I have been a little troubled since last week a blogger I read reported that her gorgeous and smart 18 year-old son was in the ICU, in a coma, with extensive brain swelling, fluid around his heart, and lung damage from a long period without oxygen... Following a massive drug overdose, and a assault due to a drug deal gone bad.
Ouch. This is the real deal, with shady people and hard street drugs, an extremely harsh and ugly universe, a life totally diverted to revolve around "the next fix", and a family's life totally put on hold out of worry and heartbreak. Only 18. Oh my. There are success stories of such addicts who get a big enough wake-up call and turn their lives around. And probably just as many stories of people who just can never escape this path of self-destruction... For some reason, addiction stories always have a way of touching me deeply. I'm always asking myself why? How? How did they end up choosing this path, why are they are unable to pull themselves together even as they see everything is unraveling around them? The boy is now out of the coma, and seemed to have pulled through for this time. I wish this family well, a lot of courage, especially...
This post where the mother comes out with her "big family secret" is especially touching: I'm sure every parent in this situation must ask themselves what they did wrong... She blames herself for one thing especially: having downplayed her son's early experimentation with drugs as "no big deal," when it was clearly the beginning of his journey into hell. This made me think about my own experiences with drugs, about my parents' attitude towards it, and about what would be the best way to educate our son and react when/if...
I've done drugs, I mean a little, from 14 to 22. Except for the last time, a bad experience with ecstasy, it never made me feel like I wasn't in control, or that it could be a problem. I started smoking a little pot once in a while because my friends did, but it was never a big deal for me. At some point I started thinking that they were smoking too much, so I just stopped, and gradually lost touch with them. And looking back I'm proud of my 14-year old self, naive, vulnerable, emotionally reeling from her parents' divorce, but still knowing her limits and still secure in not doing what didn't feel right. Even as I later had my partying years and did a lot of stupid things (binge drinking, for instance), when it came to drugs I never crossed the lines I had established for myself: never doing anything that you could snort, and even if I considered that occasionally smoking pot at a party was fine, other than that, never trying anything more than once.
Sometimes I think about it and shiver a little and wonder if at one point I could have slipped... Can anyone honestly say that it could never happen? All around me they were people who have and went farther than I did, although I somehow always distanced myself from them at the time, and none of them went through horror stories that could remotely be compared to the one of that poor boy... When I was 14, for a few weeks I had a little boyfriend who sniffed glue during parties, I mean can you imagine the awful, violent, disgusting, full-of-bad-consequences gesture? A few years ago I saw him at a reunion, and was surprised to realize that he had not wasted his life or evidently destroyed too much of his brain cells at all, because he was doing really well... Graduate degree, amazing creative job for the National Film Board, continued to pursue his music hobby, married with an adorable baby girl. Huh. I guess they shouldn't advertise that to teens who are vulnerable to peer pressure...
My parents didn't know any of that, of course. At the time, I positively hated the way they were totally panicked and hysterical towards drugs. I thought it was only conducive to me rebelling and doing more of them. I would have wanted them to relax and trust me more, but in fact I didn't really deserve their trust. Now that I'm a parent, I'm just not sure what the best attitude is... Somewhere between the world-will-end-if-you-try-pot-once discourse and the let-him-do-his-thing-boys-will-be-boys shrug? I do think most kids do wrong things at some point, and I do think that it's somehow part of the process, and that it doesn't mean they won't become competent adults and responsible citizens.
But. There's a definite danger, there's a definite gray zone. It's pretty clear I didn't, and still don't, have an addictive personality. Despite my dad being a pulmonologist (or perhaps because of it), I did smoke some cigarettes as a teen, mostly in social settings. But when the novelty wore off, I stopped (and it absolutely disgusts me today). Why didn't I become hooked, why did this not lead to a lifetime, really hard to break habit like it does for some many others? I like to have a drink, but never have more than two (OK, three on very rare occasions but I then physically feel so bad it puts me off doing it again for a few years).
