Timesuck with Dan Cummins - 481 - Go Ask Alice: When a Fake Diary Helped Launch a Real War on Drugs

Episode Date: November 17, 2025

In 1971, Go Ask Alice shocked parents across America - marketed as the real diary of a teenage girl swallowed alive by drugs, addiction, and death. Terrified moms and dads bought the book by the millions, used it to police their kids, and fueled a cultural panic that helped justify the War on Drugs. But there was just one problem: the entire book was a lie presented as truth...Merch and more: www.badmagicproductions.com Timesuck Discord! https://discord.gg/tqzH89vWant to join the Cult of the Curious PrivateFacebook Group? Go directly to Facebook and search for "Cult of the Curious" to locate whatever happens to be our most current page :)For all merch-related questions/problems: [e-mail] (copy and paste)Please rate and subscribe on Apple Podcasts and elsewhere and follow the suck on social media!! @timesuckpodcast on IG and http://www.facebook.com/timesuckpodcastWanna become a Space Lizard? Click here: https://www.patreon.com/timesuckpodcast.Sign up through Patreon, and for $5 a month, you get access to the entire Secret Suck catalog (295 episodes) PLUS the entire catalog of Timesuck, AD FREE. You'll also get 20% off of all regular Timesuck merch PLUS access to exclusive Space Lizard merch  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The speed was a little scary at first, because Bill had to inject it right into my arm. I remembered how much I hated shots when I was in the hospital, but this is different. Now I can't wait. I positively can't wait to try it again. No wonder it's called speed. I could hardly control myself. In fact, I could have, if I wanted to, I didn't want to. A teenage girl hurriedly scribbles that description in her diary.

Or so the author and publishers of saying, said, diary claimed. It was 1970, the year of bell bottoms and incredible vinyl records, the counterculture is in full swing, but it never seemed to reach this team in her small suburban town, the town she was forced to move to when her dad took a job at the local college. Just a couple months earlier, her diary entries were full of boring things like school and homework and things that made her upset, like her weight and acne. But ever since she tried LSD. At a party, the pages of her diary began to be consumed by one thing, her desperate, obsessive desire to try more drugs. She wanted to smoke pot, then to take speed, maybe heroin

next. Luckily, her town was full of more drug users than she'd initially realized, including a couple of college students who eagerly showed her how to both smoke pot and inject speed via a needle. And then they encouraged her to push the products on other kids. And why wouldn't she? Drugs are fun. She'd always been told by her parents that drugs were bad, but they must not have taken any because they make you feel so good. They don't understand that there's just so much out there to experience.

Not only pot, speed, and LSD, but ecstasy too. Hell yeah. And then there are the other things she's curious about. Casual sex, parties with glamorous adults, the glittering gritty city nightlife of San Francisco. She writes it all down, every high, every sleeping pill that soothes her, and the speed she uses to stay awake. At first, it's all fine. She feels so good, so mature, so free. But the more she dives in, the more the drugs start to take over.

First, she was using drugs, but now drugs are using her. The tension at home builds, arguments flare between her and her parents. She runs away for a while, trusting the wrong people, falling in with dangerous crowds and experiencing the consequences that she'd ignored in her first naive entries. Now, instead of triumphs, her entries are more like anguish screams, please for a help that nobody will hear until it's too late. She's crashing. She's spiraling. Her life becomes a series of hospital visits, overdoses, and moments where she thinks she might never make it. Death is looming. Her diary reflects all of her turmoil and fear, unflinching and raw, and just when she finally gets clean, she relapses. Damn, you drugs! She succumbs for a final time, and she dies. Still a teenager. A teen who had lived a straight and sober life until so very recently, until the nasty drugs consumed her. Her diary is the only thing she's left behind. A stark warning to others of the dangers of drug use. The stark warning appeared on bookstore shelves across America as the 1971 smash hit book, Go Ask Alice. Parents everywhere were both released.

and utterly horrified to hear the poor girl's story, a story so real, so gritty that they could imagine their own children in the poor girl's place. They vowed to keep a better eye on their kids to crack down when they suspected them of using drugs, to send them away, to teen wilderness programs, to other relatives if they needed to. The girl's words had convinced them they must be strict and repressive as they need to be, as they must be, to make sure their kids don't meet the same tragic end. Their ends will justify their means. They must be strict.

If not, they will lose their child to drugs. But there's one taincy-weensy little problem with that girl's story. She's not real. And so, of course, none of what was written in her diary ever happened to her. It hadn't happened to anyone as it was written because it was pure fiction. Fiction presented as unquestionable truth. And yet this lie presented and accepted as the truth will have far-reaching and major consequences. It will help change the culture of America. It will help launch Nixon's

war on drugs. The true story of the bullshit go-ask Alice, Gryft, and the fraud behind it, and the fake true books that followed right now on a fascinating, how had I not heard of this before, what other grifter's lies are living in our heads rent-free edition of TimeSuck. This is Michael McDonald, and you're listening to TimeSuck. You're listening to TimeSuck. Well, happy Monday, and welcome or welcome back to the cult of the curious. I'm Dan Cummins, a master sucker, guy who appreciated General Patton's bravery and battlefield genius and tenacity, more than some of his thoughts that he shared after World War II. Known drug user, and you are listening to TimeSuck.

Hail Nimrod, Hail Lucifina, praise be to good boy, Bojangles, and Glory B to Triple M. A couple quick announcements. and then I cannot wait for you to hear this wild story. We have new challenge coins. Another holiday merch in the store at bad magic productions.com. Lots of good stuff, especially the challenge coins. I fucking love the design. They're nice and heavy, too.

No, fuck yeah, bro. Also this month, in honor of Veterans Day, we are donating to the Manatee Veterans Village based in Florida. The Manatee GBD, GPD, if I didn't say that clearly, program, provides clinical treatment, transitional housing, and case management services to home. homeless veterans. We assist veterans, and I, this group, I'm speaking on behalf of this group, they assist veterans in identifying personal goals relating to education, employment, health,

entitled benefits, spirituality, relationships, and community participation. We thank all veterans who have served our country and a donation in the amount of $11,670 has been made. If you're interested in learning more or supporting this organization, you can visit V-O-A-Florida.org slash locations slash manatee veterans village. We have also added

$1,300 to our scholarship fund for 2026, so thank you, thank you. Big thanks to our space lizards. Also, big thanks to everyone who participated in our bad magic street team

sticker contest this year. It's so hard to pick winners since so many did amazing jobs and we don't have a perfect system for selecting the winners. I appreciate everybody who put a sticker up somewhere. Just love hearing about

people finding the show that way. And all that being said, shout out to mythical human, Anthony Wolfe, and Lee Adam Hartley for winning this year's Bad Magic Street Team. If you have not received your code for free merch, be sure to email us. No other announcements other than I started strictly limiting my use of social media and access to my news feed about three weeks ago. Just set it up on my phone where I only get to do 20 minutes a day and I feel so much better. Not trying to ignore the world's problems, just trying to not be consumed by rage over things

I can't do anything to fix on a given daily basis. So logging on just long enough to stay informed, not staying long enough to become obsessed. Crazy how much doom scrolling can affect your mood. And I've known that for a while. I've preached against it, but I still fucking did it. So if I'm coming across a bit lighter now,

that's probably why. And now here we go. When we talk about the counterculture, as we've done so many times here before, we usually take it for granted that parents were, you know, opposed to it. You just say something about how kids were rejecting the lifestyles of their parents, upper middle class, conservative, religious, heterosexual white picket fence lifestyles.

And we just kind of leave it at that heading off to explore the drug-fuelled creations of some of history's music, art, and cultural legends. If we do talk about the people that oppose the counterculture, we usually focus on politicians, you know, Richard Nixon's infamous war on drugs, for instance. That's framed as a classic good and evil battle. Drugs and hippies bad. Sober, law-abiding parents and politicians good.

Or the inverse. Drugs and hippies good. Old stuffy unquestioning parents and politicians they support bad. The people crusading for change, for transcendence, for spiritual enlightenment versus the people who don't want to let that change happen and use whatever resources they can, like law enforcement, to crush it. But for every politician and every counterculture icon, there were thousands, millions of other people who never took center stage. People in the middle. Regular people, business owners and mechanics, factory workers, and plumbers. customers, electricians, and truck drivers, secretaries, librarians, travel agents, cashiers,

bartenders, shoe salesmen, the list goes on and on. We tend to ignore these people in our discussions because they aren't all that exciting. But we shouldn't ignore them because when it comes to the average person's experience, their life is ultimately influenced most by the people in their direct communities. And it's these communities that decide what's accepted, what's ostracized, what constitutes a decent person or an acceptable lifestyle. and, of course, many of them are parenting, shaping the next generation of thinkers. The average person might not have known what to do with the ethos of the countercultural movement

or with the passage of some new law against it. They might not have been a hippie or somebody who, you know, went to church every Sunday either. They might not have protested the Vietnam War or supported it. They were just out there, middle America, living their lives, especially in the pre-internet, pre-24-hour news cycle era, lives centered on what's happening in their community. You know, in their town, at their job, at their kids' school, hearing stories that get passed around, the water cooler, the narratives that get formed at PTA meetings. You know, did you hear that Michelle got pregnant at a party after the homecoming game, and then she got an abortion? Did you hear that Lincoln, the varsity quarterback, almost died at a party when he overdosed on speed?

Did you hear that some poor high school kid in a neighboring town got addicted to heroin, started worshipping the devil, and then hanged himself? It's these stories that became the truths that mattered most of them. that taught them what to fear, what they needed to protect their families from. So a big important question for today is, how were these truths made? And just, you know, who makes the truth in general? It's probably not surprising to us that the way the truth is made for, you know, any given person generally lies in who they listen to, who they trust. How yeah, these people explain, you know, what the hell is really.

going on to them. In today's landscape of polarized news and disinformation, it's hard to imagine there being a single widely accepted cultural narrative. So many topics and opinions are explosive these days because of how strongly so many of us disagree when it comes to which narrative is, in fact, the truth. The media landscape was much different in the 1970s, though. The 1970s media ecosystem was incredibly centralized, with the big three of ABC, CBS, and NBC setting the national agenda with primetime entertainment and the evening network news. In 1970, PBS launched and provided educational and cultural programming and legacy magazines like Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, and Esquire,

shaped cultural conversations and long-form coverage. Also back in the 70s, there was a lot more government regulation regarding media truth, thanks to the Fairness Doctrine. Have you ever heard of that? I had not until very recently. It was just introduced to it by my friend Jamie Jean, introduced in 1949 and in 449 and enforced by the United States Federal Communications Commission, the FCC, it was a policy that required the holders of broadcast licenses to present controversial issues

of public importance and to do so in a manner that fairly reflected differing viewpoints. The news, legally, could not just consistently pander to one side of the political or ideological spectrum. The demise of this FCC rule, it was abolished in 1987, has been cited as a major contributing factor in the rising level of party polarization in the U.S. in recent decades. CNN and Fox, for example, would not be tolerated as they currently exist to so aggressively pander to either a right-wing or a left-wing viewpoint if that law was still around. Also back in the 1970s, what's important to understand about the average person is that they were not used to seeking out alternative coverage.

There was no mentality for 99% plus of the population to, quote, do your own research. When one outlet covered a story, millions were likely to see or hear it tens of millions, and they didn't have a muscle developed for anything like fact-checking. They, by and large, just accepted whatever was presented as truth. Meanwhile, the rise of consumer culture in the post-war years meant that editors, publishers, and talk show segments favored sensational hooks, so the scandalous article you read in the morning paper would often be reinforced by that night's news. In short, a few gatekeepers could ignite a fire.

and institutions eager to defend societal norms could and sometimes did sensationally fan the flames, which was exactly what happened when the book Go Ask Alice first arrived on the scene in 1971 shortly after Nixon declared his war on drugs, like within weeks. The publishers presented the book as truth. Publicists presented it as nonfiction to media pundits and politicians, media pundits and politicians then presented it as the truth to the general public. While politicians railed against drug use and the youths, culture that approved of it, the thing that brought drug use home wasn't anything Nixon,

founder of the war on drugs legislation, was doing as much as it was the story of a young woman, known only as Anonymous, who went from a comfortable suburban life with her parents and siblings to a drug spiral that led to multiple runaway attempts, addiction, prostitution, violence, and ultimately death. This convinced parents that in small towns, big cities, in quiet suburbs, across America, their kid was one bad choice away. from a descent into pure chaos and or an untimely death. And then this truth, it didn't go away when the counterculture faded. As a supposedly real text, Alice, and the additional true stories, in quotes there,

of troubled teens, its grifting author subsequently published, helped convert infrequent and often fleeting youth misbehavior into a durable, generalized narrative, that teenage rebellion was inevitable, dangerous, and something adults must constantly, constantly police, whether it's drug use of the counterculture or indoctrination into the occult or anti-video game crusades. If you were born during or after the 70s, your parents likely raised you in a way that was at least partially informed by Alice, whether your parents were familiar with the book or not. They didn't see adolescence as a phase, but instead a crisis waiting to happen. And that perspective has continued today. Today on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube,

a single viral video of a teen doing something dangerous or rebellious can be framed as evidence that all teens are at risk that whatever dangerous activity being talked about in the post or the video is pervasive. It's a national crisis. Social media posts of extreme cases are often treated not as outliers but as evidence of a universal trend. In 2018, for example, a viral trend emerged

where individuals, particularly teens, were filmed biting into laundry detergent pots, generally tied laundry detergent. pot's. While the challenge was real, the extent of participation in it was widely exaggerated. But Gen Z still came to be associated with ridiculous insane behavior like eating Tide Potts, despite the fact that the vast majority, overwhelming majority of them never ever did such thing, or even considered it. At the height of the Tide Pod craze in January of 2018, poison control centers nationwide only handled a total of 119 cases of intentional exposure amongst teens.

and that exposure did not lead to a single death. Not one teen would die that year from the challenge. Not one teen would die the next year or ever. However, in 2017, over 10,000 toddlers did ingest tidepods and two did die, but that didn't make headlines because it wasn't part of a social media trend. Moral panics involving the Internet receive further attention and notoriety due to the very nature of the Internet itself, and that it contributes to the viral trends. transmission of sensational stories, explains Dr. Lisa Seguera, senior lecture in cybercrime with

the University of Portsmouth. In 2017, the Blue Whale game went viral, if you remember that. Headlines reported that, quote, over 130 teenagers had killed themselves because of the game, which ostensibly saw young people carrying out increasingly dangerous dares in a secretive social media group. Despite the panic caused by the reports, not a single suicide was actually linked to the game. Those headlines were bullshit. In 2021, reports serviced of a TikTok challenge encouraging students to slap teachers and record the incidents. However, while there were a few real occurrences, investigations found no substantial evidence of widespread behavior among students.

That same year, a baseless claim circulated that some schools were providing litter boxes for students who identified as cats to go to the bathroom. I fucking remember that. And to be honest, I did believe it for a little while. and I was thinking like, man, this shit's gone way too far. I personally heard or overheard several acquaintances complain about this specifically. It was used by some people I'm familiar with as an argument for homeschooling their kids or not wanting to pass some levy to further fund a local public school. It was presented as evidence of the dangers of allowing kids to think that being transgender is okay

because, you know, you let them identify as a member of the other gender one day and then the next day they'll be identifying as a cat. I don't want my tax dollars going to help turn kids into furries. You know, I don't need my kid being taught that it's okay to use litter box instead of a bathroom. His country's going to shit. Except once again, that entire story was bullshit. This narrative was debunked thoroughly by school officials and fact checkers across the country, yet it sparked significant public concern and political discourse.

Nothing more than urban legend. To be clear, not a single U.S. public school classroom ever had litter boxes for students use as part of a policy or accommodation for identifying as a fucking animal. And yet millions today still undoubtedly believe, undoubtedly believe this to be truth. This isn't to say that all moral panics have centered around kids, teens mainly, have been lies, you know, but so many have. Zooming out, you could argue that being worried about kids, maybe overly so, isn't necessarily a bad thing, though, right?

It's good, of course, to monitor kids, but to monitor them well, you have to understand what they're actually doing. not going after what the news or some book is telling you as a threat, but exploring what's truly going on in their lives. Go ask Alice, convince parents, they knew what was going on in their kids' lives because it was presented as a real diary, written by an actual teenage girl.

The only problem was that Alice was not written by an anonymous teen, who simply wanted a place to vent her frustration. It was written by a morally bankrupt Mormon housewife, whose true motivations were far more murky, and the effects of her writing career, which spanned three decades, would turn out to be devastating. Let's now meet its real writer

and get into the telling of a story that I did not want to stop reading about when Sophie Evans turned in her initial research on this gem of a topic in today's time suck timeline. Right after today's first of two mid-show sponsor breaks. If you don't want to hear these ads ever again, please sign up to be a space lizard on Patreon.

Help us make monthly charitable contributions, get the catalog ad-free, get episodes three days early, and more. Thanks for listen to our sponsors. I hope you heard a deal that makes sense for you. And now time for that timeline. Shrap on those boots, soldier. We're marching down a time-suck timeline. Beatrice Ruby Matthews.

Was born in 1917 and a mining case. camp called Goldberg near a railroad running through the southeastern Idaho wilderness, kind of central southeastern. The closest actual town would be the 900-ish-person burg at Chalice, Idaho, over an hour's drive away. Very, very rural part of a pretty rural state. Her mother Vivian had went into labor on a train, a tough-ass woman. She told a porter to look after her two older children, got off the train by herself, fetched a medic to help deliver her baby, baby Beatrice. And she got back on the train, met up with her toddlers further down the line. People were just built different back then. Vivian and her husband Leonard, not sure where

he was during this train fiasco, probably working, was a house painter and a craftsman. They would go on to have two more kids and raised their family, mostly in Logan, Utah, a town just 20 miles south of the Idaho border. The family would become fairly prosperous. They owned a midsize home with a standalone garage, also owned radio, something half their neighbors couldn't afford at that time. For Beatrice's 12th birthday, she and a dozen guests enjoyed a sleigh ride through snow-dazzled Logan and returned to Beatrice's home for a rose-colored supper, pink candles on the table, side dishes including pink sweet peas, and a centerpiece cake decorated in pink. What a start to her childhood, one hell of a birthday party.

