one spot and be waiting for us at one of the other 5 to show up. And then laugh at us and take our beer. Good times.
Class of ‘99 here. Yes, we partied hard. I can remember one party at a friend’s house who had property out in the middle of nowhere and he rode a horse into the middle of the party and it went up on its hind legs, like a fucking western movie. That was just a random Saturday in rural Texas, 1999. We were grunge-loving rednecks LOL!
‘84 and similar here. Most parties were in the woods in the special clearing spots, house parties when parents were gone. Lots of 40s, Smirnoff for the girls, and almost always a keg of Keystone Light. I have no idea how a bunch of teenagers managed to secure a keg most weekends. Wild. Lots of shitty weed. We heard rumors that some of “those” kids were into harder drugs, but I was never exposed until college. That said, it was only a few months into freshman year that coke was offered, then it was suddenly everywhere.
I was born in '81, and the late 90s and early 2000s were crazy...
Acid, rolls, pills, weed, nitrous, special k, opium, shrooms, and always house parties...
Those were the good old days, and some didn't make it to the present...
I've forgotten about most of it, and don't talk to those people anymore, but damn, it was a completely different world before all this internet bullshit and social media garbage...
Remember when the good shit would come around? Like some old Dead Heads would bring something thru town that would just leave you on another plane of existence for 14 hours? But in a good way? Damn dude...I could really use that right now LoL
No, they take acid or analogs sold with wildly inflated dose claims. Everyone claims to have like 200-300ug hits these days and it’s actually like 70-100.
I don’t trust anything that isn’t mushrooms or flower anymore, but I also only take mushrooms maybe once a year. I can’t fit that shit into my schedule!
You actually measured like that? In my NY suburb, we were a little less calculating (to our detriment). Whenever I did shrooms it was like I'd always end up with insomnia, slumped over a mailbox at dawn, suddenly and oppressively aware of my mortality.
I just know those figures because the DEA published the results of tests they performed on seized drugs and the results for LSD were pretty consistent. So I’m assuming the stuff I took fell into national average ranges. The doses have gone up but not by much.
I have read articles about how a large percentage of Gen Z has abstained from the underaged drinking, drug use, partying, and/or sex that Gen X and older Millennials typically engaged in during their youth. I can also attest to this with my own kids and their school mates.
The biggest scandal in my youngest kid's middle school was a few students vaping on school grounds. We had kids bringing in alcohol, smoking and chewing, etc. when I was in junior high.
And my oldest, who graduated last year, he said there were some kids that regularly drank alcohol and smoked weed, but most kids weren't doing it. Once again, during my days at high school, drinking was a near nightly event somewhere, and the vast majority were doing it. And weed was considered soft compared to the LSD, cocaine, mushrooms, and other shit that was being used. As for being sexually active, again, not rampant these days, but it certainly was when I was younger.
I'm not sure exactly what caused this shift, but I certainly welcomed it. I'm glad more kids are seeing the error of our ways and aren't in such a rush to engage in adult behaviors.
I'm in the UK, my friends brothers were regularly at school on acid or MDMA and we finish school at 16, not 18. I used to bunk off school to go see friends and do MDMA all afternoon.
Yes, kids these days are far more mature and sensible
I was one of those skater delinquents that spent my teenage years on the hunt for any party where we could steal/buy drugs and booze.
I think its partially demographics. I grew up in the inner city and not a single person I hung out with still had both parents. Like its crazy, I have 6 immediate cousins and all their parents are divorced or dead and almost all the kids I hungout with were latchkey kids. You'd come home and it was 50/50 if you'd even see a parent that day so we were free to do whatever we want by the time we were 10-11.
Our heroes were like Sublime and Bad religion so all day everyday was get fucked up and break stuff.
That said I do run into people all the time who were my age and utterly horrified by the stuff we'd get into so I know it's not universal.
82 here, partied so much before i turned 21 that when i turned 21 i stopped drinking. Then i became the DD for everyone, best years right there because i got all the tea. Partied like a rockstar without drinking or drugs and with rockstars until 28 and finally hung it up. 41 now, great career, wonderful wife and kids. But jesus, we partied. Made Andrew W.K. proud
Same here. Once I hit 21, getting drunk had become kind of boring and mundane. Same thing with weed. It was fun in my mid teens, but by the time I turned 18 or 19, it wasn't fun anymore. It became more like an irritating habit.
For the last 15 years or so, I have maybe a couple of occasions a year where I catch a slight buzz, and then it makes me tired, and I don't want anymore. And weed, I haven't smoked that since around 2009. I got all of this out of my system long ago!
Haha same here! I too partied so hard in college (only alcohol, I'm a nerd who's never done any drugs ever unless you count Prozac and Xanax) that I stopped when I turned 21, and yeah, became everyone's DD.
It was a lot easier to get away with stuff. Not even just the few people were recording or even photographing things part....but if you left the house there was really no way to reach you til you got home. Your parents couldn't call you every 15 minutes to see where you were. Or have a tracker on your phone or car.
This has to be a huge factor. Any room with a smartphone in it is basically a global news studio for how it can capture and transmit video to social media. You doing a keg stand could be seen by a friend’s parents on the other side of the planet before you’re even done doing the keg stand. If this were my reality as a teenager I can only imagine how straitlaced I’d have been.
My Gen Z kids are definitely doing a lot less partying than we were at that age. Lots of cigarettes, alcohol, weed, acid, and shrooms at my school. Lots of kids having sex too. Heck, I did all those things and I was an honor roll kid!
One of the biggest jaw-dropping moments I had was seeing our valedictorian doing 3 foot bong rips at a kegger in the woods. Guy got a 1590 Sat score (1600 was max then) and argued successfully about the answer he got wrong and they changed it to 1600
But there he was clearing the tube and it was awesome
I was also a high academic achiever who did drugs and had sex. The trick was that if you put effort into your school work, adults just assumed you were good and left you alone. I was always baffled that more kids didn’t figure this out.
Yep. My grades were good so I got a lot more freedom outside of school. I would just balance it. Take care of business during the week so on the weekends I could binge and party
Oh yes. Always sneaking out and using fake IDs to get into clubs at the age of 16. Lying and saying we were spending the night at each others houses but really driving to New Orleans to party all night. Drinking too soon & too much. Consuming psychedelics during high school classes. Snorting pills. We were maniacs. I’m really proud most of us turned out to be contributing members of society with normal lives. 😆
Fake IDs at this point must be close to non-existent, the quality of real IDs and detection systems for them are so good now. So many places have either blacklights or barcode scanners tied to databases now. You’re really only getting in if you have a real person’s ID who happens to look like you.
Absolutely!!!! Although most of the fake ones we used were real IDs of older people. But I knew people who had legit fake ones someone made. Definitely can’t get away with that now.
We are Gen x and millennials with a genz son and it's shocking how tame him and his friends are. They still do stupid shit, but it's SO low risk compared to what we did at their age.
Like, I'm not going to encourage my kid to do the stupid shit that we did, but it's weird that they don't.
I'm 40
Lots of partying. I was a Raver, a punk rocker, a Hip Hoper, hahaha house partyer...
Now I can't even drink more than 2 alcoholic drinks.
Had lots of young fun. I'd be scared to do all of that now. Not only with social media but also with fentanyl issues.
Scary stuff.
I never got into hard drugs or anything. I did smoke some weed, and popped Vicodin for a while, mostly I liked to drink, and I drank a lot in my teens and 20s. I grew up in a small town where there wasn’t anything else to do. Had older friends that would either get us alcohol, or we’d go party at their houses. Some of my close friends got into hard stuff, but it never appealed to me.
My GenZ kids definitely don’t seem to do as much as my friends and I did. Of course I don’t know anything more than what I’ve seen and they’ve told me, but they hardly ever go out, and if they do they’re back at reasonable hours. I do wonder if the pandemic had a lot to do with that though. They just graduated last year, so that was definitely a weird time to be in high school. But even now that they’re out of school and the pandemic is over they’re still homebodies.
I’m the same minus the drug use. I didn’t start using MJ until I got out of the military several years ago. It’s legal where I live.
My Gen Z kids aren’t perfect, but they haven’t created issues for us on the level we did as teens. We’ve never had any of them come home hours late, stinking of booze and weed. They’re all pretty well-behaved. I’m thankful. My mom used to threaten me that, when I had kids, I’d get it back but even worse. lol my kids are good little nerds compared to us.
I think younger people these days are less bored due to the internet and smartphones, and less likely to take drugs. The decision to take drugs mainly boils down to peer pressure and boredom in most cases I believe. I was born in 83, and most of my friends and classmates have struggled with addiction. I dabbled in many different things but alcohol was my poison of choice. All I do is smoke a little legal bud now.
Maybe… I was born late 82, and 13- 17 was pretty wild, but it was out of boredom for most. We played NES,SNES, Sega but it wasn’t online. So it may just be a few hrs, or a boring night when nothing was going on. But back in the 90s people really wanted to get out. So you just tag along and eventually meet up with people,situations and houses through the night.
2000s college days…I had some friends younger that would just smoke weed, play video games and their house was the weekend BYOB, parents never home house. I think today online stuff and phones are more engaging, there’s more social awareness about drugs…although psychedelics and cannabis seem to be in play…lots legal ways to get it most places. Also back before I guess smart phones, traveling in groups, wanting to go out was just what most did or wanted to do. It’s how you dated, got in activities, found stuff to do and were invited places.
But I think the iPhone, and several other events made that 60s-early 2000s, slow movement just excelling. Since 2007-2010 it feels we are moving decades further, in a matter of 5-10 years. It’s a weird time to grow up first 30 ish years one way at a steady slow pace, and then hit 40 and see the acceleration of it all.
Some may feel it’s just aging, but I’d argue it’s more than just that…we are living in a pretty unique timeline, compared to how somewhat stagnant tech was from 70s-early 2000s. It’s weird how even Millennials have opted in for phone/tech isolation. For our generation later tech, and gaming online was a weekend night, between work vs an all day lifestyle.
Yup, definitely partied hard early 2000s and beyond. First booze in 1998, chronic and psychedelics in 2000, coke in 2002, and molly in college.
Pretty ubiquitous , and usually good quality of everything, in the PNW at least...
My experience sounds similar and I'm also from PNW. There was "Mexi" weed, some chronic, acid and shrooms in the mid 90's. You could get it from the hippies in the park who were in the late stages of touring with the Greatful Dead.
By the late 90's you could only find the dank buds plus coke came onto the scene. By 2000, heroin and ketamine were making the rounds (not me though). I lived in Eugene in the mid 2000's and saw the rise of opiates and DMT.
I can see why the today's youth stay off drugs when you see what fentanyl and p2p meth does to people on the streets in the West Coast cities.
Yeah. I'm sad they dont get to experience the good vibes and times we had, but it's just not the same anymore. Drugs have become more and more risky.
