There are five drugs you need to know about.

There are many drugs available nowadays, but there are five that you absolutely need to know about, for yourself and especially for your kids. (I'm not including here the "downers" that most kids don't have any interest in, Valium and all that: those are for us adults who want to slow things down; hence the name.)

The first, and most dangerous, is meth, the shorthand name for methamphetamine. It's commonly called speed for its tendency to speed everything up. You feel like you have more energy: you can run faster, talk faster, do more work, etc. The problem, of course, is that once it wears off, you feel much worse than before you took it. I haven't done it myself, so I'm not sure how it's ingested. (I do remember diet pills from a few decades ago that contained it -- yes, the women lost weight, since it makes you not want to eat -- without any warnings.) The worst way to get it into your system is to shoot it into your arm, which, of course, is the worst way to take any drug: once you're injecting yourself, you're all but dead. Meth is, unfortunately, easy to cook up in a lab in your own home, using ingredients bought at a local pharmacy.

I hope you don't plan to try making it yourself, but if you do, be warned: the fumes, and maybe an explosion, make it very dangerous, especially if you have kids. Meth is strong stuff and kills people, at any age, stops their hearts just like that. One second you're seventeen and dancing with your date at the prom, and the next second you're dead, and your parents are beside themselves. In fact, they'll never be the same again. Don't do it to yourself or them.

A second drug to be aware of is cocaine, which does much the same as meth but also makes you feel great about yourself. Again, it can stop your heart, without warning, so be careful. (A first round draft choice in the NBA a few years ago dropped dead because of coke, barely twenty.) Unlike meth, though, it can be ingested just by snorting it up your nostrils -- doing lines, it's called, where you lay it all out on a surface and snort it using a straw (really!). The old comic Rodney Dangerfield had a good bit about coke: "I never liked it, but I liked the way it smelled." And then he would simulate snorting it up a nostril. If enjoyed in a controlled environment, among smart friends, it can be a real trip, but it's very addictive, and the tendency to do too much, and too often, is always there.

Cocaine is the long-time favorite drug of movie stars, who, if you've noticed, sometime die too young. Crack -- cocaine condensed into crystals -- is an offshoot, even stronger, more addictive. If you're on it, or if your kid is, God help you. It's most often smoked, but not for long. You can do cocaine and enjoy it, and survive it, if you're disciplined. But I don't think anyone survives crack, the crystalized/condensed version, for very long. It's just too much for the human nervous system to process.

Heroin is a third drug to be very careful of. Distilled from the poppy, i can be smoked but is more often injected into a vein and goes straight to the brain and the heart. Like cocaine, it makes you feel wonderful for a while, but, again, when it wears off, your first thought is how to get more. I'm pretty sure heroin killed Janis Joplin -- not the Southern Comfort she swigged onstage -- and probably lots of other rock stars who died too young. Avoid it, unless you're in the last days of your life when it doesn't matter what you're on.

At that point, of course, you can also take morphine, which the medics in Viet Nam gave to boys like my radio operator who'd stepped on a mine that took off half his foot, to totally dull the pain and let the brain relax, for a while. Talk to your hospice people about it, okay?

A fourth class of drugs are the hallucinogens, so named because they produce weird and wild visual and bodily sensations. The most famous, of course, is LSD, but I'm sure there are others I don't know about. Magic Mushrooms, as they used to be called -- real mushrooms with this bizarre quality -- can produce the same kind of mind-altering experiences. For the record, LSD is taken orally; the one time I did it, I licked it from a sheet someone had put it on. Mushrooms are usually eaten, like ordinary mushrooms. Hallucinogens aren't inherently dangerous as they usually transfix the user into a sort of catatonic state: because of the amazing effects they produce in the mind, the user is often semi-comatose, perfectly fine just sitting somewhere, totally in his or her own private zone. Once in a while, someone on one of these drugs freaks out and does something crazy -- Art Linkletter's daughter supposedly jumped out of a window to her death on LSD -- but, for the most part, users of hallucinogens sit and enjoy the show.

The fifth drug to be aware of, marijuana (also known as pot or weed), is the least harmful of the drugs just discussed. (For the record, they are all classified by the U.S. government as illegal and dangerous.) The Obama administration, to their credit, have made marijuana a low priority as far as arrests are concerned. It's legal for "medicinal" purposes in a number of states, and the Obama people smartly are deferring to the states on this issue. Marijuana is almost always smoked and produces a "high" that is characterized by heightened sensory experiences -- music sounds better, food tastes better, sex might be enhanced -- but, so far as I know, no one under the influence of it feels the need to commit violence or even get into much of an argument.

Marijuana is a calming drug, but -- unlike some prescription substances like Valium -- almost never becomes addictive. The old dictum is that when you're out of crack, you knock over a 7-11 hoping to get enough money to buy more crack -- and maybe shoot the clerk; when you're out of marijuana, you say what a bummer that is and hope you get some more someday. And then you go on about your life. If your kid has smoked marijuana, don't freak out. It's eye-opening, to be sure, but, compared to the other drugs, it's pretty mild stuff.

I guess it's only fair to include one more drug, alchohol, as it's the only mind-altering substance that is currently sanctioned by federal law. And, of course, it is, in some ways, the most dangerous of all. Whereas most of the drugs mentioned here enhance your senses, alcohol dulls them -- and your judgment. When you're drunk, you're much more likely to drive crazy and get into arguments and even fights. You're like yourself on a more primitive level, yourself racheted down a notch. You're like who you would be if you were twenty or so I.Q. points dumber.

Sometimes it works out okay, but other times it doesn't, and you get called on it and have to own up: yes, I was drunk and don't remember anything but I'm really sorry, etc. If you notice this happening often -- or happening to your kid -- it's time to step in and have a talk. Just the fact that alcohol is available to almost anyone makes it dangerous. Alcohol, as we all know, is ingested orally, in drinks -- often very sweet to mask the danger -- and comes on slow. Unlike the drugs already discussed, alcohol takes its time and is on you before you know it.

If I were a parent -- which I am -- I would caution my kids about alcohol, warn them away from meth and coke, advise them to try hallucinogens only later in life (and only if they're in a good place mentally), and tell them that marijuana can be a nice way to relax -- by yourself or among friends -- but only if you're just trying to relax. If you're trying to escape from reality -- your own reality -- you shouldn't be doing ANY drugs. You need to see a therapist. Or talk to someone you love and/or trust. Or just think about your life. I would advise my own children to use any drug prudently and only when they DON'T need it.

Humans have always had a desire to change their consciousnesses, at least for a while. Drugs do it for us right away -- we don't have to master the art of the yoga master, which may take years.
But some of those drugs snatch us up without warning and won't let us go. Avoid those.

Use the others in moderation and have a good time.