Reflections for a Sunday: Brokenhearted

The powers that be want us addicted one way or the other and they sell us the drugs, either on the streets or through doctors and psychiatrists.

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I try to write something inspiring at least every other Sunday. I confess I’m having a hard time today.

Yesterday I went to the memorial of yet another friend of my two sons. This young man, he must have been 32 or thereabouts, was a good friend of my older son, Harry. Like so many others, he died of a drug overdose. Between the two of them, my sons must know between 25 to 30 friends or acquaintances from school days that have died either from a drug overdose or suicide.

As a kid, Jake was one of the many youths who would come and crash at my home. Harry was always inviting his friends over and he had a lot of them. They’d do music together. They were artistic ones who didn’t fit into the school system. The kids with busy minds who couldn’t sit still, the ones the system wanted to put on drugs to sedate them, to destroy their natural wild spirits. I’ve always said if Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn were alive today, they’d both be on Ritalin and probably in and out of juvenile detention facilities. They’d end up drug addicts and criminals for sure.

I was a struggling single mom living in an apartment with my two teenage sons. My daughter was already in college. I never turned any kids away, no matter how many times they emptied my refrigerator. They slept on the sofa and on the floor. Sometimes I’d come home from the gym where I worked as a trainer and I’d sit in my car, not wanting to get out, wondering how many kids were inside my apartment that night. I often thought, I shouldn’t let them in. But I did.

Years later, many have come back to say thank you for never turning them away. If I hadn’t let them in, they wouldn’t have had anywhere to go. Some have said, honestly, they don’t know what would have happened to them. At the memorial, I heard more than once, oh, yeah, you’re the mom who had that apartment.

Just days before he died, Jake had come to visit Harry and his girlfriend. He’d been depressed and my son had done his best to cheer him up. You always wonder, is there something more I could have done? But really, there isn’t. Each of us has our own journey and we are responsible for it. Jake had suffered a lot. Not only the drugs that had captured him as a kid, but three years ago, he’d been in a horrible motorcycle accident and had almost died. Of course, they’d put him on pain medication. Ultimately the deeper pain can never be taken away by drugs.

Danny, the best friend of my younger son Max, overdosed three years ago just before Christmas. Christmas is forever ruined for Max. He will always mourn his best friend. The sweetest, kindest young man who, no matter how hard he tried, just couldn’t keep fighting any longer. My heart is so heavy. Danny used to call me his mom. His own mom had abandoned him as a child, just up and left.

The world can look very beautiful on the surface, especially in Tinsel Town, but underneath it can be hell. We deny it, we cover it up with lots of shiny distractions, but it’s there, and we need to face it. It’s not just going to magically disappear on its own.

I will never forget Lena. I wrote about her in The Devil's Playground.

In my essay, I describe how Lena’s mom, Wanda found her daughter in what is known as a “traphouse” in the San Fernando Valley:

It was past midnight when Wanda showed up to try and save her daughter. She banged on the front door and then she just walked in. It wasn’t even locked. She found Deadbody in the kitchen. When she asked where Lena was, he pointed a long skinny arm toward the basement door. And so, Wanda descended into hell.

The smell hit her first, a vile stench of urine and feces.

Through the haze she saw graffitied walls that looked as if they were dripping blood and vomit. Sheets on strings divided the space into six partitions. Bodies lay or sat slumped on filthy mattresses, some writhing in sex or drug induced nightmares. Wanda searched until she found Lena, pulling her up, just a skeleton really, nothing more.

It took Wanda’s breath away to hold her daughter like that. What had happened? At what exact point in time had Lena lost her joy, her wit, her intellectual curiosity? When had she stopped being Lena and become Cemetery Girl, inspired by an ICP song where every night is haunted?

The only way Wanda could get her daughter out was to buy her forty dollars of heroin.

“You never imagine, holding your newborn baby in your arms, that one day you’ll be making a forty-dollar deal with the devil.”

