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The Other Side of Addiction
How Cool Are You?
The recent tabloid photos of Kate Moss snorting cocaine in an urban restroom were very entertaining to many people across the globe, and maybe even inspiring to those who seek the hip and the cutting edge. Certainly as the poster child of “heroin chic”, Miss Moss has been celebrated, photographed, blogged upon, and written about. In some cases, the rhetoric describing her lifestyle verges on the romantic. The mystery of a young, attractive woman who needlessly falls prey to drug addiction is the stuff of hit movies for screen bobbles like Angelina Jolie. There is something of the tragic hero in the famous and beautiful who can claim addiction to a harsh master like cocaine or heroin. Perhaps it is masochistic voyeurism that leads us to find this addiction fascinating. Perhaps we are just bored out of our minds – a sad state of affairs, especially in a city like New York.
But for those of us who have seen dear friends and family members slide ever further down that slippery slope of abysmal suffering, the scene is not so romantic. Addiction eats away at life, at hopes and dreams and indeed at
humanity. It destroys more than the addict; it breaks the hearts of mothers, sisters, fathers, brothers, daughters and sons; it tears families apart and estranges children from parents, friends from friends, human being from life on earth.
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What All Young Drug Users Should Know
Addiction is not a stage prop; it is not the stuff that makes a person interesting or talented; it is not something to be emulated or romanticized in sleek movies or
photographs; it is not something that anyone should aspire to.
This Morning on a Manhattan Bound L Train
This morning at 7AM, a bedraggled group of young adults, no more than 20 years old, pushed their way into the L train, reeking of alcohol, cigarettes and excess. They were completely entertained by their altered states, loudly bragging about how much they had imbibed, smoked, popped and snorted. They laughed, giggled, made faces at the morning commuters, and acted in the way that many young people do as they push into and challenge the world around them. But to me, it was neither funny nor entertaining, not because I am cranky at 7AM (I will not lie, I am surly), but rather because I know the many forked roads down which such excessive reveling can take a person.
The Other Side of Addiction
Of the people I love most in the world, two are racked by addition. One is a close friend of over twenty years who has peaks and valleys as dramatic as the Colorado Rockies. She is a brilliant wordsmith, a comedienne of galactic proportion and one of the most creative people I have ever known. But the monster of addiction snaps at her heels and howls in her ears, never leaving her alone for too long. Try as she might, she will never be able to control this demon. Living in the modern age is complicated enough and beset with pitfalls that no amount of careful parenting could have prepared us for, but to have piled on top of that an addiction beyond heroic measure is hard to imagine. My friend has learned to stay one step ahead of this monster, but just one step. Sadly, the same cannot be said for my aunt.
Only four years older than I am, my aunt has been addicted to different degrees to several different substances since we were in our teens. At any given time she might be drinking impressive amounts of alcohol, snorting cocaine, raving on the Ex, free-basing whatever is around, or doing crystal meth. No one of these things is better than the others, more glamorous, more s-s-sexy. But somehow I doubt that if Kate Moss had been seen doing crystal meth rather than cocaine she would not have been as well received in her naked addiction. Snorting expensive cocaine seems to have an additional cache, something more primal. On Christmas Day, my aunt was in jail on possession charges. We made the hard decision to leave her there this time.
To see my aunt sliding down that slippery slope and knowing that no amount of conversation,no amount of love, no amount of best wishes can stop her from destroying herself is sometimes more than I can bear. It is heartbreaking. It is scary. It is inexplicable.
When she was young, curly haired and rosy cheeked, it might have been chic or cool or somehow even sexy to see her buzzed, or to have her take a trip on the LSD railroad and giggle all night long in that perverse state between innocence and addict. I suppose that the memory is worthy of a song or a movie script – yes, her story and hundreds of thousands of similar stories. It is now a tired theme.
Think Beyond the Buzz
When I see these young people on the train or the bus or the subway, laughing and joking about how cool it is to drink too much or to do cocaine or some other home manufactured drug, I feel sad. At least one of these youths will end up like my aunt and will break the hearts of her daughter, mother, sisters and friends. It is not that experimentation is an evil; it won't go away, it is part of human nature. But the danger for those who have a predisposition to addictive behavior is that they are opening a very scary door.
In a world where there is so much to stimulate our minds and our senses, many of choose instead to drug ourselves into oblivion, whether to fit in, to be hip, to escape, to drop out. And there lurks that monster that is Addiction, a horrifying spectre that lives inside some of us, and we have allowed it a way out.
Tags:
addiction, hip, kate moss, l train, monsters
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Posted on 1/3/2006
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