Alright, sorry it took so long for me to post a new blog, but I have been extremely busy as of late. Just getting school stuff done, all that stuff, I'm sure you know the drill. By the way, thanks to my Aunt Dodi for posting the link to my blog on her page, I promise I'll return the favor when the opportunity arises. So anyways, this post is going to be a bit of a tirade against something that has been bothering me lately.
Anyways, if you live here, you may know it, but for those who don't, Winnemucca has an extremely bad hard drug problem among people my age. Far disparate of its population. Some people say this is because we are at the junction of two major highways, some blame it on the size of the town. I don't know the cause, and I'm not going to pretend to. Perhaps later on I will research that a little bit more and post, but for now we will just cover my observations. Anyways, I'm a senior in high school, I would consider myself fairly social, and I will often find myself in places where quite honestly I shouldn't be. Now I don't mean stupid high school parties where bored teenagers drink and act stupid or even the comparably less serious problem of tobacco and marijuana. While that may be a problem, it is a separate problem. I'm talking about the places where the minute you walk in you wonder why you're there. The kind of places where you just don't go in any other rooms except the one you're already in, out of sheer fear of what you will find. The kind of places you stay for ten minutes and that's way too long. Now I know what some of you are thinking, "Of course you're going to think the drug problem is going to be bad if you go to shady places like that, you're observations are skewed," or at least you're thinking that if you think in complete sentences like I do. Anyways, that's what I thought too at first, but oh how wrong we are!
It's not just the shady people who abuse pain killers, eat 'shrooms, smoke meth, pop ecstasy, shoot heroin and do God knows what else (those are just the ones I've seen). It's also the athletes, the normal kids, the smart ones. You know what I mean, the kind of golden kids that everyone likes, that all the junior high kids emulate, that win scholarships and are the pride of the community. These aren't just the high school dropouts, but the graduates too, the ones going on to bright futures. Those of you young enough to remember going through DARE or whatever similar program was in your area might remember how much they stressed not to believe the excuse that "everyone is doing it." But that's just it, in Winnemucca everyone does it. I honestly feel that by not being addicted to anything (with the exception of maybe caffeine but that doesn't count) I am in the minority at my high school.
People chew in class, trip on "e" at dances, and hotbox cars all while I and a few others watch in dazed confusion. It's not that I feel super pressured to do all of these things, I mean, I've held off on constant drug use/experimentation this far, so I'll be alright, and people seem to respect the decisions of people like myself who don't do these things. I just feel like it's all kind of pathetic that people need to take little blue pills to have fun at prom and chew up vicodin to be able to sit through an English class. I dunno, maybe I'm wrong and I'm missing out on some kind of fun, but I think my life is hard enough through the prism I see it through now, without anymore confusing lights and sounds, so to speak. There will probably be more on this later, but for now I'm done.
So there that is...
I love your view point in the last few sentences. I very much agree with you drugs are overly used in Winnemucca and all over the world its something people need to start taking into consideration to change our quickly dropping world....
ReplyDeletei'm not really even saying that drugs are causing the acceleration of the worlds downfall, or even that people should stop them jasmine. i'm more just saying that i'm missing the point of spending life in an inebriated state...
ReplyDeletebut you have to analyze the life of the substance user, because not all people do things like that just to "fit in". There are some who use it as an escape to forget things that have happened to them in the past, to cope with the present, things like that. Yeah, maybe the location of winnemucca has stimulated the drug trafficking, and maybe the size of the town isnt helping either- but they arent just using them to drain their inhabitions. They use them to escape. Believe me, i know.
ReplyDeletemaybe you should message me about this so i can further explain without incriminating myself..
As a mom, drug use scares me most of all. I panic when I think that someday my children might not have the strength to pass it up, or that curiosity might get the better of them. It would break my heart to see my child have to fight addiction - or worse yet... not fight it at all and just be an addict.
ReplyDeleteScary stuff for a parent. Drugs are everywhere and I honestly don't know how to prepare my children for all the bad things in life but to talk to them about making good decisions. Any ideas, since you are part of the generation that is growing up with these issues?