"But let me caution experimenters and would-be shitheads"

This is a passage from the second page. it's probably worth noting that the book was released in 1971.

We started everything young in the hills of southern New Mexico: smoking at ten, hunting at eleven, driving at twelve, drinking at fourteen, and if you were a virgin at sixteen you didn't admit it. As for me, I started inhaling at ten, but in every other respects pretty well followed the norm, including being a virgin at sixteen and denying it. We even had pot. A coarse grade of it proliferated as a local weed, along with skunk cabbage, morning glories and stinging nettle. personally, I shied away from marijuana, having been convinced by the Reader's Digest and other medical authorities that the stuff wa saddictive and would lead straight to hard drugs such as heroin, which was not indigenous and would cost money- a rare item among farm and ranch kids in the eraly thirties. (Once I concocted a sort of reefer, using coffee grounds, dried horse manure, and it gave intersting sensations: lightheadedness, nausea and a touch of magalomania. But let me caution experimenters and would-be shit-heads- there is no other possible word for it- that our horses ate mostly alfalfa hay and that thier offerings lay baking for weeks under a dry Southwestern sun. Satisfaction is likely to be less than complete in other climates.

© Bill Mauldin. 1971