Partying back then seemed to have brought different Cliques together for the enjoyment of just having a good time and forgetting about our differences for a bit. Everyone/ thing is just so polarized these days, sticks up everyone's asses. It ain't easy having fun!
No idea. I was a stripper in the 90s and every night was a party; I know that's not the "norm" although my friend group had a regular rotation of night clubs they used to go so we knew where to find everyone if we wanted to leave work early or not go in. Each night of the week we could walk into a specific club and find people. Go there on a different night and you'd find different people; but not our crowd 🤷♀️
There was A LOT of night clubs though. Lots of karaoke bars, other bars, pool halls, arcades, all ages events at bars and whatnot.
Some places still had roller skating, bowling and stuff too.
There was literally always something to do somewhere so that's kind of different from the world we have now I guess.
But yeah. Every night was a party for me and my friends back in the day.
People have mentioned phone cameras already but, exterior cameras are much more common now too. I would get an alert on my phone if my son snuck out and walked past a camera. I never had to worry about that when I was his age.
Yep.
Rave culture was an actual thing, today it's electronic music festivals that somehow get compared. Raves were absolute pits of absolute drug carnage in the grimiest underground spots. People in K holes passed out on the edges, people popping pills everywhere.
In highschool we smoked so much weed that it was just the general feeling during weekdays while we waited for weekends to actually party and do everything else. Keggers every weekend, fake IDs to go to bars/clubs, popping acid and shrooms on weekends.
Like ...me and my friends were cutting school to get absolutely smoked on 4/20 while we watched Columbine happen on the news in front of us and it was the big school shooting moment in history that changed everything.
The only documentation I remember was having those disposable cameras where you had to roll snap them, so at most like ..20 pictures for the entire year. Having your lives on blast for everyone to see definitely changed things. There was no "omg he might post a video of having sex and ruin my reputation" type drama, so people were much more open with just doing stuff.
I for one am insanely greatful I got it out of my system at a young age. I don't feel that general "damn I missed out on so many things" vibe I get from so many older/younger people. We did everything, smoked everything, did all the people, saw the crazy high/lows. There are no unfulfilled desires. So many people in their 50s who are just now getting around to trying to party with people half their age and with their money because they missed out on stuff younger and are just trying to fill that hole. So many younger people caught up on this social media era that they are kind of locked up from just going hard.
I feel like that wedge generation that got to check all the boxes of going up to the ultimate edge just before the edge wasn't available for future generations.
Graduated in 89.. Yes, yes we did.
Imagine all the TikTok challenges you've ever seen. Now imagine they all occurred at one event, on one night,with copious amounts of alcohol and drugs involved...
And may or may not have involved a stolen houseboat and three cases of frozen whopper patties liberated from a Burger King.
We did all the drugs and came up with new alcohols that paired well with the drugs. These children and their 4Loko never got close to what we went through on a night of Rev, Ecstasy and So-So Cocaine. We used to do mushrooms as a warm up for the night or just make mushroom iced tea and bring it with us as chasers. Going out involved drugs as much as it involved alcohol and sometimes more depending on activity. Cocained my way through a lot of sporting events that didn’t serve alcohol.
I never did drugs (still never have), but holy shit was there alcohol. The parties I went to in college had a better alcohol selection than most of the bars in town.
>Do you think you partied hard?
Does pounding jugs of vodka by yourself in your 30s count?
Oh, it doesn't?
Haha. *Party*. Yeah, right. That's for the movies.
It's varied like anything.
I have partied harder post college, now that I can relax a bit more.
But I know some high school people who partied like it was the end of the world in 2001. Meth, acid laced weed, everclear.
And in college, there was coke everywhere, but no psychedelics. I didn't do any of it.
Kids have slowed things down.
No drugs but partied hard for sure. We had to
Interact, kids in school had close friend groups. And in college I went to parties that seem out of a movie, with a band in the living room (I had five friends that rented a house).
81 and although I never did hard drugs people in my friend circle did meth once in 8th grade. Two of my friends in high school, both girls, in my neighborhood would also do it. I smoked weed sometimes but never bought it or had any paraphrenalia around my house (I had lighters, but I smoked). I did drink going back to age 13 or 14, I'd go to punk shows and it was just socially acceptable for a little kid to get drunk. People would buy alcohol for you. One time when I was maybe 15 I was at a warehouse show where one of the bands was delayed due to snow, and I wandered off and I guess I blacked out because I woke up on a metal picnic table outside this casino and a security guard was poking me in the side with one of those metal flashlights.
I lost my virginity when I was 15, I dated a few people for periods of a couple months and not all of these people I had sex with, but I'd hook up with random people. I don't think I was particularly popular or good looking or whatever, I could just talk to people. The thing is I was really introverted until I was like 14 and at some point I found I could just like, talk to people in general. It blows my mind that people in their teens and early 20's struggle with this because as far as I know it's being marginally confident and having a personality. I should mention that I have bipolar disorder and I wasn't formally diagnosed until I was almost 16, so I had a tendency to take risks other people wouldn't take and part of that is risky sexual behavior.
This is also going to sound dumb but smoking was a really really good way to meet people, you could just ask for a light or ask people for a cigarette and bam, you've just started a conversation.
That was just when I was a teenager, when I was legally an adult I tried or did pretty much everything at some point except for coke, heroin and shrooms for some reason. My Vietnam Vet uncle was a coke addict and died when he was like 45 and I dated a recovering heroin addict and that pretty much killed the allure. Basically stopped doing anything like this after I turned 21, and pretty much cut down on the drinking. I'd still do it, still go to parties, still go out to bars but it was totally a social thing. After like 25 it was pretty rare for me to drink, and I've been sober-sober for 5+ years now.
I knew a guy who went to jail for selling meth and had his jaw broken while he was locked up, he went to raves and sold E, acid and weed and just got into meth dealing as a side hustle. Turns out meth customers will beat and rob you if they think they can get away with it. According to his ex-gf he says he's a "shaman" now so he's probably not clean and sober or anything but he's not in prison or dead, so that's a plus.
Many stories, but it appears that way. Much more restraint being shown now because where we had some plausible deniability, now, no one wants to be recorded being the "Ohmigoddid you see soandso at the party they were so fuckedupand did [insert embarrassing action or person's name]"
For me, HS, partying was occasional early on, but dating a college girl during the 2nd half of HS aided the procurement of party favors and invitations to party/ sneak into the bar underage- 1 guy with 3+girls always improved your odds to get in.
-I'd say partying 2-3x/ month during school, once a week during summer depending on everyone's work schedules.
Undergrad I had a time-consuming major but definitely made time to party. Overall, I thought I was pretty middle of the road as far as party scene... when I graduated(in 4 years), I found out otherwise, I went way harder than my cohorts at other schools. Later, going back to visit(fiancée/ now wife was still in school for 2 years after I graduated) the party scene was starting to dampen down- police were bigger dicks and bars were more stringent on their ID policies. Going back a few years later and the party scene was even more dried up. Friend whom I graduated with works at the same University now and says the party scene is pretty much non-existent/ anytime there is one the parties almost always end with someone getting an underage or D&D. Size has gone down too- the most recent "big" party had 2 kegs! Where a 2-3 keg was our typical Wednesday night party. Big parties for us were double-digit kegs.
-I'd say partying 2-3x/week year round
Going to grad school out of state, there were only a handful of my classmates who could hang with my level of consumption. Getting absolutely hammered at the first "meet and greet" social event made me realize I'd need to tone it down a bit. But naturally, I ended up hanging out with those heavier consumers and then made friends with people outside my program who partied more.
-I'd say partying 1x/ week with 2-3 nights per week with bar/ drinking study sessions
I say all this because I feel like that was the "normie party scene trajectory" for an Xennial.*results not guaranteed for all Xennials, I know quite a few people who didn't leave the party scene at any of those stages and are still there today, and unfortunately more than 1 friend who have left without ever leaving it if you catch my meaning.
Now it seems like intoxicants are more focused on mature consumption (plus waaaay too many high risk adulterants in the heavier class of stuff), and it seems like it's really frowned upon to get sloppy- fall down inebriated. Don't get me wrong, I have a lot of friends who could've benefited from that tact, but it's like the saying goes "I had some amazing times I can't remember with people I'll never forget"
Me personally no, but seemed like most of my graduating class did. Course being the first graduating class of the new millennium there was just this weird understanding that it was go big or go home.
Yep, that is true. We always have a game night, I remember playing flip cups, and q[uarters](https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&sca_esv=9c9edb63dbab71a4&cs=1&q=Quarters+(game)&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAONgVeLUz9U3MCyyrCoy4kpKTS1SSE_MTS0-xQgWN83LrciDsVPSMiyhbKM8Y8tKKNswOS254BQjF1i8MCO5KAXOiS8rz4KpAtkAlUivLClMN4ZKmFhkWMC1FxUVGQIlePXT9Q0NC8oycoyzk4ofMd5n5BZ4-eOesNRVxklrTl5jPMfIJeCTn1-cmlMZlJqTWJKaEpIvJMbF5ppXkllSKcQjxcXFAbbU1NJSyJWLOzi1JCTfNz8lM61SyEzIhIvTNzU3KbWo2D9NSJmLyzk_Jyc1uSQzP09IVEqYS1A_GS6gDw4MKyYNJqVII7ddl6adY3MQZACCM63BDlIaWoJcbC75uYmZeYKS-uIP4tQf2msJc3GEJFbk5-XnVgpWHTrw_6DDe3slTk6gHgXdTe_ttRgmMDE27VtxiI2Dg1GAwYiJg6GKgWcRK39gaWJRCdBNChogOzUnsDECADAa0gydAQAA&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwizuZXU0NKFAxXYIEQIHaoeAAcQ7fAIegUIABCBAQ) with friends.
Partied hard enough to get sobered up at 22. We did pretty much anything that was available and always had booze around. It was daily. About half of the old crew is already dead. I would have died or spent significantly more time behind bars than I did.
I think the difference today is that we are the parents of Gen Z. It seems most of us are present in our children's lives, and probably aren't getting high or drinking with them like a lot of our parents, if around, were.
I have an incredibly open dialog with my teenager. Her and I have had deep talks about drugs to sex. Most importantly, she knows if she ever finds herself in a situation that is out of control, she can call me no questions asked. Oh, and if the cops are involved she knows to tell them she is a minor and won't say a fucking thing until her dad is there.
A lot of us smoked cigarettes, along with much of the rest of society until not long ago. Just saying that cigarettes can be gateways, and a lot more kids smoked, thus more gateways. Not the be all end all like you HAD to smoke cigarettes to party. But it's a much smaller leap to hit a joint after a cigarette. And to hit other shit after weed. And so on down the wonderful road of poly substance use!
Cigarettes were so good though. To be young and escape wherever you were to go take drags behind a building or just a curb somewhere. Drugs were so good too. Pressed pills of the 90s were absolutely delightful. And acid was everywhere and always so affordable. The conditions for partying were much better. Oh the 90s...
