All
of us, at some time have watched television programs portraying both the dangers
and victims of drug addiction especially for young people. My immediate
reaction: as yours might be also, is to wonder why these victims allow
themselves to become addicts when there are so many public warnings about the
dangers that they face. When we think about it more deeply we realize the whole
sentence pivots around the word ‘young’ and with the word ‘young’ (with no shame
attached to it) we have to couple the words ‘and inexperienced’. In your home
you are experienced in knowing your relationships with your family members and
their requirements. Outside of your home, with other people you are still
finding your feet, as are your friends and acquaintances still finding theirs.
Probably you long for the self-confidence that only time and experience of life
will earn for you, and most of you want to be popular with your peers. For this
reason, most shy teenagers tend follow the ways of the ones that appear to be
self-confident (whether they really are or not). The illegal drug dealers are
well aware of this and know exactly how to exploit the teenagers' general
condition that is a mixture of shyness and uncertainty, bravado and a wish to
shine in the crowd. The Illegal drug dealer no doubt loves his wife, family,
friends and pets, but in his or her trade of selling addictive drugs there is no
room for friends, only victims. I will now offer to you a few facts about these
people and then a short fictional story in which, to help you to understand the
hidden dangers, YOU are the central character.
A
FEW FACTS ABOUT ILLEGAL-DRUG SUPPLIERS AND DEALERS
Any
person., of whatever age, involved in any way in the illegal sale of drugs to
teenagers or to anyone else, is involved in the crime of murder. Why, because
just as if they shot their trapped customers with a gun, they are killing them
with their drugs. The gun would at least be quick and clean, but to be addicted
to a drug is slow death of the most agonizing and degrading sort. The dealer
would say "It's up to my customers, I don't make them buy anything, but this is
a lie because it was he or she who first laid a trap for them. They may lay the
same trap for you and in the story you will see how it is done.
First
of all you should understand that the supplying of illegal drugs is a HUGE,
INTERNATIONAL PROFITABLE BUSINESS organized by ruthless men who never see their
victims. Most of these suppliers are as old or even older than your own father.
In turn it is these drug suppliers who supply the illegal drug dealers
with drugs to sell to you. Next get it very clear in your mind that Drug Dealers, just the same as Murderers,
Pimps and Rapists, do not carry placards telling you what they are. They do not
have claws, fangs or a permanent vicious snarl on their faces. They look
just like anyone else: smiling, friendly, self-confident, and because the big
drug suppliers, that you will never meet, want to trap you they will use drug
dealers of around the age group of you and your
friends.
Let
us imagine that your parents have allowed you to go with trusted friends to a
Disco. At the disco you all are invited to a party at the house of someone you
all know. You telephone Mum for permission to stay out later to go to the party.
Mum says "O.K. but at the party keep near your friends and be home by Midnight"
You and your friends all arrive at the party and soon are having a good time.
Your friends drift away to talk and dance with other friends, whilst you find
yourself talking to and then dancing with a handsome, attentive, friendly and
amusing person, not much older than yourself. He is very likable and you find
yourself warming to him. Whilst you are dancing and laughing with him and his
friends, various teenagers, some you know, some you don't know, drift over to
him and he gives each one of them a few white or colored pills from his pocket.
Puzzled and intrigued you ask him what they are for. He laughs and explains that
they are "Happy" pills to make you feel wonderful for the party. He then offers
you some of the pills whilst his friends urge you to try them, "Don't be
Chicken, they're harmless, you'll feel marvelous, go on, try them" They will
say. You feel confused, shy and flattered at suddenly becoming the center of
attention. It's lovely being popular so you try one of the pills, and yes, they
do make you feel happy and high. You stay conscious but your entire focus of
attention is on the sensations in your head; rather like a walking dream state.
The "Happy" effect wears off before you leave the party but while under it you
feel too high to be cautious. Fortunately, because your friends are around, none
of these strangers have attempted to take liberties with you.
Just
as you and your friends are leaving the party this nice young man will flatter
you into meeting him again for another dance or party. Once again you swallow
more pills, and again you feel happy and high, but now the trap begins to close
on you. After a few more exciting, entertaining meetings, and Happy pills taken,
the next morning you wake up in pain. Your head is aching and every single
nerve, muscle and joint in your body hurts. You take painkillers but they don't
work. Finally, in desperation you take one of the nice young man's pills. In a
matter of moments the headache and body pains disappear. The "Happy" effect this
time is less intense but ‘Thank God’ that pain has gone. For a few days there
are no more parties or pill taking, the nice young man is
busy.
Again
you wake up in agony. You have just one of his pills left. You take it with a
drink of water. This time no happy effect at all but again the pain fades away.
Suddenly, filled with horror, you realize that the pain relief you get from the
pills, you didn't need until you started taking the pills. You, the carefree,
laughing, happy girl, beloved by your family, you are trapped. What happens now?
You now know that life to you means the pills or the pain. This is your future.
The nice young man makes himself unavailable to you until the pain will make you
beg him for some pills. He will then explain that in future, as he has to pay
for the pills he will only be able to sell them to you. He will give you a few
more to stop the pain but will tell you to bring an amount of money next time
when you want more pills. The price will be high for a dozen pills, and you must
have them. You only have your pocket money. You can't ask Mum or Dad, you think
that they suspect something already, and you feel too ashamed and think they
wouldn't understand. But you must have the pills. Somehow you scrape the money
together from pocket money and savings to buy a dozen pills. You are alone in
this and it is Hell. Now you find that the pain is more frequent. This
compels you to swallow these expensive pills more often. Next you start
borrowing money from friends until they get sick of the sight of you. Next you
lie to your parents to get them to give you money. Soon you find yourself
stealing from your parents, from friends, from shops, from anywhere to keep that
pain away, until one day, You have to beg the nice young man for pills while
also telling him that you don't have any more money.
