My Kids and their Friends are Dying Faster than my Friends
This testimony from South Florida was published on 6/21/2015.
I know that has lost a child tells me they first used cannabis. The numbers of young people I know that have died that were friends of my children between 15 and 30, including my daughter, all began with smoking marijuana. And their numbers are greater than the number of my friends that have died and I graduated in 1962. My daughter died at 28.
My father was an alcoholic and her father is an alcoholic. Margaret displayed signs that I did not understand were huge clues that her train was running off the rail. Marijuana and Robitussin were the early substances used by her and her brother and their friends.
In total, ten of their friends have died between the ages of 15 and 28. I am 71, and have not experienced the death of that many of my classmates and friends.
Her brother struggles with alcoholism and also started as a teen with marijuana and then alcohol, heroin, LSD, kratom, on and on. He is still alive. But a lot of damage has been done. Delayed maturity is the biggest and poses the main obstacle to recovery, in my opinion.
Were there signs of a problem?
How did I miss the signs? I think there were signs but didn’t read them accurately because she was an honor student and listed in Who’s Who in American High Schools 2002. She was a gifted concert pianist and was fluent in Russian. (See a video from 2001 on the Facebook page of Maven Hembree.)
Honestly, parents please warn your kids. The message “safer than alcohol” isn’t true. If there’s addiction in your family, don’t just warn them about alcohol, because it’s marijuana too and everything else. Margaret began with marijuana four years before she used alcohol.
Their peers’ opinions override your information. I discovered that not only did my children’s friends have more influence but in some cases the younger, “cool” parents were supplying a buffet of recreational substances in an effort to be open and “enlightened” parents. I could not trust the parents. Some parents even knew their kid was doing marijuana and heroin and introducing it to my son. They did not tell me.
A Public Problem of Addiction
The only reason I can think of to legalize drugs is to anesthetize the nation and affect a generation of people in order to influence the fabric of a nation and redirect a culture to create more need for government intervention — thereby maintaining their relevance.
I’m reminded that Aldous Huxley said,
“There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak.”
There is no guarantee people will use anything responsibly. Alcohol has medicinal purposes too. That does not stop them from using it irresponsibly. Studies indicate that 100,000,000 people are affected directly or indirectly in negative ways by alcohol and drug addiction.
Real medical use of marijuana needs to be dispensed as a controlled substance, not a corner smoke and paraphernalia shop.