[jumpy]

I think that given the chance to do something better most young people will 'grow out' of dabbling with things like smoking weed or whatever. Like most things; once the novelty wears off they loose interest (thank god for mtv attention spans lol).

I do agree that this is not the case for a small group, who sadly go on to become addicts, as opposed to the habitual user who maintains their life and family alongside their indulgence. There will always be those who take it that bit further than everyone else- that relatively small minority that newspapers like the daily mail (eg) would have you believe are victims of the 'evil-gateway-to-the-hard-stuff-ganja' ...that it's the substances fault they became a smackhead and not their inability to control their own personality or circumstances to any real degree.

In 15 years I have seen a few people I know really well fall by the wayside and mess themselves up by becoming involved in the use of 'hard drugs'. No amount of reasoning to the contrary was able to influence them to move away from this end; they just had to have more, of everything all the time.

One of them woke up next to his girlfriend one morning to discover that she had od'd on the methadone he had got off one of his dodgy dealer mates. She'd been dead for about 4-5 hours apparently. Shame... if it were not for his (shall we say) 'condition' the poor girl, who had never touched anything stronger than a bacardi & coke until then, would still be alive today. I cannot imagine how the knowledge of his responsibility for that weighs upon him every day. That he avoided a custodial sentence for supplying a control substance resulting in the death of a young woman is equally heavy on his conscience. And on her family's too I would imagine.

The other had 5 heart attacks at the age of 22, during the early 'clubbing' years at the beginning of the ninties... he just loved those e's and charlie. Fortunately the only person he hurt was himself, if you could call that fortunate. The last I heard he had discharged himself from hospital after collapsing in the middle of the street and is now off that whole scene. For him it was never really an addiction as such, he just liked to party hard all the time.

And not forgetting my housemate when I was at university who lost all of his marbles after dropping acid one night. I still see him around occasionally. Even now almost ten years later he's still not the same bloke as he was before that night. Some folk will say that the drugs did it to him, and in a sense they're correct. But that's only half the story. He was no novice when it came to drugs but he wasn't some kind of raving fiend either. The root of his psychosis that the lsd unleashed was centred around his inability to reconcile his own ideas about life and belief and responsibility compared to his family's strict traditional standpoint on what should make a good Indian son "Why don't you become a doctor, like your elder brother?".

He was constantly being pulled in two different directions at once. Every time he would come home from visiting his parents he was withdrawn and quiet; a far cry from his usual exuberant, outgoing self. I guess something had to give eventually. Unfortunately for him and his friends and family it was his mind.

Apart from splitting up with a girl I was totally in love with, watching my friend die and cease to be the man he was and yet still remain walking around like some kind of dreadful, hideous simulacrum, was the most painful thing I have ever had to witness.
His story is markedly different than the previous two in that he was just a normal guy just like the rest of us, with no compulsive or excessive habits. Indeed my saddest recollection was watching his cogent mind disassemble itself in a matter of hours into something totally unrecognisable, to us his friends, and more poignantly, himself. That he seemed to be somehow aware of what was happening to him and yet be unable to escape his dissolution (it's the only word that truly fits what happened to his personality) was especially chilling to see.


I guess we all take our chances one way or another. But in the case of people who use drugs, the recipe for disaster can be summed up as follows:

"There are three factors to take into account when you do drugs- Who you are, Where you are, and what the ******* you're taking" - Howard Marks.