Alice’s family is another problem that she is facing. Her family is not very supportive for her. Her siblings think that she is a stuff-up; they don’t even want people to know that they have such a sister. Alice’s parents tried to help Alice to become an educated person, however, they do not really understand Alice and the problems she is facing. They have no idea the amount of stress she is under. Alice’s parents can only tell her off or make her do things that they think is right. By doing this, it only gave her more stress and one more reason to take drugs.
She felt that her parents do not love her and this is caused by the lack of communication between parents and child. Alice’s grandparents are very caring but she can’t tell her problem to them because they are old and probably had enough problems already. [Gramps’ attack only means that he’ll be bedridden for a few weeks, but I’ll have to really be careful that I don’t cause any extra trouble so that they’ll want to send me home][pg29 July 23 entry]. From the quoted sentence we can see that her grandpa had just suffered from a heart attack, so it would not help to tell them about her problems.
Alice is not the type of person that make friends easily, she does not make friends carefully in the corrupted society, and that’s how she ended up taking drugs in the first place with Jill introducing her to the game ‘Button Button’, a game that has 14 cups of drink and 10 of them contains LSD. Alice even lost her virginity because of drugs [pg31 August 6] [Last night a bunch of kids were picked at a party and today they’re blaming it on me. Jan rubbed up against me in the drugstore and told me that this time I wasn’t going to get away with this finking shit. ][pg117 June 20 Entry]
Alice’s friend gave her peer pressures when she quit drugs, they beat her up because she stopped taking drugs and they always try to turn her on drugs again by secretly putting them into her food or black mail her. She felt that she became a trader to her friends. Silly things can happen way a person is on drugs because they have no self-control, that how Alice ended on getting locked up in a mental asylum. Alice did not talk about drugs because she felt that no one would have understand her, therefore she took her Gramps sleeping pills and try to forget about it.
Alice is a victim of her time with factors such as the pop culture, peace movement and drugs that influenced her. If the society stays the same as before and if pop culture has never existed, the possibility of her taking drug will be very low. However, this is not very likely to occur because history cannot be changed. Alice longed to escape at a cost that too great for her own good. The social change in the 1960s had a huge impact not just on Alice but also on the youth in America. Alice is one of the 50 000 youth that has died because of drugs.
