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Andrew was just a curious Grade 8 student trying pot for the first time. In a few short years, he would escalate to heavy drugs and being high almost all day, so he wouldn’t feel like hell.
“We’d get stoned in the morning on the way in (to school). Go to the bathroom and do a line of coke, go to class and pop a couple ecstasy. We did so many drugs nobody could tell,” said Andrew (not his real name). “It gets to a point when it’s not an extra fun thing to do, it’s the only thing to do because you’re not having fun if you’re not on drugs. You just want to live life high … It just escalates really quickly.”
Andrew’s addiction began taking over his life. He started getting in trouble with police, first on small drug possession charges and later for having a scale and metal bar (for self defence) in his backpack. Andrew’s drug use got him expelled from high school months before he would have gotten his diploma, and destroyed his serious relationship with his girlfriend.
Before turning 19, the youth would take on years of addiction counselling and Prozac to recover from the depression caused by heavy ecstasy use.
“If there was a drug I could take back ever doing, it would be cocaine because it gave me some of the worst nights of my life,” said Andrew. “Ecstasy was probably my favourite drug, but probably took the biggest toll on my body.”
His story is far from unique.
Mary watched in shock as her teenage daughter, Diana, who had always been of average weight, wasted away to an unhealthy, thin size zero in a spiral of drug use that pulled her life dangerously off-track.
“(Drug addiction) absolutely destroys families,” said Mary, who asked This Week not to use either woman’s real name because she doesn’t want to identify her daughter, who is struggling to put her life back together.
Diana’s father is a drug addict and Mary later learned her young daughter was exposed to his substance abuse while staying with him. He might have even provided their teenage daughter with drugs.
“Really to this day, I don’t know how much he gave her,” said Mary. “I was naive. I didn’t know.”
Mary said her daughter began her rebellion with cigarettes, alcohol, then pot and eventually cocaine. Mary remembers finding pot in Diana’s room, in the air vents and behind speaker covers.
Mary said she came from a strict family background and tried to deal with her daughter’s increasing rebellion by tightening the house rules.
“I was critically demanding in expecting things and I probably didn’t sit her down.”
At 16, her daughter left home to live with her boyfriend and began habitually skipping class. Mary remembers being frantic at the time, trying to find a way to keep her teenager at home and in high school.
“I begged the school to help me keep her in school … I went to the police. I went to CAS (Children’s Aid Society). I talked to anyone who would listen and I had no rights,” said Mary, who knows teen drug use is something many families struggle with. “This is not a one-off story.”
The most recent data on how Ontario teens use alcohol and drugs shows a new and potentially alarming trend.
While teen drug use is down overall, opioid pain relievers — such as codeine, Oxycontin and Percocet — have for the first time cracked the top three most popular substances, coming in behind alcohol and marijuana.
“That’s the biggest change we’ve seen recently, and it’s a real concern,” says Angela Kirby, who coordinates community treatment services at Pinewood Centre, Durham’s primary drug treatment centre.
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For the rest of the story read …
http://newsdurhamregion.com/life/article/174403
Source: Durham Region News