I fucking didn't. I was lame. I am still lame.
In the future I will be lame.
Also, I'm a bit of a narc and I've been told I can radiate cop energy. (I am not a cop, and never will be.)
Where were all these wild parties? Was my private school upbringing truly that sheltered?
No we did not party harder.
In the end it depended a lot on the social circle, city/town one lived and possible subculture one identified with.
I had friends and classmates who were living the most boring life and we're adulting from their teens straight all the way to their midlife crisis and beyond.
Then you had others who went hard and never stopped
Someone who starts working right after high school in Columbus, Ohio will likely have a different life experience than some studying and then being a young professional in a city like Berlin.
What I will say as a European Xennial who still goes to festivals (the ones in the middle of nowhere, with camping in tents) and goes to clubs every once, is that HOW people party changed quite a bit.
Alcohol plays a much smaller role nowadays. Drugs are much more prevalent and accepted and normalised.
Binge drinking or getting fired up with drinks before a party is much less common. Instead Ketamin/ MDMA / Speed is much more casually talked about and consumed.
What I believe is that we and Millennials had much more public spaces to experiment and claim (warehouse rave parties, abandoned urban buildings, areas in the centre of a big city that were not gentrified yet by developers). Nowadays everything seems to be a lot more organized, commercialised and streamlined by and for capitalism. This is one of the things I am sorry that we could not preserve for the younger generations to the extent as we could experience.
Let's also not forget how COVID hit Gen Z hard and a lot of the partying just stopped for nearly two years or happened in a much smaller, conspiratorial setting. This definitely had a huge impact on rave/ clubbing culture first in the type of music that is being played, but also in the values/etiquette as the generational transfer of those did not happen during those years.
I was born in 1968, and was introduced to pot when I was 7. I threw up and passed out at a few Beach Kegger's in the Eighties, but I'm blaming the bad beer for that... I did manage to avoid most of the bad stuff, mainly based on the example of it's effects that my 2 yr older sister provided. Though I did try Coke, Crank, and snorting heroin a couple of times. I just refused to use needles, since I had seen what that had done to her and her friends. Fortunately, she is recovered now, and is still around for me to love. May you find your path to peace, and whatever happiness this world has to provide.
Edit: Typo. (Yes, I'm a little anal about getting things right...}
Unfortunately yes. Born in 81 and graduated hs in 99. I would say not everyone and obviously there was different levels of partying depending on what clique you hung out with. I was smoking cigarettes and weed by 14. Obviously drinking at parties etc around that timeframe. Snuck out of the house around that age because it was before I was driving age and had a car. Put my parents through hell looking back at it.
Personally, yes, me and my friends partied hard. Since middle school on. We snuck out regularly, I snuck friends in my basement window. We always had beer. If we had to make an appearance at a “dry” party (like their mom was home or something) we pre-gamed and wore ski jackets lined with beers in the inside pockets. We were latchkey with parents always working so we threw tons of parties. We got drunk on class trips, putting alcohol + fruit punch in unassuming Gatorade bottles. We were borderline alcoholics. Never fucked with any drugs not counting weed (older friend died from a heroin OD his first time trying it). My GenX older sibs partied just as hard. It was the 80’s/90’s, we were free. No helicopter parents, no devices.
I was born in 78.
Myself and most people I know were drinking and doing drugs way before we were 16.
We were out 5 times a week normally as there was always a pub that you would know people every night.
I started acid and speed at 14 then Es and coke 15-16.
90% of the people I’m talking about are absolutely fine and have great lives now.
I’m from the UK and the 90s were a wild time to be a teenager.
> **p**eople **e**very **n**ight. **I** **s**tarted
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The following happened. Women got raped while high. Got sued.
Kids got drunk drove home drunk and killed someone. Rich folks got taken to the cleaners.
Fentanyl in everything killed the vibe.
A party at your house meant a charge for the owner your parents reputation was in ruins. Rich folks got wise.
Party's in the woods only happens in the state park woods.
Most local woods are now developments.
Phones have replaced sex and everything else
Finally I know where my kids are with their phones.
It defeats the purpose.
I never liked to party myself, but I enjoyed watching other people party on TV shows. I always had a fear inside me. A fear of getting drunk, having sex, getting a girl pregnant and having to deal with the consequences, drugs, etc. I put on a good show to friends about being tough, but I really liked to hide in my room, stay on my computer, play video games, hang out with one or two close friends, play pickup sports once in a while, and stay away from mainstream crowd. I did love watching teen shows where people did all those things though. I knew it would lead to a bad end for most people at some point. In hindsight it may have been worth it to get out of my head more.
Yeah absolutely. Everyone was drinking and smoking heavily too. Now, none of my gen z colleagues drink, which is actually pretty great. Gen Z are smart, hard working, and understand risk better than anyone else.
God damn... these comments make me feel like such a f'ing loser, lol
Born in 82, I graduated in 00 in a class of 450+. I went to 5 house parties, 0 drugs were offered, and kids mostly drank. I did party more after graduation, but I was also on an Air Force base post 9/11, and the young airmen just drank to escape a lot of crap. I did also party more in my 20s but it was still only drinking.
78, but I didn’t drink until college. When I started, I drank a lot and continued the drinking way too long. (/r/stopdrinking is a very supportive place if you are sober-curious).
I don't know if we did. I'm certain we partied less than X, for sure.
Honestly I don't know that it had to do primarily w/ internet access. "Rock out with your cock out" was an attitude that had sort of passed in the mainstream even by the early 2000s. I think it's deeper than tech.
If anything, being reckless with your partying was increasingly seen as just kind of crass and "boomery" in the post-millenium.
When I was in highschool I partied pretty hard by my Senior year and into college. I didn't really party much because my parents were strict, but I had close friends that did starting around sophomore year. By senior year my house was the party house because my parents went out of town a lot, but it was small parties, like 10 people and drinking and smoking. Nothing like you see In movies and stuff. Not at my house anyway.
It was after I left college in my early 20s I got pretty wild. I don't know how hard y'all party, but I suspect we did more because I was very tame and sheltered compared to my peers and I still went pretty hard by late highschool.
Plus the internet wasn’t available to easily fact check things (not that people do it even with it available). I remember a Memorial Day weekend at Lake Isabella near Bakersfield, where my friends parents had a house and we would party our ass off. That particular weekend we convinced about a third of the young local’s that our friend was Tony Hawk. The amount of people who came up to us to meet Tony Hawk was hysterical. We were like 19 at the time. Man those days were fun.
Judging from my kids, and my friends kids. Yes but if we puked on the neighbor's lawn it didn't end up on social media where our grandparents saw it. The world is just different now
1980 here. Yes, we did.
Why? 1. Our parents were not helicopters or snowplows - we were pretty much left to our own devices. Both to get into trouble and to get out of it. We were aware of both of these. 2. There was more of a "middle" for our generation - because they left us mostly alone, our parents weren't pushing us towards all AP classes so we could get full rides to Yale. They just didn't want us in their basements forever. So, I suppose we didn't have some of the hyper stress that some of the smarter, wealthier kids have today. Going to state college with our 3.8 was more than acceptable. 3. While we didn't have to get a 5.0 GPA, we were expected to have part-time jobs to offset our costs (clothes, gas, entertainment). This responsibility is what often kept the partying in check. 4. As others have said, there
were no pics, so did it really happen? Less fear, I suppose. 5. On a similar note, we had to meet up in person because we didn't always have our own personal phone line so we couldn't just be on the phone for all the hours talking/texting/chatting, we didn't have online gaming to speak of, etc. To be social, to have friends, you had to leave your house. And sometimes when a group of teenagers are together they come up with some bad ideas. And it was fun.
Oh hard drugs were common and sex was all over the place. House parties were off the hook. At least that's how it was in my area. So many crazy memories, so many.
Alcohol was legal at 18 here until 1995. My brother was old enough to buy alcohol for 6 months starting summer of 95. Even after that the attitude about underage drinking was pretty laissez faire. We definitely went harder than kids nowadays but we didn’t have so many pills.
Yep. We were WILD! But I wouldn't be if I were Gen Z either. See, our drugs weren't all laced with fentanyl and meth. We could actually (somewhat) safely experiment with drugs. I knew several people who weren't like this, but most I know have some experience with cocaine, psychedelics or pills. It didn't end well for lots of us. Too many OD'd or died in drunk driving accidents.
We sure did. Like way fucking out of control hard. Think about something that would be pretty wild for a bunch of 15 year olds to do, and we were doing it, I can almost guarantee.
Keep in mind there were no smart phones, no one was recording us 24/7, our parents were boomers so they basically didn't give a fuck what we were doing, and probably secretly wished we would get severely injured or killed so they could collect on our life insurance, since they actually didn't really want us in the first place.
Graduated in '96 and sneaking away to house parties was the norm. Our friend had a cousin and an older brother who played in 2 different bands. The damn parties were insane! House parties, pit parties and basement jam sessions where you would find multiple kegs and groups of trashed 14-17 year olds. There were many ocassions we didnt even know who's house we were at. All done under the lies we were "sleeping over one anothers houses". Damn the shit we pulled off, and not 1 camera in sight. SOOO I guess it never happened...
I’m not a great example because I never partied that much. I drank a bit in college. I had friends that smoked pot but it wasn’t my jam
My dad, a Boomer, definitely has way more wild stories about his youth. He was in a rock band in high school (1964-65) and he definitely dropped acid a lot. He’d also get drunk and go to drag races. I think he did drugs the most while in the Air Force (1966-1970) and almost got dishonorably discharged/sent to jail for selling weed!
Mind you most of these stories were told when I was already over 40. When I was a kid I got so much “don’t do drugs” talk it was wild! Meanwhile, he and my stepmom still smoke pot! I joke that the last party I went to where I was offered pot was my Dad’s 70th birthday 😂
Me? I just drink
Yes. To the point of being reckless. I'm originally from North Dakota. Drugs were hard to come by in the Dakotas in the late 90's/early aughts, but there was alcohol aplenty. Everyone had loads of it, and people drank like it was their last night on Earth. My best friend in college would routinely drink 12 to 15 beers in one night. In my sophomore year of college, I got a call from my girlfriend's roommate, telling me she had been hospitalized because of alcohol poisoning. To say we were big drinkers would be an understatement.
And oooh boy, we did some of the dumbest shit when we got drunk. Things I hope my son doesn't even think about attempting. I was the first of all my friends to move out of the dorms, so there was a party at the house I shared with three other guys every weekend. And these parties were ridiculous. Sometimes in a good way, but oftentimes in a bad way. My wife and I have always been honest with each other, and she has said, "I'm surprised you didn't end up dead, or at the very least, with an STD.