But then, eight months later, in September of 1929, the Great Depression hit. And across the nation, banks folded, factories closed, families lost their footing, including the Matthews family. Suddenly, no one needed their house remodeled or painted. And Leonard's income dwindled. So he looked for odd jobs and took what was offered. Down in the dumps, struggling in his role as a provider. He felt he needed something extra to keep himself going, to feel good about,

something to take the sting out of support in what was now a family of seven at a time when supporting just one person seemed like too much to bear. So he started seeing a woman half his age. And he had a great time. Solid move! I mean, I get it right? We all get it, right? He simply loved his shiny new bike.

Love the way it smelled. Love the way it rode. loved how it didn't nag him about finding a better job or helping around the house more. He took it out for rides, fun rides, carefree rides in the northern Utah countryside, going off-roading, you know, carving new trails with the dirt, popping wheelies, trying out tricks. When Beatrice was around 15, Leonard left the family for his new bike, I mean this new woman, leaving his wife and children to fend for themselves. And he did this when the national divorce rate was less than 2%

when in the Uber-conservative LDS town of Logan, Utah, the divorce rate was basically zero. this might have honestly been the only divorce the town had ever experienced so this wasn't just a scandal it was flipping unheard of oh my heck in heavens to Betsy cheese and rice and owing to the staunchy conservative atmosphere Vivian took to blame from neighbors and relatives

right men can do no wrong which is true you might not like it sometimes the truth hurts but we are actually infallible why hadn't she been bettered him why hadn't she submitted further why hadn't she made Leonard to stay she must atop let him ride her bike what a terrible wife.

I hope this sarcasm is coming through. Vivian took a job at a local restaurant, but the money wasn't nearly enough to pay the bills, so the children had to help however they could. Beatrice dropped out of high school and took a job working the old glory hole in the men's room with a local gas station, making a nickel a peen bringing home around a dollar a day.

It's a hard way to make a living, but also a limp way to make a living, depending on how you look at it. First part of that was true, but not the second. Beatrice did drop out of high school. She did get a job as well, but at the same place as her mom waiting tables. And she was humiliated.

She was now serving food to the other kids and townsfolk who gossiped about what a shameful mess her family had become. In a town of less than 10,000, it felt like everybody knew who she was and they all had an unfavorable opinion about her and her family. So soon, this young woman had had enough. At the age of 17, she left.

She headed out west like the Mormons before her, but her destination was different. It was San Francisco. Here, the ravages, or I guess there, The ravages of the Great Depression seemed to affect even more people than it had in Logan. Thousands of families sleeping on the streets are in crime-ridden parks, prohibition lingering, liquors everywhere. People are seeking something to dole the pain or hardship, you know, breadlines or stretching around city blocks.

It's a nightmare. And in 1934, just as Beatrice arrived, the pent-up tension of years of poverty was exploding into violence. That summer, police fired into a crowd of picketing dock workers, killing two men, wounding several others, in response, more than 130,000 workers walked off the job. The largest strike in U.S. history up to that point. The governor then responded by sent it in the military, down on the docks, machine gun nests, ringed by sandbags, now protected ships in their cargo. When one civilian tried to take some photos of these guns, a soldier shot him.

All of this left quite an impression on young Beatrice. Cities were dangerous, and the youth who were drawn to them were put themselves at risk. By 1936, Beatrice was waiting tables down south in Santa Monica, California, where a full day's work paid only two bucks. Santa Monica, very different town back then, of course, than now. Closer to 30,000 people instead of the nearly 100,000 there today. A lot more working class families, a lot less real estate investors, more orange trees and yards, less mansions and big modern condo buildings taking up their entire lot, more

mom and pa shops, and less franchises. Beatrice didn't have a diploma or any real job. prospects when she moved there. She was also determined not to let her pass define her. But she still had that small town Mormon drive for respectability. She wanted to be considered a pillar of the community, a model for other women. The week that Beatrice turned 19, she met someone else who was looking for exactly that. He worked at the clothing store, across the street from her apartment, and his name was Levorne Sparks. That's right, LeVorn. Don't you fucking snicker. Lovorn is a very cool name, as is Mr. Sparks.

His father had died when Levorne was 11 in the middle of the Depression, and Levorne went to work immediately. Six weeks after Levorne and Beatrice met, they got married. And the following year, the couple had their first child, a girl named Jimmy Levorneette. Stop laughing! Jimmy Levorneette is a fucking great, respectable name for a little girl. What little girl wouldn't want to be named Jimmy Levorneette?

Sadly, Jimmy was born premature. She passed on Saturday, April 10th, 1937. at the age of just six days old. And she died, or so I heard from sources you will never find, of a combination of anxiety and embarrassment. She was embarrassed about how many people were already making fun of her name, anxious over how many more people would mock it in the future as she grew older. I think she actually died of complications from being born premature,

which is obviously so fucking sad. And that horror had barely passed when Beatrice got another shock. She found out that her younger siblings, Robert and Roma, were both living in an orphanage now. What happened there? Well, her mom Vivian, had got married and decided to start her life over without her kids. Just fucking left them. Damn. You know what, but also good for her. Kids can be such a drag, right? Leonard knew that, and now it was Vivian's turn. Leonard was having fun again. Now Vivian wanted somebody, you know, fresh to ride her bike without a couple nagging training wheel kids

hanging around. She wanted to squeal loudly while being ridden. She didn't want to wait until the kids were asleep, have to be quiet. But for real, that is fucking crazy. That both, both Leonard and Vivian reached a point where they're like, you know what, fuck our kids. Life would be so much more fun if we just walked away. Makes me wonder if Beatrice, Robert, and Roma, were these shitty kids? Maybe they would have smiled, you know, a little more, said thank you more often, chew with her mouth open less. Maybe their parents would have stuck around.

A good reminder for any kids listening to this episode, at any point, your parents can decide to never see you again and just bail. So maybe act right, don't take right. tempt them, you piece of shit. Put your fucking toys back in the closet when you're done playing with them. Shut the fuck up about broccoli. Just eat it. Your parents, they might just beat it if you don't. I want to see these warnings worked into a national ad campaign as soon as possible. Shape up or get shipped out, kids. Your parents don't actually have to raise you. In the land of the free, is there a more powerful way of expressing your freedom than choosing to abandon your family?

But seriously, that is crazy. Both mom and dad bailed. Beatrice and Levorne intervened, essentially adopting. Beatrice's little citaroma, who was seven, while Robert, her little bro, went to go live with his dad, Leonard. Speaking of kids in 1938, the, or excuse me, Levorne, I don't know why. I wrote something so weird in my notes, just a little typo. But I put The Levorne. That'd be funny if he was known as The Levorne.

Hi, I'm Beatrice. This is my husband, The Levorne. anyway speaking of kids in 1938 they had their second kid a daughter name stick that shit back up your butt hoss yeah okay first name stick that shit middle name back up your butt second middle name hoss last name sparks i'll rein in a bit here uh her name was yvonne suzette and two years later they welcome to son levorne junior actual weird name fact now levorin junior will end up going by the nickname of sparks and soon that's anyone that's all anyone will know him by uh excuse me sparky um not sparks sparky and when people say his full name they will literally call him sparky sparks oh sparky sparks

not as weird of a name as take that shit back up your butt hoss but sparky sparks still pretty weird name anyway the family then moved to levorne's hometown of san angelo texas to start a dry cleaning company be around family but their house with then burned down in 1943 before the family had really ever settled that much. They would rebuild throughout 1944. Then a sudden windfall would change their lives. Levorne had made what turned out to be a lucrative investment. Oh my God.

What a crazy fantasy come to life. He'd invested in a prospecting, a company that was prospecting, the Permian Basin, where a motherload of oil was indeed discovered. And now, newly rich with oil money, the couple moved back to Southern California to Los Angeles, where a little Roma will grow up, graduate from school, get married, and begin her own life. And now with things relatively established, her sister out of the house, her three kids all in school and old enough to not need constant supervision, and plenty of money to be comfortable for the rest of her life, Beatrice's mind turns to a career. She initially wanted to be a psychologist, but that's hard. That would take years of study.

It would take work, classes would have to be passed, and that didn't appeal to this woman of means, who would rather just lie about stuff like that, as you'll see. fake it. She started volunteering at a veteran's hospital, and while that fulfilled her somewhat, she wanted to do something that gave her more recognition. And she felt her true talent was writing. Then writing gave her the opportunity to rewrite her own life. And now shit starts to get weird with B. For example, under her pen name, she writes a profile of herself, citing only a different article she had also written under a different fucking alias calling herself a promising young poet because of two poems she had published in a vanity press

and by that I mean essentially just like a place you can just pay to publish stuff so the griff begins what a slimy way to start a literary career with a fake bio made to look real by concocting you know some fake sources takes a certain kind of person to do something like that a delusional unwell manipulative power-hungry person her first bio said when she reached high school in college University of Utah, which she didn't go to,

she majored in philosophy and psychology. Nope. She was still writing poetry, she wasn't, and was considered talented and promising enough to appear in an anthology of American poetry as a promising and talented young American poetress. This is all nonsense. Short time after this, Beatrice parlayed her bullshit

into writing an advice column in comic form, which then became actually pretty popular locally. And the grifter becomes, you know, like a low-level guru, which I think is usually how it works. Interestingly, a lot of the people writing letters to her column were named after Sparks as relatives and sounded exactly like Beatrice. What a weird coincidence. Almost like she was writing the supposedly real letters and also then answering them.

As the column's popularity increased, Sparks reached out to agents and editors, angling for a breakthrough into Show Beach. That's how they write in Hollywood. She ditched the column and found some success as a playwright, writing The Maid and the Martian with a co-writer Joseph Barbera, which ran locally in L.A. for seven weeks. I'm guessing Joseph did most of the writing, if not almost all of it. A second run starring, and you'll see why I say that here in a bit, a second run starring a young James Arnest, later of Gunsmoke, was more successful,

now movie executives began sniffing around. But then her writing partner ditches her and heads to animation. Joseph Barbera would ultimately help form a cartoon empire, Hannah Barbero, with his new partner, William Hanna. They came up with the show's Tom and Jerry. the Flintstones, the Jetsons, Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, and more. Crazy that one of the dudes, or one of those dudes, was previously partnered with the Go Ask Alice author. Well, Beatrice felt like she'd been left behind.

I'm guessing she was left behind because she wasn't contributing much. That would keep happening. 1961, American International Pictures announced a film version of The Maid and the Martian, starring Annette Funicello, former Disney Mouseketeer. But by the time it hit theaters, Beatrice's name was gone from the credits. and the movie title was now Pajama Party. Soon after this slight, which I'm guessing was probably deserved because she probably didn't contribute nearly as much as she thought she did

to the initial play, Beatrice decided to give up on Los Angeles. After their son started college at BYU in 1964, LeVorn and Beatrice, who was now almost 50 years old, will they move into a big mansion in Provo, Utah? They still got all that oil money. In Utah, she tries to reinvent herself as a screenwriter, claiming she had a film degree from U.S. UCLA, which she didn't, new grift.

In her new community, Sparks and her husband network heavily. Beatrice joins a bunch of different women's clubs. LeVorn becomes deeply involved in politics. Like she had in L.A., Beatrice also volunteers. Now at the Utah State Hospital, which had a separate psych unit for adolescents, the youth center. And she will interview and exploit what she finds on these kids. Even though she still didn't need the money, the siren song of paid glamorous work to

kept a call in her. And so she began to work for a multi-level marketing scheme of sorts, writing essays that were then recorded on vinyl by the likes of Pat Boone and Art Link Letter and sold in five album sets by the Family Achievement Institute. Can't really find any info out there about the Family Achievement Institute outside of them being the production company full of these readings. I'm guessing what happened here is her and her husband, you know, they got this money, they create this thing, and then they pay Pat Boone and Art Link Letter a whole bunch of money

to read her fucking shitty essays which are going to found audio of these readings somewhere but the old records are very rare now it doesn't seem like any deep cut collectors have digitized them you can find the actual vinyl if you're willing to pay a decent amount for it

the track titles are the time of your life what makes you tick part one and part two crystal clear time out for being nice time out for you now is the hour your main spring all through your life time. It's never too late. What time is it? And then more. There were five discs. The final

track on the fifth disc was winding up wonderful. These essays were full of wholesome content about how to maintain family unity or teach your kids character. A salesman would hawk them from door to door. Beatrice met art art link later, link letter, a radio personality famous for the collection, Kids Say the Darnest Things through this project. I always thought kids say the darned as things was a Bill Cosby original, but it was, yeah, based on a Link Letter radio segment. Anyway, Link Letter had struck a deal with the Family Achievement Institute in 1967, and although this record project was short-lived, he and Beatrice reconnected in 1969 after a tragedy. On October 4, 1969, 20-year-old Diane Link Letter, Art's daughter, had died after jumping out of her

six-floor kitchen window. Link Letter would go on to claim that her death was drug-related because she was on an LSD trip. But was she? He didn't actually have any proof of that, like none at all. Another urban legend is born. In reality, Diane had been struggling for a while as an aspiring actress. She felt like she could never get out of her dad's famous shadow, or famous dad's shadow. That was weird phrasing.

She'd had a short-lived marriage that had just crumbled. And three months before she had died, Diane's brother-in-law had died by suicide. Yeah, she was fucking depressed. She was suicidal, and she jumped because of her personal problems. but that explanation, the truth, was no comfort to a grieving father. And it probably made him feel somewhat culpable in her death, right? Why didn't he talk to her more? So he looked for a scapegoat.

And one of Diane's friends mentioned that she had taken LSD, at some point, maybe even just once, art latched on to that as an explanation for her death. It wasn't suicide, he said in his first statement after his daughter's death, because she wasn't herself. It was murder. She was murdered by the people who manufacture and sell. LSD reminds me of people who blame heavy metal music for their kid murdering somebody. Newspapers rammed with a story without investigating it.

It didn't matter that there was literally no proof. The Diane was tripping when she jumped or even shortly before she jumped. To me, this is the equivalent of, you know, somebody getting fucked up on wine coolers, like one night in 1996. Then, you know, in 2005, they fall down the stairs and they die. And their family screams to the heavens, Damn you, Siegrens escape, black cherry fizz! Papers printed front page had.

lines giant scare quotes you know LSD killed Diane link letter charges diane link letter victim of LSD Diane link letter slain by LSD sellers an autopsy would go on to test Diane's body for drugs wouldn't find any LSD but you know LSD testing very tricky thing most employers don't test for it even the military usually skips it in 1969 the process was even slower costlier and prone to more mistakes than now, and that was with a living person, post-mortem detection of LSD was, as one California crime lab, put it, quote, an impossible request. So unless directly ordered, toxicologists didn't even bother trying. For Diane, only ethanol, barbiturates, codeine, morphine, amphetamines, and methamphetamine ended up on the test, and all of that

turned up negative. It appeared that she had been sober when she had done what she had done. And for the link letter family that was agonizing. They'd had what they thought was their explanation, but now that was proven shaky. So, Art found another explanation. It must have been an LSD flashback that killed her. Totally, 100%. For years, LSD users had whispered about flashbacks,

short, unexpected freakouts that happened days, months, even years after a drug trip. However, there were still no medical proof that flashbacks existed. Still the stories of LSD flashbacks circulated, warning kids at trying the drug even once could have light. lifelong horrific repercussions. Given that LSD research was also illegal since 1966,

there was no way to prove that that didn't happen. We now know that flashbacks can happen, but outside of exceptionally rare cases, they are typically very brief, primarily visual, and for most people in controlled studies, not distressing, do not cause impairment in daily life. Also, modern controlled clinical studies on psychedelics, which have monitored for flashbacks and adverse events have not found any cases of flashbacks, literally none, leading to clinically relevant problems or self-harm and healthy participants. Still, by late October of 1969, Art was pushing a lie he could live with. What we didn't know, he told the San Francisco examiner, is that she was having involuntary flashbacks. It was in one of these flashbacks that

she killed herself. And again, he just pulled this out of his ass. There was literally no way he could fucking know that. In the first month after Diane's death, nearly 2,000 newspaper stories made an unfounded LSD suicide connection. That's fucking crazy. Nearly 2,000 newspaper articles. It blamed LSD with no evidence. It was a convenient boogeyman for confused and or grieving parents for tens of thousands of letters, excuse me, and tens of thousands of letters of support flooded in for the link letter family.

Drugs bad. Stay away from LSD kids. One tab and you'll be jumping off a roof or trying to eat a bag of razors. Richard Nixon, old tricky dick himself, sent a condolence letter to Link Letter. And on October 23rd, just three weeks after his daughter's suicide, Link Letter was at the White House to give a joint statement. For fuck's sake, they're taking this thing so far. Diane Linkletter said Nixon, as cameras word and nodded and art nodded, was no scum-crusted, dirty, free-loven, commie hippie, but, quote, a well-educated, intelligent girl from a Christian family. to solve the problem of how this nice young woman,

these nice young people were getting hooked on nasty, dangerous, loved by hippie, grateful, deadlist, and scum drugs, Nixon wanted more laws and more power to enforce them. If Congress agreed with him, Nixon said that the government would soon have, quote, the necessary weapons to attack this whole problem. So they've made up a boogeyman, and now they're going to attack this boogeyman. As things wrapped up, Nixon shared another idea with Linkletter. His idea for a war on drugs needed something more interesting.

than media reports that soon became sensationalized and unwieldy, not to mention buried in other unrelated articles about moon landings and the price of oil, et cetera. They needed their own manifesto. Could Link Letter help with that? Well, of course he could. When you lose a beautiful young girl at the beginning of her life, Link Letter told the House Select Committee on Crime that autumn, there is no one you won't attack. I will attack commercial enterprises. I will attack my own media. I will attack anybody who stands in the way of our progress against this scourge. Just not myself. I will never attack myself because me is never the problem.

