Erin Goodburn

Professor Lindenberg

English 2010

8 December 2020

A Conversation on Drugs

I was sitting in Emma’s room when Emily and Hannah bounced in and planted

themselves next to us on her bed. It was cramped; four girls sitting on one twin-sized mattress.

The small talk began. I hadn’t seen or heard from Emily in two years or more. Not that I ever

paid any mind to the fact that she disappeared from all social media and was no longer the topic

of conversation like she was freshman year. I knew that she had gone through something very

arduous and I was dying to know what, but that is not how you start a conversation with

someone you haven’t spoken to in years. We chatted about mutual friends, our first semesters in

college, and boys, of course. Emily always had intrigued me; maybe it was because she

conducted her life very differently from me, or because she presented herself to the world in a

very unconventional manner. Either way, I wondered why I found her so interesting.

Emma, Hannah, and I spoke about our college experience so far. We discussed everything

— our classes, our new friends, and the parties we attended. Emma was enrolled at West Virginia

University, which has a reputation for being quite the party school. She explained how whippits

were like nicotine there; people used them upwards of 15 times in one day.

Whippits are small metal cartridges filled with nitrous oxide, a chemical that is intended

for pain relief. They are legal, so teenagers and young adults often have a misunderstanding

about the dangers of inhaling this chemical. The euphoric “high” from a whippit lasts less than a

minute, but long-term damages can occur when this short-lasting chemical is used too frequently.
The nitrous oxide in whippits can negatively affect some of the most important organs in the

body: brain, kidneys, liver, heart, and lungs. The use of whippits can even cause frostbite of the

mouth, nose, and vocal cords. All of these consequences for less than sixty seconds of a high

seems like a bad bargain; young people, however, aren’t always aware of these major risks. As a

result, whippits have come to seem mainstream and harmless.

Emily chimed in and said that she used to inhale whippits more than often. She said she

had once even used a whipped cream can to get high. All of this new information on such

creative ways to get high shocked me because of the matter-of-fact way that Emily discussed it.

She also told us that our mutual friend did whippits so often that he badly deteriorated his brain.

This led to his overdose from Percocet; the whippits did so much damage to him that he could no

longer withstand the amount of Percocet he was used to taking and he unintentionally passed

away.

The conversation about whippets faded and the topic of college parties arose again.

Hannah told us how cocaine was a popular drug at the University of Kentucky and she had been

offered it on multiple occasions.

“I can’t go to college because I will definitely do Xanax again.” Emily interrupted.

There it was; the reason she had gone MIA for two years. She had been addicted to

Xanax on and off for the first three years of high school. I was the only one in the room unaware

of the magnitude of her struggles. This showed in my face; my jaw was on the ground. Internally,

I began to compare my high school struggles, or what I thought were struggles, to hers. “Why

did she turn to drugs?” was my first thought.

There are a plethora of reasons why teenagers and young adults find themselves using

substances: to deal with stress, family history, genetics, easy access to drugs, mental illness,
self-medication, struggling to find an identity or a lack of support inside the home. Parental

guidance and support are pivotal in the teenage years of development. When a teenager’s body,

brain, and hormones are changing all at once and without structure, drugs can become an

appealing way to deal with unpredictable changes. I knew that Emily did not have an extremely

attentive mother and her father wasn’t in the picture. Had this made her more vulnerable to

addiction?

“Ally would pick me up from school because I didn’t have my license and we would go

to her house. I would take six Xanax at a time and sleep until it was dark outside. Then I’d snort

a line to wake me up and she would take me home.” This was Emily’s daily routine during her

sophomore and junior years of high school.

Xanax is medically intended to help ease anxiety and panic attacks. It is considered one

of the most addicting benzodiazepines available today, and it is all the more dangerous when

taken without a prescription. Dependence on Xanax can occur within weeks. As usage becomes

more frequent, the user’s tolerance rises and the drug becomes less effective. This means that the

person needs progressively higher doses of the drug to derive the same effect. Consequently, the

brain becomes more reliant on it to feel normal. From there, a “slippery slope” develops

involving ever-greater dosages used on an ever more frequent basis. Xanax can impair a person’s

ability to keep their balance and speak normally; it also damages brain cells if taken for a long

period. Emily endured many of these negative effects of Xanax; she told us how she had to go to

court for truancy multiple times and her grades dropped dramatically. As she was describing this

she showed us pictures of her when she was in an altered state of mind, some taken at school.

She looked broken, tired, and defeated by the drugs.

 This posed yet another question relating to her mental health and overall happiness. Even

though she didn’t explicitly state that she was depressed during that time, the pictures spoke for

themselves. Drug addiction and mental health often have similar warning signs: despondence,

irritability, mood swings, poor academic performance, and altered eating habits. Studies show

that a high number of teenagers struggling with drug abuse are also dealing with mental illness.

Decision-making and impulse control are the last things to mature in the adolescent brain,

making teenagers more susceptible to drug abuse and addiction. The basal ganglia controls

“positive forms of motivation... and [is] involved in the formation of habits and routines''

(National Institute on Drug Abuse) but when drugs are integrated, the circuit becomes

over-stimulated which, in turn, produces the “euphoric high”; this feeds the urge to continue

using. With repeated use, the brain becomes accustomed to chemicals and its circuits become

desensitized, making it difficult to feel pleasure when sober. Emily fell directly into this trap;

doing drugs was her form of self-medication until she couldn’t function without them. She

explained how she withdrew from school almost entirely and instead, immersed herself in drugs

and the people enabling her addiction.

One of the most interesting things about the whole conversation was that Emily kept a

positive and joking tone through it all. She almost laughed when she told us her roommate in

rehab robbed a grocery store with an AK-47 while she was on PCP. She said that the biggest

deterrent from relapsing was rehab, not the addiction to cocaine or Xanax itself. While this is

worrisome, it shows how addiction as a teenager affects your entire outlook on life.

Work Cited
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