by Matt Baume • Feb 1, 2021 at 11:00 am I'll pass for now, thx. Photo by Alberto Ortega/Getty Images In sixth grade we were visited by a DARE officer about whom I can recall two things: One is that his first name was “Lowell,” which everyone found obviously hilarious; and the other is that everything he had to say about marijuana was extremely funny to one small segment of the class for reasons that I could not at the time understand. “It’s a gateway drug,” we were told, “it’ll get you into the harder stuff.” The student who laughed the most at Lowell was a short kid named Rob who had adopted the nickname “The Cadillac Kid,” after the hood ornaments he was known for stealing. Everything about the DARE instruction was deeply amusing to him, and afterward, at recess, he would go point-by-point through all of the details that DARE had gotten wrong.