Ten years ago, I retired as a college-level professor and started teaching math to middle school students. As a university professor, I never knew of any of my students having problems with drug addiction. However, in my first year of teaching math to seventh graders, I had the opportunity to meet a student whom I love very much, who faced a drug problem that school year and was able to overcome it. She told me that one of her friends insisted that she take some white pills that she distributed. She suggested that they would make her forget all of her problems, she told her she would really enjoy life, she would always feel good about herself, and that she could stop taking them whenever she wanted to.
After much persistence, she agreed. She went from being a regular student to a student who did not assimilate to anything, who was missing a lot of classes, was always distracted and now had behavior problems and at the end of the year failed every subject.
She told me that when she remembered that incident, she always thought of the biblical story of the serpent’s temptation. She said that who she thought was her friend, just wanted to drag her into a bottomless pit of drug addiction and hopelessness. Like the serpent of the biblical story, her friend offered her many false promises, to tempt her over and over again, until she was able to hook her on drugs. I can hardly remember her face, she told me, but when I think of her, her face is transfigured into a snake.
She told me that she was able to overcome the problem of drug addiction when she realized that her life was in ruins, that everything had been a hoax. She felt had fallen into a bottomless abyss. She told me that drugs had destroyed her life and made her loved ones unhappy. She told me that there was a time when she would think about suicide to leave everything behind. That before she had drugs she had problems, but her vice now made them worse it made them intolerable. She told me she would have gladly given everything she had to have returned to the time when she was a student who was not addicted to drugs. She confided her problem to her grandmother; she told me that they cried a lot together and that together they also asked God to ask her for the strength that would help her get ahead and out of doing drugs.
That is why I tell my students what drugs are, which is the greatest enemy they have to succeed in life, and the fastest way to destroy their future. They are the easiest way to prison, to poverty, to loss of health, loss of family, and finally death.
One child asked me if she could die with one-time use of drugs. I shared what I have read of cases of sudden death, and the more frequent cases of people suffering irreversible brain damage with a single use of some drugs. I suggested he check the internet statistics. More than 55,000 people die each year in the United States directly from drug use and, there are more than a million people incarcerated for that same reason, countless families live with the martyrdom of having a drug addict in the family. We talked more and he understood that drugs were not worth trying.
Drugs are bad for both those who consume them and those around them, they hurt them individually and hurt their families and friends. If someone wants you to do drugs, stay away from him or her, that person does not wish you any good.
If you have fallen into this serious problem, seek the support of your close relatives, your spiritual guide, your teachers or counselors. Do not give up, always fight to get ahead!
