drugs

Smugglers

I prefer that term to the one actually used, traffickers, as the term used makes me think painfully of human and child versions of it. Super sore subject for me, which only increases the pain of the actual topic at hand.

Anyway, we crossed a National Geographic show that was a documentary-esque suspense-injected show following federal police at airports in Peru and Italy who track and aim to prevent drug trafficking. At first, it was really cool to see the police work and to work so well. But it eventually just became increasingly sad – all the people involved in the trafficking have miserably sad problems that led them to make the smuggling attempt in the first place. Most of them were convinced by some outside source that it would work and that they would receive enough money from that someone afterward that would solve some major problem in their lives. In a way, advantage was taken of them, and some even were conned into doing it.

These people’s lives are then directed to years in prison, the single instance of drug transfer is stopped, and the origins of the drugs in the first place are left practically untouched. So, it may make things a bit tougher for the drug organizations to distribute their drugs around the globe, but what do they truly care about a small amount stopped at an airport? It cost them only that small amount, and the people imprisoned were no skin off their backs. They likely will find more sad and desperate people to take the risk the next day, again and again.

The cycle is not stopped, only disturbed with a small ripple.

The one consolation I had – that they may at least have a place to live with food and water once imprisoned, keeping them off the streets and from utter poverty – was dashed at the mention of the high likelihood that they might be “removed permanently” by the drug folks and their connections within prisons.

How utterly sad… all of it is immensely sad.

Though it is a new way for me to look at the world, I can see very easily how this very much is the work of the devil. (Yes, that still sounds weird to me, but I believe it nonetheless.)

Dear God, please, help us to heal the broken people. Help the most broken ones to return to you and your guidance. Help us all to repent and to turn fully to you and your will, at all levels and in all places and at all times. We are all in such need of you – help us to hear your call and to respond lovingly to it and with the immediately due haste. Help us, please, to love and to be filled with your love. Help us to embrace your love such that we can always and powerfully reject the devil and his ways. Help us to start to heal your people and this beautiful world you created and in which we still are blessed to live. In your name, I pray. Amen.

Post-a-day 2023

I have never once had a desire to participate in drugs. Never.

Yet, that seems to be more of the odd man out than the average…

I had no idea, growing up, that so many people had such great interest in drugs, even in just minor ones, like marijuana. But it has never had appeal for me. In fact, most drug use has always seemed sad to me, tied indefinitely with the idea of running away from or avoiding life on some level. But avoidance never truly helps in life, not in the long run, and drugs seem to prove the same.

Post-a-day 2022

Wasted

I wonder what it is that has people do the whole ‘hard core party scene’, filled with drinking, sometimes marijuana, and even the occasional illegal drugs.

Is there something we are seeking, and we search in the self-losing experience of extreme alcohol consumption?

Is there something that feels inadequate, but seems to be fulfilled when under the influence of increasingly strong effects of alcohol?

Are we afraid of or hating something in our lives, and we avoid the thoughts of it through alcohol’s removal of clear thinking?

Are we full of worries, and the alcohol pushes them out of our mind so well, we keep drinking more and more, until the law of diminishing return has been ignored so long that we hardly even function anymore?

Is it something else entirely?

I had a brief time of drinking in certain settings as a sort of camaraderie, or a group participation activity… sometimes even as group participation with ‘the cool kids’.

(I say ‘the cool kids’, but am definitely talking about adults… I wasn’t into law-breaking when I was under 21, and I definitely am not now.)

However, it didn’t last very long.

The worst of it, which was really only a matter of being tipsy in certain group drinking settings, not even drunk, was when I was very much hating something going on within that group setting, and I kind of wanted to avoid it while, at the same time, getting to be one of ‘the cool kids’.

(I did have a wonderful time of regular alcohol consumption at one point in life, and I believe the traditional German (and European) attitudes toward alcohol could prove quite helpful to the US… Biergarten evening drinking in summer in Germany is wonderful… but I didn’t even always drink then.

Anyway, the reason I was mentioning the Biergarten is that I do have positive memories and associations with alcohol… I just don’t much care for it.

I can have it, sure, but I wouldn’t be in the least bit concerned if I never had it again in my life.)

I’ve never understood what drives people to the degrees of drunkenness at which they are not functioning human beings, but merely stumbling babies all over again, twenty-plus years after the original state of babyhood…, but I have wondered much about what drives them to such a point in alcohol consumption.

And I’ve wondered, too, about if there is something comparable for me and my life… I haven’t come up with anything, but I haven’t looked too deeply into that specific piece of the idea.

We even call it being “wasted”…, yet do we consider that it could be a small piece of life that we have, indeed, wasted by being in such a state?

Just a thought, but it’s getting to me tonight…

Anyway… happy life, happy night

Post-a-day 2019

College

He had stayed home that night, because his program was intense – he had a lot of work to do. He had been invited, but he didn’t go, because he did work instead. His best friend went, though. He wasn’t in such an intense program, and could spare the night off easily enough. Everyone there had thought that the best friend had fallen asleep. Perhaps he had. Eventually, though, the combination of this and that and ecstasy had stopped the best friend’s heart and life. But everyone thought the best friend was asleep.

He had stayed home that night, but his best friend hadn’t.

Contemplating how things could have gone differently, if he had gone to the party that night, now that is one easy way to go crazy.

So, I don’t.

Post-a-day 2018

Out of nowhere

…I taught dance this weekend. It was utterly ridiculous in circumstance – 11 girls at noon on a Saturday, in the middle of their celebrating a bachelorette party weekend, and in an airbnb house that kind of looks like a drug house from the outside. I had met two of them at the rodeo, and I had offered to show them for free how to two-step (since they’re interns, and interns typically have minimal money), when they had asked where to learn it. I genuinely began the lesson by asking with what level of intoxication I was dealing, and they loved it. (Surprisingly, it was rather low, but they had just had a lazy start to the day, I guess, because mimosas were definitely happening.) By the end of it all, I was clear that it wasn’t about how well they all danced, but that they loved what they were now doing, thanks to me. And, to be fair, a good handful of them could actually two-step (and some even polka) decently as lead and follow by the end. And they could identify the difference between a two-step and a polka. Not bad for the middle of a bachelorette party weekend. 🙂

I really enjoyed it.

Post-a-day 2018

No!Drug!

I see various posters and signs and advertisements all over the place here regarding drugs (and even “drags”), and almost every single one seems to have something about it that portrays the idea of promoting, as opposed to opposing, drugs.

The natural phrasing seems to be, “No, don’t do that. Do this.” And so, we have the natural adjustment in my brain of, “No! Drug!” to, “No, don’t do that! Do drugs!” or, “No, don’t do that! Drug!” (And then, is it meaning yourself or others?)

I know that I am silly. This in no way changes that I am using legitimate logic here, and these posters are kind of hilarious. 😛
Post-a-day 2017