Drug Addiction

When I was in high school one of my old best friends always had a problem with drugs.
Unfortunately were not as close as we used to be, I still feel bad for the guy. I think that a lot of
his addiction problems came from his hard past and dealing with mental illness. When he was
younger his older brother also had the same problem that he had. He could never get away
from drugs. No matter what his parents did to stop his brother from using he’d always wind up
back at it. But, one day was when the real pain began. His brother was overdosed in his bed
and my friend walked in and saw him. He unfortunately passed away and that left my friend
scarred and traumatized. You would think seeing your brother die from drugs stop you from
using in the future but that wasn’t the case. First it started with weed with my friend and that
became an all day every day sort of thing. After that the psychedelics would come into play
and I would see him tripping even in school. Surprisingly he kept his grades at around a 3.5 to
4.0 gpa but for a young kid doing drugs every day can be detrimental. He was also prescribed
vyvanse, an ADHD medication which didn’t help as well. I remember one time when we were
hanging out he decided to take way more psychedelics that he should have and I had to take
care of him for the whole day because he was so out of his mind. He couldn’t gure out where
he was, when he talked he made no sense, and he was basically a baby in a teenage body. It
always made me think why does he do this to himself. What’s the point of making yourself feel
these things. One thing is never enough for him. But, at the time I was naive and didn’t really
understand anything about mental health.

I remember asking him one day “Noah, why do you do this to yourself.”

And the blank response of “I don’t know it makes me feel di erent” he says.

At that point I didn’t understand what he meant but that. I didn’t get why he needed to “feel
di erent” by using drugs but time has passed and I now realize that he was really hurting
inside. Instead of going to therapy, or reaching out to his family or friends about his problems
he would use drugs to “ x” his problems. Most likely the death of his brother brought on a lot
of problems for him that made him start taking it too far. One day my friend took it too far. He
took an assortment of pills and when he was leaving one of his friends houses he crashed his
car not even a street down into a parked car. He was arrested and got charged with a dui. I
wish when I was younger I knew more about the severity of his problem so i could have maybe
stopped the problem sooner but there’s no going back now. Around 1 in 5 teens have taken or
are addicted to prescription medication. This may be a reason of kids are dumb and they do
stupid things, or there could be a bigger reason on why these teens are doing these sort of
drugs.

ff
fi
ff
fi