the drug du jour is oxycontin. Young people here can visit most doctors, complaining of chronic or severe back pain, and receive a script for dozens of pills. They will then sell these pills for an obscene amount of money. Worse yet, they have learned to crush and snort these pills, or inject them, to get an instantaneous high. I have heard the street jargon, but forget what they call these methods of abusing oxycontin. They tend to call oxycontin 'hillbilly heroin.'
The repercussions of oxycontin abuse are often devastating. Kids lose their moral compasses, and decide to do dangerous and illegal things--like breaking into a small local pharmacy to get more pills. The son of a friend is currently in prison for making this bad decision, and he doesn't even remember what actually transpired.
Some years ago, I did substance abuse prevention in this little neck of the woods. Those days, the kids were abusing alcohol and cigarettes. We were starting to see an increase in huffing.
Many of these kids grew up in homes where marijuana use was frequent and 'normalized' by their parents or other significant adults. Their use of marijuana was benign compared to the other drugs they have learned to abuse.
In the 80s, Newton County (where I spent my formative years) was the source of 10% of the domestic crop of marijuana. Reagan's AG, Ed Meese, actually flew into the closest air field to 'inspect' two truck loads of plants, 'confiscated' by over 2,000 federal agents. The locals laughed about this fiasco for months.
The 'War on Drugs' is a thin veneer over a highly profitable means of criminalizing or marginalizing the poorest of the poor. These days, resourceful addicts are using a 'shake and bake' method of manufacturing meth--cheap and fast. That's the REAL outcome of the 'War on Drugs'--cheap, fast, and easy ways to obtain substances that provide an illicit high.
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