A speaker came to the school today for a drug awareness prevention assembly. Now I consider myself to be quite educated about drugs and the importance of promoting drug prevention practices in schools. For the first five minutes of the speaker's presentation I wasn't really listening since he was talking about various facts and information I've heard numerous times before. But then he said something that resonated with me so powerfully. Something I had never thought about before....
"Though you might not think that you are hurting anyone by buying drugs, the money you spend goes up and up the food chain and the guys at the top of that food chain are very bad people."
Bad people? Top of the food chain? Ok, I know that drug dealers are very bad people that spread illicit and fatal substances and target children and weak-willed people but I thought drug-prevention assemblies were supposed to be about the drugs themselves. After all, aren't drugs to blame for drug-related problems? I thought this was supposed to be an assembly where we show our young and impressionable and image-obsessed teenage students photos of meth addicts without teeth and coke heads without nasal cavities? What was all this about fighting the people behind the drugs?
Suddenly I had a flash of a memory about a documentary I watched years ago about child opium addicts in Afghanistan. I remembered it being incredibly gut-wrenching, heartbreaking and powerful. Images of poor Afghani farmers and their families struggling and suffering to cultivate hashish and opium crops started racing across my mind and all I could think about was the amount of human destruction that is tolerated in the world in order for millions of people around the world to "get high".
I decided I needed to learn more. I needed to become more educated about this pandemic. I needed to learn about heroin and hashish addiction among children in Afghanistan...
I began by thinking about my friends; none of whom I would refer to as "drug-addicts", yet the majority of them do enjoy getting high from either marijuana or hashish recreationally I too never thought of those drugs as anything "serious" or life-threatening in any way. After all, they come from nature and don't cause you to become too messed up. They aren't poison like meth or coke or crack or heroin. They make you kind of tired, but that's about it.. Studies have shown that they don't appear to have any long term damaging health effects. So they're not that bad right?
Well, perhaps....but what about where those drugs come from? Especially hash -- the drug of choice here in Saudi Arabia.
As I listened to this drug awareness and prevention speaker all I could picture were small children and their poor families in Afghanistan getting addicted to drugs and suffering to make ends meet and survive for just one more day. I saw children picking the cannabis leaves with their little grubby fingers and rubbing their itchy, blood-shot eyes. I imagined what their homes looked like, I wondered what their dreams were, what their thoughts were....and I couldn't stand it any longer.
Drugs really do destroy people.
Though individual drugs may not cause much damage on their own, the global drug industry is one that thrives on the exploitation of humankind. Particularly the uneducated, the under-privileged and the desperate.
I went onto YouTube later that afternoon to try and find that documentary about child opium addicts in Afghanistan. While browsing the various channels and websites I discovered a wealth of information that both shocked and intrigued me:
The drug trade [in Afghanistan] is flourishing and there is a developing underground epidemic affecting children and families addicted to heroin.
Food is more expensive than opium. So many families buy opium to make them and their families feel less pain from hunger.
Half of all drug users in Afghanistan give drugs to their children.
Nothing. Not a single feeling, experience, moment or sensation is worth this.
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