cannabisnews.com: These Are Your Kids on Drugs!





These Are Your Kids on Drugs!
Posted by FoM on April 18, 1999 at 16:04:47 PT
Source: SF Gate
LAST NIGHT I saw the ad again - part of the clever, $1 billion anti-drug campaign aimed at young people that President Clinton announced last year. A riff on the old "This is your brain on drugs" spot, it shows a teenage girl smashing an egg with a frying pan, then demolishing her kitchen to illustrate the horrors of heroin. 
This renewed concern over hard drug use among the young seems encouraging, but if the message is simply "drugs are bad," it's hard to feel hopeful. For the past three years, I have filmed young heroin addicts on the streets of San Francisco, where black tar heroin is cheap, abundant and more potent than ever. They come from all over the country to take refuge in The City's drug underworld. They are mostly white, the children of the affluent as well as the poor. The average heroin user is about 20, but I've met addicts as young as 14, boys and girls who've turned to crime and prostitution to support their habits. At times, the misery and desperation seem unfathomable. I'll never shake the memory of sitting on the floor of a seedy hotel room with Jessica, an 18-year-old, HIV-positive prostitute, as she shot up a gram of heroin, followed by a hit of crack, followed by a shot of whiskey, followed by another hit of crack. Then she told me how much she missed her mother. Or the time Jake, 20, also HIV-positive, hospitalized with a life-threatening blood infection, sneaked out of the hospital and used his I.V. shunt to inject his drugs. They know drugs are bad. Not one of the kids I talked to was ignorant of the dangers of drug use when he or she began. Heroin simply blotted out a pain that couldn't be dulled or silenced any other way - a despair that, for the most part, started with parental neglect, alcohol- or drug-abusing parents and, often, extreme child abuse. Periodically, a celebrity or the child of a celebrity dies of an overdose and, briefly, addicts are given a face. Most recently, the death of musician Boz Scaggs' son, Oscar, age 21, did that in San Francisco. But to deal effectively with the falling age of addiction, we need to be willing to put faces on all the other addicts: on Jake and Jessica, on the neighbors' kids, on our own children. In addition to the catchy ads, the Clinton administration recently committed another $18 billion to the war on drugs, the bulk of which will go towards law enforcement. This, despite the fact that a 1994 Rand Corporation study found that was the most expensive, least effective strategy. Will increased border patrols help Jake and Jessica? Will a higher arrest rate? Certainly, prevention is important. But it's not prevention to tell kids to stay away from drugs while we ignore the circumstances of their lives. As long as policy makers refuse to back off the tough-on-crime bluster and address the frayed social services net and lack of treatment options for addicts, as long as communities resist looking at what drives so many young people to such desperation, until we look at ourselves as parents - and come to terms with the times we look away from our kids - there are going to be a lot more broken eggs. Get the picture? Examiner contributor Steven Okazaki is an Academy Award-winning film maker. His documentary, "Black Tar Heroin: The Dark End of the Street, was shown Wednesday on HBO and will be repeated at 10 p.m. Monday. 
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