This is my contribution to Miss Queenie’s Command Post.
I’ll try not to drag this out too long, but my intent is to type what I think, as I think it, and to hit the publish button without ever reading what I have written.
As revealed in previous posts, my late childhood/adolescent years were not pleasant ones. Many of the reasons for these awful memories are directly attributable to drugs.
I wont’ wax nostalgic, so pardon my rush…
We lived in government apartments, and in such places, desperation leads to desperate actions.
First, my mother started with pot, and then she built from there. She used assorted and sundry drugs, eventually leading to the sale of said drugs, eventually leading to the terrible day when, at the age of 13, my sister and I sat terrified while watching the police tear our apartment apart.
My sister and I spent the next several hours trying desperately to reach our mother by phone to warn her not to come home.
Because of my mom’s drug use, and subsequent drug arrest, and what she then deemed a loss of income, she resorted to other means of employment.
She started stripping. Of course, as anyone who knows a stripper can attest, strippers do the worst drugs of all…that’s how they manage to get up every day and do what they do.
Because of the drugs that my mother did, and the drugs that my mother sold, my sister and I were exposed to others, mostly men, who did drugs.
At age 16, the feds showed up at our door. They demanded that my mother prove her identity. Why? Because a woman had been discovered, dead, and floating in a pit called ‘Donut Lake’. Her physical makeup was nearly identical to that of my mother, and, if their I.D. was accurate, the body was that of a woman who’s name was spelled exactly the same…except for one letter.
I had to watch my mother prove that she was actually alive.
Why?
Because several of the men with whom my mother had been ‘involved’…the same men who had spent time in our home, had murdered not only this woman, but a young couple too.
Why?
Because of a drug deal gone bad.
One of the men, Tommy Groover, appeared at our home, and it was my mother who convinced him to turn himself in to the authorities. He has been on death row awaiting execution since that time.
Because of the lack of supervision and because of the examples that had been set for me….because of the desperation my sister and I then felt in our need to escape said environment, my sister was pregnant and wed at fifteen. I moved out with my boyfriend at seventeen.
When I was nineteen, and my mother was, again, taking drugs, she and one of her former husbands broke into someone’s house in order to get money. In the process they stole a weapon, and when the teenage boy who lived in the house returned home, and walked in on my mother and her ex-husband, he feared he was going to be killed. An hour later my mother was arrested for armed robbery and was sent to federal prison.
It was around this time that my sister, now seventeen, and already a mother of two, began to do drugs as well. She became addicted, and in her determination not to expose her children to the same life that she had lived, she deserted them.
For the last twenty years, my sister has been addicted to cocaine, primarily, crack cocaine. She has been in and out of prison more times than I can count. She hasn’t seen her sons in years.
She, although only 38, appears to be fifty.
Now, I am not going to claim that the drugs made them do all that they did. However, I am going to say that once their weaknesses prevailed, and they began to do drugs, that they were overcome by the need for them.
I, on the other hand, tried…literally tried, a few drugs, a couple of times. I never cared for them, and viewed my mother’s life as an example of how I did not want to live.
It is the weak, and the desperate, and the stupid who do drugs.
Those who exist in the world of drugs…the users and the sellers…do so as criminals.
It is the law-abiding nature of most citizens that causes them to withdraw from such things.
Saying that we should legalize drug use because it is a cheaper, more expeditious way to deal with the problem is pure and simple horseshit. It’s a little like saying that disciplining a child is just too damned difficult, and that it’s easier to just let them do what they want.
When drugs are legalized, then even law-abiding citizens will become ‘curious’, and will choose to ‘experiment’, and when they do, many of them will become addicted.
And, they, too, will become our problem.
NO ONE…ever tries their first drug and hopes to become addicted. NOBODY ever said, “I think I’d like to become a junkie.”
It is human weakness that leads them to the door, and once they step across the threshold, the door slams shut behind them.
Do not tell me about the world of drugs, and how it’s a waste of taxpayers dollars.
True, too frequently “non-violent” users/offenders are placed behind bars when they should be placed in treatment programs. True, there should be more available by way of treatment for users, but this is a fact: Those who are addicted, are always addicted. And, the same inability to cope with the world around them that led them to drugs’ door in the first place, is still out there, and now…they have to face it while dealing with addiction. It seldom works.
Recidivism is a near certainty.
As long as there are people who are weak, or abused, or stupid, there will be drug addiction, and according to the law of supply and demand, as long as there are users, there will be dealers.
The line in the sand between the kind of life I have lived, and the lives of children who have not, is illegality.
Now…
This is my qualified opinion.