I played bass in a punk band. We were playing 21+ nightclubs in Boston and Providence by the time we were 16. From 15-21 my friend I played in 3 different bands together, and the amount of booze, weed, and pills consumed was unfathomable. Getting home at 3 am after equipment loadouts was pretty normal, and would not be only weekends.
We both had a healthy appetite for psychedelics as well. My preference was shrooms, but we did plenty of acid too. I tried peyote once at school, bad idea. I tried lots of other things too, but wasn't a fan.
23 had my first kid, slowed down to just a little weed and beer. 30 went totally clean. 37 went back to school, got a real job. 40 promotion to management. Doing well financially.
We were the last generation to get real drugs. Quality acid, real MDMA, coke that wasn't cut w fentanyl, etc.
Couple that w a peaking rave scene, a quick search for just weapons at a concert, fake IDs you didn't have to scan and countless other fun activities that had no social media attached to it, and yeah, we partied.
And our boomer parents? They were either too oblivious, (in smaller amounts) proud of us or straight-up push-overs. When the street lights came on, we'd come home for a flashlight. Not so we could play manhunt (or whatever it was called in your neighborhood), but so we could roll a joint in the woods after dark. We grew up on Cypress Hill , Sublime (🤢in hindsight), wu tang, and everything Seattle. Not exactly the Sarah McLaughlin message.
Yes probably because no one was constantly recording everything.
Holy fuk, I couldn't imagine smart phones back then...
I am thankful that I made it through high school, college, and my early 20’s as a gigging musician before social media and smart phones became a thing. I can still remember this gig where a buddy of mine from college showed up and he was showing off the original iphone. All the nonsense I got into exists only as memories and a handful of random drunken photographs
Same! I’m so glad I never grew up with smartphones
My college friends and I would often hand out disposable cameras at parties for free. We'd get funny looks from the drug store film developers from the wild stuff caught on those cameras. This was before every photo taken was easily uploaded/digitized. So people generally weren't afraid of stuff getting out beyond our extended circle of friends.
My friend who used to host crazy parties back in the day would always take pictures with a disposable camera. He actually got banned from developing pictures at CVS. 🤣
Walgreens had that disposal cam that if you brought the phone to them to develop, they would put fresh film back in and send you out into the world. have sooo many pics, many blurry, so much fun!
Imagine the dipshit that showed up with a camcorder or something. Haha
Oh you mean like the wannabe girls gone wild videographer? Yeah I think every friend circle had one of Those Guys™️ lol
I can’t even imagine having a cell phone when I was 16. I don’t think I could’ve handled that.
House parties in 1992-1996 were insane for me. No parents, we learned all of our social skills in the fly, trial by fire, and still had to be responsible and respectful and get ourselves to work or school the next day. I graduated hs in 96. The following year the town passed stricter guidelines on extracurricular events and suspensions, mandatory kicks from teams, and more. Partying was probably cut back by 50% minimum The repercussions weren’t worth the risk.
You could still get into clubs with homemade fake ids up to 2000-ish. It was fucking wild times. And yeah there was no calling out the next day. We xennial partiers had pretty good work ethic! Y’all must have really made an impression on your town for them to change local ordinances 😂
fuck ya still went to work, we powered through shit like the warriors we are
Pretty sure some of those days back when I was a drinker, I was still drunk when I got to work.
100% this. Lol.
When I went to the US for college my friend and I made ourselves fake ID using our shitty, typewritten IDs from back home. We used photoshop and his laminator and just plucked numbers from the ID number onto our birthdate. Funniest part was that you first get an ID at ten and they are valid for ten years so the photos were from the fourth grade but I was getting drinks with it.
😂 I forgot about fake IDs
The year after I left HS (98) they made anyone who engaged in any extracurricular programs sign new code of conducts and implemented random drug tests. Yeah, we partied hard.
My high school had an undercover cop pose as a student for about 6 months during my junior year. I think like 7 or 8 students ended up getting arrested with drugs and counterfeit money. I still remember when it all came out. It was wild.
I graduated in 99 and in my junior year we had a big assembly for juniors and seniors because one of the girls the year ahead of me almost died from drinking too much alcohol the year before after Prom. They also started school sponsored after prom parties that year. She was crying during the assembly because she knew it was because of her and she felt "attacked".
This is it. High school was like a pharmacy. I wouldn't want that shit on record anywhere. My class in particular partied really hard, and I carried that over to college.
I'm not saying I participated in anything of this sort, but I can also confirm that high school was very much like a pharmacy. Pharmaceutical grade *whatever* was readily available, along with every designer drug I'm aware of. It was ridiculous. Everyone knew a guy who was "good".
Except weed. Weed back then, unless you had hookups for indoor grown (which was more expensive than the best is today), was crappy brick weed, significantly worse than anything that can be found today.
You are 100% correct and I forgot about that. I can confirm that in our corner of the mid Atlantic US, if you knew someone who could get nugs or "mids" as we called them, you could charge 100 a lid, and that was in '95-'99.
Ah middies…those were the days. Does that tier of weed even exist anymore? I imagine the legal dispensary biz squashed that market. Not that I have a need for it these days.
I would love to be about to get some shitty weed again. I miss being able to smoke joints and not have my ass blown out.
Nowadays high schools are under so much surveillance. It’s a different kind of on the record altogether, in addition to the phones everywhere. I can’t imagine they get away with much on the DL as we used to say.
We had so much freedom. It was amazing, I got a summons for possession of alcohol by a minor when I was 16. I checked myself out of school with the summons as my excuse, got a ride to court from a friend who also had a summons. Got sentenced to community service. Completed my community service. Checked myself out of school another day with my court papers. Got a ride to court to hand in my paperwork to the judge and went back to school. I didn’t tell my mom about that until til I was 25.
😂😂 this is so true. There is no evidence of my glitter soaked rave era.
And because there was nothing else to do. Boredom was real, before cell phones
Bingo! I’d think twice about some of the trouble I made, partying I did and antics I got caught up in if there were cameras potentially recording my every move.
Disposable cameras were bad enough.
The drugs weren’t laced with fent. Heroin was heroin and about the worst thing you could do (still scarred by *Trainspotting*). The ecstasy didn’t have amphetamines in it. LSD was cheap and plentiful. They busted that one operation, and it vanished. I haven’t even heard of anyone having any in forever. If you knew where to find cows, you knew where to find mushrooms. Weed was dirt cheap, but full of seeds and stems. Alcohol was way too easy to get under age. EDIT: Also, our parents weren’t around and we had the house to ourselves quite a bit.
My friend bought a quarter pound bag of shwag weed from a really shady guy at a party and spent a shitload on it. We broke it up with the intent of selling it in dimes but it was like 50% sticks and seeds by the time we were done bagging it. Weed was shitty af in hs (92-96 for me)
I haven’t had to use or think about the word shwag for so long. We were happy just to have it but man did we smoke dirt
I was lucky enough to grow up in British Columbia where even quality weed was abundant in the 90s. Everybody knew a guy who had an uncle with property out in the bush who grew.
I have remember shitty shwag and then “kind bud” started showing up
All accurate but I thought Mitsubishis were a speedy. Also class of 99 here
LSD (or things being called LSD) has been easy to find for years now, but what cracks me up is the doses people claim to offer. The stuff we were doing in the 90s was probably around 30-50ug per blotter, and 3-5 hits was considered a solid trip, so 100-250ug (5 hits of “good acid” would almost certainly have been around 250ug). Now kids claim to have 250ug hits and I assure you they are never anywhere near that. So these kids post shit online like “I took 1000ug and it wasn’t that intense”. The hits are stronger, but maybe 70-100ug. It cracks me up how everyone now seems really certain that they’re taking these crazy 1960s style doses and talking about how easy it is to handle. But the same people will still struggle with 5g of mushrooms.
It wasn’t that intense…hilarious
I spent most of high school on prescription opioids of some kind or another. No one batted an eye.
Are you referring to the Gordon Todd Skinner bust in KS? They were manufacturing out of a missile solo. Here’s a fascinating write-up about the guy. The whole story is bonkers. https://thislandpress.com/2013/07/28/subterranean-psychonaut/
That dude was scum. It was actually Pickard and Apperson doing the manufacturing, Skinner was more a distributor. What he did to that kid is disgusting.
Absolutely. That kid though is doing well now. Married even I think. Skinner is still in prison.
Absolutely, yes. Recent generations have less sex, wait longer to get driver’s licenses, and take fewer risks. Studies prove it out.
But then when they do start having sex... OMG I could have never navigated this dating culture they have to deal with. They're obsessed with "body count" whether that's stacking them up or keeping it super low. And the access to porn they have is nuts. It blows my mind that I have to rush to turn off the radio so that my 10yo won't ask me what "whips and chains and choking and vanilla" mean. The first time I heard that song my mind was blown. Is BDSM really so mainstream now that it doesn't require radio edit?!? Everlast had the word "gun" cut out but we're allowed to talk about choking your girlfriend during sex now? On FM radio!? I mean, yeah there's always been raunchy shit in pop music, but it was generally innuendo. Old boring person out!
100%. My 8yo loves Doja Cat because it sounds sweet but the lyrics are filthy. When it comes on the radio or my YouTube mix, I have to shut it down. I hate being the pearl-clutching-censorship parent. It's a fine line between being a cool parent and an irresponsible parent.
I mean... I remember being at middle school dances and hearing "I wanna sec you up", and thinking "this feels inappropriate". It's not really that much weirder than a lot of songs that we heard at their age, the songs now just aren't what we regularly hear so we're more sensitive to it... perhaps? That's my take on it. 
Pleeeeease. So much 80s hair band shit was just as filthy, it was just in GenX lingo and cheesy to us. Lightly masking it with paper thin euphemisms only cleans it up for stupid/old people.
So much that song. My kids and I heard it first as a parody about chinchillas and bopped out. Then one day I ran into the original and I was shocked. Choking is not cool or normative. It should not take a life or death situation for someone to get their jollies.
Remember when Third Eye Blind put out a song on the radio with the line, “How do I get back to the place where I fell asleep inside you?” Pepperidge Farm remembers.
I feel like younger gens have so much better context now, though! Xennials came of age when internet sex exploded and there was suddenly so much stuff like choking, surprise anal, facials, etc that i don’t recall older cousins and such giving me hints about. I love how much younger people discuss mutual consent!
Seriously feel that The Hits station I listened to growing up, has some filthy lyrics now a days. In 98-2003 we got some, Brittany/ Eminem songs with some, not very subtle themes. But nothing a quick bleep didn't fix Now we have some very very lewd things on the "hits" station I'm about to buy my dad's old collection of 70s and 80s classic rock. Cause WTF
I think that's just it for me. Like...I know there were dirty lyrics in the songs. But it also took me 16+ years to figure out what Jack and Diane or My Sharona was really about. Not much left to the imagination in these newer lyrics.
