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Drugculture in NYC
Before I went to the USA I had never been much confrontated with the problem of drugabuse. Of course I was in touch with Europe's legal drug alcohol before and nicotine addicts are found all over the place. But that was it. Of course i had heard of heroine, exctasy or marijuana before. But all I knew was drugs are bad! Dont ever get in touch with them, they will destroy your life. That's just about it I thought and as long as I would stay away from them I won't have to deal with that problem. Well, what I didn't expect was that living as a teenager in NYC it's almost impossible to prevent any contact with these substances.
I don't mean that every person or every juvenile I met there did drugs, just that it's hard to find people who don't at least have friends who tried a lot or are addicted to some kind of drugs. It's a lot harder for teenagers in the States to get alcohol than to get marijuana and the scale up. Most people I knew started out with weed. I wouldn't necessarily say that smoking a joint leads you on to do harder drugs but it provides entry to the drugscene, to dealers and a certain circle of friends. I don't think that marijuana is not a common drug in Austria too, but the step of doing harder drugs in NY is definitely way smaller.
There's a different kind of awareness towards what these kind of substances can do to you here. In NY juveniles often underestimate or simply dont know how toxic these pills that friends pass on to them really are and what they can do to their bodies and minds. .
Usually the first step is smoking weed, later eating mushrooms, tripping on Acid and LSD and then all kinds of other synthetics or medicamention like anti deppresive pills follow, the next harder step is crack, coke and heroine, and other death drugs finish the scale.
There are different kinds of motivations behind young people to try or do drugs on a regular basis. What I believe is the most harmless reason and the most unlikely to really get addicted is being curious or wanting to experience a special kind of entertainment for some time.
It's also used to gain mind opening experiences. The problem is that it just seems to get you closer to a certain surreality, the truth is though that drugs won't help you understand god and they will confuse yourself more than helping you to comprehense. Drugs confuse your system and your brain which makes you think you understand things on a higher level.
And then of course people use drugs to escape. To escape their problems, their frsutration, their daily lives. If you are a drugabuser of the last category you're most likely to get addicted because you won't be able to bear reality any longer and at somepoint you won't care about your life anymore. Death seems nicer and death during a beautiful dream even more seductive.
During my stay I have been confrontated with people and friends from all categories.
FATE OF MY FRIEND
The most miserable fate of people I called my friends had a young very talented, extraordinarily sensitive guy , smart too with an intersting cynical kind of humor.
He came from Brooklyn and lived alone with his mom, a secretary who worked from 8 to 6 to be able to keep her small family alive. He was a poor bored teenager, who grew up in not exactly what you would call a nice neighbourhood.
When he was 6 or 7 he was regularily molested by his mother's recent boyfriend.
This is something I just found out a couple of weeks ago myself and it gave me another reason to understand why he got addicted to drugs later. He remembered waking up sucking this guys' penis almost every night. And his mother knew about it, which is something he never forgave her for. He first started to drink alcohol on a regular basis with his mother's landlord at the age of ten. His friends and him started smoking weed when they were around eleven, the most common age to start toking there actually. First only on parties and weekends, later alone in his room, whenever he wanted to get away from his life that seemed not to have the brightest future. At the age of 13 he discovered more effective drugs, LSD, Acid, Exctasy, finally coke. His best friend at that time had spend 10000$ on coke in a week!
He had inherited a small fortune from his father who died when he was 12, but he had spent it all by the time he was of age.
After doing Coke it is impossible to get up in the morning and to go to school, so my friend didn't come and was bored again. He failed his classes and he was convinced now of never going to make anything out of his life. He got kicked out of school later which made things worse and worse, his mom probably knew about his addiction but she gave him money everytime he asked her for some. She was scared that if she refuses, he'll leave her and he's gonna get his money from other sources. Besides I'm sure that her bad concscience about the past played an important role too.
I remember this day, when he told us he wanted to quit everything, and the two days he stayed clean he was a different person. I had never seen him that happy before.
But of course it didn't work out. I had to leave. Our joke was " you better still be alive when I come back visiting" and he was smiling.
But what I heard about him while I was back in Vienna, more than took me the hope of seeing him again. He did more drugs than ever and his dealers started to beat him up because he couldn't pay them anymore and was in debts. He finally ended up in the hospital, with broken ribbs and a heavy concussion. I guess that was the point when he realized he can't go on like that and he decided to go to rehab. From that point on everything sounds like a movie happy ending. He went to rehab everyday, built up a whole new circle of friends there and broke every contact with his old drugcircle, he started school again and got into an art programm and he started working out to get his body in shape. Its very rare that people in his position have the willpower to actually go to the AA or organisations like that. It's even rare that how it was in his case he admitted his addiction towards himself and that he wanted to change something about it. Another important role was definitely his mother, who isn't a very strict person, but she loves and cares about him and he knows that. Even though he hated her for some things that she permitted in the past he knew that there was at least somebody out there who was really concerned about his life.
When I returned to NY last summer he looked good. He had gained a lot of selfesteem and some brand new tatoos. "For every 6 months I'm clean im getting a new one. " He explained to me proudly. "I think tatoos are my new addiction now, wow I think I am a natural addictive person, everything I start I get addicted to" he added a little worried but with a wide grin on his face. He told me about rehab and I learned that it's not done with maybe a year of going to the meetings. During the first 6months he had to go there everyday, he's slowly gonna cut down but it will be a lifelong struggle not lapsing back into the drugconsumption.
I will never forget him or our unique kind of friendship. We've been in the same artclass while I attended La Guardia Highschool and he was always amazed about how innocent I was. "You're coming from Happyland Katrine, you're like an Alien in my world, I dont know how you could ever understand where I am coming from" He was so right, I never could understand it and I probably never will. This young man is one of the most amazing people I have met in my life. His faith and strenght is incredible. I am immensly proud, that I can call him my friend, that I got to know and to love him and gained a little more insight on what it means to depend on drugs.
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