Over the next nine months, Lena was arrested twice. Although the court ordered her taken straight from jail to rehab, she was let out both times back onto the streets.

Eventually, Lena ended up in an alley with all her possessions stolen. She called her dad and went to his house to detox.

And there, Lena came to the end of the hard road. On December 6, 2014, Lena died. Not from a heroin overdose as Wanda had always feared, but from meth. Her body had suffered too much abuse and her heart gave out.

Wanda tells me, “After I found out she was dead I stayed in my house, awake, for four days. Sometimes, I would find myself just standing there and I couldn’t remember why. No family came to help me. I was shunned because my daughter was an addict. And I was punished because she died.”

If you are the parent of a child with a drug problem, a stigma is attached to you. You must be a bad parent. It must be your fault. Parents with “good” kids don’t want to be tarnished by you. It’s a lonely place to be.

I hate drugs. I hate the legal kind and the illegal kind. They are both the same. And yes, there are some very good reasons to take drugs, but I’m not talking about that. The powers that be want us addicted one way or the other and they sell us the drugs, either on the streets or through doctors and psychiatrists.

I’m thankful that I never had a desire for drugs. I’m thankful I had that example to set for my children. If you are like me and unaffected by the lure of drugs, please don’t think you’re somehow superior to those who struggle with addiction. You’re not. That’s like thinking you’re superior to short people because you’re tall. You did nothing to merit being born that way. It’s the same with addiction.

I have a good friend, a very successful musician, who described how the first time he slammed heroin into his vein he knew it was evil. He knew he was letting in the demons, but he did it anyway. He just couldn’t resist the temptation. It’s a miracle he is still alive, but he has been drug-free for at least 30 years now.

Marilyn Manson said, “I say no to drugs, but they don’t listen.”

Drugs don’t call to everyone and it’s a mystery why. I find nothing tempting about sticking a needle in my arm, or even popping a pill in my mouth. But then, I have other weaknesses. We all have our Achillies heel, our crosses to bear, and we should not judge one another.

On the other hand, an addict can drain those who love him or her. In their pain and desire to destroy themselves, they can destroy everyone around them. It’s especially hard when it is your own child. You don’t ever want to abandon them, but at some point, you have to let them go, knowing either they will end up dead or they will recover. There is really no middle ground for a serious addict. And even when they recover, it is one day at a time…for the rest of their lives.

The downfall of the United States is drugs. We can talk about a hundred other problems, but this is the big one. It fits into the transhumanist agenda. The elites want us addicted. It is so evil; I cannot even express how evil. They have got most people believing they literally cannot survive without drugs. The government is the biggest drug dealer of all.

I have a lot of anger toward artists who made drugs cool. It started in the sixties with songs from the Beatles and others. Songs like Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. I could go on and on, there are so many.

Or on a more sobering note, when Stevie Nicks sang, "Take your silver spoon, and dig your grave."

Whether sobering or fun loving, the results are the same. Drugs are cool. The artists that promote them live hard and too often die young. Only the strong survive. And only by stopping the destructive behavior.

I remember in 2015 when The Weekend’s song ‘Can’t Feel My Face’ came out and all the kids were singing it. My kids were older then, thank goodness. I asked my son Max what it meant, and he told me, “Mom, it’s what cocaine does to your face. It makes it numb.” (Like that should be obvious to me) The song was a huge hit—with kids! They were all singing it. How do you protect your children against that kind of insidious propaganda. It’s everywhere. Unless you tie them up and put them in the basement. And that certainly isn’t the answer.

Nope, this wasn’t my most inspiring Sunday piece! Sorry! But what else can I do? I have to tell it like it is. I have to share the truth. We are in a real battle of good against evil. A battle for the souls of our children. We need to keep them safe.

Please pray for our children.

Here are a couple of other more in-depth essays I’ve written on this topic:

Hustling Humans

So, You Wanna Be a Kingpin?

Happily Slipping into Our Straitjackets

Building the mRNA Empire