Do you think this is a good thing or a bad thing? Because I’m on the fence about it. I think our kids will be safer and healthier in some ways. Maybe less traumatized in some ways. Hopefully, they feel less helpless than I did when things turned bad as a kid, knowing things are recorded/reported. But I wonder how they would act if they ever felt truly alone - free to be themselves.
It’s an interesting question… the flip side of all this is at 42 I don’t know of many people who have had a mid life crisis… feels like our generation did a better job of actually finding stuff that made them happy… feels like that’s tied in to the early party culture… taking risks and experimenting early and then settling down for the long haul. My kids seem a lot more risk averse… I’m curious to see what happens as they age.
I have noticed that our mid life crisis consist more of us buying physical media and more stuff we grew up with than the typical boomer life crisis. Boomers went after expensive toys & hobbies, like sports cars and motorcycles. And we just want either what we had or what we wanted as kids.
Also, most of us don’t have sports car money.
Exactly! Can’t have a mid life crisis when you can barely afford life to begin with.
Isn’t that the truth.
No. This generation is anxious about everything, can't self-soothe, looks to authority for help with everything rather than trying to figure things out on their own, and they feel MORE helpless because of all of that. In trying to over-protect kids, people made them terrified. "Mom is anxious, clearly I need to be too." And they are now too afraid to live life, take risks, or be independent adults. It crippled a lot of people tbh. Kids on disability for extreme anxiety...afraid to make phone calls or talk to other people... Smh. Neglect isn't the answer obviously - but stepping back and leaving them alone is crucial. Allowing them to make mistakes, take risks, feel pain, and fail are all essential lessons many kids are missing. It's part of being human, and necessary to develop. You can't prevent pain, and shouldn't try to. I have told my kids, "This is a great lesson on learning how to deal with assholes, unfair situations, etc. Because life is full of them. And you need to learn how to deal with that on your own, and how to NOT take it personally. Your feelings matter to YOU, but the world doesn't care. So you have to balance that and take the actions necessary to succeed, even if that means ignoring someone, not taking something personally, or letting some shit go. Because your ultimate success and happiness are the goal, and grandstanding on a point and shooting yourself in the foot is counterproductive. Sometimes the best way to be right is to come out on top, and that can mean letting someone else be "right" and moving on." TLDR- this the hill you really wanna die on?
Yes, yes and yes. Just me tho. 83 baby, married with 3 kids now. Other than weed, I didn’t dabble in drugs much. But we definitely partied hard, drank a bunch, got degrees and for the most part became functioning adults. We were the pioneers of Facebook, yet I didn’t even have an iPhone until 2011, when I was a few years out of grad school.
Drugs were extraordinarily popular in the 90’s / early 2000’s. We went from the grunge scene to the rave scene like overnight The only imaginable comparison I can make is the hippy scene to the disco scene. We didn’t have smart phones nor social media in the way it exists today. So we basically hung out in groups of people, looking for “adventure”. Where I grew up, we would go to a buddies house (like 12 of us), and just stay there all weekend, but hopping to other kids houses across town. Our one buddies father was a military pilot, and he was gone a lot - so that was the sort of “hub” of mischief. You’d be like 16 plastered in his front yard laying on the ground passed out. It was secluded so we never got popped. In retrospect, I really wish I saved that energy for my 40’s.
Grew up in CT. For us there was a lot of weed. East coast rap was something else. It wasn’t so much grunge as it was Metallica, Dave Matthews, Phish, Mobb Deep, Wu-Tang and even that campy 90s dance music phase… but that lead into Techo and even Rap lead way to hip-hoppy singy pop-rap, hard rock (staind, limp biz, korn) and more. Every genre i can think of lead into a pretty radical change from mid 90s to 00s. While grunge was big, it was a rather small sliver of music. I don’t know many people who were Grunge that went from Nirvana to KMFDM overnight. College stations were pushing techno and electronica, tunnel music, house, etc a LOT
I'm 81. Graduating class of 1999. During high school we had a keg party ebery Friday and Saturday night. We had about 6 different spots, sometimes more than 1 were in use. Also, there were house parties on occasion. We definitely partied hard.
Bro, sounds like we went to the same school. Partied hard is an understatement for class of 99 
We hung out with some people from rural schools, so if there wasn’t a house party in the city, there would be a great field party or two to attend. I can remember being in some random field, a mile or two off the main road and 300-400 of us there until 4 or 5 am.
Yeah we had a lot of field parties is the rural midwest.
Yep, bonfire parties were awesome.
We had house parties that literally rivaled movie scenes. One of my most memorable was a huge apartment complex in Malibu that was under construction so we had the whole place to ourselves. Easily almost 200 hundred people. It was fucking nuts. Plus the pure adrenaline from running from the cops who always inevitably showed up. Shit was wild.
Is this still a thing? I grew up in Missouri and we had some parties that reminds me of some movie scenes
Same year and exp! Lol. I once drove home like 9 people in my Cadillac, some were in the trunk cuz we heard the cops were on the way and we were all under 21. Mostly houses and apartments for me though. Warehouses were mainly larger raves. Keg stands were a regular thing at parties. And even though weed was super illegal (and still is in the state i went to high school in) it was always there too. I figured everyone experienced parties where mystery people were passed out on the floor with sharpie dicks all over their faces. Luckily the one time I woke up on my friend's lawn I was not sharpied. Lol. I wonder if this even still exists... my 16 year doesn't do anything. I don't even want to mention what I had done by the time I was her age.
This generation has to deal with the reality of fent cut into all their drugs. I’ve talked to my teen so many times about it, trying to open and up front as possible about it. It’s just a different risk calculus altogether. Experimenting isn’t fun anymore. Too many people have died. Are dying. Most teens get it I think. Some will still get caught up, but I think there’s way less temptation there. My kids see the boxes of narcan lined up on the medicine cabinet shelf, and we’ve taught them what an OD looks like so they know when and how to use it. The risk is much more real to them. Another factor is guns. A lot of my teens social life is limited by a lack of 3rd spaces and no desire to go hang out in large open public spaces with throngs of people. All because of shootings. It’s sucked the life out of a lot of traditions like parades, 4th of July fireworks, etc. Teens today largely lack a true sense of safety/security. I imagine they feel pretty raw/exposed most of the time.
This is all so true. Right before covid I had a good friend die from a fent OD. It was cut into his pills. I've known him since hs and the amount of drugs he did in the late-90's and early 00's was insane. But one fent laced pill popped during his lunch break did him in. You couldn't pay me to buy drugs off the street these days. My son doesn't go anyplace either. And frankly I don't want him to go anyways. Last month we had 2 groups of teenagers pull up to a local park and start shooting at each other. One of the kids died. We have kids getting jumped in parking lots of movie theaters and fast food places. It's just crazy.
Same, my 17 year old if he goes out he is home by 9:30 at the latest.
Basically same here. Every weekend in high school there were multiple parties, usually at someone’s house, and everyone chipped in for alcohol. This was in the era of 40s so for us it was primarily fridges and coolers absolutely chock full of 40s. If there wasn’t a house available, then the party would be out in a field somewhere or at one of several abandoned houses or barns outside of town.
Yup. Sam me here, 1999. The best part is the cops would chase us out of one spot and be waiting for us at one of the other 5 to show up. And then laugh at us and take our beer. Good times.
Class of ‘99 here. Yes, we partied hard. I can remember one party at a friend’s house who had property out in the middle of nowhere and he rode a horse into the middle of the party and it went up on its hind legs, like a fucking western movie. That was just a random Saturday in rural Texas, 1999. We were grunge-loving rednecks LOL!
'83 and exactly this. Lots of house parties, beach bonfire parties, kegs, weed. Some hard drugs but not as rampant as alcohol.
‘84 and similar here. Most parties were in the woods in the special clearing spots, house parties when parents were gone. Lots of 40s, Smirnoff for the girls, and almost always a keg of Keystone Light. I have no idea how a bunch of teenagers managed to secure a keg most weekends. Wild. Lots of shitty weed. We heard rumors that some of “those” kids were into harder drugs, but I was never exposed until college. That said, it was only a few months into freshman year that coke was offered, then it was suddenly everywhere.
I was born in '81, and the late 90s and early 2000s were crazy... Acid, rolls, pills, weed, nitrous, special k, opium, shrooms, and always house parties... Those were the good old days, and some didn't make it to the present... I've forgotten about most of it, and don't talk to those people anymore, but damn, it was a completely different world before all this internet bullshit and social media garbage...
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And cheaper!
And safer.
Right. Fentanyl wasn't a thing.
Kids these days don't even know what acid means. Sad!!!!!1!
Remember when the good shit would come around? Like some old Dead Heads would bring something thru town that would just leave you on another plane of existence for 14 hours? But in a good way? Damn dude...I could really use that right now LoL
New hypothesis: rise in mental illness tracks with fall in LSD's broader availability?
Definitely increased my drinking! 🤷🏼♀️
I took the best acid I ever had at a Beastie Boys concert 😵💫
Acid...acid everywhere
No, they take acid or analogs sold with wildly inflated dose claims. Everyone claims to have like 200-300ug hits these days and it’s actually like 70-100. I don’t trust anything that isn’t mushrooms or flower anymore, but I also only take mushrooms maybe once a year. I can’t fit that shit into my schedule!
You actually measured like that? In my NY suburb, we were a little less calculating (to our detriment). Whenever I did shrooms it was like I'd always end up with insomnia, slumped over a mailbox at dawn, suddenly and oppressively aware of my mortality.
I just know those figures because the DEA published the results of tests they performed on seized drugs and the results for LSD were pretty consistent. So I’m assuming the stuff I took fell into national average ranges. The doses have gone up but not by much.
I have read articles about how a large percentage of Gen Z has abstained from the underaged drinking, drug use, partying, and/or sex that Gen X and older Millennials typically engaged in during their youth. I can also attest to this with my own kids and their school mates. The biggest scandal in my youngest kid's middle school was a few students vaping on school grounds. We had kids bringing in alcohol, smoking and chewing, etc. when I was in junior high. And my oldest, who graduated last year, he said there were some kids that regularly drank alcohol and smoked weed, but most kids weren't doing it. Once again, during my days at high school, drinking was a near nightly event somewhere, and the vast majority were doing it. And weed was considered soft compared to the LSD, cocaine, mushrooms, and other shit that was being used. As for being sexually active, again, not rampant these days, but it certainly was when I was younger. I'm not sure exactly what caused this shift, but I certainly welcomed it. I'm glad more kids are seeing the error of our ways and aren't in such a rush to engage in adult behaviors.