Is addiction a true disease, completely devoid of responsibility? If you do have an addictive personality (I'm sure you have all known such people and see what I mean), are you simply doomed? It is in our genes, or in our willpower, or in our coping skills, or all of it? How does it all work?
Thursday, May 6, 2010
On addiction
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6 comment(s):
I wonder the same thing all the time in relation to addicton. I've done drugs, the small stuff....on a pretty regular basis at some points in my life. But, like you, it never took over. I never felt out of control in terms of feeling like I NEEDED more....it felt no different than wanting a beer to go with my burger on a Friday night.
But what makes me different? Why did it happen that way for me and not for someone else? And, most importantly, how can I guarantee (I know I can't) that Felix will use alcohol/drugs responsibly later in life. It scares the shit out of me that he may not have my experience....his experience may be more like that of the blogger's kid....and will I KNOW what to look for?
I can only hope....
Nice post!
I am (as you may know by now) a vivid defender of casual pot smoking, and I ususally don't like the "pot is evil" way of thinking. I smoked a lot when I was younger, still do, and tried some harder stuff. But I never felt that I was close to addiction. And for that reason I usually think it's plain wrong to say that pot is "an entrypoint to harder drugs", which is usually the main argument coming from the people against legalization.
However, reading this kind of story frightens me. I've always been open with the fact that my daughter will eventually smoke pot. But what if things go wrong, just like this poor kid? How can I be sure that it will remains "in control", like it was for me? Do we have any kind of control on that? Is it, like you said, some kind of genetic predisposition? Or is it related to the education and values that you transmit to your kids?
There definitely are addictive personalities. I don't have one though whether that's due solely to my nature or was influenced by the times when I was a teenager that I decided I didn't want to be "addicted to anything" so I made myself abstain if I craved something. And we're not even talking drugs here. It was more like potato chips or sugar cereal.
I've never touched a cigarette except to throw away someone else's litter - they've always disgusted me. I did smoke pot in college occasionally but it never really did it for me. I tried two other "light" drugs once each and was never inclined to go back. Maybe if the hangover hadn't been so bad on the one I would have. I have never once had any inclination to try anything else.
Then again, I dislike being out of control. Maybe that's all there is to it. I hope my (future) kids follow in my partying footsteps.
I also tried many different things as a teen/young adult. I was never addicted to anything. I think there are some things about addiction we just don't fully understand yet. Part of it may be genetic, part of it may be life experience or personality. For instance, I can totally see how a person who had a problematic childhood with neglectful parents could end up on drugs, but some kids with the same background don't. I think some people are drawn to self destruction and who knows really what brings them to that place? My father abused alcohol for years (from his late 30s through his 60s) and then one day he stopped, on his own. How was he able to do this? He had medical issues, but a lot of people who are quite sick will still drink if they can get to it.
What we do as parents does affect who are children become, but it seems it's not the only thing. There will always be things we can't control.
@Cait: I think we have very similar personalities in that regard. I also absolutely hate not being in control, and that's probably a big part of it. And also, for me the hangover/physical sickness is always much worse than the little fun I could have while drunk or high, so it's just not really worth it! Maybe that's part of the equation actually: perhaps it's just plainly less fun for us than for addicts, so we're not really tempted to go back.
Wow this a great post! I've often wondered the same about what causes and addict to become one. Is it just a tendency to have an addictive personality? Or is it that any drug could take over at any time? I've dabbled as well in the past and luckily have never been addicted. I had my favorites but they were drugs I used just in the moment to enhance the experience. Never something I ever needed to do again thankfully.
And it's such an interesting question on how to approach the issue with your kids. It's a tough one. I would think that I would have a more kids will be kids and experiment attitude but horrible stories make me question that approach.
Oh and thx for what you said about the new series. Your so sweet. Sometimes I just like to play around and I never know if I'll end up being successful :)
xoxo
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