Yes, it usually occurs in that order. However, one does not have to be a child to experience physical or emotional abuse that could result in any number of named diagnosis of a classified mental disorder. Let’s look a little closer at what this means, abuse is cruelty that tends to come in the form of physical violence and/or emotional manipulation which is usually repetitive unless you are smart enough to recognize just what kind of person you are dealing with early on and press the abort button whereby avoiding any future dealings with said person. When abuse comes in the form of physical violence once the cuts, scrapes, broken bones and bruises heal we are still left with the emotional remnants of a traumatic experience. Only the remnants are more than just small fragments of trauma floating around in your psyche. Depending on how worn down you have become from life depends on just how large these fragments are and whether or not they will fester to gargantuan size in your subconscious as you try to move on with your life. The same can be said when it comes to emotional abuse minus the bruises of course, as well in the end either type of abuse boils down to emotional trauma. As an adult traumatic experiences can cause some problems even if you have all sorts of coping tools in your mental toolbox. If all of the aforementioned happens as a child during the early stages of psychological growth and development it can really destroy and wreak havoc in one’s life. To say that is even an understatement. Unfortunately, I know this to be true from experience. The amount of emotions that flood the synapse in the form of electrical signals in the brain cannot be adequately described in words however, unfortunately it is adequately felt, which ironically will turn one into feeling completely inadequate as a human being. I would argue though it is an unacceptable way to live life and one of the steps to change that fact is the acceptance of what caused the emotional problem to begin with. I will save the some of the coping techniques I have acquired in my exploration of self-help materials throughout my life for another article.
I prefer not to go into the details of who, what, when and how I got to be so screwed up. I will say this I have had more than my fair share of shit to deal with. As a child before the age of 11 I had been sexually abused a multiple of times by multiple people (both Men and women), physically attacked by a strange man and emotionally assaulted not only by my own parents but by an entire community of racist’s religious fanatics. Moving on, as a very young adult, I had been arrested a few times for drug possession. I equate being arrested to the equivalency of being kidnapped and tortured. By my mid to late twenties I had been through a plethora of traumas akin to that of someone who has seen brutal combat. Sorry for the evasive nature of my last sentence but that’s all I am willing to share on that subject. Suffice to say I have my fair share of mental health issues, crippling depression and anxiety (PTSD), In the last 10 years I can count on 2 hands the number of a full night’s sleep where I was not woken up by nightmares or a leaf dropping on my roof.
So now that you have the short version of everything so far stated we can move on to how the experiencing of emotional traumas can and will most likely morph into self-abuse in the form drug abuse. Yah, yah, I know drugs are addictive and that’s why people use them, right? I mean shit Nancy Reagan said so, as well as the B.F. Skinner operant conditioning method that led to the understanding of addiction that to even this day U.S. drug policies are developed. Well, newsflash folks this might not be the whole story. I do realize this is one of those rare circumstance in which the “official” show of facts is not exactly accurate. Now I know that you may be used to having been told the truth about everything all of your lives by the usual official channels but stay here with me folks for just a little bit longer because I am going to go out on a limb here and call SHANIGGIANS just this once and I tinks you are going to see how I am making sense of it all.
After my second arrest as an adult at the age of 20 for possession of 616 hits of LSD, I realized I needed to get control of my life. Not because I was arrested but because I realized I was not living, I was dead inside. So with some support from my brother and sheer will to change I started my journey. I started to read and gather any information I thought would help me. Now I have not read a book since the 5th grade at this point and as kid I used to love to read but the abuse changed me and my depression started at 10 years old in turn my life force began to drain out of my soul. I started with Newsweek and Time magazines that I would get from my neighbor which in turn those articles led me too other avenues such as Deepak Chopra. His references let me to others and in turn those references led me even further. By the time I was 21 my two separate felony cases finally came to yield some jail time. After almost 3 years of constant stress of not knowing if I would be serving the next 25 years of my life behind bars. With the first case I caught (the term criminals like me use in the place of the word received) 5 years’ probation. With the second case I caught 1 year in the county jail to run concurrent with my probation. I know what you are thinking who did I rat out, nobody, really, it was a long hard fought out legal battle in which the police did not have a warrant nor permission to search, and they lied under oath. Again this was another one of those rare circumstances where the officials telling the official story were not exactly telling the truth.
By the time I surrendered myself to the jail, yes you heard that right I turned my self in when I lost my appeal. For a while I did not realize why I was getting such strange looks and laughs from the prison guards when they heard I was there to surrender myself and even stranger looks from the inmates when I shared my story in the passing time. Apparently most people just prolong the inevitable and wait to get caught but after weighing out that option for 2 seconds I decided self-surrender to be the best call of action. The alternative was to wait to get pulled over and have the expense of my car being towed and impounded added to my monstrous surmounting legal bill.