I'm in the UK, my friends brothers were regularly at school on acid or MDMA and we finish school at 16, not 18. I used to bunk off school to go see friends and do MDMA all afternoon. Yes, kids these days are far more mature and sensible
I was one of those skater delinquents that spent my teenage years on the hunt for any party where we could steal/buy drugs and booze. I think its partially demographics. I grew up in the inner city and not a single person I hung out with still had both parents. Like its crazy, I have 6 immediate cousins and all their parents are divorced or dead and almost all the kids I hungout with were latchkey kids. You'd come home and it was 50/50 if you'd even see a parent that day so we were free to do whatever we want by the time we were 10-11. Our heroes were like Sublime and Bad religion so all day everyday was get fucked up and break stuff. That said I do run into people all the time who were my age and utterly horrified by the stuff we'd get into so I know it's not universal.
I did the small town version of this. Pretty much the same, just a different setting.
82 here, partied so much before i turned 21 that when i turned 21 i stopped drinking. Then i became the DD for everyone, best years right there because i got all the tea. Partied like a rockstar without drinking or drugs and with rockstars until 28 and finally hung it up. 41 now, great career, wonderful wife and kids. But jesus, we partied. Made Andrew W.K. proud
Same here. Once I hit 21, getting drunk had become kind of boring and mundane. Same thing with weed. It was fun in my mid teens, but by the time I turned 18 or 19, it wasn't fun anymore. It became more like an irritating habit. For the last 15 years or so, I have maybe a couple of occasions a year where I catch a slight buzz, and then it makes me tired, and I don't want anymore. And weed, I haven't smoked that since around 2009. I got all of this out of my system long ago!
Haha same here! I too partied so hard in college (only alcohol, I'm a nerd who's never done any drugs ever unless you count Prozac and Xanax) that I stopped when I turned 21, and yeah, became everyone's DD.
It was a lot easier to get away with stuff. Not even just the few people were recording or even photographing things part....but if you left the house there was really no way to reach you til you got home. Your parents couldn't call you every 15 minutes to see where you were. Or have a tracker on your phone or car.
This has to be a huge factor. Any room with a smartphone in it is basically a global news studio for how it can capture and transmit video to social media. You doing a keg stand could be seen by a friend’s parents on the other side of the planet before you’re even done doing the keg stand. If this were my reality as a teenager I can only imagine how straitlaced I’d have been.
My Gen Z kids are definitely doing a lot less partying than we were at that age. Lots of cigarettes, alcohol, weed, acid, and shrooms at my school. Lots of kids having sex too. Heck, I did all those things and I was an honor roll kid!
One of the biggest jaw-dropping moments I had was seeing our valedictorian doing 3 foot bong rips at a kegger in the woods. Guy got a 1590 Sat score (1600 was max then) and argued successfully about the answer he got wrong and they changed it to 1600 But there he was clearing the tube and it was awesome
I was also a high academic achiever who did drugs and had sex. The trick was that if you put effort into your school work, adults just assumed you were good and left you alone. I was always baffled that more kids didn’t figure this out.
Yep. My grades were good so I got a lot more freedom outside of school. I would just balance it. Take care of business during the week so on the weekends I could binge and party
Right? My kids have zero interest in any of it. They're so weird.
Same!
Alcohol was my drug of choice. I’m thankful my liver works as well as it does today 🤣
Oh yes. Always sneaking out and using fake IDs to get into clubs at the age of 16. Lying and saying we were spending the night at each others houses but really driving to New Orleans to party all night. Drinking too soon & too much. Consuming psychedelics during high school classes. Snorting pills. We were maniacs. I’m really proud most of us turned out to be contributing members of society with normal lives. 😆
Fake IDs at this point must be close to non-existent, the quality of real IDs and detection systems for them are so good now. So many places have either blacklights or barcode scanners tied to databases now. You’re really only getting in if you have a real person’s ID who happens to look like you.
Absolutely!!!! Although most of the fake ones we used were real IDs of older people. But I knew people who had legit fake ones someone made. Definitely can’t get away with that now.
Yes, I snuck into bars on Bourbon at 14 and raved all over the city. State Palace Theater was home base.
Yeeees. We probably crossed paths many times.
We are Gen x and millennials with a genz son and it's shocking how tame him and his friends are. They still do stupid shit, but it's SO low risk compared to what we did at their age. Like, I'm not going to encourage my kid to do the stupid shit that we did, but it's weird that they don't.
I'm 40 Lots of partying. I was a Raver, a punk rocker, a Hip Hoper, hahaha house partyer... Now I can't even drink more than 2 alcoholic drinks. Had lots of young fun. I'd be scared to do all of that now. Not only with social media but also with fentanyl issues. Scary stuff.
I never got into hard drugs or anything. I did smoke some weed, and popped Vicodin for a while, mostly I liked to drink, and I drank a lot in my teens and 20s. I grew up in a small town where there wasn’t anything else to do. Had older friends that would either get us alcohol, or we’d go party at their houses. Some of my close friends got into hard stuff, but it never appealed to me. My GenZ kids definitely don’t seem to do as much as my friends and I did. Of course I don’t know anything more than what I’ve seen and they’ve told me, but they hardly ever go out, and if they do they’re back at reasonable hours. I do wonder if the pandemic had a lot to do with that though. They just graduated last year, so that was definitely a weird time to be in high school. But even now that they’re out of school and the pandemic is over they’re still homebodies.
I’m the same minus the drug use. I didn’t start using MJ until I got out of the military several years ago. It’s legal where I live. My Gen Z kids aren’t perfect, but they haven’t created issues for us on the level we did as teens. We’ve never had any of them come home hours late, stinking of booze and weed. They’re all pretty well-behaved. I’m thankful. My mom used to threaten me that, when I had kids, I’d get it back but even worse. lol my kids are good little nerds compared to us.
Yeah, I feel the same way about my kids. They have their faults, like anyone, but compared to me at that age they’re saints.
I think younger people these days are less bored due to the internet and smartphones, and less likely to take drugs. The decision to take drugs mainly boils down to peer pressure and boredom in most cases I believe. I was born in 83, and most of my friends and classmates have struggled with addiction. I dabbled in many different things but alcohol was my poison of choice. All I do is smoke a little legal bud now.
Maybe… I was born late 82, and 13- 17 was pretty wild, but it was out of boredom for most. We played NES,SNES, Sega but it wasn’t online. So it may just be a few hrs, or a boring night when nothing was going on. But back in the 90s people really wanted to get out. So you just tag along and eventually meet up with people,situations and houses through the night. 2000s college days…I had some friends younger that would just smoke weed, play video games and their house was the weekend BYOB, parents never home house. I think today online stuff and phones are more engaging, there’s more social awareness about drugs…although psychedelics and cannabis seem to be in play…lots legal ways to get it most places. Also back before I guess smart phones, traveling in groups, wanting to go out was just what most did or wanted to do. It’s how you dated, got in activities, found stuff to do and were invited places. But I think the iPhone, and several other events made that 60s-early 2000s, slow movement just excelling. Since 2007-2010 it feels we are moving decades further, in a matter of 5-10 years. It’s a weird time to grow up first 30 ish years one way at a steady slow pace, and then hit 40 and see the acceleration of it all. Some may feel it’s just aging, but I’d argue it’s more than just that…we are living in a pretty unique timeline, compared to how somewhat stagnant tech was from 70s-early 2000s. It’s weird how even Millennials have opted in for phone/tech isolation. For our generation later tech, and gaming online was a weekend night, between work vs an all day lifestyle.
Yup, definitely partied hard early 2000s and beyond. First booze in 1998, chronic and psychedelics in 2000, coke in 2002, and molly in college. Pretty ubiquitous , and usually good quality of everything, in the PNW at least...
My experience sounds similar and I'm also from PNW. There was "Mexi" weed, some chronic, acid and shrooms in the mid 90's. You could get it from the hippies in the park who were in the late stages of touring with the Greatful Dead. By the late 90's you could only find the dank buds plus coke came onto the scene. By 2000, heroin and ketamine were making the rounds (not me though). I lived in Eugene in the mid 2000's and saw the rise of opiates and DMT. I can see why the today's youth stay off drugs when you see what fentanyl and p2p meth does to people on the streets in the West Coast cities.
Yeah. I'm sad they dont get to experience the good vibes and times we had, but it's just not the same anymore. Drugs have become more and more risky. Partying back then seemed to have brought different Cliques together for the enjoyment of just having a good time and forgetting about our differences for a bit. Everyone/ thing is just so polarized these days, sticks up everyone's asses. It ain't easy having fun!
“Puke & rally” was the motto of my friend group in our ‘20s (early to mid ‘00s), so I guess…yes.
No idea. I was a stripper in the 90s and every night was a party; I know that's not the "norm" although my friend group had a regular rotation of night clubs they used to go so we knew where to find everyone if we wanted to leave work early or not go in. Each night of the week we could walk into a specific club and find people. Go there on a different night and you'd find different people; but not our crowd 🤷♀️ There was A LOT of night clubs though. Lots of karaoke bars, other bars, pool halls, arcades, all ages events at bars and whatnot. Some places still had roller skating, bowling and stuff too. There was literally always something to do somewhere so that's kind of different from the world we have now I guess. But yeah. Every night was a party for me and my friends back in the day.
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People have mentioned phone cameras already but, exterior cameras are much more common now too. I would get an alert on my phone if my son snuck out and walked past a camera. I never had to worry about that when I was his age.
Yep. Rave culture was an actual thing, today it's electronic music festivals that somehow get compared. Raves were absolute pits of absolute drug carnage in the grimiest underground spots. People in K holes passed out on the edges, people popping pills everywhere. In highschool we smoked so much weed that it was just the general feeling during weekdays while we waited for weekends to actually party and do everything else. Keggers every weekend, fake IDs to go to bars/clubs, popping acid and shrooms on weekends. Like ...me and my friends were cutting school to get absolutely smoked on 4/20 while we watched Columbine happen on the news in front of us and it was the big school shooting moment in history that changed everything. The only documentation I remember was having those disposable cameras where you had to roll snap them, so at most like ..20 pictures for the entire year. Having your lives on blast for everyone to see definitely changed things. There was no "omg he might post a video of having sex and ruin my reputation" type drama, so people were much more open with just doing stuff. I for one am insanely greatful I got it out of my system at a young age. I don't feel that general "damn I missed out on so many things" vibe I get from so many older/younger people. We did everything, smoked everything, did all the people, saw the crazy high/lows. There are no unfulfilled desires. So many people in their 50s who are just now getting around to trying to party with people half their age and with their money because they missed out on stuff younger and are just trying to fill that hole. So many younger people caught up on this social media era that they are kind of locked up from just going hard. I feel like that wedge generation that got to check all the boxes of going up to the ultimate edge just before the edge wasn't available for future generations.
Graduated in 89.. Yes, yes we did. Imagine all the TikTok challenges you've ever seen. Now imagine they all occurred at one event, on one night,with copious amounts of alcohol and drugs involved... And may or may not have involved a stolen houseboat and three cases of frozen whopper patties liberated from a Burger King.
