Some additions! Some of which "counter" it but in a very particular way.
"A girl in my high school once told me I had pretty eyes." Dilworth is an all-boys school. There are a few ways to reconcile this but I think we all know which one it is, considering. (It was a teacher.)
This one's more conjecture but I always feel like John thinking Ken was a creep and feeding him to the dog suggests some things about his childhood feelings toward adult men. That could suggest a lot of things and it's impossible to narrow them down, really, but I suspect he and/or his (later absent? dead?) mum particularly well...
He does mention "talk about a bunch of people who couldn't find someone to buy weed off of."
Someone in the replies also mentioned, Otago has a reputation as a party school.
Twice John compares earth's power flowing through him and feeling a thanergy bloom as drugs being injected into him. Not as him choosing to do drugs, but having someone else force them into him.
We know he drinks, and M— assuming as much is entirely fair. I do firmly subscribe to the belief John very rarely says anything directly false (lies of omission, technical but misleading truths, 'just' agreeing with someone else's wrong guess, etc are a different matter entirely, but he's gotta maintain plausible deniability and the moral high ground, is so extremely autistic, and also by the time he's recounting the story _is part Alecto_) so I DO believe him when he says he wasn't on anything at that time. I believe him when he said he'd never tried crack cocaine.
That said, A— asked if he was taking any Class As and "you know you can tell me," and it's A— who later gives M— whiskey and a benzo (which hey don't do that, but also she accepted, surely also knowing better). And he was a chemist and a very heavy smoker so like. I do think he was probably on a lot. And John might not have joined him on all of it but he doesn't express anything negative about it, either.
At Dios Apate Minor, John drinks less than the others and is the one trying to check in with everyone regularly, worrying about Mercy, reminding everyone to drink water. His really heavy drinking only starts when he gets extra self-destructive.
Another one that's pure conjecture but. John's Nana died of pneumonia when he was a teen. There are absolutely implications of environmental racism contributing to that. But I do wonder if she might have also smoked, considering how much more dangerous that makes pneumonia, and the fact that...
Barring the new babies, and Ianthe later picks it up, John is the only person on the Mithraem who doesn't smoke. Even Mercy takes a drag from Augustine's cigarette at the end.
It feels likely he has a family history of addiction, and there are definitely themes of it throughout. I suspect he's firmly tried to avoid some things, like tobacco and harder drugs, while struggling a lot more with others, like alcohol but also thanergy and various toxic behaviors and even love. Everything he's ever let go of has claw marks on it and that feels like a sort of addiction, too; 10,000 years with someone still isn't enough time. Nothing satisfies him. Nothing.
And then, going way, way back to something that might not seem related at first, but...
Ulysses the dog died from eating too much pizza. I think an older woman probably knew better, but a lonely kid—7, 8, 9?—who also worshipped that dog?
Yeah. I think John learned really, really young that too much of anything, even something deeply enjoyed and given out of love, could wind up devastating. And between Ulysses, his mum, and his nana—was a dad ever even in the picture? did it ever bother him if not?—I think he learned over and over that he needed to cling tight and cherish every moment because eventually he will lose everything. And I think one of those lessons resonated so deeply that it resulted in a lot of denial about the other...
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