Alcohol was commonly available during high school. I'm not even sure if we were explicitly forbidden from drinking during lunch hour if we were allowed off premises. Although it was a goody two shoes school, so it was certainly strongly implied.

Never saw any of my classmates do any illegal drugs, but I'm sure they were, just not when I was looking. Just alcohol.

Illegality didn't start showing up close to home until university, where it pretty much all showed up, right away.

I'm sure a kid could have gotten a variety of things at my school, even from some of the "good" grade-grubbing type kids that people get psyched if you hang with. But not a Class Mascot like me in high school. They liked me, but not enough to do illicit things with. so in college, I learned ten years of stuff in one.

I drank a little in high school, senior year, mostly. And it was all about the wine cooler baby! I supported Bartles & Jaymes. There was also the memorable night when I drank almost an entire bottle of gin by myself. No, I don't drink gin after almost 20 years, why do you ask?

Whippets are so much more available than alcohol -- I mean, access to whipcreme was not restricted.

My school was a much bigger alcohol place than pot. I tend to think that might be true for many high schools (though, naturally not all, as Jesse pointed out above) then and now.

I graduated HS in 1981, and 18 was the legal drinking age. My BFF and I made a big ritual out of getting drunk for the first time, us and two guys we were/weren't dating. I recall pronouncing the wine "soda pop" and picking up the whiskey. My awareness of the events after that is limited to the photographs. Apparently, when I get really wasted, I take my clothes off.

I've spent precious little time where it was illegal for me to drink (or at least where remotely enforced--I'm sure Jamaica had a drinking age, but it's so far down on the list of things to prosecute), and alcohol was always readily available, including at home. We weren't mixing up cocktails when we got home from school, or anything, but my sister was drinking wine with meals when she was around ten. I didn't know people drank egg nog without alcohol until I went to university. Unalcoholic cider was an American weirdness. I'm not sure when it occurred to me that rum punch was alcoholised fruit punch. It was a whole different (lifelong) constant for me.

All that being said, I didn't get hammered until about sixteen. We decided to have one of every cocktail on the menu. Good god, the bed spins. It was rough.

Paled in the face of the binge underage drinking I witnessed when I moved to Michigan, but those relatives are perhaps not the best people to gauge any excesses by. I did feel dirty buying for them, though.

Hamster Hotel lets you live like a rodent

A hamster-themed hotel in Nantes, France, offers rooms and layouts inspired by hamster-cages. Rooms have hamster wheels, the food is all grains and seeds, the water comes out of hamster bottles, etc.

Awww... who's a cute widdle coelacanth?

First photo of baby coelacanth

Above is the world's first photograph of a baby coelacanth, recently taken by Japanese researchers off Indonesia's Sulawesi Island. A cryptozoology favorite, coelacanths were thought to have been extinct for 65 million years until one was found alive in 1938.

A hamster-themed hotel in Nantes, France, offers rooms and layouts inspired by hamster-cages. Rooms have hamster wheels, the food is all grains and seeds, the water comes out of hamster bottles, etc.

The scary thing is that someone, somewhere is reading this and thinking "FINALLY!!"

AIFG!