Gosh.
My littler sister was a 14 year old meth user and
dealer.
My mom was in total denial about it. "Oh, she's just losing her baby fat."
:
And, I've known a
lot of teen addicts--junkies when I was about 16-19 (anyone remember the Black Tar epidemic?), ravers with habits for MDMA/LSD/Xanax/ketamine when I was 19-21. And, there's always gonna be stoners. And, even now, there's an 18 year old that I'm friends with that's hooked on meth, been to jail, been to rehab, laughs at his dad's attempts to reform him.
They all seem to fall into two camps:
1.) They are self-medicating for hormonal psycholocal disorders.
2.) They are using it to escape
something, in an effort to cope with PTSD.
The 18 year old meth addict that keeps showing up at my house (at
ungodly hours
) comes from a normal, upper middle class house. He's of average intelligence, and his parents are willing to send him to college, and I just want to smack him for being so stupid. And, he *knows* he's got a problem.
And, to his parents credit his dad has our phone number, and keeps up with the people that his kids hangs out with. He let us know that he was putting J. in therapy, then he let us know that J. was in rehab, and we were to act accordingly. And, finally, he sent J. to his mother's to get him away from the dealers her in California.
But, the kid's problem isn't the drugs, so much as depression. Even this last weekend, he said that he thinks life is pointless, and why
shouldn't he just do what he wants to do? He thinks that he's ugly, and shy, and being "in" the drug scene makes him feel important. His phone rings when he can hook someone up, and all throughout high school, that
never happened.
So, I'm a firm believer that drug addictions are a
symptom of something larger. A large majority of the stoners I've met are making crude attempts at mood stabalization, and are either diagnosed or unknowingly running around with Bi-polar disorder. I myself had a
huge problem with MDMA about 5 years ago, and I
kept going back because it was actually helping with some emotional problems I had, though it was causing TMJ and probably screwing my nuerological system up (it makes you twitchier than normal.)
I dunno, though. From a parent's prospective... I can't even begin to say anything... My mom had an absolute cow when she found out about what I was doing from 20-21. She's just couldn't get past the recklessness of it, the "wasted potential," and "what if I had died" and all I could tell her is that we do what we have to do.
What I wanted to tell her was that perhaps she should have asked me why was looking for love and the ability to emote wholly in the form of a pill.
I will say, that when I was younger--there's always that friend that's freaked out by your kids drug use. I told on two different people that scared me by how deep they sank into substance abuse.
I was also a snitch for medicated kids that quit taking thier pills and started to act out.