These fingers only point outwards, mother truckers. Link later would go on a speaking to her, nominally about Diane's health, but really pushing Nixon's new war on drugs. His presentation was less educational, more enraged. And a speech in Boca Raton, Florida, somebody mentioned Timothy Leary, the former Harvard psychologist, whose promotion of LSD, had made him a counterfeit culture icon slash guru and link letters face darkened he said of leery if i ever get my hands on him so help me god i'll kill him oh how dare that piece of shit question the status quo how dare he be curious as irritated as i am over link letters views in this arena i should also note he was known to be very kind and generous individual well like by many he's probably an unintentional

propagandist i guess his belief grief blinded him i'll give him the benefit of the doubt was not part of this political crusade, not yet, but very soon she will be. In a way, she will soon be leading the charge. For now, she is still back in Utah and Provo, trying to find something to fill her time with after the end of the vinyl record door to door, are your kids okay racket? She'll find something to do in BYU's Youth Academy, a summer camp for Mormon teens, where they get to experience a version of college life, attending classes, eating in dining halls, living in dorms, but with no drugs and no sex, of course. Uh-uh. Just maybe some kind of sex. Maybe some of that sweet, sweet, uh, provo floating, some of that Salt Lake City

soaking. I soak it to the east. I soak it to the west. I soak it to the woman that I love best. I'll be soaking. I'll be soaking This next I love that whole Clarence Carter song This next part of the timeline Is based on the research

Of one of our main sources today Unmasking Alice by Rick Emerson And he gives the two young Mormon women In the story pseudonyms To protect their identities I just want to point out That their existence has not been validated By any other research

But based on Beatrice's later M.O I think it seems likely to me that they're not real Okay that summer The summer of 1970, according to Beatrice, two young teen girls arrived to participate in this little camp she's at. Toby Hudson, a tomboy from Washington State who had picked apples to pay her tuition to attend, adorable, and probably not true. Brenda Marsh, blonde-haired California girl with broad shoulders and muscular arms. Brenda was blunt with a low, masculine voice, and she hated to wear dresses, which she and Toby, as roommates, bonded over.

But Toby found it easier to fit in. Brenda, on the other hand, spent her nights crying in bed saying things like, God hates me. A counselor would later remark that it seemed like Brenda didn't want to be a girl, but nobody in this community understood what that meant the time. As the closest person to her, Toby contacted the camp volunteers, who said they'd send someone over to talk to her for a little bit. That person was Beatrice Sparks.

Two women then talked for a couple of hours. Well, two women, one woman, one girl. Over the next few days, Brenda would tell Toby and the other girls about, or excuse me, abrupt and shocking stories about smoking. I hope you're sitting down right now. Marijuana, the devil's lettuce. And what did doing that directly, and I mean directly, lead to? Why, shooting up a heroin, of course.

And once the heroin use began, the suicide attempts started. And, of course, all of that drug use led to pre-marital sex. Oh, yeah. She had a boyfriend named Stephen. And even though she and Stephen were not married, She fucked him, you guys. More than once. After camp, Toby and Brenda wrote back and forth,

and though Toby's letters were cheerful and upbeat, Brenda wrote things like, quote, there was nothing anybody can do. God doesn't care. I would be better off dead at the bottom of a river. I should kill myself and get it over with. And it's worried, Toby. And by September, she thought that Brenda needed more to help

than a 14-year-old pen pal could give. At the both 14, Toby decided to write to the friendly volunteer that had once helped them, old Beatrice Sparks. I am so frightened for Brenda, Sister Sparks, Toby wrote in a letter date of September 10th, 1970, but not because this is all bullshit. I fast and pray. I try to help her see the good parts of life, but I don't know if it's even helping. I am so afraid of what she might do.

She thinks God has abandoned her. Please, please help her. Beatrice replied quickly and soon. Toby was feeding her everything that Brenda told her in long rambling letters, and soon Beatrice had an idea. For three years, she had peppered art with ideas for projects they could do together. She tried to go at it on her own, but to dismal results. Her first book, a self-improvement guide published by the LDS Church called The Key to Happiness, had sold in Utah County, but just barely in nowhere else.

She launched a series of courses based on it at Brigham Young University, nevertheless. But those were a bus, too. Nobody showed up. Now she pitched art on a new project, a simple story with a shocking twist. The tale of a bright but troubled California teen, a girl from a good Christian family, a girl whose parents love, her, like Diane Linkletter, like Brenda Marsh. Beatrice said it would be based on the story of a real girl with real diary entries she had kept or she would adapt into a continuous narrative.

Art accepted Beatrice's shifting stories about the diary's true author. Sparks had met Alice supposedly at a youth conference in 1970. The two became friends. And after the girl died, Sparks thought an important lesson could make its way into the world. Beatrice even had a title, Buried Alive, the Diary of an Anonymous Teenager, edited by Beard. Beatrice Sparks. Soon, Arts Literary Agency, Vandenberg Linkletter, signed a deal with Sparks. Clyde Vandenberg, who did most of the agency's actual work, went looking for a publisher, and they would find one in Prentice Hall. Only problem was, who was the book aimed towards? Princess Hall, a publisher based in Northeast, New Jersey, mostly published adult nonfiction.

Indeed, the publishing industry as a whole did not see much money in what is now called young adult books. It was a category that didn't really exist back then. Certainly not. not like it does now. Kids were expected to jump from Dr. Seuss to pastoral classics like Anna Green Gables, to call of the wild, a little house on the prairie novels before they moved to adult books. Those classic middle grade books were full of stories about plucky orphans and scenic natural landscapes, learning lessons about having strong values and being good members of the community. They were not stories about teens living in the suburbs and coming across new, sometimes frightening things like drugs.

Okay, last time, this is drugs. This is your brain on drugs. Any questions? I have a question. Is that going to be an over-easy egg or an over-medium egg? Looks delicious. When literary agent Clyde Vandenberg pitched what would become Go-Ask Alice, editor Catherine Fitzgerald was intrigued, but not initially super hopeful. But then before long, she was convinced that it was indeed something special. By the final months in 1970, things were locked in. Sparks would get a few thousand dollars up front, and if the book was a hit, she would eventually get royalties. Link Letters Agency would take 10% of Sparks's end, including that advance, and the book was scheduled for an autumn 1971 release. But first, Catherine Fitzgerald wanted some changes. She felt it buried a lie was not a good title. Walking through the office one day, Catherine caught a few lines of White Rabbit, that Jefferson Airplane song that was a hit a few years before.

Yeah, one pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small. And the ones that mother gives you don't do anything at all. Go ask Alice when she's 10 feet tall. Yeah, so that's where the name Go Ask Alice came from. from a lyric from a psychedelic rock song. Of course, White Rabbit was not demonizing drug use. That song, actually one of my favorite songs ever, by the way. Written by San Francisco-based singer Grace Slick,

she was fucking fantastic. While she was still a member of original band, The Great Society, upon joining Jefferson Airplane in 1966, she had offered up her White Rabbit while the band was recording their seminal second album, Surrealistic Pillow. The song became the band's second biggest hit, peaking at number eight on the pop charts, in part because of its obscure image.

since you had to be somewhat in the know to get the drug references. But instead of what it was framed as, as either a celebration of drug use or a condemnation, Gray Slick said Alice was a metaphor for her own escape from society's outdated rules. I identified with Alice in Wonderland. I was a product of 50s America in Palo Alto, California, where women were housewives with short hair and everything was highly regulated. I went from the planned, bland 50s to the world of being in a rock band without looking back. It was my Alice moment.

Heading down the rabbit hole. White Rabbit seemed like an appropriate title. That's awesome. Meanwhile, Clyde Vanderberg made another suggestion to take Beatrice's name off the book. They wanted a punchier title page that read, Go Ask Alice, by Anonymous. The idea was twofold. It made the content more real, more immediate,

and also, since it were targeting teenagers, it spoke to them directly, instead of having the story mediated to them through a middle-aged adult editor. Beatrice was furious, but she didn't have much leverage. It was either go along with these changes or lose the book deal. By her own account, she had only assembled the dead girl's writing, and even then it wasn't finished. It had shown up to Catherine Fitzgerald's office in a paper bag of loose files and scraps of notes. And now Catherine was putting it together.

Didn't seem like Beatrice had, well, done anything. All she'd accomplished was finding this diary and passing it along. This was also insurance against something, Beatrice's shifting stories. when she talked about this supposed Dead Girl dates and details changed frequently randomly sometimes Alice died in May other times November

sometimes Alice had given Sparks the diary herself other times her parents had given it to her after Alice had passed Sparks occasionally mentioned interview tapes she had supposedly made with Alice but then nobody ever heard these tapes no one ever

will of a big mess arose because of Beatrice's unreliability a.k.a. if anybody could prove she'd made this shit up the money in time the publisher had poured into the book would be lost. So, uh, P.H held firm. No Beatrice name on the cover. Sparks was so mad about that that at one point she hired a lawyer.

Even, uh, he agreed, though, that she was done for. Professionally, too, it didn't make sense for her to get in a big dispute, a big pissing contest with the publishing company for her first book. That would get her blacklisted. On February 2nd, 1971, Sparks lawyer penned a letter agreeing to the deal. Page two held the gist. As you already know, Mrs. Sparks is dedicated to assisting young people through the new book and is willing to remain anonymous

in order to get the message before the public. Meanwhile, that spring, Art Link Letter, still acting as President Nixon's anti-drug mouthpiece. He would visit the White House again May 18, 1971. Just seven months into the war on drugs, Nixon wanted to escalate, crushing the potheads and speed freaks, jailing the so-called radical left. He would need congressional sign-off, and thus, he would need art. Ironically enough, within a year, Art Link Letter would soften his view. on marijuana and by 1980 would become a public advocate for drug rehabilitation, not criminalization. Like I said earlier, I think it was actually a good dude, a good dude used for Tricky Dick's political agenda. But at the moment, still in the depths of grief, he wanted the government to do anything

they could to avenge his daughter's death. As the lunch hour passed, Nixon and Link Letter talked about the drug issue. Link Letter said another big difference between alcohol and marijuana is that when people smoke marijuana, they smoke it to get high. when most people drink they drink to be sociable Nixon says A person does not drink to get drunk

Eh Linkletter said That's right Nixon said A person drinks to have fun Get the fuck out of here Nixon also used the opportunity To advance a strong

Foreign Policy agenda Framing the Cold War Bizarrely is the fight between two strong Pro-drinking nations Saying at one point Why are the communists So hard on drugs?

It's because they love booze I mean the Russians They drink pretty good. Countries that weren't superpowers, in other hand, were pro-drug. He said Asia, the Middle East, portions of Latin America. I've seen what drugs have done to these countries. Everybody knows what it's done to the Chinese. I love when people act like alcohol is somehow entirely separate from drugs. Are these your drugs? Look, Dad, it's not on. Where did you get it? Answer me. Who taught you how to do this stuff?

You, all right? I learned it by watching you. Parents who use drugs have children. who use drugs. Oh, boy. I learned by watching you, okay? With the permission of Hollywood, in the form of Art Link letter, one month later, on June 17th, Nixon made his case to Congress,

seeking an additional $84 million to fight his war on drugs and greater jailing powers, and he will get it. And a few weeks later, the first copies of Go Ask Alice will be sent to the world and will make the war on drugs

seem so very necessary to save America's children. By the way, it's not like I'm some advocate for kids to do a drug, drugs. They are dangerous, some of them, for sure. Many of them, especially contextually, you know, with developing minds and all that. I just hate how the bullshit that was used to push this war, how they based it in some lies. The design that the publishing house decided to go

with was striking and simple for the book, five words and crimson on a yellow cover, so as to look like a giant warning sign. Go Ask Alice. Author Anonymous. There was no fiction or non-fiction label, but the presentation made it very clear that the book was supposed to be the real thing. Go Ask Alice is based on the actual diary of a 15-year-old drug user. Names, dates, places, excuse me, and certain events have been changed in accordance with the wishes of those concerned.

Set a page early on. And the back cover reinforced the idea that what was inside was real. Where it was written, Go Ask Alice is an extraordinary document. It is the raw and painful story of a young girl's experiments with acid. Pot and Pills. I strongly recommend it to all parents concerned about the health and well-being of their children.

Art Link Letter. Go Ask Alice gives a true glimpse into the beginner's drug world, whereas every person indulging in drug experimentation says, it can't happen to me. We who work with such problems know that psychological addiction as well as physical addiction can and does happen to young people. Dr. Myron Greenbaum, psychiatrist specializing in drug problems. Definitely worth getting into this book. and all of its insanity now, so let's start at the beginning. By the way, I'm not sure that Dr. Myron Greenbaum is a real psychiatrist who said that.

Some of the shit made me laugh so hard the first time I went over it. So incredibly melodramatic. But before I begin, time for today's second to two mid-show sponsor breaks. Thanks for listening to those sponsors. Hope you heard some deals you liked. And now let's dig into the main focus of today's episode. Go Ask Alice. And at the beginning of the book, Alice, though she's

never named in the book itself, only in the title, is like any other teenage girl. She frets over dates and diets, gets bored at school, enjoys spending time with her family, her stay-at-home mom, her professor father, her two younger siblings.

Early on in the book, however, Alice's dad takes a job that forces the family to relocate, which angers Alice, understandably. When her younger siblings start to flourish in their new community, her anger turns inward. And she tries to distract herself

with small and very 70s-coated activities like washing her hair with mayonnaise and making gelatin salads. The same old dumb teacher teaching the same old dumb subjects in the same old dumb school. I seem to be kind of losing interest in everything, she writes.

At first I thought high school would be fun, but it's just dull. Everything's dull. Maybe just because I'm growing up and life is becoming more boring. I put on seven ugly, fat, sloppy, slobby pounds, and I don't have anything I can wear. I'm beginning to look as slobby as I feel.

But then things turn around. She makes some friends, gets invited out, and then the worst happens. She goes to an autograph party where instead of passing around your books, the partygoers pass around Coca-Cola, but some of the Coca-Cola cans or bottles probably were spiked with acid. Oh my God. Dear Diary, she writes on the morning after getting spiked with acid.

I don't know whether I should be ashamed or elated. I only know that last night I had the most. incredible experience of my life. It turns out that the things she has heard about LSD were obviously written by uninformed, ignorant people like my parents, who obviously don't know what they are talking about. His experience was so amazed that Alice naturally

became an avid user of any and all drugs. She wrote, I've tried to convince myself that using LSD makes me a dope addict and all the other low-class, unclean, despicable things I've heard about kids that use LSD. and all the other drugs. But I'm so, so, so curious.

I simply cannot wait to try pot. Only once, I promise. I simply have to see if it's everything it's cracked up to be. After acid, she tries marijuana and shoots speed, then starts popping dexidrine and bennies when she gets tired. The drugs are great, as she describes them there, like riding shooting stars through the Milky Way, only a million trillion times better.

They allow her to deal with stressful home situations like her grandpa's heart attack and her grandma's ensuing grief and they make an awkward first sexual encounter with her drug dealer, a low-life, hippie, long-haired college student named Richie, into something that felt like, quote,

lightning in rainbows and springtime. After this, Alice worries that she's pregnant. And as if that's not enough, she finds out that her dealer boyfriend is sleeping with his male roommate too. He is a bisexual deviant. likely satanic. Alice writes,

If there were medals and prizes for stupidity and gullableness, I certainly would receive the half-assed one. Chris and I walked into Richie and Ted's apartment to find the bastard stoned and making love to each other. No wonder, Richie, bitchy, wanted so little to do with me. Here I am out peddling drugs for a low, class, queer whose dad probably isn't sick at all.

I wonder how many other dumb chicks he's got working for him. Oh, I'm so ashamed. Finally, when he forces her to push LSD to gray schoolers Because we all know that third graders Fucking love to go on heavy acid trips And carry around drug money And definitely won't freak out and rat out Who sold it to them

She drops out and runs away to San Francisco With her friend Chris And this is all just in the first half of the book I love the concept of selling acids at grade schoolers Hey kid It's a fucking eight year old want to go on a heavy trip Yeah man I do

And I can totally handle it When Alice and Chris get to San Francisco They live in a quote Whoring Spider Hole A.k.a. some crappy apartment And try to work honest jobs To get their lives together But at a party at Chris's boss

Sheila's house They smoke a joint And a couple days later Sheila and her boyfriend Rod Introduce them to heroin Because that's how it works everybody You smoke a joint and then someone's like, want to have this needle for heroin?

And you're like, yes, mama would like to ride the dragon. Okay, then it turns out, introducing them to heroin. Heroin was just a front, a front to gang rape them. She writes, Last night was the worst night of my shitty, rotten, stinky, dreary, fucked up life. There were only four of us, and Sheila and Rod, her current boyfriend, introduced us to heroin. At first, we were a little afraid, but they convinced us that the horror stories were just so many American myths. Ha!

But I guess I was pretty excited, and the truth is I really couldn't wait when I was watching them set up. Smack is a great sensation, different from anything I'd ever tried before. I felt gentle and drowsy and wonderfully soft like I was floating above reality, and the mundane things were lost forever in space. But just before I was too out of it to notice what was going on, I saw Sheila and that cocksucker she goes with lighting up and setting out speed. I remember wondering why they were getting high when they had just set us out on this wonderful low. And it was until later I realized that the dirty sons of bitches had taken turns raping us and treating us sadistically and brutally.

That had been their planned strategy all along those low-class shit-eaters. Uh, okay. I don't know that that's... You know, I'm sure there's all different kinds of ways. Sadly, you can be gang raped. This seems a bit far-fetched, but, you know, okay. After a stint in Berkeley, Allison moves back home and re-enrolls in high school, even asked her parents to take her and Chris to the mountains on the weekend so they won't be tempted

to go to parties and get heroin gang-raped again. Mom, dad, can you take us to the mountains? I just, I feel safer way out in the mountains where you don't have to worry about getting heroin gang raped. But then Chris invites her over to smoke a joint. Just one joint. And you know what? It just hooks Alice all over again on drugs.

What's wrong with you? Tom's elitis? Appendicitis. Yes. Nobody's died of Tom'slitus around here for a while. Appendicitis. Nothing to worry about. Scalpel.

What if the joint were in somebody else's hand? like your surgeon, your lawyer, or your local policeman, would you still say marijuana is harmless? No, let's see if I can still make a straight lie. Oh, no! Her parents tried to keep an eye on her, but one night while she stoned, Alice slips out and hitchhikes to Denver,

as one does when they get stoned on Marijuana. And then it is back to life on the road, the drug road. I'm sharing a place with a couple of kids, kids I met, she narrates, but they think it's kind of dull here, so we're going to go to Oregon and see what's happening in Coos Bay. We've got enough acid to keep us all stone for the next two weeks or forever, and that's all that counts. Who the fuck is dropping acid for at least two weeks straight? And not just microdosing. I mean, I guess maybe those people exist, but I've never met one. Tripping on acid takes a lot out of you. I've heard pretty

experienced users, you know, talk about taking it for like a few days in a row. And it never seems like a positive experience. You know, they're like, oh, man, it was so great to do acid fucking four days in a row. Like in a music festival or something. But then it takes them a few days to recover. Anyway, this is fucking nonsense. After Cusbe, Alice heads to a protest in Southern California. Pot leads to heroin, leads to gang rape, leads to acid, leads to protesting.

