LESS JUDGING, MORE HELPING.

There is a tendency to walk past or make comments like “Oh, it is their life and if they have chosen to mess it up, it is their business”. I hear such comments a lot and my heart sinks each time. Individuals make those comment partly because our society has purely tagged drug addiction as a product of loss of moral values and this in itself is not absolutely true.

Drug addiction is way beyond morality, it is a progressive brain disease and just as a number of other brain diseases, the individual’s sense of judgement or self assessment is reduced and sometimes absent. Hence their journey to recovery often begins with those that love them recognizing the promptness of seeking appropriate help.

Quite a number of teenagers began substance use at the time they knew very little. Had their innocence polluted due to ignorance and failure of older ones to guide, caution or lead by example. Parents worried more about the girls having sex and getting pregnant but no one talked about drugs except their peers who had it ready to offer and the media that paints it as chilling. It is true that homes with a more peaceful family structure, moral and spiritual exemplification are less likely to fall victim, however young people sometimes find themselves in complex family dynamics they didn’t choose.

A lot of young people started out from innocent experimentation. Caught the bait to dive farther, losing sight of their numerous potentials, great dreams and the endless possibilities of what they could be or had earlier set out to achieve. Alas, just as the smoke, those dream faded or at best remained as a dream.

Painfully, just as many diseases of the minds particularly in this part of the world, substance use and addiction is often mis-understood and wrongly approached. Addiction is not an event, but a spectrum that spans from exposure to an outright organic/structural brain damage. Hence irrespective of what stage an individual is, either pre-exposure, exposure or at the latter stages, It should be taken seriously with utmost priority.