[A significant rewrite to a published 2012 post. - JK]
If you and your friends are sitting in the patio around the fire pit enjoying a joint as the burgers are sizzling in the gas grill, you probably don't understand why people think that the recreation use of drugs is dangerous.
To many, a number of ruined lives and deaths are acceptable so that you can choose your method of recreational intoxication.
If you and your friends are sitting in the patio around the fire pit enjoying a joint as the burgers are sizzling in the gas grill, you probably don't understand why people think that the recreation use of drugs is dangerous.
To many, a number of ruined lives and deaths are acceptable so that you can choose your method of recreational intoxication.
I saw people die. I saw people who would die soon.
They say that it's not a gateway drug, a drug that gets you in the door to access and use other drugs. A drug that introduces you to other drugs. A drug that introduces you to other people who use and have access to harder drugs. A drug that removes the stigma of illegal drug use for an otherwise above ground person. A drug that limits your social connections to other people with similar interests. A drug, without which, you are less likely to die from the perils of addiction. No, it's not that.
On the other hand, 100% of those people I saw die, 100% of the hundreds deep into the risks and dangers of drug use that I knew, started out on marijuana and soon hit the harder stuff. Would that be a gateway? No, some experts tell me that it isn't a gateway because the rats' chemistry did not change. So I guess it's not.
I saw people die. This is about one of them. Probably a good one.
Anne would come to my un-air conditioned upstairs apartment to sleep in safety. She would show up about every five weeks or so when she could no longer stand the meth induced paranoia.
I don’t even know how it started or where we met. For all I remember she just showed up one day, followed me home like a stray cat. She never knocked. She would climb the stairs like an old woman, give me a nod as she stared at the floor, “Hi,” and then flop down on the twin bed cot in a side room by the large double-hung windows held open by a small paint-worn two-by-two that took the function of a long-time broken counterweight cord. I would slide the curtain across the doorway and leave her alone.
I would come and go into what was a normal life in the crowd I was in with back then as she slept - usually off and on for about three days. She may have eaten some, too - I never could remember if was her or me that messed up the kitchen. If I was there when she got up, I would make sure she had some real food before she left. Sometimes I would come home and she would be gone - no note, but the bedding was folded, dishes washed.
That was the extent of our relationship.
Thin with death-pale wooden skin and cheek bones showing, Anne cropped her dark black hair short. She didn’t tell me where she was from, but a South Dakota accent is hard to affect. I couldn't tell if she was pretty then, but I could tell she was pretty at some time in her life.
Every once in a while a glimmer of sophistication, upper class richness broke through from a spark in her eyes and an almost smile that could have been mistaken for a twitch in the corner of her mouth, but extinguished as fast as it came. I could see it again as she walked down the stairs to leave - in another lifetime she had been taught to carry herself with confidence, privilege, and style. There was a story in there that I never got to hear, maybe I was spared.
Anne belonged to a loosely knit group of speed freaks. A very, very odd fringe of the already strange drug culture. Little food, many cigarettes, no sleep for days created fear and conspiracy plots galore that fed on themselves and grew as the talk escalated. Parked cars meant surveillance; a click on the phone was a tap; crowds meant being tailed, strangers were not tolerated. Trust outside the group was not tolerated either; trust inside the group was fragile, cautious, intermittent.
I came to a quiet thought on a stifling hot day while watching the wasps fly around the un-screened gap at the top of the window in the side room, that Anne hadn’t shown up for a long time. I couldn’t get too worried about the unpredictable, but I couldn’t shake her out of my mind either. A feeling like you get when that rounder tomcat you've been feeding doesn't show up the day after the temperature hits -10.
I remember my friend Jake tell me that he thought Anne and her mischief lived in a two-story clapboard house close to the center of town near the Italian Village Restaurant, but cautioned me never to go there: “Those people are jumpy and afraid of their shadows. You might as well poke a bumblebee nest. They have weapons and the cops have no need of them, and they expect the same.”
I was over that way to buy a used text book and curiosity got the best of me. I went up to the porch that looked like what Jake described and got not just a little bit scared. The faded blue wainscot with blistered and cracked paint was bulging down from the porch ceiling as though it was holding water, but that did not seem out of place for the times and the neighborhood. I knocked and a thin young man with face-gaunt of experience way beyond his years answered the door with a Camel unfiltered hanging from his lips. A smoke stained hand was holding the screen door from losing its bottom hinge. The lines of his face were accentuated by a heavy dark black three-day beard like empty winter trees define the mountain ridgelines.
He looked both ways down the street, checked for parked cars, then looked at me. "I suspicion ya'll don't live in this neighborhood?" he questioned with a slight sign of cautious trust in his eye tempered with that southern instinct to be wary of an unchangeable human nature. His eyes caught mine for a second then went past me, through me, like an uncompleted, compelling thought took over.
“Hi, I’m a friend of Anne’s and I wondered if she was OK.” I managed to say trying to look over his shoulder as he then moved to block my view.
“Ya'll ain't from this neighborhood, I can see. You Jim?” he answered back. The vacant stare from a minute ago looked like it captured a ounce of trust. His shoulders relaxed after he said my name.