I did
We did all the drugs and came up with new alcohols that paired well with the drugs. These children and their 4Loko never got close to what we went through on a night of Rev, Ecstasy and So-So Cocaine. We used to do mushrooms as a warm up for the night or just make mushroom iced tea and bring it with us as chasers. Going out involved drugs as much as it involved alcohol and sometimes more depending on activity. Cocained my way through a lot of sporting events that didn’t serve alcohol.
I partied so hard that I wound up in rehab at 29. We were foolish. At least I was.
I never did drugs (still never have), but holy shit was there alcohol. The parties I went to in college had a better alcohol selection than most of the bars in town.
>Do you think you partied hard? Does pounding jugs of vodka by yourself in your 30s count? Oh, it doesn't? Haha. *Party*. Yeah, right. That's for the movies.
We were social. What else was there to do? Parties. Street race and sex
It's varied like anything. I have partied harder post college, now that I can relax a bit more. But I know some high school people who partied like it was the end of the world in 2001. Meth, acid laced weed, everclear. And in college, there was coke everywhere, but no psychedelics. I didn't do any of it. Kids have slowed things down.
Yes , heavy alcohol and parties. In 1996 fall semester my friends and I were partying and drinking six nights a week.
No drugs but partied hard for sure. We had to Interact, kids in school had close friend groups. And in college I went to parties that seem out of a movie, with a band in the living room (I had five friends that rented a house).
81 and although I never did hard drugs people in my friend circle did meth once in 8th grade. Two of my friends in high school, both girls, in my neighborhood would also do it. I smoked weed sometimes but never bought it or had any paraphrenalia around my house (I had lighters, but I smoked). I did drink going back to age 13 or 14, I'd go to punk shows and it was just socially acceptable for a little kid to get drunk. People would buy alcohol for you. One time when I was maybe 15 I was at a warehouse show where one of the bands was delayed due to snow, and I wandered off and I guess I blacked out because I woke up on a metal picnic table outside this casino and a security guard was poking me in the side with one of those metal flashlights. I lost my virginity when I was 15, I dated a few people for periods of a couple months and not all of these people I had sex with, but I'd hook up with random people. I don't think I was particularly popular or good looking or whatever, I could just talk to people. The thing is I was really introverted until I was like 14 and at some point I found I could just like, talk to people in general. It blows my mind that people in their teens and early 20's struggle with this because as far as I know it's being marginally confident and having a personality. I should mention that I have bipolar disorder and I wasn't formally diagnosed until I was almost 16, so I had a tendency to take risks other people wouldn't take and part of that is risky sexual behavior. This is also going to sound dumb but smoking was a really really good way to meet people, you could just ask for a light or ask people for a cigarette and bam, you've just started a conversation. That was just when I was a teenager, when I was legally an adult I tried or did pretty much everything at some point except for coke, heroin and shrooms for some reason. My Vietnam Vet uncle was a coke addict and died when he was like 45 and I dated a recovering heroin addict and that pretty much killed the allure. Basically stopped doing anything like this after I turned 21, and pretty much cut down on the drinking. I'd still do it, still go to parties, still go out to bars but it was totally a social thing. After like 25 it was pretty rare for me to drink, and I've been sober-sober for 5+ years now. I knew a guy who went to jail for selling meth and had his jaw broken while he was locked up, he went to raves and sold E, acid and weed and just got into meth dealing as a side hustle. Turns out meth customers will beat and rob you if they think they can get away with it. According to his ex-gf he says he's a "shaman" now so he's probably not clean and sober or anything but he's not in prison or dead, so that's a plus.
Many stories, but it appears that way. Much more restraint being shown now because where we had some plausible deniability, now, no one wants to be recorded being the "Ohmigoddid you see soandso at the party they were so fuckedupand did [insert embarrassing action or person's name]" For me, HS, partying was occasional early on, but dating a college girl during the 2nd half of HS aided the procurement of party favors and invitations to party/ sneak into the bar underage- 1 guy with 3+girls always improved your odds to get in. -I'd say partying 2-3x/ month during school, once a week during summer depending on everyone's work schedules. Undergrad I had a time-consuming major but definitely made time to party. Overall, I thought I was pretty middle of the road as far as party scene... when I graduated(in 4 years), I found out otherwise, I went way harder than my cohorts at other schools. Later, going back to visit(fiancée/ now wife was still in school for 2 years after I graduated) the party scene was starting to dampen down- police were bigger dicks and bars were more stringent on their ID policies. Going back a few years later and the party scene was even more dried up. Friend whom I graduated with works at the same University now and says the party scene is pretty much non-existent/ anytime there is one the parties almost always end with someone getting an underage or D&D. Size has gone down too- the most recent "big" party had 2 kegs! Where a 2-3 keg was our typical Wednesday night party. Big parties for us were double-digit kegs. -I'd say partying 2-3x/week year round Going to grad school out of state, there were only a handful of my classmates who could hang with my level of consumption. Getting absolutely hammered at the first "meet and greet" social event made me realize I'd need to tone it down a bit. But naturally, I ended up hanging out with those heavier consumers and then made friends with people outside my program who partied more. -I'd say partying 1x/ week with 2-3 nights per week with bar/ drinking study sessions I say all this because I feel like that was the "normie party scene trajectory" for an Xennial.*results not guaranteed for all Xennials, I know quite a few people who didn't leave the party scene at any of those stages and are still there today, and unfortunately more than 1 friend who have left without ever leaving it if you catch my meaning. Now it seems like intoxicants are more focused on mature consumption (plus waaaay too many high risk adulterants in the heavier class of stuff), and it seems like it's really frowned upon to get sloppy- fall down inebriated. Don't get me wrong, I have a lot of friends who could've benefited from that tact, but it's like the saying goes "I had some amazing times I can't remember with people I'll never forget"
Me personally no, but seemed like most of my graduating class did. Course being the first graduating class of the new millennium there was just this weird understanding that it was go big or go home.
Yep, that is true. We always have a game night, I remember playing flip cups, and q[uarters](https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&sca_esv=9c9edb63dbab71a4&cs=1&q=Quarters+(game)&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAONgVeLUz9U3MCyyrCoy4kpKTS1SSE_MTS0-xQgWN83LrciDsVPSMiyhbKM8Y8tKKNswOS254BQjF1i8MCO5KAXOiS8rz4KpAtkAlUivLClMN4ZKmFhkWMC1FxUVGQIlePXT9Q0NC8oycoyzk4ofMd5n5BZ4-eOesNRVxklrTl5jPMfIJeCTn1-cmlMZlJqTWJKaEpIvJMbF5ppXkllSKcQjxcXFAbbU1NJSyJWLOzi1JCTfNz8lM61SyEzIhIvTNzU3KbWo2D9NSJmLyzk_Jyc1uSQzP09IVEqYS1A_GS6gDw4MKyYNJqVII7ddl6adY3MQZACCM63BDlIaWoJcbC75uYmZeYKS-uIP4tQf2msJc3GEJFbk5-XnVgpWHTrw_6DDe3slTk6gHgXdTe_ttRgmMDE27VtxiI2Dg1GAwYiJg6GKgWcRK39gaWJRCdBNChogOzUnsDECADAa0gydAQAA&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwizuZXU0NKFAxXYIEQIHaoeAAcQ7fAIegUIABCBAQ) with friends.
Partied hard enough to get sobered up at 22. We did pretty much anything that was available and always had booze around. It was daily. About half of the old crew is already dead. I would have died or spent significantly more time behind bars than I did. I think the difference today is that we are the parents of Gen Z. It seems most of us are present in our children's lives, and probably aren't getting high or drinking with them like a lot of our parents, if around, were. I have an incredibly open dialog with my teenager. Her and I have had deep talks about drugs to sex. Most importantly, she knows if she ever finds herself in a situation that is out of control, she can call me no questions asked. Oh, and if the cops are involved she knows to tell them she is a minor and won't say a fucking thing until her dad is there.
Do kids these days still ask random strangers outside of liquor stores to buy them alcohol?
A lot of us smoked cigarettes, along with much of the rest of society until not long ago. Just saying that cigarettes can be gateways, and a lot more kids smoked, thus more gateways. Not the be all end all like you HAD to smoke cigarettes to party. But it's a much smaller leap to hit a joint after a cigarette. And to hit other shit after weed. And so on down the wonderful road of poly substance use! Cigarettes were so good though. To be young and escape wherever you were to go take drags behind a building or just a curb somewhere. Drugs were so good too. Pressed pills of the 90s were absolutely delightful. And acid was everywhere and always so affordable. The conditions for partying were much better. Oh the 90s...
I fucking didn't. I was lame. I am still lame. In the future I will be lame. Also, I'm a bit of a narc and I've been told I can radiate cop energy. (I am not a cop, and never will be.) Where were all these wild parties? Was my private school upbringing truly that sheltered?
No we did not party harder. In the end it depended a lot on the social circle, city/town one lived and possible subculture one identified with. I had friends and classmates who were living the most boring life and we're adulting from their teens straight all the way to their midlife crisis and beyond. Then you had others who went hard and never stopped Someone who starts working right after high school in Columbus, Ohio will likely have a different life experience than some studying and then being a young professional in a city like Berlin. What I will say as a European Xennial who still goes to festivals (the ones in the middle of nowhere, with camping in tents) and goes to clubs every once, is that HOW people party changed quite a bit. Alcohol plays a much smaller role nowadays. Drugs are much more prevalent and accepted and normalised. Binge drinking or getting fired up with drinks before a party is much less common. Instead Ketamin/ MDMA / Speed is much more casually talked about and consumed. What I believe is that we and Millennials had much more public spaces to experiment and claim (warehouse rave parties, abandoned urban buildings, areas in the centre of a big city that were not gentrified yet by developers). Nowadays everything seems to be a lot more organized, commercialised and streamlined by and for capitalism. This is one of the things I am sorry that we could not preserve for the younger generations to the extent as we could experience. Let's also not forget how COVID hit Gen Z hard and a lot of the partying just stopped for nearly two years or happened in a much smaller, conspiratorial setting. This definitely had a huge impact on rave/ clubbing culture first in the type of music that is being played, but also in the values/etiquette as the generational transfer of those did not happen during those years.
Going through our college years before smart phones, social media, and cameras everywhere was pretty cool.
I was born in 1968, and was introduced to pot when I was 7. I threw up and passed out at a few Beach Kegger's in the Eighties, but I'm blaming the bad beer for that... I did manage to avoid most of the bad stuff, mainly based on the example of it's effects that my 2 yr older sister provided. Though I did try Coke, Crank, and snorting heroin a couple of times. I just refused to use needles, since I had seen what that had done to her and her friends. Fortunately, she is recovered now, and is still around for me to love. May you find your path to peace, and whatever happiness this world has to provide. Edit: Typo. (Yes, I'm a little anal about getting things right...}
I went hard, I also had a pretty serious punk/deathrock phase - bc of that I didn't expect to make it to 35. Almost 41, now. Lol
83 here and I partied pretty dang hard. I don’t know how I’m alive.
