Drug abuse statistics count shattered souls like dollars. Each digit is a person, a family, a tragedy. People aren't wired to make good choices about tragedies with mathematics, we need to engage with people on a human scale, make eye contact, touch, hug, empathize. The more in trouble the person is the more love they need, the more support they are crying out for. In this world there are many sensitive souls that need help to thrive. We need to see them as fellows of our kind, ones with gifts from the divine as much as ourselves. When it is most challenging to give love we should be taking that as a signal to give more. Wounds are healed by love, compassion, caring, genuine support. Do that and your addict will find it easier to cast away the drugs.
My sister was always the smart one, the one who outshone us all. In any room she was in she'd be the brightest light, the one everyone turned to admire. She was their first born, and though they would deny it, my parent's favourite. Now I can barely think of her for two seconds straight without desperately seeking a distraction. Last time I saw her she was already dead, though she breathed and shouted obscenities. She was skeletal, her once snug and fashionable clothes looking like they were thrift store cast-offs. It's just a matter of time before she overdoses or some client does her in. I know when that happens the part of me that still loves the girl she was will mourn all over again. I will visit her grave with the flowers we used to plant in the spring and paint in the summer months andI will tell my children how their aunt used to be. I will try hard to forget ever detail of the ghoul she became and how she broke our hearts into ever smaller pieces.
Teen drug abuse was how our society was being knocked down. Who can think of global issues when their child has been stolen from them? The war on drugs had been false for so long, the laws against them were a screen for keeping the money in the hands of criminals. Money, after all, is only loyal to money. Seasoned police officers wanted all drugs legal, to treat the addict as a sufferer not a criminal, to put revenues into the tax system instead of funding the worst in society. Any moves to expose the truth were labelled as a "conspiracy theory" and it worked every time. Until people learnt that thinking differently is good, that problems are only solved by new approaches, that keeping doing the same things over and over is a form of societal neurosis, change was just a dream.
"Drug abuse hotline" - that's all the sticker said, then a phone number in black letters. It must have been on the railings in the park in all weathers, sitting there, waiting for the right eyes at the right time. It was a place the teenagers would find it, there in the sunlight, urging them to reach out and get help. Amber wondered how long it had been there, years most likely, just three little words reaching out to save everyone they could.
Keyla had so many signs of drug abuse. She had become withdrawn, her personality sunk in dark thoughts. Money was disappearing from purses and items of value had vanished. She'd lost so much weight, her hourglass figure becoming more stick-like, skeletal. She wasn't the same girl anymore, like all of her sunshine had been stolen by the drugs and locked tight in a cage of fear.
Sarah had grieved so many times. The drugs had taken him away a piece at a time. Once he had been the boy that held her hand on the way to swings, squealing with delight and demanding to be pushed higher. He had been generous with his smiles and free with his hugs. In his early teens the remoteness had begun and she chalked it up to hormones. That was her first grieving. Soon after that his grades collapsed and she grieved for the future she had hoped he would have. The night the police brought him home with charges of shoplifting and he had screamed obscenities at her before storming into the night, her heart had felt like it was beating in a tight cage. Then his school called to inform her that he had quit, he was sixteen, there was nothing they could do. With no way to break through his silence a chasm opened between them. After a few weeks of noticing her belongings disappearing she began to cry as if he were dead. This could not be her son. This could not be her life.
The clown washed down some uppers with red bull and pulled on his fat suit. Clowns were jolly and fat, in seconds he became both. His face was already made, once he took his pharmaceutical helpers his hand would not be steady enough to do a good job. The only thing worse than being a clown was being an unemployed clown. His face was flawless porcelain white and his mouth made three times its original size in red. His eyes were lined with back as smoothly as if painted by an artist and on his cheek was a glittered star. He grinned into the mirror and the clown grinned back, already getting high from the drugs. He never usually drank but his new girl had given him some gin so he knocked back a couple. After a time he felt his high decrease, he wasn't so happy anymore. So he took another upper. He looked in the mirror again, no grin. His heart rate accelerated in his chest as if it would explode. He became hot and stumbled out into the wintry air, sweating and giddy....
The consequences of drug abuse overwhelmed Mila like a tonne of gravel, pinning her to the dirt like yesterdays news. The drugs took over her mind, drove her body to unconscionable acts of depravity, doing anything to attain her next hit. The drugs decomposed her like a walking corpse, meat on bones, ready to be nailed into a coffin and swallowed by darkness.
Our estate was a picture of drug abuse. Entire families shattered, no-one loving anything but the drugs. Children came home to no food and went to school with empty stomachs. Adults were either listless or violent. Everything decayed: the housing, the streets, our minds. It was a cycle of pain, each generation damaging the next and all for chemicals poisons their bodies demanded. The children were often seized and sent to different forms of abuse in the care system. Hate and fear were all we knew, how could we find love let alone understand how to care and nurture? Don't you need a model to follow, someone who knows how to love and get things right?
The drug abuse counsellor looked like she could do with some speed. She sat there as inspiring as damp lettuce on a dirty plate. She simpered and adjusted a skirt that no amount or readjusting could fix. Everything about her screamed fashion disaster. Now if that was what drug addicts ended up like I'd steer clear of them for life. No thanks. Drugs not for me...
The drug abuse treatment was a joke. It was all about the drug and nothing for problem that drove the teen to take them in the first place. When the soul is arid, when darkness comes and they have no love to ward it off, chemical substitutes are tough to resist. It made the treatment as effective as telling a hungry person not to eat. Pour in the love first, show them how much they matter (and mean it or don't bother); then try your "treatments" and see how much better the mind can defend itself against the addiction. They have to want to live, want to get better, want to heal, and it takes love to bring them to that better place.