It's a vicious drug cycle. At this point, the narrative gets kind of murky. And we don't know where she's living or who she's living with, which is either bad writing or an intentional attempt to create a sense of unease in the reader when they think about Southern California. California in the future. At one point, a random diary entry declares, quote, I only know that I am now a priestess of Satan. Oh man, I was waiting for a satanic reference. Apparently the protests, or maybe the Satanism, also made her gay. Because that she writes, I'm really confused. I've been the digger here, but now when I face a girl,

it's like facing a boy. I get all excited and turned on. I want to to screw with the girl, you know, and then I get all tensed up and scared. Oh, fuck. Drug use leads to protesting, protesting leads to Satanism. Satanism leads to gay. What a slippery slope. To support her gay satanic drug habit, Alice starts doing sex work. Another day, another blow job, she writes in one of the most ridiculous entries.

Totally. That's totally what somebody who's just fallen into sex work would write. another day another blow job you know how be you clock in then you cock out i'm just trying to get paid you know keep my nose to the cockstone going the extra cock early bird gets the boner stuck in that nine to five blow job grind alice also wrote the fuzz has clamped down to the town is mother dry if i don't give if i don't give big ass a blow he'll cut off my supply guess. That sounds like a real drug dealer's name. Alice needs her drugs, you know, because she's addicted to acid, because acid's so addictive. She worries for a while, and so is pot. She worries for a while that she's pregnant and reassures herself that if she was, somebody would, quote,

stomp on me during a freak out, and I'd lose it anyway. What the fuck is it? Stomp on me during a freak out? Who says that? A middle-aged woman prone to lying with zero actual drug experience. Price says that. Again, the reader has no idea where she is or where she's living at this point in the diary. She jumps around from reading the paper in the park, which for some reason reports that a woman has had a miscarriage, because that's stuff that makes the paper, to hanging out with some, quote, ass draggers to going to church, getting her advice from a priest, who finally convinces her to call home and give her life back to God, which she does. She also plans to become a guidance counselor and helps kids, you know, kids who are just like her. But then,

what pulls her back into the drug world are some acid flashbacks, because you know how they'd be. Was that ass and gets its dirty claws into you It never lets go She's sitting on her bed When she feels herself pulled backwards And see some weird shit She writes Naked girls were dancing around

Making love to statues I remember one girl ran her tongue Along a statue And he came alive And took her off Into the high blue grass I couldn't really see what was happening But he was obviously putting it to her

I felt so sexy I wanted to break wide open And run after them Uh This sounds fucking awesome She must have gotten some of that good Owsley Stanley white lightning acid

I'd fucking love to see naked ladies dance around fucking statues next time I trip I'd be amazing To make things worse When Alice is not having sexy flashbacks She's getting bullied

by the kids at school Who want her to keep using drugs with them Because now she's back at school After everything this happened That's I guess reasonable But then her beloved grandpa Has a stroke and dies

Will she relapse now Will she return to the darkness of drugs Doing drugs? Doing drugs is like being on top of the world. Everyone says so. Everyone seems to be having one dandy old time. Hey, it's part of growing up, or is it?

Just think about this. Before you go and do something you've never done before, you just better know what you're jumping into. Oh my God! that showed a woman jumping on a diving board while he was setting that all up and then she jumps into an empty pool because she's on drugs

things actually get a little better for her now she meets a hardworking college student named Joel Reams for a while everything seems to be getting better even when her grandpa dies because Joel good old sober straight age Joel is there to respectfully comfort her

with hugs and not drugs with hugs and not even rubs or tugs but then oh shit somebody gives her spiked peanuts uh-huh you know spiked peanuts i'm sure you've heard of them back in the early 70s you couldn't fucking throw a rock without hitting some fucking spiked peanuts now sadly they're nearly impossible to find

which i had a bad bag of acid peanuts laying around but alas the war on drugs destroyed them all i think anyway alice had went to babysit and she ate some chocolate-covered peanuts that somebody had spiked with acid presumably the kids that were mad at her for not doing drugs with them you know how it was you know kids were just break into some home

you know they heard that somebody was babysitting at and risk sending small children to the fucking ER and waste a ton of acid somehow that they got in liquid form which is much more difficult to come by than tabs and then they'll just hope that the person that they you know

want to get high is actually the one who eats the acid peanuts that's normal believable hippie stuff well while trying to to call home, Alice has another powerful hallucination. Suddenly she thought her grandpa was there to help her, but his body was dripping with blazing multicolored worms and maggots, which fell on the floor behind him.

He tried to pick me up, but only the skeleton remained of his hands and arms. His two eye sockets were teeming with white, soft-bodied, creeping animals, which were burrowing in and out of his flesh, and which were phosphorescence and swirled into one another. the worms and parasites started creeping and crawling and running toward the baby's room and I tried to stomp on them and beat them to death with my hands but they multiplied faster than I could kill them and they began crawling on my hands and arms and face and body they were in my nose and my mouth and my throat choking me strangling me

tapeworms larva grubs disintegrating my flesh crawling on me consuming me while she was trying to get the worms off her what she was actually doing was clawing her own skin and hair off then even when she was taken to the hospital she still had ongoing hallucinations The worms are eating away my female parts first They am almost entirely eaten away my vagina And my breasts

And now they're working on my mouth and throat I wish the doctors and nurses would let my soul die But they are still experimenting with trying to reunite The body and the spirit This is so fucking nonsensical If you've done LSD before And Alice was supposed to be an experienced user at this point You know that you don't

go from being stone sober to not being able to call an ambulance because you think you're dead rotting grandpa is with you and your fucking flesh is rotting off your body. You start with feeling a heaviness in your chest as it starts to be absorbed into your system. Your body feels a bit different. You get sweaty, maybe cold, a bit tingly perhaps. The world's real form gradually melts into something else. You don't fall off a fucking cliff into just like the peak of a fucking drug trip.

You're not sober one moment and then just deep in the three. rose of the acid trip the next. But anyway, following the trip that never happened, Alice, the girl who was not real, sees her bruises slowly fade and her hair grows back. I guess her skin comes back on after she clotted off. But then a judge decides to put her in an inpatient program in a psychiatric facility, or as Alice terms it, a loony bin, a crazy house, a freak wharf. Due to the testimony of the high school bullies, those peanut spikers, who claimed that Alice was the one pushing drugs on them? Alice is frightened at first. in the freak wharf

but eventually realizes that she's somewhere where kids can get help she meets a 13 year old girl named Babby who began to use drugs at age 11 and a guy named Tom

whose addiction to huffing glue had led him to rob a pharmacy why are they talking about why would you rob a pharmacy if you were addicted to glue why not just steal some glue

it would be much easier just to shoplift a bit of glue than rob a pharmacy to get money to buy glue finally Alice gets out of the freak wharf. She returns to family life, vowing to stay on the straight and narrow, make her parents proud, and she won't have sex until she's married, not again. Sorry, Joel, you're going to have to wait before you take Alice's bike out for a spin. She has polished it back up,

my friend. She's put a new basket on the front. No more jumping off ramps, no more crashing into ditches. Not unless you're willing to put a ring on it, pal. Alice even makes a new friend Fawn, who doesn't hate her for not doing drugs. In the end, she was resolves to appreciate her family and Joel, live in the moment, be friends with good non-hippie scum kids like fawn, and stop writing in her diary. She writes, Diaries are great when you're young. In fact, you save my sanity a hundred thousand million times. But I think when a person gets older, she should be able to discuss her problems and thoughts with other people, instead of just with another part of herself as you have been

to me. Don't you agree? I hope so, for you are my dearest friend, and I shall thank you always for sharing my tears and heartaches and my struggles and strifes and my joys and happiness Beatrice once again really nailing the voice of the youth with these very authentic sounding diary entries the book ends

with a final tortured twist in the form of an editor's note the subject of this book died three weeks after her decision not to keep another diary her parents came home from a movie and found her dead they called the police and the hospital

but there was nothing anyone could do. Was it an accidental overdose? A premeditated overdose. No one knows. And in some ways, that question is not important. What must be of concern is that she died, and that she was only one of thousands of drug deaths that year. And a line in the back of some edition,

as a line on the back of some editions puts it, an equally melodious... I got, I can't talk. An equally melodious... dramatic terms you can't ask alice anything anymore uh okay obviously that any was pretty weird no mention of what drug she overdosed on seems very fishy uh but of course it does because it's pure fiction uh as shitty as all that writing was very few people noticed its bizarre features when it was first published like the progression of which drugs alice tries uh not that was

their fault right they simply didn't have the proper context while today we have you euphoria, other gritty tales of life in high school at the time, there wasn't really anything like this being published. A couple of pulpy novels back in the 1940s like the Amboy Dukes and Knockin Any Door had portrayed sensational tales of youth and horror, with the last being

famous for the line, live fast, die young, and have a good-looking corpse. But none of these were all that influential, mainly being limited to circles of people who had already loved hard-boiled detective stories. More known for their stark portrayal of drug use were beat generation novels

like Jack Kerwax on the road, a great book, which detailed experiences with marijuana and also benzadrine, and also hippie activities like listening to jazz, hitchhiking, search for transcendence. There was also William S. Burroughs, Junkie, Confessions of an unredeemed drug addict, which was an explicit portrayal of heroin addiction, withdrawal, and the, quote, junkie life.

But both of those books were considered countercultural manifestos, not meant for a readership of young, middle-class people. Go ask Alice, was even out there among books that were being published at the time for a similar readership, like 1970s, Are You There, God? It's Me Margaret by Judy Bloom, which didn't go further than portraying Margaret getting her period and getting felt up over her bra. Immediately Alice's story began to make waves, not in the way that novels make waves, but in the way that real news stories make waves. In June of 1971, advanced review copies were circulated to the press and critics, including to Nicolet Handros of, excuse me, of, excuse me, Miami News.

The card attached read, this special pre-publication paperback book that you hold in your hands is, in our estimation, one of the most gripping, terrifying, and socially important books that we at Prentice Hall have ever published. We feel confident that you will share our enthusiasm in our dedication to bring the published addition to the attention of every parent and young person in your community. Handros hadn't asked for this book. It just arrived, as many ARCs did and do. She covered health and drugs, so it made sense, and she began to peruse it. As she read the following 159 pages, Handros grew uncomfortable, like she was peering through somebody's window. The writing was clunky and unguarded. It seemed to her like the kind of thing meant to stay private. Handros concluded it had to be real. Handros fed a sheet of paper into her typewriter and thought about how she would introduce this book to the nation. She typed, could be anyone's daughter. In Cincinnati, columnist Terry Lubker came to the same conclusion she was a high school senior,

working as a teen correspondent. In her October 16th column, Lubker urged every reader to buy two copies of Go Ask Alice, one for themselves, and one for a friend. Oh, Terry must have been a real square. In Jackson, Tennessee, 24-year-old reporter Dolores Ballard started reading Go Ask Alice and could not stop. Alice didn't know she was writing a book, said, in the September 5th, 1971 review of hers and the Jackson Sun.

She was just one of a million 15-year-old girls who kept a diary, a real honest-to-goodness teenage diary. In Illinois, a reviewer compared Go Ask Alice to Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl. My God, in Ohio, a newspaper put Alice alongside Eleanor and Franklin, the young Elizabeth, and other high-brow biographies. In Florida, the Tallahassee Democrat, told readers, no teenager or parent should miss Go Ask Alice. a documentary novel based upon the actual diary of a 15-year-old drug user. There were also some skeptics, to be fair. A few papers did list Alice as fiction. However it was listed, Beatrice's name would not be associated with it.

Not really, only in one place. Not on the front cover or on the back, or anywhere in the fine print. It was buried in the government's massive catalog of copyright entries. Third series, 1971, January through June, page 1308. No one's finding this. Sparks Beatrice M. C. Go Ask Alice. But, of course, nobody ever fucking read that. Instead, people were intrigued by the mystery around the book.

The week before publication, advanced orders for Go Ask Alice surpassed 18,000 copies. It blew the roof off, said editor Catherine Fitzgerald in 2018. We didn't print anywhere near the amount of copies we needed. After the book was officially released, the press only kept coming. Joseph Bennett of the Indianapolis News said on September 25th, 197, go-ask Alice is required reading for teenagers and for anyone who cares about them. Mary Williams of the Argus leader said on October 3rd, 1971, this is an actual diary of a lovely happy 15-year-old girl who turns to drugs.

What is frightening about it is that it could happen here. Parents should read this intense book. It is simply and directly a diary of a good girl led down the dreadful road of drugs to death. So much propaganda being spread. Robert Sorensen from the Minneapolis Star Tribune said on September 12th, 1971, she was 15 years old when she began to keep a diary, and she had no way of knowing

that what began as a typical penciled scribbling of a bright adolescent would soon be written in blood, a journey below and beyond hell. Readers, like the reviewers, found themselves taken with the tone of this supposedly real Alice, and letters poured into the Prentice Hall office addressed to Anonymous. The book was truly a national sensation.

In January of 1972, the American Library Association announced its best new books for young readers. There are 10 picks from the previous year. Even by best of standards, 1971 was exceptional. The list included Sylvia Plast, the bell jar, D. Brown's, bury my heart at Wounded Knee, S.E. Hinton's own teenage drug tale, fictional tale marketed as fiction. That was then, this is now. But above them all, at the very top, was the diary of a nameless dead. girl, and soon Go Ask Alice would find a wider readership than ever.

On Sunday, May 7, 1972, the Times million and a half readers woke up to this. One extraordinary work for teenagers, an anonymous diary called Go Ask Alice, records the entry of a 15-year-old Alice into the world of drugs and sex, and follows her through trips, runaways, near insanity, and finally death, perhaps murder, possibly self-induced, after several months of taking dexie marijuana co-pilots lsd heroin everything a superior work surely written by an experienced hand and freely adapted from whatever source go ask alice is a document of horrifying reality and possesses literary quality a well-known book critic webster shot had his doubts he put diary in quotes but they were overshadowed by this final line of a document of horrifying reality

What's more, despite doubt, over its authorship, he still endorsed it for a younger audience. So far, Alice's readers have been primarily adults, but now, Schott aimed to widen that readership. Go Ask Alice is number one on the American Library Association's list of best books for young adults, 1971. Unfortunately, he wrote, not many teenagers are reading it, but adults are. It's the kind of book we wish our young would take to heart. Webster Schott had his own personal reasons for this promotion.

his own daughter had just turned 16 and was according to Schott beautiful sometimes distant and occasionally angry shot had also lost a close friend recently to suicide and another acquaintance had recently suffered a meltdown

all on LSD I think they recovered they probably just got freaked out whatever both had sought psychiatric help only to find it was inaccessible but of course he didn't write about that all he said was that young people

should read Alice to Prentice Hall Schott's review was better than gold Avon Books was already prepping the Alice paperback and Schott's key phrase, an extraordinary work, a document of horrifying reality would fit nicely on the back cover. Indeed, that already selected a new cover, it showed a girl in half shadow, her expression all pain and mystery. Go ask Alice by anonymous, said the rounded font, along with three new words, a real diary. Inside on the splash page,

there was another edition. Sugar and spice and everything nice. Acid and smack and no way back. not everybody was thrilled about the book's sudden popularity first of all nobody specified what the age cutoff was for Alice in an era before you know young adult fiction would crystallize to mean roughly 12

to 18 seem like the age range for Alice could be anything then of course there are always the kids that can read at an adult level very early kids may be reading stuff they're not ready for

so when the book started to make its way to younger and younger readers whose innocent eyes took in sentences like another day another blowjob if I don't give big big ass a blow he'll cut off my supply some parents were less and thrilled uh one of them was illinois state representative weber bortures interesting name whose 11 year old granddaughter had read the

book uh through other adult or though other adults had protests bochers had influence uh burchers had influence and he would take that influence across the country speaking at libraries indeed reading some of the books more disgusting paragraphs aloud and demanding the book be removed from shelves Librarians did not tend to agree with him. After all, the book got kids reading, and that was a good thing, right? But you could actually argue that Sparks, in her attempt to dissuade people, took things too far in her explanations and basically taught kids how to do this shit, like this passage where she basically teaches kids how to smoke.

Then Richie showed me how to smoke, and I've never even had a cigarette. He gave me a small orientation lecture, like I should listen for small things I wouldn't ordinarily hear and just relax. At first I took too deep a drag and almost choked to death. so Richie told me to suck it in open-mouth gulps, to mix as much air in as possible. But that didn't work too well either, and after a while Ted gave up and brought out a hookah pipe. It seemed funny and exotic, but at first I couldn't get any smoke and felt cheated because the other three were obviously stoned. But finally it started to work just when I thought it never would,

and I really began to feel happy and free as a bright canary chirping through the open endless heavens. I was so relaxed. I didn't think I've been that relaxed in my whole entire life. It was really beautiful. Excuse me, and then there were places where the over-the-top descriptions were just completely unnecessary. Like this description of a girl named Doris, a character who lasted all the three pages. When Doris had just turned 11, her current stepfather started having sex with her but good. And the poor little stupid bastard didn't even know what to do about it,

because he threatened to kill her if she ever told her mother or anyone else. A teacher had her taken away and put into a juvenile home till she could find a foster home. But even that wasn't much better because, both the teenage brothers gave it to her, and later on an older teenage girl turned her in and turned her on drugs, then took her the homo route. Since then, she's pulled down her pants and hopped into bed with anyone who would turn down the covers or part the bushes. Many found that the moral of the story, don't do drugs, didn't make up for these long, explicit tangents. Or as Bortcher would say it, the ending where she dies is good. But the scenes regarding sex are too

vivid. Many libraries eventually gave in, to a point. The book stayed, but it was listed as an adult book, with no teen under 14 being allowed to borrow it even with parents' permission. Well, all that press, of course, just makes more kids want to read it. The label of being illicit was a marketer's dream. You had people arguing that Alice was vital, essential reading for today's world. That drew in the adults and well-meaning kids. And now you also had people saying Alice was disgusting, and that drew the curious onlookers in, the kids who found their first kind of pornography in Alice's cartoonish descriptions. Maybe the book would save your life, or maybe it would help you get off. Another day, another blowjob. Read it to find out. Within 18 months of its

original review, the New York Times had published three more pieces on Alice. Sales surged to match by early 1973. Sales were already nearing two million copies. And now it was time for an adaptation. The book was turned into a made-for-TV movie, back when those were actually quite popular. Alice would be played by Jamie Smith. Jackson and William Shatner, Captain Kirk, only three years after the finale of Star Trek would play her father. Andy Griffith, known as America's dad for his portrayal of the titular small-town cop in the Andy Griffith show, played the blue-collar preacher who convinces Alice to go back home. For the most part, it was pretty true to the book, except for Alice's

final traumatic meltdown. The script bypassed the casket and the multicolored worms. Instead, Alice simply wakes up in the hospital. After a short wrap-up, we see her heading up to step of her high school, determined to make the most of a second chance, she pauses, looks back at the viewer, and the action freezes. And then Alice's mother narrates. In the fall of her last year in high school, our daughter died of an overdose of drugs. We were never able to find out what the drugs were, or whether or not they were self-administered. Since she had stopped keeping a diary several months before, we had no clues as to why she died. We have discovered since that she was one of almost

5,000 drug deaths that year and so we decided to make her diary public because we feel she would have wanted us to. With that, the action resumes, the generic version of White Rabbit fades in and Alice vanises into the crowd of students implying that any one of them

could be met with the same fate. Though it would be again a made-for-TV movie, the filmed version of Alice garnered a claim like it was, you know, some best picture-worthy box office smash. Every youngster is, in this area, along with his parents, should watch Go Ask Alice, said the Cincinnati Inquirer, Steve Hoffman. It should be mandatory viewing for school teachers, and they, in turn, should remind

students to watch it, if necessary, at the expense of homework. Occasionally wrote Kay Gardella of the New York Daily News, a television film comes along that has something so agonizingly true to say in the context of today's increasingly complicated world that a critic feels compelled to recommend it. One such film is Go Ask Alice. For today's concerned parents and young people alike, this film is not to be missed. Wednesday, January 24th, 1973 now. Nearly a third of all U.S. households have viewed ABC's adaption of Go Ask Alice. That's fucking wild.

