Liberals and other left-wingers in Canada have long been calling for “soft” drugs like marijuana to be decriminalized or even legalized. I have never believed in their campaigns and arguments. To me, deep down inside, the best way of dealing with those who use or sell drugs is the Singaporean model. I have seen enough evidence with my own two eyes to know that anyone who has ever been addicted to drugs, including marijuana, will never be a fully functional person again, no matter how much treatment or counselling they receive.
For all I care, drugs could be decriminalized, or even legalized, because it is not the legal status of the drugs that is the problem, but their very use. Various scientists have shown, and I can attest to their findings based on personal observations, that even marijuana, when smoked regularly, causes irreversible changes to the brain and forever diminishes the user’s cognitive abilities. That damage to the brain never goes away, even if the person has been clean for decades. Unlike alcohol and tobacco, the consumption of marijuana, heroin, cocaine, meth, etc. targets the brain and alters it for good.
Let me tell you about “Ray” (not his real name). Until about two years ago, Ray was a normal teenager. He never got into a trouble, went to school, was quite good at and loved sports, and dreamed of becoming a car mechanic who would own his own shop. That he had turned out so well was no small feat. Ray grew up in a “broken” home, with a philandering father and a mother who fell extremely sick one day, ending up being blind and paralyzed for almost year. The mother eventually divorced Ray’s father, who, as she would later find out, had cheated on her the night before their wedding. The mother moved away and spent several years overseas before returning to Canada.
The mother had no other choice. She was virtually without means, and given her health, she was in no position to seek custody of Ray. So, Ray stayed with his father, who quickly remarried a co-worker whom he had been having an affair with since well before his divorce. In other words, Ray was a textbook case of a lost child destined to end up in a gang. But, to his credit, he did not.
But things changed drastically when Ray turned 17. He had fallen in with the wrong people who introduced him to alcohol and drugs. Before long Ray would not only use drugs, but also sell them, as well as committing a number of other criminal offences. Eventually, the long arm of the law caught up with him, and he, still a minor, was given a short custodial sentence, followed by probation.
Now 18 and an adult, Ray says he is clean, but recent events tell a different story.
Having been kicked out of a halfway house, because the couple running it had their own alcohol problems and finally decided to get a divorce, Ray pleaded with his mother to take him in, swearing that he was not using or selling anymore. His mother, now living in another province and remarried herself, decided to give her son another chance. She booked his plane ticket and made all the necessary arrangement. Later that same day, Ray was reunited with his mother.
Within two or three days of Ray’s arrival, his mother caught him smoking marijuana in the middle of the night. The following day, by sheer coincidence, she got a phone call from Ray’s probation officer back home. It was then that Ray’s mother learned that Ray, technically speaking, had not been given permission to leave his home province, but his probation officer was willing to overlook that “minor detail”.
Ray’s mother told the officer about the pot he had brought with him – in fact, Ray had passed through Toronto’s Pearson Airport and flew on an Air Canada plane with marijuana in his possession, and no one (!) had caught him; so much for security at Pearson Airport – but the officer decided to let that slide too. Instead, she wanted to work with Ray’s mother to see if they could work out a deal that would have Ray go in for counselling near his mother’s home.
Ray’s mother agreed and starting looking for different places around town. She was determined to give her son a second chance. But with each day, Ray, who used to be such a nice boy just barely two or three years before, exhibited the symptoms of a typical drug user whose brain had already suffered considerable damage. He would punch walls and become extremely aggressive and abusive to his mother and her husband. “When I look into his eyes, all I see is evil,” said her husband. “This is not the Ray I used to know at all. That Ray is dead and gone. The drugs killed him.”
His mother had bought him a gym membership and new gear, so that he could go and work off his aggressions. The next day he came home from the rec centre and claimed that his brand-new, 200-dollar pair of running shoes had been stolen. With the rec centre being next to a high school, his mother instantly suspected that her son had sold or traded in his shoes for drugs. Still, she wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, and so she did.
However, things did not improve. When his mother told him it was time to look for a job, he disappeared for hours (going to the movies, in fact). When she told him he had to look into finishing his few remaining high-school credits, he would sleep in until well after noon, and then, again, went off by himself for hours. Every time she tried to confront him about his behaviour and his anger-management issues, he would blow up at her, punching or kicking things.
It all came to a head when Ray made death threats to his step-father. Ray, then, continued to verbally abuse his mother and proudly proclaimed that he, Ray, was a “businessman”, a seller of drugs, and that he was, indeed, proud of his “career”. His mother had had enough. She called Ray’s probation officer and told her that Ray was going to be shipped back home. “I can’t live with this violence, abuse and threatening behaviour in my home. He’s my son, but none of us here is equipped to deal with these very serious issues,” she said after putting Ray on a plane back to his home province.
“Drugs really do change a person forever. There’s no going back once you’ve touched that stuff,” Ray’s mother explained. But she is also disappointed by the support system that liberals (“bleeding hearts”) have set up: “Judges regularly let young offenders off with a slap on the wrist. They put them on probation and into halfway houses and order counselling,” says Ray’s mother. “That sounds great in theory, but in reality, and this is the stuff those judges don’t tell the public, those young offenders on probation have a hard time finding shelter and counselling spaces, because the system is bursting at the seams with all those ‘young offenders’. My son’s probation officer is only doing the bare minimum she’s required to do, because, I think, she’s already given up on the system and my son.”
As a matter of fact, many young offenders like Ray are put on probation only to get lost in the system. Most of them end up on the streets again, reoffending, because even their probation officers are unable to procure shelter and counselling programs for them. Ray himself, in one of his more lucid moments, said that he might have been better off with a prison sentence.
He may get his wish yet. Before being put on a plane back home, he warned his mother that he would get himself arrested if he could not find a place to stay. That proud “businessman” forgot only one thing: next time he is arrested, and convicted, he will be tried and sentenced as an adult. That is, if his anger issues – and drug-induced mental problems – do not get him killed first.
Hearing the story of Ray, I cannot help but feel sorry. He had everything going for him, despite his adverse circumstances. But now he is, and always will be, a “zombie” – at a minimum, he will always be an individual with serious behavioural and cognitive shortcomings. The proponents of decriminalized or legalized drugs do not want people to know this, but Ray’s story is, indeed, typical. Even those who kick the habit never fully recover; the damage to the brain remains forever.
We need to get that message out. People think these stories are just "reefer madness".
Posted by: SUZANNE | December 18, 2009 at 02:52 AM