Since Go Ask Alice is thinly veiled anti-drug propaganda, it kind of goes without saying that drugs and alcohol play a pretty huge role in our tale. Alice's journey into the substance-abusing hippie culture of the early 1970s—she tries everything from pot to LSD to heroin—is a harrowing tale of the cycle of addiction, and the authors pull out all the stops to show us that drugs are bad—very, very bad.
We get to follow along on Alice's journey as she goes from loving her hallucinations and lack of inhibition to descending into the land of sexual assault, homelessness, and eventually death from overdose. Fun.
Questions About Drugs and Alcohol
- There are a bunch of motives, if you will, for why Alice gets so hooked on drugs. Is it possible to rank them in order of importance? If yes, how would you rank them? If no, why?
- If Alice hadn't been innocently drugged with a spiked soda, do you think she would have sought out the same lifestyle on her own terms? Why?
- What does Alice find most appealing about drugs? The lack of inhibitions? The trippy hallucinations? The escape from reality? Whatever your answer, why is this the thing that pulls her in the most?
Chew on This
This story wouldn't work if it were set in the present day because, quite simply, drug culture is too different today.
Alice's introduction to drugs had to be via innocent means—i.e., the spiked soda—in order for her to be a sympathetic character. If she'd just been at a party and casually chosen to try LSD, her story would have a different flavor.