If you haven’t ever been there, don’t go there. Not even once.
I had this discussion with my little brother (he’s 22, but still younger than me) about hard drugs and about cocaine in particular. Cocaine is a hell of a drug. It’s a nasty, mean, ugly, disgusting drug that turns you into your own worst nightmare, second only to Meth (which I haven’t done, but my neighbour was a meth-head and I was privy to many of his freakouts). My brother said that he had never done either and has no intention or desire to do chemicals. I explained to him how cocaine works and that every time you do a hit, it will NEVER be as good as the first time you do it because - now I’m no scientist but this makes sense, esp. when my mom found out that I was doing coke for a short time a couple years ago - okay, I told her after I quit, but here’s what she said:
“Jessica, first of all, I am not happy about this, but I want you to know that you are playing Russian Roulette with your nose. Every hit you take prompts the brain to grow additional pleasure receptors where there had previously been none, thereby requiring you to keep taking hit after hit to satisfy the newly-grown receptors. You will never get enough to keep them quiet and you will only want more which will produce more receptors and then when you do finally quit, IF you do quit instead of taking a quick gunshot blast to your beautiful brain and dying, then you will spend a life with all these pleasure receptors screaming in your ears. And think of how that will feel. You think you’re sad now. And believe me, there’s no amount of chocolate cake that’s gonna shut that shit off.”
I quit the next day, well, after having assaulted the washing machine for not cleaning my clothes well enough (yeahhhhhh) and then it all sank in and I was like, whoa, this is not cool. Thanks, mum, I love you for not sending me off to Juvy (not that you could have, I was 24, but still) but for scaring the fuck out of me by using my love of knowledge against me. She has done this with every drug I have either done or expressed a desire to do - “Jessica, did you know that Ecstasy puts holes in your spine? Yeah, it just eats right through it.” Now I don’t know if that one is true or bunk but I really don’t want to find out. Maybe if I was a slack-jawed yokel who was already a functional retard, but I have a pretty awesome brain to fuck with it.
So I carried on the tradition of shock-and-educate by telling my brother the same thing. Thanks, Mom, you’re radical!
