I hate to sound like Captain Obvious, but college is expensive. According to some study or something, attending college now costs something like a billion zillion dollars a year, and that’s just for books. My numbers might be a little bit off, seeing as I don’t and can’t read, but even I can see college costs too much when I have to sell my plasma in order to buy fresh apples for all my teachers.

Some people cope with the ever-increasing costs of college by getting part-time jobs. However, those people are chumps. Only an idiot would think you could get anything more than a piddling amount of change for doing some asinine task like working at Hardee’s, panhandling or working for the school newspaper.

I, on the other hand, have bigger plans. In order to pay for the skyrocketing costs of a generic college education, I intend to create and distribute my own drug.

Now, I know what you little whine-mongers are saying: “Oh, you can’t sell drugs! That’s wrong and illegal!” Which is precisely why you get so much money for selling them. And don’t worry, I am fully aware of the legal penalties behind selling such horrible yet profitable commodities as smack, crack, crank, blow or sulphate.

That’s the reason I plan to create my own, not-yet-illegal drug. My drug will contain Crisco, salt-water taffy, that blue stuff barbers use to clean combs, cornstarch, Flintstones’ chewable vitamins, iron oxide, lawn mower clippings and red ink. However, the active ingredient will be that yellow crap skunks spray out of their asses at you when they’re scared.

As a side note, I don’t actually know if skunk juice is yellow; I’m just assuming it is because that’s what color the stink clouds coming out of Pepe Le Pew’s ass always are.

I also don’t know what the effects of this drug, which I intend to call skunk, are. My plan is to use skunk as a placebo. If I tell people that skunk causes nausea and dizziness, which it probably will, then they’ll also believe me when I say it causes fatigue, lots of excess energy, the munchies, loss of appetite, a general sense of well-being, depression and dangerously realistic hallucinations, such as those stupid Grateful Dead teddy bears or space coyotes who wish to teach you important life lessons about not talking to strangers.

Fans of skunk, or “Skunkies” as they’ll call themselves, will be able to use it in any of its myriad forms. You can drink it, take it as a pill, smoke it, inject it, snort it or take it as a suppository. The different incarnations of it really won’t make a difference, since as previously stated, it’s made out of lawn mower clippings and rodent secretions. However, I’m sure the Skunkies will still believe me when I lie to them, because we all know how trustworthy drug dealers are.

Obviously, the introductory price of skunk isn’t going to be very much. Even though there are people who inject floor cleaner into their veins just because they want to see what happens, I will clearly have trouble convincing people to voluntarily drink the stuff that comes out of the backside of a skunk.

So to get the word out about skunk, I intend to maliciously flood the e-mail accounts of every student on campus with information on how they can acquire skunk, much like how my e-mail account is bombarded with spam telling me how I can get prescription drugs without a prescription.

Although this is just an assumption, I’m pretty sure most people would be more interested in drinking the putrid-smelling juice that comes out of a skunk’s ass than acquiring any of the other services advertised in spam, such as consolidating credit card debt into a patch that will increase the size of even the tiniest love torpedo.

And then of course there are the typical avenues for getting the word out about a hot new drug, such as giving free samples out to regular patrons of playgrounds and Chuck E. Cheese’s.

This will all change, however, when skunk becomes popular, because then it becomes illegal. I may be getting children addicted to a drug composed primarily of rust and a yellow liquid that looks a lot like urine except it smells a lot worse, but only a monster would dare desecrate the sanctity of our nation’s anti-drug laws.

No. Not even a monster would do that. Only a communist could do something that wicked.

All this drug pushing will take a lot of work, but I know I’ll truly have made a difference when I see addicts in front of crack houses holding a skunk’s ass up to their face and vainly screaming at the exhausted animal: “ONE MORE HIT!”

But don’t think the buck stops there. I’ll also squeeze as much money as possible out of the rehabilitation industry. Just like how I’ll be there when bored college students are watching “Spongebob Squarepants” without any opiates, I’ll be there when they get sick of vomiting skunk-ass oil and whatever the hell else I said was in it.

As you probably could have guessed, the treatment of skunk addiction involves injecting tomato juice into the Skunkie’s veins. It will be just like methadone! And I, ever the opportunist, plan to heavily invest in V8 before unleashing my noxious cancer upon the unsuspecting masses. And then, of course, they’ll be hooked on tomato juice.

There. Now that we’ve all had a good laugh at the expense of illegal drugs, I suppose I should prepare myself for the violent flow of angry letters from recovering skunk juice addicts by apologizing for this column before it even ends.

Drugs are no laughing matter! Except for marijuana, which apparently is so funny that people can’t seem to stop making movies about how funny it is.