He
then will offer you a solution to (not his) your problem that will
disgust and sicken you. He will offer to supply your pills in exchange for the
sexual use of your body "Take it or leave it" he will say. This is not the worst
that faces you. To have unwilling sexual intercourse with this ° charming
good-looking young man would be bad enough, but he doesn't want your body for
his own use. He has many teenage drug slaves in your position to choose from. He
intends to offer the use of your body to any man, however brutish, of any age,
who will pay the price he asks. By now life at home has become intolerable for
all who live there and you will have left home, leaving a heart broken family
behind you. You will be living alone in some cheap dingy rented room where you
are always on call. You have no choice it is the pills or the pain. You think
that this is scraping the bottom of the barrel, the worst that you face? No, it
isn't, because next, you will find that the pills no longer remove the pain.
They become less and less effective. Now the nice young man provides you with a
more powerful drug that you will have to inject into yourself. This is for his
benefit not yours, to enable him to continue offering your body for rent until
your physical and mental condition makes you useless to him. The injected drug
will remove the pain but continued use will kill you within weeks, at the most,
a few months, and the drug is so highly addictive that you will crave for it. By
now your personal cleanliness, and attractiveness will be things of the past, to
the point where, in your rented room you exist in squalor whilst waiting for the
next drug ‘fix’ or for the next customer as your means of paying for
it.
The
young drug addict usually dies alone, beyond the help of heart-broken parents,
doctors or of anyone else. Dumped by the nice young man into some filthy room or
dark squalid alleyway to die, wracked by the pain, poisoned by the drugs, and
degraded, humiliated, and soiled by misuse. The nice young man has to make quite
sure that any police inquiries would not connect him with the cause of your
death. Meanwhile he will be busy tonight setting his fatal traps at a party for
teenagers.
As
you’ve seen, at the beginning of the story it all seems to be harmless fun to
copy what the rest are doing, but now you know where it might lead you, just
because you didn’t say and mean, “No thank you”. Healthy people don’t
take pills unless needed, and then a doctor prescribes them. In the story I’ve
named them ‘Happy’ pills, but instead the nice young man may call them some
other name, and may offer you colored capsules, or even a powder to sniff into
your nostrils, but no matter what he offers you, the end effect is the same as I
have described, and so always say “NO THANK YOU”
Do
you think that this is grim, horrible story? I promise you that it is a true
story repeated many thousands of times. Each time another teenage girl or boy is
trapped, soiled and degraded, used, and then left to die in agony, fear and
loneliness by these evil men. The names are different but the path to
destruction always starts with something you want to believe is harmless. The
moral of this story could be.........
BE
STRONG-WILLED AND ALIVE. NOT POPULAR AND DEAD.
None
of the story makes sense until we explore the logical reasons for the awful
pain. The normal sensing process of the brain receives nerve signals from every
part of your body, all of the time. To protect your brain from damage by this
ongoing flood of signals, the pain control center in the brain produces a
natural chemical that keeps this activity below certain intensity. In this way
the natural chemical allows every nerve in every part of your body to be
sensitive to the lightest touch, but without this naturally-produced buffer
chemical the intensity would register in the brain as pain from every nerve
ending all of the time. The only purpose of pain is to act as a warning signal
to protect your body. Only when part of the body is damaged, such as a stubbed
toe or worse, is the cushioning effect of the buffer chemical overridden by the
warning signal that you’d then feel as pain. The ‘Happy’ pills, that the nice
young man persuades you to believe are harmless, actually contain a manmade
chemical very similar to the natural buffer chemical produced by your brain. In
fact it is so similar that when taken into your system it takes control of your
brain’s pain control center, which then ceases to produce the natural buffer
chemical. When the effects of the pills wear off, your brain has no way of
controlling and buffering the incoming nerve signals…Until you take another
expensive ‘Happy’ pill to control the endless pain.
Before
we leave the subject of drug addiction let’s briefly explore what might often
mistakenly be thought of as a milder form of drug addiction, that of cigarette
smoking. Once again it all seems very harmless and very adult to smoke
cigarettes, either alone or together with friends, but to do so is to fall into
another trap, only this time a trap to be set by your self, and this I know from
personal experience. Maybe your parents and family are smokers, but you don’t
have to be a smoker as well. Continuous intake of the nicotine contained in
cigarettes is addictive because your body becomes dependent upon its soothing
effect. This means that once you are hooked on smoking, cigarettes become part
of your diet, and you would feel that you couldn’t exist without them. No matter
what else you went without you would have to have your cigarettes. Already many
people have written about the damaging effect of nicotine upon your health, but
there are other unforeseen pitfalls to consider. For example, governments have
always used the tax that is added on to each packet of cigarettes, as a source
of revenue. When the harmful effects of smoking became widely known, the
governments didn’t ban tobacco as an illegal drug, but instead each year they
increased the tax on each packet to compel each smoker to pay more and more.
This means that always you would need to set more and more money aside to buy
your cigarettes. When you smoke a cigarette the smoke has a pleasant fragrance,
but the smoke also impregnates your hair and your clothes so that you would
always give off the not so pleasant odor
of
stale cigarette smoke, regardless of any perfume you might use. Cigarettes have
been described as…
A
FIRE ON ONE END AND A FOOL ON THE OTHER END…Avoid the trap now.