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Pretty early, if you count the sips and half-glasses of wine I was always allowed for ritual purposes on the Sabbath and whatnot....
My first serious drink was at 13, when I fell in with as bad a crowd as I could find (this being Minneapolis, MN, in the early 1980s, as bad as I could find was not very). It was gin and Bubble-Up, and to me it tasted like crappy 7-Up laced with floral aftershave and lighter fluid. I would not drink again until I was in college.
Even in college I was never a big drinker. I never developed a taste for beer, and I never cared for getting drunk even a quarter as much as I cared for getting stoned (like Manic Skafe said. Right on, brother!). I still don't drink much. I haven't gotten drunk more than a handful of times in the past thirteen years, but I do keep a bottle of single-malt scotch in the house for the occasional sipping beverage, and I sometimes have a bottle of hard cider, or some wine with dinner. But that's about it.
My first toke was also at 13, BTW, and I smoked on and off for the next year, until for various reasons I decided to stop for at least two years, and in the end I didn't really smoke again until college. Then I smoked like a blissed-out chimney for four years, and have since continued to smoke on and off in moderation ever since.
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Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.
(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)
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