Watkins dropped out of high school during his senior year, in which school officials distressed by his use of psychedelic drugs terminated his term as student-body president, a position he held in every grade from first through eleventh. Having come to find his studies less interesting than music and marijuana, he became, as he would later write, "a fugitive flower child in search of enlightenment and truth." In the same December 1967 week in which he was put on probation after an arrest for marijuana possession, two friends of his were returned dead from the Vietnam War.