“I’m Jim.”
“Come on in. Smoke? All I's got is Camels. They's the only ones that keeps people from bummin' from me. And they smoke good. plus...” he pointed to the baggie of well ground pot ubiquitous in places like these.
His country dialect and language struck a few matches. Some of the country locals in Southern Illinois picked up the bias of the Chicago and other northern city students and took clear advantage of that to make fools of them. Rather than use the standard Mid-Northern English they had learned to pass with when they had to, they would affect their own English to corroborate the city-thinking of them as unsophisticated and stupid.
With that stage set, negotiations would always fall to the locals' advantage. Their "aw shucks" bumpkinisms allowed the unsuspecting to let their guards down, apply the safety, and return to the holster.
With my guard up and weapons ready (never learned where the safeties are), I continued with caution.
I pointed to the short pack of Camels, and seeing it half full said,"Thanks,” We went into the old kitchen and sat. You could tell that the house came furnished, like the other student rentals on this end of downtown. The stuff was expendable crap at the time - today mid-century modern priceless. The inside was dark - the windows were curtained with multiple layers of those thin, patterned Indian sheets that were sold at the import shop where the hippies bought their brass ashtrays and knickknacks.
Surprising clean - no dirty dishes, no cluttered counters, the yellowing of the vinyl due to age, not dirt. Contrary to some current Southern writers, meth addicts can get compulsively active.
“Anne spoke some about you. You were kind to her - she trusted you. You should feel special about that. Those that hang around here see narcs and haints around every corner. Yeah, she about trusted nobody, but she never said where you lived. We all appreciated the care she said you gave her and we never asked about you.
"Anne had Type 1 Diabetes and she spent times not taking her medicine shots. She comaed for a month and died two weeks ago. Her parents came down and took her back home. It’s weird, Man, we don’t sleep much around here and there she was, in a coma.”
It was no use asking for his name. Either it was one of those dumb monikers that hippie herds used, or some other fake name. He smoked his Camel down to about 3/4 of an inch and stuffed it into a surprisingly dirty ashtray filled with angled cigarette butts and their ashes, and roaches that will add to the glow in a hookah bowl when money gets tight.
“The cops don’t even check these things out anymore. They suspicioned we cleaned the house out before we called them. They tested for dope in her system, but they know hit’s hopeless trying to bust anybody. Sometimes I think they wished we would all end up like 'at - all dead, and stuff. Take the worry and effort out of hit.
“Monk and French left after that. I’m the only one left and the others don’t come around here anymore - speed freaks are nervous enough without they see dead people.”
“What was her last name?" I asked starting to put my guard down.
“Beats me, I ain't even sure her first name was Anne. The cops found her parents somehow - you might want to check with them. She started out in schoolin' for a degree down here. Could be she has records.
“Be needin' some crank…? For the studyin'…” nodding to the used blue Norton Anthology of English Lit I just picked up.
I stood up to leave, put my smoke out. “No thanks. Thanks for the smoke… and the info.”
"Here. Hit's just some green and yellows, not electrified crystal. Makes learnin' interesting. Hit's the least I can do for your helpin' Anne and all."
"Alright. Thanks." The unlabeled prescription bottle ended up in my pocket.
The twenty minute walk back seemed short as I spent it thinking. About the others that died or disappeared, the soon to die and the miracle survivors. And I thought about God, Who surrounded me like a cloak. Without authority, I spoke, "Not now. Maybe later. I'm not ready." My words had no range, no echo, stopped short a few feet away, like talking in a padded room.
I never went to the cops or the school and tried to forget about Anne and her friends. I wouldn't have known what to say to her parents, if I found them. And I looked like somebody they could easily blame for her death. I know now what to say, but it's too late.
I think about her, now whenever I read about the marijuana stores popping up in the West. I know I did not have the tools to do anything to save anybody from the lives and deaths they led, or prevented them from getting to that point of no return, and Anne was just one of many horrors I experienced in that dimension beyond sight and sound.
Suicides, faces scratched bloody from the quinine itch, skeleton bodies, weak bones, vacant eye sockets, insanity, family estrangement, and lots of hepatitis. A Hieronymus Bosch world of pain, poverty, sadness. It's the room in No Exit, except you're alone.
It can't be explained how the adventure of marijuana use becomes tolerated by the psyche to a common place that makes the pursuit of greater drug adventures become risk-less. This rarely happens with alcohol - where you just get drunker and try a fruit flavored vodka.
Alcohol removes the fear of the danger to act; while marijuana, inhibiting the action, removes the fear of the adventure of the drug itself. With sanity surviving a session of extremely powerful pot, the idea of something even stronger becomes less fearful. Once you enter the sad world of recreation drug use, you are then put into contact with people who offer you those adventures.
The same person that was right when he told you that all the bad hype about pot is wrong and trying pot is fun and harmless, is now saying the same things about meth, coke, pills, and other stuff.
The horrors that will escalate as a result of universal access to marijuana are far more terrifying than the horrors that we are experiencing as a result of the illegal drug trade. And generally, the horrors of the illegal drug trade are earned by those who we could not care less about, while the horrors of drug progression are placed up the road for our kids, friends, and family.
