University of Arizona

In David Sheff’s memoir, the University of Arizona is the setting for a formative period in Tucson, where college life offered both an academic path and a party-centered alternative. The account does not describe the institution’s administration or policies; instead, it presents the university through Sheff’s experience as a student, his roommate Charles, and a social world in which drug use could be treated as recreation, experimentation, or even intellectual inquiry. Those memories later become part of a broader reckoning with the dangers of intoxication and the stories people tell themselves to make it seem acceptable.

Setting and Enrollment

After high school, Sheff enrolled at the University of Arizona in Tucson, a location he describes as bringing him closer to the U.S.-Mexico border. His roommate, Charles, came from Manhattan and had a trust fund. Charles’s parents were dead, and Sheff never learned exactly how they died, though he understood that alcohol and drugs had been involved and wondered whether suicide might have played a part. This uncertainty forms part of the background to their friendship, but the account does not claim to establish what happened to Charles’s parents.

Charles made a strong impression through his elaborate stories of privileged travel and social connections. He recounted Christmases with Kennedy relations in Hyannis Port and summers in Monaco and on the Côte d’Azur; at restaurants, he ordered French dishes and wine with a performance of practiced worldliness. Sheff describes Charles’s stories and manner as contrived to inspire awe. His habits of drinking and drug use belonged to that same display, and Sheff recalls being impressed at the time by Charles’s determination to pursue them. The university experience is thus introduced less through classrooms or institutional life than through a vivid personal relationship formed in its orbit.

A Campus Divided

Sheff remembers Tucson as containing two parallel versions of university life. One was attended by students who took college at least somewhat seriously. The other was the one he attended: a party scene that Playboy had ranked among the country’s top party schools. The distinction is Sheff’s retrospective framing, not a description of formal divisions within the University of Arizona. It conveys how he understood his own student life: as a choice, or drift, away from academic purpose and toward leisure organized around drinking and drugs.

Sheff presents himself as an amateur beside Charles, who did not allow school or other obligations to interrupt his dissipation. Episodes of hangover and remorse could prompt resolutions to work harder, but those resolutions were followed by celebratory toasts with Champagne or margaritas. The cycle makes the contrast between academic intention and actual conduct concrete. A promise to become more diligent does not alter the pattern; it becomes another occasion for drinking.

Charles also had friends from New York City who shared a pink adobe house on Speedway Boulevard, at the far end of Tucson from the university. They were not trust-fund students, but they could afford parties and steak dinners through dealing frozen magic mushrooms smuggled from the Yucatán. Their house and income show how the social world around the campus extended beyond the university itself. The memoir links students, parties, and drug commerce without suggesting that the institution organized or sanctioned those activities.

Drugs as Experiment and Diversion

The intellectual language surrounding psychedelic drugs gave Sheff and his friends a way to distinguish their use from mere debauchery. They read Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan and its sequels, which described a shamanic pursuit of knowledge involving psychotropic substances such as peyote, datura, and psilocybin mushrooms. Sheff recalls that the books encouraged the group to regard trips on mushrooms and other psychedelics as intellectual inquiry. That framing sat alongside a much broader assortment of substances: marijuana, Quaaludes, Jack Daniel’s, Jose Cuervo, cocaine, and assorted uppers and downers. The range matters because the memoir depicts not a single isolated experiment but a permissive culture in which different drugs and alcohol could be folded into the same social life.

Sheff remembers a mushroom trip in the red-rock high desert outside Tucson. A Mexican daisy seemed to change into a man’s face; then the flowers appeared to become angels, before the scene dissolved into laughing English muffins. The episode presents the altered perceptions as Sheff’s remembered experience, not as evidence of spiritual insight. Later that night, after the moon had risen, he considered whether he could climb a ladder to it, reasoning from a book read in a literature class. He abandoned the idea when Charles announced that it was time to go clubbing. The episode compresses the tension in Sheff’s college recollections: an experience that could be interpreted as a search for meaning turns, almost immediately, back toward the night’s social routine.

Risk and Retrospective Meaning

Drugs also entered the pair’s attempts to study. Charles bought them for that purpose, and Sheff recalls that they seemed to help for about half an hour. Soon the two were too high to concentrate on anything except which bar to visit. The intended academic use therefore gave way quickly to another night out, illustrating the gap between the stated purpose of the drugs and the behavior that followed.

The most serious risk in Sheff’s account comes from driving. Charles continued to drive despite consuming large amounts of drugs and alcohol and crashed two Peugeots. Sheff says that, as far as he knew, no one was harmed. He rode in the passenger seat and later recognized that doing so had exposed him to extreme danger. The danger did not appear to stop the pattern at the time; in retrospect, it changes the meaning of the story. What had once seemed to Sheff like Charles’s impressive resolve now looks like recklessness with consequences that could have been far worse.

The University of Arizona matters in the memoir as the location and social frame for Sheff’s early adult life, not as the subject of a history of the institution. Its remembered campus culture provides a setting in which academic ambition, party life, drug use, and self-justification coexist. Sheff’s account moves from the apparent glamour of Charles’s stories and the group’s claims of intellectual exploration to the practical costs of intoxication: neglected study, recurring drinking, and dangerous driving. The university years are consequently recalled not as a single turning point, but as a formative chapter in which the habits and rationalizations of a wider drug culture became personal experience.