So let’s get back to it now that you have a little more back story. People use drugs for an array of reasons. Don’t get me wrong drugs are addictive and do create a propensity for chemical dependency. The body’s need to use a drug can become overwhelming once the train has already started down the tracks. However, the mind can be much more tenacious and convincing when it comes to making the choice to continue down the road to perdition. While incarcerated I continued my studies having been mostly drug free for a good year before being held captive for the duration of one year. Now while most of the other inmates were having cigarettes and drugs smuggled in I was having books, vitamins, and crystal hot sauce smuggled in. The books were the food for my soul, the vitamins were the food for my body and the hot sauce was so I could pallet the slop that was being called food. I was sitting in my bunk contemplating all I have learned in life through experience, conversations I had with other inmates in my predicament and my recent quest for knowledge. All of a sudden I realized it, I am not a drug addict I never was, my problem is that some really terrible things had happened to me and in order to deal with them I started to use drugs. The more I used drugs to cope with the social circumstances I had encountered the more dependent I became on them. Oh yea and my body also became chemically dependent on them but all along it was my mind that started it. The year is 1996 I have no college degree I am 22 years old and I know more than professionals about drug addiction? How can this be? For years I would go around telling people what I discovered and for years I was looked at like I was from another planet. Then I found a study in my research in 2009 or so called the rat park experiments which was conducted in the late 1970’s and published in 1981. The conclusion of this study was that people use drugs due to poor social conditions. Well no shit, it’s doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that one out nor a pretty messed up young man sitting in a jail cell for that matter. I highly suggest you look it up and read the rat park experiments by psychologist Bruce K. Alexander. How has this study been missed and ignored for so long? It was ignored because it did not fit the policy of the way the government treats people that use drugs among other things. Finally, I had a scientific study I could quote to back up what I already know about drug abuse. http://www.brucekalexander.com/articles-speeches/rat-park/148-addiction-the-view-from-rat-park
People are not born bad; I will however entertain the idea that some human beings may have a genetic disposition to becoming a psychopathic killer due to a propensity of frequency. Being that one’s genetic bloodline has had a reoccurrence of violent circumstances and behavior that may perpetuate and store in the DNA thus creating genetic variants that in turn effect neural pathways. However even in these situations it still takes conditioning to create a monster. Most people if not all, including violent offenders that have been arrested or are currently serving time for drug possession or other crimes were once victims of a crime. Terrible things happened to these people when they were children and in some case adults, PERIOD. How our society deals with people that never got the help they needed as children is fucking deplorable and downright despicable. Let’s address this fact first, With the exception of sex slaves, bizarre robberies and rapes and secret government mind control experiments people who use illegal drugs to self-medicate use them on their own accord meaning they make the choice to freely ingest the substance, moreover, there are no victims to this act other than self-inflicting damage, this is what is called a victimless crime. If there is no victim how can it be a crime? If we are free independent living human beings and we own ourselves then are we not free to cause injury to ourselves? Are we not free to do our own diligence and discover for ourselves what may work best for us? We live in a world in which it is legal for people to have appendages amputated to satisfy a fetish or have gender reassignment but we do not have the right to explore our own consciousness. I find this notion absurd moreover the official commentary on the subject deceitful which it a trip down a different rabbit hole entirely. What we have decided and when I say we I do not included myself in that. What we have decided as a society is that we are going to take our brothers, our sisters, mothers, fathers and our children that have had terrible crimes committed against them as children and as adults, people that are really hurting inside emotionally and are now abusing themselves by using drugs, we are going to take these emotionally damaged human beings and hire thugs that are going to harass and intimidate them, violently restrain them, kid nap them, lock them in a cage like an animal, in many cases physically beat them and in all cases phycology abuse them. If you think for one minute that this is not the case, that the police are not trained to treat the citizenry this way and that this is not the method of resolve the justice system chooses to execute. Then I highly encourage you to put your money where your mouth is and do an experiment by getting yourself arrested for a victimless crime and see how well you are treated. After the legal system is done destroying people’s lives even more so then they could do to themselves we are going to make sure once they have paid their so called debt to society by either serving a jail sentence or probation or both. We attach a digital file to their person to make sure for the next 10 to 15 years of their life they will not be able to rent an apartment in a good neighborhood or get a decent job. This is what Americas best and brightest holding political office have come up with as a resolve to help emotionally damaged citizens. Seriously? This is what the best colleges in the country produce, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Williams, Amherst, Really?
If I believed that there is a God I would thank God for never giving me the chance at college because I could not imagine how I could live with myself if I went to this place called college and came out of it as sick and twisted as those people who believe this is how to solve other people’s problems. Not that forcing people by the threat of imprisonment and extortion to solve their problems is even moral to begin with all under the guise of reform. I can only wonder if college is a place where people go to become heartless, maniacal, narcissistic psychopaths. In this place called college they come up with ideas and create laws on how to deal with people who attempt to repel their philological attacks by acting out self-abuse or punching them in their face.
Well then what sort of polices should we adopt for our great country Merica? A good start would be to decriminalize drugs (see Cato Institute PDF white paper “Lessons for creating fair and successful drugs polices” http://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/drug-decriminalization-portugal-lessons-creating-fair-successful-drug-policies) The results of Portugal’s efforts to reduce the strain on society is a rather hopeful story and the outcome of that effort may or may not surprise you. Portugal and Brazil took a lot of criticism worldwide by the most of the masters of the citizens of planet earth. When the U.S drug czar John P. Walters was asked to comment on the success of the countries that decriminalized drugs he refused to comment this was of course after years prior to when he Criticized about how it was going to be disastrous if they did such a thing. I Doubt he has even read the research to date as his 2012 article in the weekly standard is so delusional its almost incomprehensible. He bases his data and the “success of the drug war” on the results of the current policy as he fails to consider the carnage and mayhem that drug prohibition caused in the first place. Never looking at the countries statistics that have decriminalized drugs. He also fails to look at the history of alcohol prohibition and the crime that it caused. His vision of the world in completely myopic as this appears the be the case with most policy makers.
Personally I say Legalize all of it, and let the free market sort it out, I do realize at first this could be overwhelming for most Americans due to our overall excessive cultural practices. Decriminalization would certainly be a move in the right direction. I do believe in time however with a new overall perception and approach toward drug abuse, North America really could have a cultural shift in conscious awareness, at least on this matter.