They made it the week's highest rated TV movie. For months to come, and with every rebroadcast, calls and letters pour into ABC. Like most of the country has seen this or read this book now. One Seattle mother wrote, until tonight, I felt my son was unapproachable on the subject of drugs. after the movie we talked for two hours I mean that is good for the next several years Go Ask Alice re-aired on a regular basis

presenting bullshit packages truth to millions and millions and millions of additional parents and kids also ensuring steady promotion for the paperback and selling more of copies of the book and now you might be asking where the hell is Beatrice Sparks and all this while she's still in Provo

watching the world pass her by while her book blows up getting zero credit for it but she's getting money not that she needed more we'll check in and discuss her more thoroughly in a bit going to write a bunch more bullshit. For now, let's talk about somebody else.

Someone else in Utah, in fact, and this will reconnect with Beatrice here. Nine miles north of Provo, so very close to Provo, in a little town called Pleasant Grove, a mother of six discovered a green spiral-bound journal. It belonged to her son, Alden.

And this is real. This actually happened. Alden had tragically died by suicide. This next part is going to be long. It'll seemingly be unrelated to Beatrice's a story, but bear with me. Need to establish a true. events to show why Alden decided to end his life so we can then explore what Beatrice would

make of his life. On Pleasant Grove, Marcella clung to the journal for months, even though she was you know, even though it hurt to read it, but Marcella was no stranger to hurt. Her first husband had died in a car wreck. She'd raised their three kids while putting herself through college. She hadn't expected to marry again, but when she met Doyle at BYU, things just fell into place. Doyle was pre-med. That took money, so Marcella rented daycare, rented out a spare bedroom, all while raising the kids, who soon numbered six, three from her first marriage, three with Doyle. Alden arrived in 1954, Scott in 1959, and Elaine in 1961. Well, these, her three, you know, second batch of three kids.

From the start, Alden was a wildcar, sweet and funny one moment, withdrawn or sobbing the next, and when he started crying, he couldn't stop, even when it choked him. Other kids sensing this, sense in that, teased him. As he grew up, the bullying got worse. even his siblings joined in, a way to get a little release, perhaps, from the tension of living with somebody whose mood could change in an instant and drastically. By the age of 12, though, he seemed to be leveling off. At school, Alden latched on to science, tutoring older kids, talking about a career in medicine.

Doyle, by then chief of staff at nearby American Fork Hospital, glowed at the idea of his son falling in his footsteps. But Alden did not want to stay in Pleasant Grove. He wanted to get out. And not just out of his 5,000-person hometown, but out of the LDS Church altogether. being Mormon took up a lot of Alden's time, at least an hour each night, often more. Monday was family home evening, a night of parent, child, religious instruction, and wholesome entertainment. Tuesday nights were for mutual, short for mutual improvement association,

meetings which taught young men and women about spiritual strength and preserving their virtues. Wednesday was a Boy Scout meeting, since many young Mormons were scouts, Fridays and Saturdays, all about homework, finishing errands and leftover chores. Sunday was the worst of he had to be up at seven for a priesthood meeting, then went off to Sunday school, then back to church for a 90-minute sacrament meeting, then on to a fireside chat for teens, and then the week started all over again. You felt it was relentless, and Alden was exhausted. Special events were even worse for Alden, like the worthiness interview that happened when boys turned 12, where a bishop interrogated to you to see if you're worthy to join the priesthood. The bishop asked Alden some basic questions, you know, if he believed in God, if he's willing to uphold the standards of the community. But there were a bishop interrogated to see if he was a person. But there were, also invasive, often creepy questions. Had he committed any homosexual acts? Did he masturbate? How often did he masturbate? We don't know if this happened to Alden, but if the bishop wanted, he could have pushed for graphic details. Did you touch yourself? Where did you touch yourself? How did you touch yourself? What were you thinking about while you were touching yourself? Did you orgasm? These interviews would take

place every two years, more often if the bishop deemed it necessary. Alden took refuge in clubs and music, debate club, theater club, rock music. Soon, tension with his dad bubbled into all-out war, father and son screaming about politics. Alden was becoming more liberal while his dad remained staunchly conservative. Marcella tried and failed to intervene. More and more, Alden spent his time at home in his room and his time not at home doing drugs. For real, actually, smoking pot, dropping acid, taking speed. Didn't matter. him whatever was available. His grades began to slip. He let his hair grow long down to his collar. His parents tried to persuade him to cut it, but he turned them down. So they got his older

siblings to badger him about it. And one night, two of the older kids finally had enough. They just couldn't stand him having long hair and being a hippie in their house. And so they waited for Alden inside the front door, then grabbed him, threw him to the floor, pinned him down, took out a pair of fucking scissors, and cut out chunks of his hair. Well, he screamed and fought against them finally his fighting led to his siblings cutting his scalp with his scissors then he was able to wriggle free he ran for the door bleeding fucking all patchy hair he vanished into the night only returning the next morning marcella then called a truce offered to take alden to the barber but then told the barber to buzz it all off which pissed him off more nobody's on his side his poor kid it's fucking abuse his siblings

getting zero trouble for holding him down and assaulting him after another argument his parents empty his bedroom they move everything books clothes records chairs the fucking bed itself into the hallway and all that remained was the carpet and an overhead light like an interrogation room and then Doyle ordered Alden into the bare bedroom made him stripped to his underwear Marcella took the clothing returned with a pillow and a blanket Doyle tossed the bedding to Alden yanked the door shut and then went to find a dog chain soon the doorknob was lashed to a or leashed I guess to a nearby sink meaning the bedroom door could not be open from the inside that's fucking insane that is abuse no attempt to relate to him no attempt to educate themselves

on the dangers or lack of danger in whatever he was doing whatever he was taking uh he had to ask for permission now to piss or to go fucking take a shit uh situation that would only end when his parents told him he wrote them a note saying that how he was behaving had been wrong finally he breaks down and agrees to write this note just to get out of his fucking bedroom and be able to have I don't know, clothes. I started saying things without thinking, he wrote. I said school and family rules are set up like a dictatorship. This is not so because opinions and suggestions can be freely expressed if done in the proper manner.

I feel like she's writing that note, North Korea. Next, they wanted a list of things, personal traits that needed fixing. So Alden sends him a full page. He called himself conceited, disrespectful, a liar, a procrastinator, rebellious, self-centered, whatever he thought they wanted to hear. But when he slid the paper back, or when they slid the paper, paper back, a reply from his parents came in the form of, this is an outline only. And they made it clear they wanted him to go into further detail. So now he writes several pages. And after three days of writing these pages, they finally let him out of his fucking room. Alden's friends

would later remember being shocked when Alden told them what had happened. They didn't realize what was, you know, abuse back then, you know, that that was abuse. So they didn't like report it or anything. To their credit, Marcella and Doyle did try to find Alden and psychiatrist after that. but options were scarce, especially for kids. So they ended up sending him to a outdoor survival program run by a BYU instructor. The outdoor program worked, but only in the short term. After repeated relapses, Alden asked his parents to send him to the Wasatch Academy, a military-type school in San Pete County, 70 miles from Pleasant Grove.

His parents agreed. Really, Alden didn't care about shaping up. He just wanted to talk to somebody who could, you know, communicate more than church speak. Many of the teachers at this camp held PhDs, like they were, actually educated in counseling. They had years of training in their given fields. Wasatch embraced not just Western, but also Eastern philosophy, with kids meditating, practicing yoga in common areas.

These kids were interested in everything, even the paranormal. A handful of academy students, including Alden, formed a group called karma. They held long, intense discussions about existence, you know, if there was truly something after life on earth. On occasion, somebody would bring out a Ouija board. The boys would take turns asking it questions. Alden one friend later recalled found the Ouija board hokey as hell preferred to talk about dream symbolism

Then they would all sneak outside to get hammered or high Before creeping back into their dorm When the school year ended Alden came home and to his parents' horror Additional education had not closed their son's mind It had opened him up to more ideas So they told him he would never be allowed to go back For Alden that was the last fucking straw

He was almost 16 In two years he felt he would most likely be sent to Vietnam where he might very well die. It seemed like his parents wanted him to be as miserable as possible until then, so he said, fuck it. And in June of 1970, he packed a few things, got a one-way bus ticket, and set out for San Francisco. He landed at Huckleberry House,

a hostel for runaway teens in the famed hate Ashbury district, but eventually beat down by a few weeks on his own and out of money. He called and asked his parents to come pick him up. They drove the 700 miles that same night, even stayed to watch a production of hair with their son. It was a glimpse of the future with a family, found some common values, traveling, seeing art, and being together. But that vision

was not to last. In August of 1970, Alden's parents took a vacation and Alden through a house party. When the cops appeared, they caught Alden with a bag of pot and a bunch of secondal capsules prescription barbiturates. He got off with probation and house arrest, going to school and his clubs.

Not much else was allowed for him now. And for once, Alden actually seemed to agree it was necessary that he be punished. He wanted to get better. He even started a diary, a green spiral notebook, bought from the local Smith-Rexall drugstore. It helped him deal with ongoing tension with his parents, especially his mom,

who seemed to want the best for him, but would frequently betray what he had told her in confidence to his dad. After writing about her, he wrote, I feel a heck of a lot better. That's what this is for, I guess, to get the hassles out of my system. It would be cool if we could get along, but they just don't understand.

At any rate, I do feel less hostile. I suppose that's constructive. Sometimes things just wait on him, and he wrote in another entry, I'm very, very lonely. I've got myself and that's all beside the burden I'm carrying, the burden of change.

The burden of being myself, my only possession. If I lose myself by conforming to be exactly what they want me to be, I lose the only thing I've got. I need somebody to tell me, some of my ideas are right. I know dope is bad,

no argument, but shit, what about everything else? I need somebody to believe in me. God, this poor kid, Alden sounds like he was a very smart, sensitive, evolved kid. Stuck with a family much less evolved in their thinking. And that, I would argue, a much better recipe for teen suicide than drug use.

Not that some drugs, such as opioids, especially, aren't incredibly dangerous, especially for kids, and even too much weed or too much acid, of course, dangerous for kids, just like too much alcohol is. But this lack of parental understanding and support, I think, much more dangerous. Around the beginning of the school year, Alden started to talk about suicide. Casually at first, the same way teenagers talk about, you know, many things casually. and not to his parents, to other kids at school, and to his new girlfriend,

18-year-old Teresa Blaine. Teresa herself had once tried to swallow a bottle of aspirin after a fight with her parents. She understood where he was coming from and their conversations soon turned to lighter things, plans for their future even. In his diary, Alden wrote, What can I say?

We communicate, we express, we interact, we feel, we happen, we happen, we lean on each other. It doesn't need a reminder or force of lies or encouragement. It just happens, and I am joyful. In mid-October, Alden proposed, and Teresa said yes. Crazily enough, you could get married in Utah with parental consent at just 14 years old. A few students in their high school were already married.

Married 14 in the 70s. That's wild. Unfortunately for Teresa and Alden, Teresa's parents would not approve, so they'd have to wait. They did manage to have their own kind of wedding, though, sneaking off from a school dance to say their vows on a small prayer rug that belonged to Alden. But in such a small town, word got back to Teresa's. parents and they told her in no uncertain terms that she had to call it off. Alden felt like his past was following him. He was being punished for it. Even though the court had lifted Alden's house arrest and his probation would end on March 15th, even though at school his grades were

improving, he'd joined both the choir and the drama club, landing roles in Oklahoma, the mouse that roared. Even though he'd worked so hard, he still felt he wasn't being accepted by polite society, by people like Teresa's parents. And that infuriated him. It was even worse when trying to placate her parents, Teresa went out on a date with somebody else in December of 1970. Alden fell apart over this. He became wildly anxious and depressed, scared even to go to sleep. All the images on TV of coffins returning from Vietnam weren't helping either. On Saturday, January 10, 1971, Alden made his final journal entry after a brief reconciliation with Teresa. This has been a week of depression. I'm getting over it, though. With my shrink and everything, it's been cool. My sister is a major

cause of the problem. However, with time and space, I'll get over it. It is coming about with Teresa, coming back into an existence of greater feelings and love. It's bitching. The following month in February, the Barrett family had to put Alden's childhood dog down. A great day named Duchess. Alden is devastated. But he had recovered a little bit by March. On March 12th, 171, Teresa and Alden went on a double date with another couple, going to the movies to watch love story. But after the movie, they have a fight. Alden was hoping that. that Teresa's upcoming 18th birthday uh yeah sorry I said she was 18 earlier

she was 18 by the end of this but she was 17 before uh my bad there uh he was hoping that her upcoming 18th birthday meant they could be together teresa pointed out that alden still had another year and a half of high school uh they couldn't just pack up and start a life somewhere without money degrees or jobs teresa then informed him that she was going on a date with her ex-boyfriend bart and curtis by the time alden got home he felt like he wanted to die he was sick of school He was sick of Mormonism. He was sick of parents in a community he felt did not understand him.

He was sick of trying to prove himself, trying to find a silver lining in a relationship that clearly wasn't meant to be. The next morning, March 13th, was raining. Alden had a list of chores. Replace some light bulbs, clean up his room. He did a couple of them. But then when his siblings started to argue about whose turn it was to feed the family's new dog, Pete, Alden's anger boiled over, and he threw a fork at them.

He then left the house, walking over to Teresa's house, where he put a box with a pair of earrings on her porch, left without ringing the doorbell or saying a word. A little while later, he returned to find his little brother, 11-year-old Scott, playing marbles on the floor, and after a long while, Alden spoke and said, How you doing? Scott kept his eyes down, thinking he was in trouble

for fighting about the new dog earlier. Fine, he said. More quiet passed. And finally, Alden said, I love you. Scott didn't answer. And Alden said after a little while, well goodbye and then quietly walked away

and that sadly was the last time anybody would ever see this poor kid alive by dinner time his little brother Scott was getting hungry his parents had left Alden enough money to take everybody to the purple turtle for burgers and fries but Scott figured that Alden was in too bad of a mood to take them thinking his older brother had gone out he decided to pick Alden's lock on the door to see if he could find some money in his room from the doorway he saw Alden in profile slumped in a chair motionless. His head and face obscured. Then he saw the hole in Alden's right temple. Later they'd see the gun, a small silver pistol

from Doyle's home office. A dark stain was spreading across the carpet. Scott hadn't even noticed hearing the weapon fire earlier. He ran to tell his sister Elaine at a house just down the street, Scott and Elaine's older half-brother, Brian answered the phone when Elaine called. Help us! Alden's bleeding! Elaine shouted. Brian bolted over with his wife, Judy, and when he realized what was going on, he yelled for Judy to get the kids out of the house. Now, 120 miles away in the 10,000 seat assembly center arena, Doyle and Marcella Barrett watched BYU battle Utah State for a playoff slot. And a message came over the loudspeaker. Dr. Doyle Barrett, please come to the main office. You have a telephone call. A moment later, he returned and told

Marcella they had to go. Alden had been shot. That was all he knew. By the time Doyle and Marcella arrived at the hospital. Alden was dead. The very next day, they began to clean up his room. Everyone grieves differently, I guess. That seems kind of fast. And his diary was discovered in the top drawer of his desk. At first, it was only painful to read, but soon. And I think maybe this, maybe just meant like clean, I guess just clean his room, not clean out his room. So I might have jumped the gun there. And jumped the gun as a fucking terrible phrase in this situation. I don't have a substitute. Anyway, at first, this diary, painful to read. but soon had helped Marcella understand she thought of making something out of it, but she didn't know what, so eventually she put the notebook in storage. Meanwhile, her family, her poor family fucking disintegrates.

No one is dealing with their emotions in a healthy way. They're all trying to push on without really talking about it, without properly dealing with it. Doyle starts working longer and longer hours just to avoid being at home. By 1973, Scott, now 14 years old,

he's drinking, smoking, skipping school, disappearing for long stretches of time. Eventually, Scott's behavior, earns him a three-month stay at primary children's hospital. When that didn't transform him into a law-abiding citizen, Doyle and Marcella try a new option. Provo Canyon School had opened in 1973 and claimed to address behavioral issues on a deeper level than possible in public schools. Years later, the truth will come out that Provo Canyon School barely a school at all.

