Quote of the Week

I don't use drugs myself. I was too straight to try them in high school, and by the time I moved into a co-op in college where housemates displayed their bongs on their windowsills, I suffered delusions of running for political office someday. (That's the Clinton administration for you.) A cousin had also succumbed to addiction, and I'd seen the toll it had taken on her family. What truly turned me off drugs, however, was dating a Colombian whose parents paid hefty bribes to dissuade cartels from turning their coffee plantation into a coca farm. After traveling to southern Colombia with him and witnessing the destruction that U.S. drug use had wreaked on a more global scale, I became one of those vitriolic Chicanas who, if offered a joint, will snap, "Sorry, I don't smoke the ashes of my people."
--Stephanie Elizondo Griest, All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands