-Painting by Lesley Oldaker, Time to Change
In the year 2017, over 70,000 people died of a drug overdose. This number was just in the USA alone.
It is relatively easy to sit around and judge those people for making stupid choices. It is easy to believe that you wouldn't make those same choices, but is it really? When was the last time that you drank alcohol? When was the last time you lit up a joint to get high? When was the last time you turned on your video game console of choice and lost hours of your life to a video game? When was the last time you turned to a vice to make your life a bit more tolerable?
Of course, you can still sit there and make an excuse as to why your vice of choice is better than shooting heroin into your arm or doing enough cocaine to kill a horse, but let's look at the motives behind the actions for a moment.
At the core of all these choices is escape - an escape from the societal confines that rule our day to day lives. An escape from responsibility.
That, in and of itself, leads me to the first choice one would make that would lead down the path of a drug addiction, and perhaps even to a drug overdose. Every choice a human being has to make is a choice of responsibility or irresponsibility. So let's follow the choice of irresponsibility.
Irresponsibility can be fun. It can be exciting. It can be a lot of things, not least of all, it can be an immediate form of stress relief. Of course, quite often, choosing irresponsibility can lead to things becoming more difficult and more complicated in the future, but it can be what quite a number of us humans must choose from time to time in order to break the tensions of stress.
So what happens when choosing to be irresponsible for your life becomes too detrimental for the future of that individual? Well, hopelessness can set in, for sure. Depression, absolutely. Going even further, an individual may not even be able to see any way to recover from their previous choices in life. Thus, addiction to various substances then becomes a very appetizing means to evade the damage from irresponsibility.
Which, at this time, I will introduce the second choice on the road to overdose - *how* to be irresponsible. We all choose to be irresponsible at times. We all have a vice of some sort that helps us deal with our lives, absolutely. So then the choice to turn to video games, or weed, or alcohol, or diving, or writing, or making music as a vice as opposed to turning to harder drugs is the second choice.
I believe it was the musician Alice Cooper who once said that the problem with drugs wasn't that they were dangerous, but that they made the user feel good. One can argue that the risks of such things as heroin addiction prevent us from choosing to turn to shooting it into our veins, but perhaps it is just because we can't imagine needing to feel that good. Maybe that's all the difference there is between the person who is laying in an alleyway right now dying of an overdose and you.
Thusly, the first choice one makes on the road to addiction is the choice to be irresponsible. The second choice one makes is how to be irresponsible. And those two choices are all that truly separate those of us who run a risk of overdose and those of us who sit on a couch playing video games (or watching movies, listening to music, or whatever else).
-Dustin S. Stover
Comments