A torture facility. For nearly its entire history, the facility has faced multiple accusations of physical, psychological, sexual abuse of its residents. fuck it would gain renewed attention not that long ago in September of 2020 when media personality and socialite Paris Hilton premiered her documentary this is Paris in which she attributed her chronic insomnia to PTSD developed as a result of being sent to four different troubled teen programs CEDU school in running springs California the ascent wilderness program in naples Idaho near ruby ridge the cascade school in whitmore california and the provo canyon school after escaping from the first three she spent 11 months at PCS in the late 90s, and she reported that she and other students were physically and psychologically abused. Some of the instances she details includes how she and other students

were allegedly drugged with unknown medications, how she was allegedly restrained and forcibly transported to the school, how she was strip searched, placed in a seclusion room for nearly 24 hours. She described PCS as the worst of the worst of all troubled youth facilities. She said, quote,

there's no getting out of there. You're sitting on a chair and staring at a wall all day long, getting yelled at or getting hit. Hilton recalled in the documentary that she felt the staff enjoyed hurting children and watching them naked as they showered. One of its staff was Dr. D. Eugene Thorne,

who is head of Brigham Young's psychology department, conducted electroshock and vomiting aversion therapy experiments on gay and lesbian students in an attempt to make them straight. Dear God, that's where Scott would spend over a year. Unsurprisingly, didn't help. Marcella, being a deeply religious woman, didn't think two of her kids developing severe behavioral problems. One of them shoot themselves in the head had anything to do with her or Doyle's parenting, right?

She just thought it was just her lot in life, like some kind of spiritual test. And I guess that's easier than doing deep introspection and owning your bullshit. She'll spend years wondering why this is happening to her. Like, she's the victim. Meanwhile, Beatrice Sparks is in the depths of a different kind of turmoil. She spent the early 70s pitching one book after another. She pitched a self-help book for grown-ups, a 70s revamp of kids say the darndest things, and an account of her fostering a Navajo team. But despite her success with Go Ask Alice, no publishers would bite.

Why not? Well, possibly because her writing not good. There were a lot of exclamation points, a lot of repetition, a lot of random all-caps phrases. Ironically, the very thing that made Alice sell her lack of skill when it came to writing that made the book seem like a real 15-year-old's diary was now proving to be her downfall. To distract herself, Beatrice and LeVorne hit the road. on a cross-country trip from Utah. They crossed Nevada, angled north towards San Francisco, then dropped south to Los Angeles for their final push. They cut through Texas and headed back to Provo. On the way, they saw a lot of runaways, not just teenage girls like Alice, but boys, too,

even some who seem like children, maybe not even out of middle school. And that gave Beatrice another idea. Later, she will claim to have interviewed more than a thousand runaways in 37 cities, finally settling on four of these runaway stories, Henry, Mark, Millie, and Jane, kids who talked about drugs, rape, and new age cults. But once again, there are signs that these teens did not exist. This duplicitous grifty bitch was exploiting real teen problems for her own ego yet again and financial game.

In this new manuscript, phrases from Go Ask Alice were repeated often word for word. And then there were the things that were straight up odd. How could a strung out teenager, Mark, recite from memory, a lengthy speech given by Gerald Ford. Furthermore, how could he reference in 1976, a TV show that didn't come out until 1977? He couldn't.

Beatrice is full of shit. Also, how the hell did she have time to literally interview over a fucking thousand runaways? Get out of here. Answering these questions didn't matter to Beatrice. She called her new book, Go Ask Henry, Mark, and Millie. God, she's so original. For the pitch package, she put her name at the top,

then added a large picture of her own face. Uh-huh. and this time she'd find a publisher. Thanks in large part, of course, to Go Ask Alice, the teen crisis genre, genre was soaring and the New York Times Company, the book publishing division of the newspaper, bought Beatrice Sparks's next two books.

First up was go-ask Henry, Mark Millie, which got a new title, Voices, slotted for an October 1977 release. Voices was soon pushed back to late 1978, but Sparks didn't want to wait for fame. She decided to do something she'd wanted to do for a long time. Take credit for Alice. Sparks chose Provo's Daily Herald, which had chronicled Beatrice and LeVorne's social clime all those years ago.

The article written by Renee Nelson appeared on August 24, 1977. Provo. When B. Sparks of Provost spoke of Alice, tears welled up in her eyes. While working in drug abuse, she said, I came across this little girl who gave me her diaries. After her death, I prepared them for publication. The diaries ultimately became the best-selling and sometimes controversial book, Go Ask Alice. The publication lays the drug scene wide open Through the eyes of a very young and often insecure child

The real Alice died just three weeks after the After she noted in her diary that she could no longer keep a record So no one can ask Alice But in her own way she has done what she most wanted to do To help others not make the mistakes she made The following thousand or so words Praise the author and the sacred trust she had developed with Alice Also mentioned that Beatrice had graduated from UCLA

Which did not happen meanwhile in Pleasant Grove Marcella Barrett read that article with no small amount of interest she knew about Alice but this laid out how a young woman's journal

and therefore her death had become something meaningful and now Marcella wanted to do the same for her deceased son Alden so the two women soon met Marcella had no intention of selling the journal she agreed to hand over a copy

and Beatrice Sparks said she'd be able to read the manuscript before publication Doyle for his part was furious but Marcella was convinced this was a good thing to do By September of 1978, Go Ask Alice was closing in on having sold 3 million copies now. Voices was undergoing a steady title waiver promotion with Beatrice doing back-to-back interviews. The back cover of the book was designed for maximum emotional appeal.

They cried mommy, daddy in the dark, or yelled obscenities from mouse that still wore braces. They said love in a language you never learned. Listen as they tell of the lives of four teenagers, what it's like to have sex at 13, to be stoned at dinner, and your parents don't notice, to turn your sister onto amphetamines, to be deprogrammed from a cult. Voices was essentially four Alice-style narratives, and in many ways, it was actually far worse than Alice. Instead of simply focusing on drug abuse, it condemned a range of cultural phenomena, including blaming 17-year-old Mary's indoctrination into a cult on Mary's mother's feminist beliefs. Okay. Mark, meanwhile, used to have a very happy, fun, exciting life.

you know, like when he made a home movie of the Christmas story with his buddies and quote The dadgum donkey we borrowed from someone just wouldn't go But then his mom got depressed And Mark had to step in to do the housework Mark's mom who had always been the neatest artist in the world Started to paint pictures that made Mark sick Because they were so depressing and macab

Mark is happy when his grandparents Pull him and his sister out of the atheist-filled streets of New York to take them to Dallas Where they have family dinners and go to church But then Mark's parents get divorced Which messes Mark up so bad He starts doing drugs in his second year of junior high. Damn, you drugs!

McGruff here, if someone asks you to try drugs, think of me and see what I'd say. And to help you, have one of these masks. Wow, thanks, McGrath. Now, what are you going to say if someone has you to try drugs? My mom and dad told me not to, and I wouldn't lie to them. Sensational. Don't you're drugs. Don't you drugs.

Here's how you can get a drug. free mask and on the back are more ways to say no and help me uh take a bite out of crime just say no to drugs and get a little mcgruff the crime dog mask till people know you're against it uh luckily mark decides to quit dope and instead finds religion spends the rest of most of the narrative shitting on his parents about using crude language drinking alcohol smoking cigarettes buying sex books they apparently left around the house uh when mark's dad takes him back to new york Mark is scandalized about his classmates having casual sex, and he soon turns back to drugs to cope with hearing about other kids having sex.

Mark sounds like a silly little bitch. His problems became even worse when an older woman Alicia puts the moves on him in the laundry room. He agrees to have sex with her, but feels filthy, disgusted, and degraded afterwards. Alicia later gives him $50, which she, of course, uses to buy dope. Then a lot of other things happened, culminating in Mark giving his sister's drug, or his sister, drugs, then deciding to run away. Mark eventually gets hit by a car he tries to hitch a ride with, is left injured

on the side of the road, he falls unconscious after trying to slit his wrist with a rusty beer can he found lying next him on the road, and he scrawled I love you in the dirt with a stick. Dear God, this is not happening. Finally, he makes his way back to Fort Worth, where his mom lives with her new boyfriend. But even though they're now good,

church-going people, Mark still decides to go back to New York for some reason, where he now engages in a gay affair. When he now Now, it's in a gay affair with a janitor named Carlos, even though he's not gay. I mean, that part, you know what? That part makes sense. You fuck around with drugs long enough. And your parents get divorced.

You will 100% every time you will fuck a gay janitor named Carlos. Yeah, straight or not. Doesn't matter. Divorce plus drugs equals fucking Carlos the gay janitor. Right? Take that. Take that. That's a fact.

That's a fact. This overly long melodramatic chapter finally ends with Mark delivering a lecture about how parents just don't understand their children's cries for help and how divorce causes so many problems like fucking gay janitor's name

Carlos. Then he repeats a four-paragraph Gerald Ford quote about National Family Week. But the Mark's story isn't as over the top as Chapter 3 where Beatrice takes arms against the horrible, terrible society ruining forces of lesbianism.

Millie, sweet, sweet straight as an arrow Millie had a happy, idyllic life with her mom and dad until they got divorced. Uh-oh. Then after one of her mother's boyfriend's molest her and a bunch of jocks began sexually harassing in the halls of her middle school, she gets close with her typing teacher, Mrs. Stevens,

who is getting a divorce. Oh, fuck. I think we can all see where this is going. Soon Millie is calling Mrs. Stevens by her first name of Fay, and they're constantly hanging out together. You know how feminist female teachers be.

They groom. They groom. Just ask anyone with the IQ of a goldfish. Faye starts brushing Millie's hair, scratching her back, eventually giving her a key to her apartment. There, Faye begins doing sexual things with Millie, including using a vibrator on her pussy. And things start falling apart when Faye suggests Millie bring her friend Lori into their sexual relationship. Faye's hunger for young puss is insatiable. She wants to push her older teacher bike On as many young teen bikes as possible Rubbing the tires together

Tangling up them handlebars Millie tries to tell her dad And he doesn't care Why? He's a dirty hippie With no understanding of proper sexual boundaries He tells his 13-year-old daughter That everyone experiments with sex at her age He tells her about he and his friend's own

quote, sissy experiences. What? He's like, What is a big deal? So tisor rassel you. I used to rassel sister vagina and tell come like many good friend of mine. Yeah, this just keeps getting more believable.

Totally. This all makes sense. That night, Millie tries and fails to kill herself with her father's sleeping pills. When she gets back to her mom's house, she screams that she never wants to see the homo whore again. Even though she can't

Truly cut Faye off because Millie is now horny all the time for vagina. For old puss. It's like drugs. Once you get a taste of old puss, you just want more of it. On Millie's 14th birthday, she and her teacher resume their sexual relationship. Millie also starts using drugs. Her mom finds out and sends her away, but doesn't tell the police for some reason and press charges. I don't know.

She punishes her daughter for being molested. Weird. And then, Millie's new private school, There, the Lizzie set immediately sniffs her out. They can smell her puss love. And she becomes well established in the local gay community. Holy shit, Mrs. Stevens did it. She turned her. She turned her. She made her a gay. Those sneaky fucks, right?

They're combing your hair and scratching your back one minute. And then the next minute they've gayed you. They've stripped away your God-given natural urges. And replace them with satanic, same genital lust. the following year Millie starts her last year of junior high to public school where she's subjected to lots of homophobic bullying

eventually it drives her to cruising for hookups and phone books and bathrooms you know how that works you get like a lot of homophobic bullying and then you're just like well all right guys I might as well just look to the phone book and try and find a hookup just calling up strangers now I guess

hello hi yes can I speak to the lady of the house hi ethel this is milly i'm a young gay and i would love to come over sight unseen and lick your pussy for a while if that's okay uh and also she's trolling in the bathroom you know uh you're doing okay over there ma'am do you need any help wiping uh if they're out of toilet paper uh mama ain't out a tongue you feel me uh this all sounds so real so gritty this is like the 70s equivalent of vice media. But then one son... Okay, back to this real story. But then one Sunday, Millie hears a minister on TV

preaching against same-sex attraction and is instantly, literally, completely cured of her situational satanic lesbianism. Finally, a shrink helps her, quote, dump that whole gag and load of gag and garbage. What?

Is that what the shrink says? You know what you need to... You know what you need to do, Millie? You need to dump that whole gag and load of gagging garbage. But then the shrink tries to molest her. So many pervents, they're everywhere. Her dad now finally gives up and sends her to her Mormon grandparents in Nebraska, where Millie loves their weekly home night every Monday evening.

This chapter ends with Millie happily talking about her wholesome new friends and unleashing more homophobic slanders, stereotypes and slurs. She's doing great now, other than being a bit mad over having been gayed up by her trickster typing teacher and some other devil gays. The final selection in this new hard-hitting expose of a book, Jane, the price of peer pressure, is a 16-page-long ramble about all the bad stuff that Jane's done

without much of a narrative to tie it all together. Like Alice before her, Jane became an instant, insatiable horn dog from the very first time she has sex. And likewise, cannot get enough drugs after her first experience. that when she hears that drugs are bad for you in school, she starts drinking instead. Because, you know, alcohol ain't the same as drugs. McGrath here with Regina, say, use this, I'll lose it.

You know it's okay. You say no. I'm telling you it too. Such a good song. Learning when to say no. When to say no. That's what you need to do. What you need to do.

Learning how to say no Be a winner Don't use drugs Don't use drugs Don't do it Uh huh Don't use drugs Don't use drugs

Because users are losers Take a bite out of crime Cause juices are losers Uh, anyway Uh, Jane goes on to claim She was such a hardened druggy and sex addict She once raped a 12-year-old boy Because drugs turned teen girls

into rapists, if you don't know Jane also slept with the boy her age And his dad at the same time At a drug party Uh-huh, that happens, a lot Another time she and her buddy Joni Had a gang bang Between two vans

At a drive-in movie They wanted to see who could screw the most guys in one hour. Uh-huh. Because Joni was also on drugged. And when you're on drugs, you gang-bang vans full of strangers. All right.

I bet that gay janitor Carlos was in one of the fans. And because of drugs, he probably decided to take a night off of cock and get some young puss instead. Jane ultimately blames dirty magazines for kids these days, being so sexual, and claims that even the most frigid of old maids,

especially if she's had enough vodka mixed with coke, will get turned on, you know, by the dirty magazines. dirty magazines plus alcohol plus drugs there is no limit to the godless hedonism that will directly lead to Jane also gets into vandalism with their buddies doing shit like burning park benches

clogging toilets, cutting swings hammering nails into slides so little kids just gashed themselves up when they head down slides the chapter ends with her looking forward to a Mormon youth conference and this is all of course ridiculous again but once again many reviewers went along with it

describing voices as nonfiction treating it like serious research. However, despite some initial, no-pun-intended sparks, that book was eventually a dud. But Beatrice, not done. She had something else super dumb, hidden up her grifty sleeve. Jay's journal came out in January of 1979.

It was what Beatrice had made out of Alden Barrett's actual journal. But rather than the stickers and bubble letters that adorn Alden's Green notebook, the cover of the book showed a pentagram with a human skull inside of it, then some big block letters. Jay's journal

The Haunting Diary of a 16-year-old in the world of witchcraft True satanic panic has now needlessly entered the chat Jay 16... I feel like I need that little droning sound Uh... Jay

16 and a half years old had been into witchcraft how deeply neither his mother nor his father had ever suspected until after Jay put his father's pistol against his right temple and pulled the trigger the introduction claimed In 212 journal entries

readers would be introduced to Jay a 15 year old living in the small religious town of Apple Hill Jay's bright well-liked gets good grades, says his prayers love Jesus, has a lot of friends but then things take a dark turn when Jay's girlfriend Debbie

gets him high and addicted to drugs you know a lot of people will tell you that drugs are cool and that everybody's doing them but you know what they're wrong see everybody's not doing drugs and you don't have to try them to be cool. Look, I don't want to tell you how to live your life, but I am telling you that you don't have to do something you don't want to just to keep your friends happy.

I mean, if that's the way they feel, then maybe they're not your friends. And maybe they're not as cool as you thought they were. This is how I feel. And if you think that makes me uncool, you're wrong. For information, call 1-800-223 dare. Thank you, Kirk Cameron. I do think you're uncool. But I guess I'm wrong. I guess I'm wrong. But, you know, he was doing a nice thing there. Okay, fair. Soon, Jay moves on to pills, booze, and anything else he can find. Along with two close friends, Del and Brad, Jay spends his days wasted and worthless. In an attempt to save their son, Jay's parents, send him to a local boys academy.

But that makes things worse. Because a pair of academy students, Pete and Kurt, introduced Jay to witchcraft. You know how damn boys academies be? Always full of so much witchcraft? Bad boys, always wanting to be witches. Using a Ouija board, the boys talked to guise. and practice spellcasting. A Habit J. continues when he returns to Apple Hill High School. He is a witch now. Back in Apple Hill, he meets Tina, a practitioner of Black Magic, who takes

him to an orgy on the far side of town. Oh, fuck! A satanic orgy? Hale Lusufina! Fuck yeah, bro! I mean, no! Oh, gosh! Oh! Where were those girls when I was in high school, by the way? Seriously, where were they? I wish Satanic Orgy was on my high school resume. I would gladly trade rough dry hand job for satanic orgy uh anyway it's a satanic orgy j and tina uh in addition to you know fucking other people uh drink a drug-laced potion then rip into each other fucking with insane bloody passion hail lucifina again i mean oh no don't do it uh soon afterwards jays busted for marijuana and downers slap with some house arrest he decides to abandon witchcraft but tina lures him back in orgies will do that and he goes deeper in this time

the couple seals their bond at a midnight wedding at the local graveyard at the moment of I do Tina and Jay slice each slice each other's tongues and kiss

letting the blood mix then one of the guests pulls out a small mewing kitten and snaps its neck okay that part actually is sad the orgy part sounded fun snapping the kitten's neck

not fun but this is all made up Jay then gets his buddies it's so loosely based on Alden it's just nonsense Jay then gets his buddies Brad and Dell into the dark arts as well and the three end up mutilating a cow, cutting out his eyes, tongue, and genitals.

They fill a bucket with the dying animal's blood, and Jay drinks it. Later, all three teens are baptized in a mixture of blood and piss. Not sure why they couldn't have just stayed focused on the orgies. This part sounds terrible. Jay's family has no idea that their son is on this path, except for Jay's little brother Chad. And one day, Chad says, You're not Jay anymore.

Jay feels bad. He tries to renounce witchcraft, but it's too late. He's too witchy. A few nights later. A shadowy figure appears in Jay's bedroom. Oh, my God. It's some kind of demon just appearing there. This is Raul, a demon who wants Jay's body for his own.