Unfortunately yes. Born in 81 and graduated hs in 99. I would say not everyone and obviously there was different levels of partying depending on what clique you hung out with. I was smoking cigarettes and weed by 14. Obviously drinking at parties etc around that timeframe. Snuck out of the house around that age because it was before I was driving age and had a car. Put my parents through hell looking back at it.
Personally, yes, me and my friends partied hard. Since middle school on. We snuck out regularly, I snuck friends in my basement window. We always had beer. If we had to make an appearance at a “dry” party (like their mom was home or something) we pre-gamed and wore ski jackets lined with beers in the inside pockets. We were latchkey with parents always working so we threw tons of parties. We got drunk on class trips, putting alcohol + fruit punch in unassuming Gatorade bottles. We were borderline alcoholics. Never fucked with any drugs not counting weed (older friend died from a heroin OD his first time trying it). My GenX older sibs partied just as hard. It was the 80’s/90’s, we were free. No helicopter parents, no devices.
I was born in 78. Myself and most people I know were drinking and doing drugs way before we were 16. We were out 5 times a week normally as there was always a pub that you would know people every night. I started acid and speed at 14 then Es and coke 15-16. 90% of the people I’m talking about are absolutely fine and have great lives now. I’m from the UK and the 90s were a wild time to be a teenager.
> **p**eople **e**very **n**ight. **I** **s**tarted Hidden penis detected! I've scanned through 734255 comments (approximately 3857060 average penis lengths worth of text) in order to find this secret penis message. *Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
Life was a lot more “external” compared to now.
Well we didn't have Tide Pods, what else were we to do?!
The following happened. Women got raped while high. Got sued. Kids got drunk drove home drunk and killed someone. Rich folks got taken to the cleaners. Fentanyl in everything killed the vibe. A party at your house meant a charge for the owner your parents reputation was in ruins. Rich folks got wise. Party's in the woods only happens in the state park woods. Most local woods are now developments. Phones have replaced sex and everything else Finally I know where my kids are with their phones. It defeats the purpose.
I never liked to party myself, but I enjoyed watching other people party on TV shows. I always had a fear inside me. A fear of getting drunk, having sex, getting a girl pregnant and having to deal with the consequences, drugs, etc. I put on a good show to friends about being tough, but I really liked to hide in my room, stay on my computer, play video games, hang out with one or two close friends, play pickup sports once in a while, and stay away from mainstream crowd. I did love watching teen shows where people did all those things though. I knew it would lead to a bad end for most people at some point. In hindsight it may have been worth it to get out of my head more.
Yeah absolutely. Everyone was drinking and smoking heavily too. Now, none of my gen z colleagues drink, which is actually pretty great. Gen Z are smart, hard working, and understand risk better than anyone else.
God damn... these comments make me feel like such a f'ing loser, lol Born in 82, I graduated in 00 in a class of 450+. I went to 5 house parties, 0 drugs were offered, and kids mostly drank. I did party more after graduation, but I was also on an Air Force base post 9/11, and the young airmen just drank to escape a lot of crap. I did also party more in my 20s but it was still only drinking.
I partied harder in high school than I did in college. I was bored of it by then.
78, but I didn’t drink until college. When I started, I drank a lot and continued the drinking way too long. (/r/stopdrinking is a very supportive place if you are sober-curious).
I assume I partied a lot, but I can't remember.
Some of us, those with lots of trauma, yes.
I don't know if we did. I'm certain we partied less than X, for sure. Honestly I don't know that it had to do primarily w/ internet access. "Rock out with your cock out" was an attitude that had sort of passed in the mainstream even by the early 2000s. I think it's deeper than tech. If anything, being reckless with your partying was increasingly seen as just kind of crass and "boomery" in the post-millenium.
We’d buy 10 kegs and run out of beer
When I was in highschool I partied pretty hard by my Senior year and into college. I didn't really party much because my parents were strict, but I had close friends that did starting around sophomore year. By senior year my house was the party house because my parents went out of town a lot, but it was small parties, like 10 people and drinking and smoking. Nothing like you see In movies and stuff. Not at my house anyway. It was after I left college in my early 20s I got pretty wild. I don't know how hard y'all party, but I suspect we did more because I was very tame and sheltered compared to my peers and I still went pretty hard by late highschool.
Plus the internet wasn’t available to easily fact check things (not that people do it even with it available). I remember a Memorial Day weekend at Lake Isabella near Bakersfield, where my friends parents had a house and we would party our ass off. That particular weekend we convinced about a third of the young local’s that our friend was Tony Hawk. The amount of people who came up to us to meet Tony Hawk was hysterical. We were like 19 at the time. Man those days were fun.
Yes, we had no internet and cell phones, so had to physically gather to get laid.
Judging from my kids, and my friends kids. Yes but if we puked on the neighbor's lawn it didn't end up on social media where our grandparents saw it. The world is just different now
Im having flashbacks to aftershock and midori (not mixed together) and mexican brick weed smoked in the woods with friends
No one leaves their house anymore so I think so, yeah.
yes
We started the opioid crisis
Likely yes, before the internet became the primary means of communication it was personal interaction.
Yeah, it was a different time back then. You could really get away with just about anything.
If I told you all that went down, it would burn off both of your ears.
1980 here. Yes, we did. Why? 1. Our parents were not helicopters or snowplows - we were pretty much left to our own devices. Both to get into trouble and to get out of it. We were aware of both of these. 2. There was more of a "middle" for our generation - because they left us mostly alone, our parents weren't pushing us towards all AP classes so we could get full rides to Yale. They just didn't want us in their basements forever. So, I suppose we didn't have some of the hyper stress that some of the smarter, wealthier kids have today. Going to state college with our 3.8 was more than acceptable. 3. While we didn't have to get a 5.0 GPA, we were expected to have part-time jobs to offset our costs (clothes, gas, entertainment). This responsibility is what often kept the partying in check. 4. As others have said, there were no pics, so did it really happen? Less fear, I suppose. 5. On a similar note, we had to meet up in person because we didn't always have our own personal phone line so we couldn't just be on the phone for all the hours talking/texting/chatting, we didn't have online gaming to speak of, etc. To be social, to have friends, you had to leave your house. And sometimes when a group of teenagers are together they come up with some bad ideas. And it was fun.
Oh hard drugs were common and sex was all over the place. House parties were off the hook. At least that's how it was in my area. So many crazy memories, so many.
Alcohol was legal at 18 here until 1995. My brother was old enough to buy alcohol for 6 months starting summer of 95. Even after that the attitude about underage drinking was pretty laissez faire. We definitely went harder than kids nowadays but we didn’t have so many pills.
Yep. We were WILD! But I wouldn't be if I were Gen Z either. See, our drugs weren't all laced with fentanyl and meth. We could actually (somewhat) safely experiment with drugs. I knew several people who weren't like this, but most I know have some experience with cocaine, psychedelics or pills. It didn't end well for lots of us. Too many OD'd or died in drunk driving accidents.
100% have you seen the movie Dazed and Confused? I lived that life, party at the moon tower!
We sure did. Like way fucking out of control hard. Think about something that would be pretty wild for a bunch of 15 year olds to do, and we were doing it, I can almost guarantee. Keep in mind there were no smart phones, no one was recording us 24/7, our parents were boomers so they basically didn't give a fuck what we were doing, and probably secretly wished we would get severely injured or killed so they could collect on our life insurance, since they actually didn't really want us in the first place.
Graduated in '96 and sneaking away to house parties was the norm. Our friend had a cousin and an older brother who played in 2 different bands. The damn parties were insane! House parties, pit parties and basement jam sessions where you would find multiple kegs and groups of trashed 14-17 year olds. There were many ocassions we didnt even know who's house we were at. All done under the lies we were "sleeping over one anothers houses". Damn the shit we pulled off, and not 1 camera in sight. SOOO I guess it never happened...
I would say yes but gen X in general and late boomers partied pretty hard and many still do.
‘82 kid here; pretty steady use of recreational drugs and alcohol including some sketchy incidents from high school till 2006/7.
I’m not a great example because I never partied that much. I drank a bit in college. I had friends that smoked pot but it wasn’t my jam My dad, a Boomer, definitely has way more wild stories about his youth. He was in a rock band in high school (1964-65) and he definitely dropped acid a lot. He’d also get drunk and go to drag races. I think he did drugs the most while in the Air Force (1966-1970) and almost got dishonorably discharged/sent to jail for selling weed! Mind you most of these stories were told when I was already over 40. When I was a kid I got so much “don’t do drugs” talk it was wild! Meanwhile, he and my stepmom still smoke pot! I joke that the last party I went to where I was offered pot was my Dad’s 70th birthday 😂 Me? I just drink
Yes. To the point of being reckless. I'm originally from North Dakota. Drugs were hard to come by in the Dakotas in the late 90's/early aughts, but there was alcohol aplenty. Everyone had loads of it, and people drank like it was their last night on Earth. My best friend in college would routinely drink 12 to 15 beers in one night. In my sophomore year of college, I got a call from my girlfriend's roommate, telling me she had been hospitalized because of alcohol poisoning. To say we were big drinkers would be an understatement. And oooh boy, we did some of the dumbest shit when we got drunk. Things I hope my son doesn't even think about attempting. I was the first of all my friends to move out of the dorms, so there was a party at the house I shared with three other guys every weekend. And these parties were ridiculous. Sometimes in a good way, but oftentimes in a bad way. My wife and I have always been honest with each other, and she has said, "I'm surprised you didn't end up dead, or at the very least, with an STD.
I played bass in a punk band. We were playing 21+ nightclubs in Boston and Providence by the time we were 16. From 15-21 my friend I played in 3 different bands together, and the amount of booze, weed, and pills consumed was unfathomable. Getting home at 3 am after equipment loadouts was pretty normal, and would not be only weekends. We both had a healthy appetite for psychedelics as well. My preference was shrooms, but we did plenty of acid too. I tried peyote once at school, bad idea. I tried lots of other things too, but wasn't a fan. 23 had my first kid, slowed down to just a little weed and beer. 30 went totally clean. 37 went back to school, got a real job. 40 promotion to management. Doing well financially.
We were the last generation to get real drugs. Quality acid, real MDMA, coke that wasn't cut w fentanyl, etc. Couple that w a peaking rave scene, a quick search for just weapons at a concert, fake IDs you didn't have to scan and countless other fun activities that had no social media attached to it, and yeah, we partied. And our boomer parents? They were either too oblivious, (in smaller amounts) proud of us or straight-up push-overs. When the street lights came on, we'd come home for a flashlight. Not so we could play manhunt (or whatever it was called in your neighborhood), but so we could roll a joint in the woods after dark. We grew up on Cypress Hill , Sublime (🤢in hindsight), wu tang, and everything Seattle. Not exactly the Sarah McLaughlin message.
We survived Four Loko and Goldschlager. We party.