Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones: Can Literature Help in the War On Drugs? Anonymous College

“I wouldn’t recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they’ve always worked for me” (“Hunter S. Thompson Sex Quotes”). Hunter S. Thompson, the famous American journalist, and writer was known for always thinking differently than others toward drugs and sex during the 1960s. Is it possible that talking about sex, drugs, and insanity might do harm during a time when quite literally everybody was doing it, man? Ranked twenty-five on the American Library Association’s list of the most-frequently challenged or banned books, Go Ask Alice confronts its readers with all of these topics (American Library Association). Claiming to be written by a real teenager, Go Ask Alice is authored simply by “Anonymous”, giving the illusion that the words of the novel hold a true, real-life value to those who read it. Depicting the story of the stereotypical teenage angst, this story places the audience in the mind of a young girl discovering the tumultuous world of drugs and promiscuity for the first time. This said the diary in which the story narrates the harrowing descent into the character’s ultimate demise presents the reader with graphic and potentially upsetting dialogue. While Go Ask Alice is littered with the gut-wrenching...