All of his bad acts were just Raul bringing Jay closer to him and closer to the devil himself. Oh, yeah. With the devil Uh-huh Sadly, not even the power of Striper Could save Jay now Dell and Brad die in separate accidents Just days apart

And Jay is driven into a deep, desperate guilt He finally makes an appointment with the bishop But on January 22nd, 1977, Jay weakens And kills himself with his father's pistol So basically, Beatrice stuck to the truth When it came to adapting Alden Barrett's story as far as the ending. You know, other than changing everything else.

The Barrett's read this book. Not before it came out as promised, but when somebody in their community told them about it and they were fucking furious, they saw immediately the Sparks had used two dozen entries from Alden's journal, sometimes word for word, but then added more than 190 new entries

that had nothing to do with him, including all of the violent and occult material. She used passages in which he described his love for Teresa, word for word, but then diverted into a fake origin. writing made-up stuff, like, I hit her and kicked her and mauled her. Sex was not enough. I wanted to hurt her. Then Sparks used Alden's real entry from October 17th, 1970, two weeks before the made-up

midnight wedding. But of more importance, Teresa and I finally came to grips about a relationship. I love her and she loves me. That's all there is to it, except that our minds are still growing, and this may cause a hassle, but what will be will be. But in Sparks' words, the sweet wedding turned into an occult ritual. by the single little black candle which we certainly don't need for light we went through the ritual of eternal slavery to each other although I the male

would always technically be the master then we cut each other's tongues and let our blood pour into each other's mouths it was Nirvana we were one perhaps what was even worse though was how poorly Beatrice had disguised the resemblance to real places Pleasant Grove's High's annual sweater

swing that dance became the sweater fling dance and local restaurant the Purple Turtle became the blue moo. Tina was, of course, Teresa, and Beatrice had even reprinted a letter Marcella sent to a friend in the days following the suicide, a sure sign that Jay was Alden to whoever knew the way Marcella wrote. But what recourse did the Barrett's now have for being taken for a ride, for having their grief exploited? They didn't want to draw even more attention with a lawsuit, so they stayed silent, hoping the book would blow over, but it didn't. Like with Alice, Jay's journal was praised by reviews across the country. Publishers Weekly called it a

compelling document more mesmerizing than fiction. Beatrice Sparks even added to the fervor herself when she claimed to have interviewed Jay's friends and watch them levitate a notebook, straighten Bobby Pins, and pull a spoon across a table with their minds and the power of Satan. Like before, not, she's so full of shit. Like before not everybody agreed with these reviews. Some called it, quote, fraudulent and idiotic, or quote, a disgrace, but those reports hardly reached the Barrett family. Elaine Barrett, nine years old when her brother died, got some of the worst of it. She had to deal with the incessant gossip at Pleasant Grove High all through the spring of her senior year. Everybody knew that Jay was Alden, and they now thought he was a devil worshipper.

At a time when most Americans truly believed in and feared the devil demons and demonic possession. Even the 1978-79 Pleasant Grove High yearbook made it clear the book was based off Alden in its recap of the year. Jay's journal, as it was written, the story of Alden Barrett's form. PGHS student was widely read during February and March, the book was taken from Alden's personal journal. It's fucking brutal. During that time, Alden's grave was constantly vandalized by graffiti and black candles. His younger brother, Scott, 19, tried to keep it clean, but it became so constant he couldn't keep up. Beatrice, did she feel guilty about any of this? Oh, no, of course not. She's a manipulative narcissist. She didn't give a shit about anybody other than

herself. She's pumped, right? She finally has the influence, the influence. me she's craved. The early 70s had seen the disintegration of the counterculture in Americans mounting anxieties about power, race, and authority, which led to the convenient boogeyman of drug users. Not willing drug users, like we covered, but those who were duped into it by bad actors. If they could be saved, narratives like Alice promised, the nation would once again be on the right path, the non-drug, life's going great, everybody's straight and wholesome. Everybody loves God and there's plenty money for everybody path. But by the beginning of the 1980s, that path seemed like a distant fantasy. Teens were getting into punk, heavy metal, Star Wars, MTV,

hip-hop, breakdancing, arcade games, comic books, horror and cult films, and provocative fashion that showed a lot of skin. The AIDS crisis was emerging. There was a deep economic recession. The hippie counterculture had gone away, and yet some kind of insidious force remained, one that still lured kids away from church, family, and school. One that got kids. into cocaine and other popular 80s drugs. Perhaps the methods had changed, but darkness was still at work. And the architect of that darkness was none other than Satan himself.

Damn you devil! This is what fear-mongering religious leaders and televangelists like Reverend Robert Grant and Reverend Jerry Falwell and Jim and Tammy Faye Baker and Jimmy Swaggart and others literally claimed. They claim that kids would be seduced by whatever tools Satan could use. Drug, sex, MTV, pop music,

or more overtly satanic tools like witchcraft, fantasy, dungeons, and dragons. That's how Satan really gets you. By getting you to roll 20-sided dye and eat Doritos in your friend's basement on a Saturday night, pretending to be a half-elf ranger, hoping to impress the cute goth girl, pretending to be a druid priestess.

America was still facing a gosh-dang crisis of morality, as exemplified by the gay rights movement, affirmative action, and the women's movement, right? All satanic. I'm sure you can see where this is going. To anyone who believed this in read Jay's journal, they saw their own beliefs validated tenfold. Finally, it wasn't just an abstract feeling of something sinister out there.

It was there in the writing, a real experience with demons. And this was how Jay's Journal helped trigger the satanic panic. Ah, the war on drugs and the satanic panic, both helped so much by Beatrice, both so damaging. Late January of 1980, a handful of parents went to Wasatch Middle School, 30 minutes northwest to Pleasant Grove, complained to the principal Bill Dudley about the after-school program that taught kids how to play Dungeons and Dragons. And when the PTA voted to keep it, the parents, parents who undoubtedly didn't know shit about this game, they went ballistic, showing up at school board members' homes, unannounced, starting rumors about the program's teachers, saying they were having affairs. In April of 1980, superintendent of schools, Doug Merckley backed down to these medievally-minded parents, people more likely to grab a pitchfork or a torch and hunt for a little literal monster than they were to, I don't know, ever evaluate something based on empirical data and evidence instead of gut feeling. and they pulled the game entirely.

By 1982, Tuila, Utah Mayor Orrin Probert had banned the game from public schools and a letter to the Toilla Bulletin specifically linked the game with Jay's Journal. We would like to applaud Mayor Orrin Probert for his decision not to allow our public facilities to be used by special interest groups

for the purpose of promoting and teaching role-playing games, such as Dungeons and Dragons. We draw your attention to the book edited from a diary written by a Utah boy entitled Jay's Journal. by Beatrice Sparks. Sparks indicates that the boy was extremely intelligent, became involved in various spiritualistic experiences,

and then ended his life by suicide. We've talked about the satanic panic. Too much here before, to recount it today specifically in many episodes, including our episode on Gary Gygaxon, Dungeons and Dragons. What's important to know now was that many parents latched on to that explanation and fueled the satanic panic

because of the same thing Art Link Letter had faced a decade before, tragedy. The rate for teen suicides, particularly young white males, showed a dramatic upward trend from 1970 to 1980. The overall suicide rate for young people aged 15 to 24 increased by 50% during that time frame. Not only that, but these deaths were often more violent and bloody than before. By 1980, firearms, rather than poisoning had become the most frequent method of suicide for both male and female teenagers.

In May of 1981, Michael Dempsey, 17, killed himself with his father's handgun. his father Patrick, a retired police officer, blamed the occult. Get over here, scapegoat. Telling authorities that his son was invoking demons and that prior to the suicide, the boy's voice, quote, changed as if demonically possessed.

Newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, repeated the invoking demons claim over and over to the point that when a month later, 16-year-old, Irving, Pulling, committed suicide, and his mom, Patricia, blamed it on the occult, and the reasoning was quickly accepted by people across the country.

A white male who is intelligent, creative, and curious, Patricia would later write, is most likely to be seduced by the occult. Of course, that was also the demographic most likely be interested in Dungeons and Dragons. So, though the satanic panic would have probably gone the same way,

more or less, with or without Beatrice Sparks, she was likely the first person to introduce occult teen suicide into this chat, and it soon became a fixture for grieving parents and thus the culture at large. Meanwhile, the macabre interest in Alden, now on a national scale, took its toll on the Barrett family.

Doyle had an affair, and in 1981, he and Marcella divorced. In 1985, Alden's tombstone, which his father had painstakingly designed with the poem of Alden's etched on it was stolen. And that was the last straw. Marcella called a family meeting that included Doyle, Elaine, and her husband, Mike Scott, and Scott's wife, also invited Beatrice Sparks. Finally, they asked her, why'd you do it? Where did all that occult stuff come from?

Why did you include that? Well, Sparks had a ready answer. Jay's Journal was actually a mix of three separate diaries from three separate people. One was Alden. The other two were, quote, close friends. Uh-huh. She's such a piece of shit. Then she passed out book reviews of Jay's Journal.

The meeting exploded into conflict. Eventually, Sparks walked out. Marcella was too beaten down to pursue any kind of real justice, dropped the matter entirely, soon relocating to a nearby apartment. In 1988, a new edition of Jay's Journal came out a paperback from pocketbooks that now credited Beatrice Sparks as Dr. Beatrice Sparks as Dr. Beatrice Sparks. she did not have a doctorate. But still, she claimed to be a psychologist.

Sometimes she claimed to be a psychiatrist. She verestly described at different times as being in psychology, psychiatry, or human behavior. Sometimes she said she got her doctorate at UCLA. Other times she got out at Columbia. Sometimes she got it from BYU. She might have even practiced as a therapist

without a license in Utah. At the very least, she claimed to be a practicing teen therapist. Fucking crazy. Let's get back to the same. satanic panic. She helped start now. By 1990, things were still going strong in the satanic panic front. Strong enough for the, uh, this following PSA to be passed around the country on VHS that year. This is crazy. A warning signs of satanic behavior may be apparent, such as a sudden, bitterly antagonistic attitude towards family and religion, a drastic decline in academic performance.

A reclusive behavior pattern and listening exclusively. exclusively to heavy metal rock music, almost to the point of addiction. When one or more of these warning signs are evident, you should look further for ritual items, such as a pentagram or other satanic symbols, black or red robes, a decorative dagger or knife, a chalice or goblet, black candles, a personal diary with a black cover which is called a book of shadows and copies of publications such as the satanic Bible and the satanic rituals and possibly a small makeshift altar if you discover items such as these experts advise you contact your local law enforcement agency at once law enforcement there was nothing illegal there hello

police. My 16-year-old has a book of shadows in his room and black candles, and he listens to Ozzy Osbourne. Please then help. Please arrest him for being satanic. After seven years and $15 million, California finally would drop all charges this year against the McMartin preschool employees. We've talked about this before. Those poor bastards accused of ritually sexually abusing toddlers who didn't, despite zero evidence of that, many of them. still, you know, ended up in prison for being sex offenders before being later vindicated after their lives were destroyed or after they died. That trial was at the time the longest and most expensive trial in California history and it was all nonsense. The taxpayers got fucked right

along with the McMartin preschool people. Over in Austin, Texas, Dan and Fran Keller, the owners of a small daycare center and Austin's Oak Hill suburb were accused of satanic ritual abuse in 1992. Jurors would convict the colors as well, despite the initial accuser retracting their statement. the killers would spend 22 years in prison before getting $3.4 million in 2017 as a sorry we sent you to prison for over two decades for being a bunch of satanic pedophiles

even though that was bullshit then there was of course the West Memphis 3 which we've covered here charged with a savage triple homicide in June 1993 mostly because some dipshit locals especially one particularly obsessed

with a satanic panic dude they just thought that they worshipped the devil which they didn't Did Beatrice Sparks ever take accountability for helping set the satanic panic in motion? No, of course not. She was planning her next book around this time, though. In 93, Beatrice's agent pitched a new book to Avon Books, a division of Hearst Publishing. Once again, it's a fucking diary.

Why find a new grift if the old grift keeps working? In this new made-up piece of shit, the main character Nancy claims to be 14. Sweet and trusting, she falls for an older man. At first, he seems protective, but it's an act. after giving Nancy a spiked wine cooler he rapes her even worse the man has AIDS and now so does Nancy

God Beatrice loved to needlessly scare the shit out of people Alice was still pushing 1,500 books a week at this point so a new book was practically a done deal and it was called it happened to Nancy Beatrice was careful to retain control of the project via claiming that Nancy's parents wanted it published in a very specific way

like in this letter dated June 29th 1993 Nancy's folks and I prefer, Beatrice wrote, a true story from the diary of a teenager who looked for love and found death through AIDS. It must say, edited by Beatrice Sparks Ph.D. on the front cover. I hate this bitch. Like Nancy's folks would just be adamant about that.

Listen, it's very important to us to have Beatrice Sparks PhD written on the front cover of our dead daughter's diary book. God. She just lies and lies, faces no consequences and just gets continually rewarded. Avon books pushed back

with the same idea that Princess Hall had years ago that teenagers were more likely to trust a book that was not associated with the grown-up and then Beatrice responded when kids find a grown-up

they trust, they trust completely. My problem is trying to get away from them after a month in session. In session? She was not in session! She was not a fucking therapist. She's not a doctor. God damn it.

Some editors noticed that like with voices sections of Nancy were remarkably similar to Jay's journal take this passage from Jay I remember a speaker at a conference said that bad thoughts are like birds we can't keep them from flying over our heads but we can keep them from nesting in our hair okay now is what nancy said she said she understood what I was saying but the kids had to learn that they couldn't keep birds from flying over their heads but they could keep them from making nest in their hair. That's a weird analogy. Also, the main characters were not the only ones that seemed made up.

She'd also obtained two quotes for the back cover that were apparently written by Milton Norbaum AIDS specialist. And Dorian Hadley's to docher, psychiatrist working with AIDS. You know Dorian, right? She's that psychiatrist who works directly with AIDS. She treats AIDS viruses for their mental health problems. The way that's written, it's like she's. who's fucking counting viruses.

Then there was the foreword, which ended with a quote from one of Nancy's supposed doctors. Dr. Dathen Sheranian wrote, I worry about all the beautiful, innocent young Nansies.

Dathen? Fucking not Nathan. Dathen? How many Dathens do you know? I mean, there is a dude in the Old Testament. It is a biblical name. Name Dathan.

There's also a character in Star Wars in the universe named Dathan. I think that's it, though. I've definitely never met a Dathan, let alone a Dathan. and shirrhanian that's a god damn it another strange move in this diary book beatrice herself makes an appearance uh here's this entry i've had the most lovely day mr peterson uh brought aunt thelma's friend in on the helicopter which he only does on very special occasions i can't believe that the lady was

dr b who put together one of my favorite books go ask alice from the diary of a girl my age who had got into she's like now she's promoting her other book in this fake book After a few minutes, Aunt Thelma excused herself and went up to the house leaving me and Dr. B to talk about my book. It seemed unreal, but Dr. B assured me it was as real a possibility as I was. This makes literally no sense.

How the fuck would Nancy know that Beatrice was behind Go Ask Alice? She wasn't listed, as his author. She only claimed credit in like a small newspaper interview. There's no internet to speak of at the time for Nancy to do some easy research. There was no reason for her to know that Beatrice was involved with it.

Why was she shown up via helicopter? I hate it when somebody creates shit this stupid and it still works. Beatrice would continue with this claim that she was somehow a nationally known psychologist, sought out by teens and their families across the country. I want to fucking punch a hole in the wall right now.

With Nancy Slater for a spring 1994 release, Beatrice had to fill out a questionnaire about her background, where she identified herself as a therapist, speaker, nope, part-time teacher at BYU, no, with degrees from Southern California, Columbia, B.Y.U. A B.A. M. A. fucking son of a bitch. She's not a professor of B.Y. They should have known that was bullshit when she was the word teacher. That's not how professors tend to identify themselves.

She would keep this going. These lies, even up in the ante, after four more books like Alice and Jay, including the diary of an anonymous teen, seduced by her teacher, and the diary of a fuck. Always diaries of an anonymous teen mother. She would claim in 1996 almost lost the true story of an anonymous teenager's life on the streets that this new. book was not a diary, it was a case file now from her psychology practice that she didn't have. In this book, Dr. B, cures Sammy's depression and steers him towards a sunny, rewarding life. Along the way, she also straightens out Sammy's parents, saving their marriage, and keeping Sammy's father Lance away from cocaine. How did no one sue her? Why can't we have someone with the bank account balance of somebody like Warren Buffett, who just dedicates himself to using their wealth for a few years to just fucking annihilating grifters? Uh,

unlike the other books, she would give it a blurb from a famous doctor, apparently one of her peers, Dr. Philip Morganstern. These doctors, Philip Morganstern, Milton Norbaum, Myron Greenbaum, they've never been located anywhere. She made them up. She made all of this up in 1996 at the 46 National Book Awards. Beatrice attends as one of five judges and a brand new category titled Young People's Literature. By this time, Go Ask Alice, is still moving a thousand copies a week.

It sold more than 6 million copies in total since its publication. Not only that, but it was considered a part of high school English programs. They're the English program canons across the U.S. It's on reading lists in Alaska, Colorado, Illinois, New Mexico, elsewhere. At the University of Washington, go ask Alice, even one of the college's young adult resources on the science of addiction. On the science of addiction. Fuck my face.

In 2003, Sparks husband, LeVorn, dies at the age of 88. You know what good. He knew she was full of shit. He knew she wasn't a doctor, wasn't a fucking professor, that she didn't interview a thousand plus street kids, etc. But he never said shit. Kept let that money from those griffs flow into his bank accounts. Fuck him and Beatrice.

