Is it worth it?

What kind of people do you think of when you’re asked about drugs? Most answers would be low life welfare bums, many claiming that they’re mostly in Newport. Which in many cases is true. What people don’t talk about is the people who seem to have a “good” life and everything they could possibly want, because no one like that could ever do drugs, right? “They have a perfect family”, “He’s got such a good life, he wouldn’t do drugs and ruin that,” The NEK can be such a beautiful, yet awfully disgusting place. You see so many faces that look like they don’t need help like others who are addicted to drugs. If you came across a man in a suit, all dressed up, you wouldn’t begin to judge him nearly as close as you would, let's say a woman who was standing behind him in torn up sweatpants and messy hair, because she doesn’t look like her life is well put together. Her house is half caved in with a bunch of kids running around. She’s obviously a druggy. But him, he works late and provides money for his wife and kids. Is he really working late though? Is he actually at the office doing paper work? Or is he selling and buying drugs because he hates the way he’s living. He works too much, his children are out of control, him and his wife barely talk and when they do it’s an argument. They both want a divorce but neither of them will say it. He gets by because of the drugs. They make him feel “good” again. What are they really doing to him though? They may be taking the pain away for a little bit, until it wears off, now what? That pain comes back 10x stronger, so his only option is to take more, maybe something with a higher risk of killing him. Cause then he won’t feel any pain anymore, right?

“It’s not an addiction, it’s a disease.” You hear people saying this everywhere, usually from people who are trying to help someone they care about from using drugs. Or people who don’t want their loved ones being accused of being an addict. I understand that people would rather say that they have a disease rather than that they are an addict, but come on. You all know it’s not a disease, everyone knows that. People don’t choose to have diseases such as let’s say a skin disease, people are born with that stuff. They don’t have the option, they didn’t choose to do something that would give them a skin disease. You chose to do drugs, and you chose to keep doing them, time after time. That’s not a disease. You’re an addict. Using drugs, counting on drugs, and being able to sell this poison to others is not a disease. That is far from a disease, you’re so caught up in thinking that it’s not your fault that you’re addicted to drugs that you find any excuse to make it seem like you have a reason to be doing them. You don’t get a free pass, you have one life that’s it. You can’t choose to come back when you’re gone. You can’t choose to take it all back and start fresh once the drugs finally get to you and you’re taking your last breath without even knowing it. You do them once and nothing happens, you get a good high and feel invincible, so you think that it’s not going to hurt you if you do it just one more time. One turns into two, two turns into three, and then before you know it you can’t go more than a couple hours without it because that’s when you feel like you’re dying. How did you let it get this bad? You were only supposed to do it once and you were going to leave it alone. Now you spend every last penny making sure you have enough to get you through the day cause who knows what’s going to happen if you don’t take it. You’re always wearing long sleeves during the summer around your family because you don’t want them to see all the needle marks in your arms. Or you have to go to the store because you need to get something but you’re gone for hours getting high on whatever drugs you have on you because being sober around your family isn’t something you can do anymore.

How do you think the parents of these people feel, when they get that call. Or when the police show up on their door step to inform them that their child overdosed last night and the narcan didn’t save them. That their child is dead because he chose drugs over them. Maybe he was waiting for them to notice that he needed help, he wanted them to see that he still needed them to worry about him and make sure that he was still on track. But they didn’t.. So now it’s on them that they didn’t do what they “should have done” to save him. Now his death is on their shoulders because they could have done something different, they should have noticed that he was acting differently, they should have made him get help. While they have to plan his funeral, all they can think of is how they could have saved him, how if they would have just asked why he was acting so weird lately, that maybe, just maybe, they could have done something to change things. How do you think they feel. When they have a million people asking them what happened and they have to tell people that their child overdosed and they didn’t even know he was on drugs. It was his choice. It was his choice to put that needle in his arm, it was his choice to snort every last little grain, it was his choice to get blackout drunk after taking all those drugs. It was his choice. It was his choice and now it’s their fault. It’s their fault because he didn’t even think for one second about what he was doing to his family when he was doing drugs. All he cared about was how he would feel after taking them. He was being selfish, he was giving his life to something that was going to kill him sooner or later, no one came across his mind except himself, not even his family was good enough to help him.

So now when I ask you what kind of people you think of when you’re asked about drugs, what comes to mind? It’s not only that girl with the torn up sweatpants and messy hair, it’s also that guy in the nice suit. It’s like that saying you were always told when you were younger, “don’t judge a book by its cover”. But you’re going to judge people, you’re going to talk about people, you’re going to believe what your friends and or family tell you. What you need to understand is that there will always be someone who has it worse than you, so before you sit there and judge them on their decisions, being bad or good, why don’t you step up and do something to help. Don’t let the nasty society we live in be the reason why you feel you can’t help someone or you can’t get help yourself. Be the change we need, take the chance to help someone who needs it.