Will Godfrey, The Influence

Cops in Hope, Indiana have self-righteously released and publicized a photograph of a young mother passed out in a car in a Dollar General parking lot. She had apparently used heroin, and had a syringe in her hand and her 10-month-old son in the back seat.

Since a hundred years before Don McLean’s “American Pie” and later-stage Beatles songs came to dominate stoned conversations about lyrical symbolism, one book’s enigmatic appeal has lent itself perfectly to such speculation.

This article was originally published by The Influence, a news site that covers the full spectrum of human relationships with drugs. Follow The Influence on Facebook or Twitter.

The phrase with which Nancy Reagan will forever be associated came out quite naturally, when the First Lady visited some schoolchildren in Oakland, California in 1982. “A little girl raised her hand,” she recalled, “and said, ‘Mrs. Reagan, what do you do if somebody offers you drugs?’ And I said, ‘Well, you just say no.'”

Eskimos use 50 different words for “snow,” runs a much-debated cliché.  The idea behind it is that constant proximity to something alerts one to its many nuanced forms and makes it necessary to distinguish between them.