Following LeVorne's death, it is a stupid name. An aging and grief-stricken Beatrice retreated from public view. But not before writing a mind-bending finale. And that would be Finding Katie. The story of a girl in foster care. Finding Katie ends with Katie, a compulsive liar. Huh. Getting adopted by Mary Matthews.

a respected professor at UCLA. In the book, Professor Matthews has her own rocky past. As a child, she lost her father and endured a long stretch of pain in isolation. Eventually, however, she became a PhD and married a wonderful man who supported her ambitions, hmm, though he died and left her alone until she found Katie. Okay. So to recap, finding Katie concludes with a teenage version of Beatrice Sparks, a.k.a. Katie, being adopted by an adult version of Beatrice Sparks,

a.k. Mary Matthews, Ph.D., all in a book written by a persona, Beatrice Sparks, born Beatrice Matthews, Ph.D., who was, of course, a creation of the real Beatrice Sparks, the compulsive liar from a broken home. Wow. Wow, wow, wow, wow. Oh, God. Beatrice wanted to live in the world where Beatrice got to be exactly who she wanted, no matter the cost. That was reflected in the book's final sentences, Beatrice's last published words being, I am somebody for eternity. the real beaches will die

May 25th 2012 with the age of 95 about I don't know 85 years too late it pains me if she lived that long and was successful she was buried next to Levorne

in Orham City Utah cemetery with a headstone that reads Families are forever and sometimes that's true but so are lies good job soldier

you've made it back barely This Saturday Get ready for Hollywood and Speed Bump to face their toughest bad guy yet Drugs Speed Bumper I'm done with the force

I don't care about police work no more I just care about smoking marijuana Oh no Hollywood Why would you ever want to do drugs. Because I'm cool, Speedbump, and everyone who's cool just drugs. Want to come with me to a party where we're going to smoke grass and worship the devil? Will Speedbump be able to save his partner?

Or will Hollywood's life spiral into satanic worship, suicide, and drugs? I don't want to go to that party, Hollywood. But I do want to hang out with you. I care about you, and I don't want to lose you to drugs. Don't miss the most important episode. of Hollywood and Speed Bump ever. The doggone drugs. Saturday morning at 9, right after

Mother, you're getting my zapples all riled up. The animated Ed Kemper story only on Channel 7 kids. Hollywood and Speedbuck. Keep in the streets clean one paw at a time. Holy shit. Even Hollywood has struggled with drugs. Go ask Alice. While we could spend this time recapping Beatrice's life and lies or the insanity of our books,

I think we've probably all had enough craziness today, right? Instead, let's return to a question we asked at the top of this episode. Who makes the truth? For many parents and their kids, for a few decades, Beatrice Sparks, and her bullshit was a big truthmaker. Beatrice Sparks did not set out to change the culture or make the truth when she wrote Alice. She wasn't an activist in the conventional sense. She wasn't trying to lead a political or moral crusade. aid, what she wanted was far simpler, attention, recognition, the thrill of crafting a story

that felt real enough to grip readers. Culture is often shaped not by grand visions or deliberate movements, but by small, selfish, personal impulses that ripple outwards, which are often then amplified through social networks, institutions, and media. And while that may seem depressing, like everything is up to the illogical reactions and whims we have to trauma and instability, it also means that we can all choose to influence the culture we live in by spreading our own messages, hopefully truthful ones, by calling out bullshit.

Culture isn't something that's handed down to us from on high. It's something we all collectively participate in moment by moment, by paying attention, reflecting, engaging thoughtfully with the media and stories around us we can decide which impulses get amplified and which fade away. When you listen to this podcast, you participate in some culture shaping, when you recommend it or when you tell others to not listen to it

when you post about it on social media for or against you are doing some culture shaping same for any other podcast or article or book or movie or TV show when you vote you participate in culture shaping when you don't vote you still do by a mission when you like a post or leave a comment

when you subscribe to a YouTube channel etc etc all these choices add up and they help others decide whether some piece of information or viewpoint is legit is truth or is bullshit when you read critically and discuss ideas with empathy you've consciously, you know, chose to value understanding over panic, correction, over judgment,

and insight over sensationalism, truth over lies. We all collectively make the truth. I know sometimes doesn't feel that way, but it is true. So in a weird way, we should take comfort in the story of how Go Ask Alice became a cultural phenomenon, you know, amplifying the war on drugs and the satanic panic. It means that we have power. We can choose to use it better than Beatrice and her contemporaries did.

If that grifty bitch's bullshit can be exalted, so can some better person's more credible, honest narratives, and advice. It can swing both ways towards satanic panic, misinformation, disinformation, fear-mongering, irrational, othering, finger-pointing at boogeymen, or it can swing towards the promotion of actual truth, towards holding artists, the media, politicians, others accountable when they lie, towards opinions and judgments supported by studies and research. And that's pretty fucking cool. But you know what's not pretty fucking cool, you guys? drugs can you help me with a problem

you see some of my best friends at school have been asking me to try drugs what do I say no no thanks trace when it comes to the question of drugs friends or not the only right answer is no

no no or maybe depend on the drugs now in the situation and you know what's going on in your life now let's head to the takeaways Time suck Top five takeaways Number one, go ask Alice published in 1971

purported to be the real diary of a teenage girl who grew up in a safe loving community only to find herself in an acid-induced drug spiral that led to her running away getting involved with sex work peddling drugs to elementary schoolers

suffering bad trips and flashbacks and ultimately dying by overdose and all of it was made up while some researchers think that Beatrice based this off girl named Brenda Marsh, who might have been real, who may have attended a Mormon summer camp where Beatrice might have been volunteering, and who is probably not addicted to drugs, but simply trying to shock young impressionable Mormons. What we do know for sure is that none of Alice's

words came from Brenda. They were all Beatrice's. Beatrice used her connection to the grieving arc link letter, got the book published, ultimately giving parents confirmation that their kids were all on the knife's edge of a life of drugs and degeneracy. Ultimately, Alice and Beatrice's other books turned the culture's view of adolescence from a time of occasional misjudgment to one of constant danger. Number two, by far the most damaging book, at least on a personal level, was Jay's journal. She took the real journal of a young, bright man named Alden Barrett, who was suffering from depression, and let's be fair, some stuff that verged on parental abuse, I fucking verged was parental abuse, and added a bizarre connection to the occult that would end up

getting him and his family branded as Satanus and fuel America's satanic panic. number three beatrice herself had a difficult upbringing born across from a railroad track in 1917 in rural idaho she endured her father leaving the family for another woman the shame and stigma the divorce brought on the family and the financial turmoil of the great depression also her mom leaving the family though her life ultimately worked out she got married raised her kids and her husband levorne was a wealthy and successful businessman she never seemed to reconcile with her upbringing and needed both to dramatize it and leave it behind That's the interesting thing about the people who create culture. Nobody creates art for completely unselfish reasons. Everyone who does wants a little bit of recognition, a little bit of power, a little bit of hunger for the world to acknowledge who they are, right? Myself included. But not everybody lies about having multiple degrees and fictionalizes teen diaries.

Number four, despite all the controversy, Beatrice Sparks, became incredibly famous during her lifetime and incredibly beloved. The story of her fraud is becoming fairly well-known now, but more people still know her, as the woman who brought gritty real, truthful stories to light in a way no writer had before. And many people felt that they were represented in the character of Alice and her other characters in all of their longing and internal turmoil. Number five, new info, if you're looking for some young adult fiction that can actually help teens

or even help the inner child and you, here are a few recommendations. The book The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, first published in 1967, deals with class conflict in 1950s, Tulsa, Oklahoma, between the socks and the greasers, explores violence, forgiveness, and redemption in ways still relevant today. It's also now a Broadway musical. The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, first published in 1983, tells the story of Esperanza Cordero, a 12-year-old Chicano girl growing up in the Hispanic Quarter of Chicago. The novel follows her over the span of a year as she enters adolescence and begins to face the realities of life as a young woman in a poor and patriarchal community. That book has sold more than six million copies, been translated in over 20 languages, is required reading in many schools and universities across the U.S.

The Absolutely True Diary of a part-time Indian, first published in 2007, is a young adult novel written by adult fiction author Sherman Alexi, who's a local actually around these parts from the Spokane Indian Reservation. It describes life on a Native American reservation to the eyes of Arnold Spirit, Jr., a 14-year-old born with hydrocephalus. It was the most challenged book in the U.S. from 2010 to 2019, for its frank portrayals of teen life. Also earned a ton of national book awards.

All of those are probably worth your time a lot more than go ask Alice. Time suck. Top five takeaways. Go ask Alice when a fake diary helped launch a real war on drugs has been sucked. Thank you to the Bad Magic Productions team for help for making time suck.

Thanks to Queen of Bad Magic, Lindsay Cummins. Thanks to Logan Keith. Helping to publish the episode, designing merch for the store at bad magic productions.com. Thank you to Sophie Evans for her research. Also, thank you to the all-seen eyes, moderating the cult of the curious, private Facebook page, the Mod Squad, making sure Discord keeps running smooth.

And everybody over on the TimeSuck and Bad Magic subredits. And now let's head on over to this week's Time Sucker Updates. Updates? Get your Time Sucker updates. First up, an anonymous sack sent in an anonymous. email to bow jangles at timesugpodcast.com with the subject line of my CSE experience and CSE as in child sexual exploitation. They wrote, Hey, Dan Lindsay and the time suck team. So listen to your short suck about the real global satanic pedophile cabal and the stats in the beginning really hit home for me. I know if you track my emails, you'll notice I often have something to say about most things. I promise I'm not too crazy, just enthusiastic. Anywho, from the time I was about six or seven years old until the summer before I went into 10th grade, I was being on. on and off sexually exploited by my older brother. For a brief time, I turned around into the same thing to a younger brother. I later found out that my older brother

had been sexually abused at a boy's military boot camp for behavioral problems. Now my older brother revealed this to me after I came to him, and he told me that I had wanted it and he blamed me. I took a different route, reconciling with my younger brother, who still rightfully blames me for what happened to him. I just make sure I'm here for him, let him know that I love him, and that if you ever needs to talk, I'm available. My older brother doesn't talk to me because he's a true predator.

I caught him with child sexual abuse material multiple times. I've tried to explain this to our family, but they tend to think I'm just being dramatic. They cover for him. And my mom, anyway, tends to side with him because it flatters her ego. Fuck my dad for different reasons. It's definitely a chain lightning situation. Kids will abuse one another in a chain from the teacher through a series of eventual victims. I'm seeking mental health treatment.

Fucking finally at 39. My boomer parents didn't believe in anything that made them look like less. and good parents in public, and they have narcissistic personality disorders for sure. So therapy was in an enema, in, oh my gosh, anathema. That word is struggle. I struggle with that word.

Was anathema to them. Actual solutions in admitting truth is still anathema to them. So I cut out the toxicity and have an awesome therapist over at the VA hospital in Philly that's helped me rewire my PTSD brain into something more useful.

Anyway, I'm not writing this because I'm proud, but because I want to be able to, want you guys to know, you've helped me through this wacky journey, and a lot of the stats you listed are definitely underreported. Your loyal space lizard, anonymous. Well, thank you, anonymous. I'm sharing this because when it comes to sexual abuse, the stats are underreported, definitely. And because when one child is abused, if they're not put into therapy and don't deal with what happened to them, they will become more likely to reoffend than a child who was not abused. A 2019 study of U.S. federal inmates found that male victims of CSA were more than eight times

more likely than males in the general population to perpetuate a sexual offense and there are so many other studies with similar findings. I felt like the right episode. To share this, go ask Alice, made up some sensationalist bullshit about the dangers kids' face,

but there are a lot of real dangers and sexual abuse is a big one. And sometimes it comes from other kids who have also been abused. It's so tragic. And it illustrates how important it is to talk to your kids, to get help for them,

especially if somebody has abused them, good on you anonymous, for not taking this lightly and for taking responsibility as well. And now, let's lighten it up with this next message from a longtime sweet sucker, Elise. She sent on an email with the subject line of Muhammad Ali song.

And she wrote, hi, Dan. My husband and I grew up in the 1970s, and the Muhammad Ali suck reminded us of a song from 1974 called Black Superman. It's a total earworm. And I've been singing it for a week. Check it out. Your loyal space lizard and Annabel, Elise.

Elise, I always loving you writing. And I did check it out. And it did not sound like what I thought it would. Not at all. Johnny Wakeland sings this. This guy's other singles were Africa Man. You turn me on. Dr. Frankenstein's disco party,

cream puff, and in Zaire. Johnny was a white reggae singer from Brighton in the UK. Not what I expected. Here's a little bit of Black Superman. This here's the story of Cassidy. Clay who changed his name to Muhammad Ali he knows how to talk and he knows how to fight and all the contenders were beat out of sight sing Muhammad Muhammad Ali he floats like a butterfly stinks like a bee

The other guy I'm Ollie Catch me if you can Now that song stayed on the charts For months in the US The UK, Australia and Canada But if you would have told me that

I would think you were joking initially It reminds me in one of those fake vintage songs Which I want to play a little bit Of one of these for you Because it fucking kills me This fake song Called I'm Pissing with a Hard On By Don and the Four Chops

It's like on I don't know if you follow forgotten vinyl bangers, but they do some pretty funny stuff on YouTube, Instagram, wherever. And this one, oh my God, I've shared it with so many friends. I'm pissing with a hard on.

I'm pissing with a hard on. Now one more from Concerned Sucker, Kelly Kipchin, who wrote in with the subject line of get ready for vigorous finger wagging. Dearest kingpin sucker, my affection for you abounds in earnest, but alas, I must wag my weary finger at you. While kindness and truth are your alma mater, I cannot withhold admonition. Why have so many words giving me so many problems today? Admonition. You know what I'm trying to say. Any longer.

Okay, that's all the fancy language my brain can concoct. I said cocked. I've noticed this for a while, but the Salina suck compelled me to bring this matter to your attention. I think you and your lovely wife will find this information valuable because I believe you are doing something you would never do intentionally. On occasion, you inadvertently broadcast and reinforce the stigma and discrimination of people who struggle with mental health problems. The Salina suck is my case in point. Here's the quick version. Violence, abusiveness, and all manner of grotesque human behavior get blamed exclusively on mental health,

as if mental disorders are the direct cause of such deviancy. not. The epidemiology of violent behavior is not fully understood. There are data-informed theories, but the complexities of the human mind and soul are endless. The one and only factor that appears to be somewhat predictive of future violence is a history of violence, not any one mental health diagnosis. Schizophrenia is especially blamed for violent behavior and seems to be the diagnosis that is most misunderstood, feared, and persecuted. In reality, people with schizophrenia and psychosis are considered a vulnerable population and are at great. greater risk to be victims of violence as compared to the general population.

The National Epidemiological Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions, Nisarck, found that schizophrenia and psychotic disorders alone are not associated with an increased risk of violence. Furthermore, major depressive and bipolar disorders are not associated with an increased risk of violence at all. This survey found that what is most contributory to violence is being male, being young, experiencing or witnessing family violence in early childhood, having a lower annual income, substance use with or without mental illness.

In addition, the MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Study, violence and mental illness found that mental illness alone does not elevate the risk for violence. This study found that what is most contributory to violence is psychopathy, not following the moral norms of society and lacking remorse, severity of child abuse, frequency of prior arrests, paternal drug use, hostility, anger, involuntary hospitalizations, violent fantasies about a specific target,

grandiose delusions firmly believing that one has an exorbitant level of worth, purpose, power, fame, et cetera, despite a clear lack of evidence, substance use problems, escalating violent fantasies about general targets. Finally, the adverse childhood experiences questionnaire, ACE, is a self-report that retrospectively assesses exposure to potentially traumatic experiences before the age of 18. This assessment consistently demonstrates an ability to to predict a variety of later life outcomes, including a propensity for violence. It evaluates two broad categories from childhood, abuse and neglect, and household dysfunction. Suggesting that mental illness needs to be regulated is horrifying.

I understand what your heart is and your motivation for making this kind of statement, but this line of thinking is dangerous, stigmatizing, discriminatory, and endorses the violation of a human's rights. Legislations such as this would be persecution at an institutional level. Furthermore, there is no test for mental illness. At best, there are assessments that aid in diagnosing, but diagnosing is as much an art as it is a science. And it's unethical to attempt it without proper education, training, supervision, experience, and continuing education. The primary purposes for diagnosing are to inform treatment and to bill insurance.

It is not, nor should it ever be used for disciplinary actions or to restrict a person's rights. Accurately assessing potential violence relies on objective observations of behavior, not on calling up a therapist and asking for a diagnosis. In short, please desist in blaming mental illness, especially schizophrenia for all things depraved, disgusting, perverse, unconscionable, immoral, evil. You get it. Thanks for all that you do. For the painstaking care you all take to deliver thorough and thoughtful content. It's perfectly clear that you're a solid human, as are your spouse, family, and team. Please consider my thoughts and take it, and take from it whatever seems valuable and useful to you and leave the rest.

Finger wagging is complete. All my love to you, your family, and are weird. Weird-ass cult. Kelly Kipchen. P.S. All my data was taken from the third annual violence prevention symposium on October 5th and 6th, 2023. Yeah, she actually attached it all. As for me, I have been in the helping field most of my adult life. I've been a mental health therapist for almost 15 years. Most recently, I've been crisis work specifically helping people who call OKC-911 that need support for mental health or substance use issues. Oh, I'd love to know what you think of this episode. PSS, while I might know more than the average bear about mental health things. I've come to realize that at the end of the day it's just all shit we made up it could all be totally wrong

Kelly Kelly holy shit that email should go in the fucking update Hall of Fame I love that you didn't just send in an opinion

you send in a mini TED talk with not just a bunch of stats laid out but attached charts and links to study so I could verify that you didn't just

pull that out all of your or pull all of that out of your ass like Beatra Sparks I love when you all share your expertise

sharing factual information is so important important especially in today's age of spin and propaganda i apologize kelly i apologize to anyone with schizophrenia who was listening to the show i did not mean to unfairly demonize you sincerely i had assumed that schizophrenia in particular did make you more likely to commit violent acts and despite how often i researched so much shit i did not research that opinion i was just so sure i was right nope i was fucking wrong uh the studies the stats the cold hard numbers they don't care about opinions. Mine or yours, right? They prove

that. I will do my very best to correct my viewpoint going forward seriously. Thank you again. Your message will definitely shape my perspective. Hail Nimrod. Next time, suckers, I needed that. We all did.

Thank you for listening to another bad Magic Productions podcast. Be sure in rate and reviewed time suck if you haven't already. Still don't fuck your niece this week. If you know, you know. And just say, perhaps, to drugs. It depends on the drug. Depends on the situation.

And keep on sucking. And now one more very important anti-drug PSA. I love these. This one's from Peeby Herman. This is crack, rock cocaine. It isn't glamorous or cool or kid stuff. It's the most addictive kind of cocaine and it can kill you. What's really bad is nobody knows how much it takes.

So every time you use it, you risk dying. It isn't worth it. Look, everybody wants to be cool. But doing it with crack isn't just wrong. It could be dead wrong. Listen to peewee, kids. Don't smoke crack. Don't even try it.

The thrill can kill. They're just out on the screen. And now another drug PSA is playing, but I gotta get out of here. Thanks for listening. everybody.