Editorial :
Drugs are a Cancer
I was once one of those people that thought illegal drugs should be
made legal, and taxed. People use drugs despite all the government
efforts to curtail such use. The "Just Say No" campaign has been,
for lack of a better word, a total failure. Despite these facts I
now feel that fighting drugs are something as important as fighting terrorism.
In a sense, this is yet another front on the war on terrorism.
Why have I made this change in my personal beliefs? Because, I
now see what drugs to do people. I'm one of the few people that have
not been exposed to drugs. Once someone offered me some marijuana,
but except for that incident, nothing. So, in a sense I've been very
sheltered when it comes to drug use. As I get older, and I meet new
people, I have come to know some people who use drugs. Drugs are
often used as an escape for these people I know. They wish to leave
their lives and experience something else. Drugs accomplish this,
for a brief time. But, once the high wears off, they are right smack
in the middle of their miserable lives. And so the cycle continues,
they feel horrible about their lives, so they use drugs, which makes them
feel horrible about their lives, so they use drugs. And so on and
so on. It is a never-ending spiral of decent into a drug induced
abyss, from which one can not escape.
I have a friend that shall remain nameless. He uses drugs because
he feels his life is miserable. He tells me that they make him forget.
When I ask him what he's doing to deal with his emotional problems he says
that he uses drugs. He is never at a point where he has the wherewithal
to actually deal with the problems that plague him. And so his cycle
of decent continues. He'll never find the courage to change some
things about his life because he never faces them. Yes, some things
are hard to face, but they must be if they are going to ever be changed.
He will never be able to do that. Not as long as he keeps using drugs
to forget his problems. Problems that are still there, and growing,
but that he doesn't deal with.
Then there are those who use drugs and cause other's harm. Like
the case of the woman who hit a homeless man on the highway, only to drive
home and leave him to die stuck to the windshield of her car. She
had not only used marijuana that night, but drank, and used ecstasy.
She testified during the sentencing phase of her trial that she habitually
used marijuana. Often getting high just as she woke up in the morning.
She also blamed her callus treatment of an injured person trapped in her
windshield to not being able to think straight. This woman went through
life smoking her weed, driving to work high, and working with patients
(she was a nurse) while high. Is it any wonder that she was in a
drug haze when she ran over a man and left him for dead, instead of taking
him to the hospital?
The deeper issue is that drugs do alter the mind. To the point
that they have become as dangerous to our society as a terrorist attack.
Because the use of these drugs becomes habitual, the user can not free
themselves from the grip of drugs. They are addicted, even as they
claim not to be.
The illegal drugs of today are so much more powerful than those of only
a generation ago. Their potency is so much higher that users are
either higher, or are high for much longer. Further causing problems
for all of use who go about our lives without a clue as to when someone
on drugs might plow into us with a car. Not everyone that uses drugs
is going to plow into us with a car of course. But, I use it as an
example of what could happen, because it has so many times before.
Drug use is dangerous, for all of us. Not just for those who abuse
drugs, but for those who consider themselves casual users. Drugs
have always been a cancer, eating away at us from the inside. These
days the cancer is spreading as it grows stronger. It is time that
we put our efforts into stopping this cancer. But not by the means
that we have chosen to fight them with now. A raid on some drug lab
isn't going to curve the use of drugs. Ideas have to be changed.
People now believe that drugs can't do harm, manly because of a campaign
to legalize so called "medicinal drugs." But these proponents of
legalization cloak themselves in the medicinal qualities of some illegal
drugs in order to hide the fact that they simply want to use them to get
high, without legal ramifications. It is a deception that proponents
wish to sell us on. It hasn't happened here with me. If anything,
I now see it for what it is, a campaign to grow a cancer deep inside of
us.
