Since the 7th grade when I received a cassette recorder and a copy of the Fifth Dimension's Greatest Hits album for Christmas, this has always been one of my favorite songs. To my seventh-grade mind, this was a song about building a utopia. Fifty years later, I purchased The Ultimate 5th Dimension so I could listen to this great group. And after three or four times singing along to Paper Cup, it occurred to me it's a song about a man on methadone. At the clinic, the methadone would be distributed in a paper cup. And I'm free.