AlannaLouisa, my heart goes out to you over the loss of your only son. It has been two years since I found
my son's body, read the awful facts in the coroner's and toxicology reports and tried to make sense of the nightmare that I found myself living in. It is an unspeakable torture losing a child in any way, but it is a layered torture when they have overdosed on drugs (and I include the legal drug alcohol here). Our sons sound like they were roughly the same age. The difference is that I knew my son was using drugs, had recently become addicted to a legal drug that he ordered online and so it was no shock that he was using. Still, I always had faith that he would regain control of his life and turn things around. Our entire family, right along with my son, struggled to come to grips with the confusing world of the "War on Drugs" and all the fallout of being plunged into the criminal justice system, our own philosophies about use, abuse and addiction, which theories to subscribe to towards recovery and the list goes on. We had lots of frank talk, heated arguments, impasses, breakthroughs, education, denial and more often than not, despair that any of us would know what to do. I know how hard it was to decide how I felt, where I stood, what to believe in etc. while trying to hash all this out before my son died. I cannot imagine trying to do it at all when you are still dealing with the shock and horror of your loss.
I decided, within hours of my son's death, that blame would not be my focus. Don't get me wrong--I fell prey to those thoughts many times and sometimes still do. In my case, I wanted to blame the drug pushing world of modern psychiatry and the big drug manufacturers for the horrendous drugs we were encouraged to allow my son to be a lab rat for at a very early age. I wanted to blame my country for the very misguided "war on drugs" that had made a felon of my son a week after he turned 18 because he had LSD in his back-pack (a slap on the wrist for my generation, a felony for his). I wanted to blame my culture which believes that it can punish away any complex and daunting problem it doesn't want to deal with, thereby incarcerating more people than any country on earth. I wanted to blame a system that offers no real mental health help, only sanctioned for-obscene-profit drugs, and then further punishes those that seek to self-medicate with substances that are often unregulated and dangerous. I wanted to blame anyone and everyone that sanctimoniously blames an addict for their addiction. And to be perfectly honest, I also wanted to blame internet sites that I felt glorified drug use and created virtual cheerleading for very young and sometimes very troubled people,
http://www.bluelight.org//vb/threads/588158-In-the-interest-of-honesty. The problem is, blaming does not lead to understanding. It sometimes prevents it.
Here are some things I believe:
taking drugs can be dangerous/ taking drugs can be perfectly safe.
drugs can be used for good/ drugs can ruin lives
people take drugs to self medicate/ people take drugs to have fun/people take drugs to change their consciousness
legal drugs/illegal drugs is a false construct
using the internet for any number of purposes can be dangerous/ using the internet for any number of purposes can be enlightening and educational
Considering those realities, and all the complexity they represent, how do countries make realistic drug policies? How do parents talk to their children about substances that alter consciousness? How do people make choices about whether to ever try, or not try, anything at all?
I respect your passion for wanting to make the world safer for kids. I want that, too, passionately. I work with children every day, see their vulnerabilities increased by the presence of the web in their young lives and wonder how they will navigate it. I talk to young adults here on Bluelight every day in the recovery forums and I want peace and safety for every one of them. This is a messy, complex world and I would be arrogant and lying to say that I have anything at all figured out. I wanted to run from this world when my son died. Instead I decided to immerse myself with an open heart and mind and to listen and explore. No one should die in their teens or in their twenties or even in their fifties because they decided to take a risk and did not have readily available information on how to do it as safely as possible. People, our sons included, will make their own choices. Harm reduction is based on the idea that providing the most unbiased information possible so that people can make informed choices is the only way to effect their choices positively. Fear has never worked.
I grew up in the seventies and I did view drugs as candy in a candy shop, unfortunately.I feel lucky to have survived my own young life. It was not at all hard to get anything; quite the contrary. The rise now of new RCs is terrifying but prohibition has never worked and it never will. Bitcoin is used, like the internet itself, for nefarious purposes and good purposes. Again, I respect your passion and I respect your vision, I just can't see how the legal/illegal, or prohibitionist paradigm has done anything other than to make criminals out of perfectly decent people. Think about it-- we have had prohibition of every single substance except one of the most toxic and addictive (alcohol) and the legally prescribed hard drugs for years and years. In those same years, accidental overdose on prescription opiates has overtaken cars as the leading cause of accidental death in the US for the first time since cars became widely used. Addiction to heroin, cocaine and meth is thriving and growing. Whole countries are being ruined by drug cartels and the black marketing of substances. Making drugs legal will not solve every problem. It could solve a few. I think it is worth exploring and discussing,
especially in light of the growing number of new RCs that hit the streets every day.
I hope that this thread can be a discussion, better yet, an exploration (as poledriver exemplifies) and not a back and forth of vitriol or snarky comments. A young man's life has ended tragically and his family is devastated. Surely the tone, from all of us, can be one of respect and openness to other perspectives. I never thought that I would miss arguing about drugs with my son but I do. He taught me a lot while he was here and I'm still learning from the short trajectory of his life. Alanna, I hope that you can learn from people here and they can learn from you.
