OrilliaMatters welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected] or via the website. Please include your full name, daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following letter is in response to an article about the province’s plan to close supervised consumption sites, published Nov. 18.
When I was little, my first contact with drugs wasn’t seeing them first-hand, nor the DARE program, but, of course, Hollywood.
Media defined what was cool and what wasn’t, and there was nothing cooler than a 1980s drug dealer. All my celebrity heroes were doing drugs. Drugs were alive and romantic and rebellious and tragic.
Before I knew what drugs fundamentally were, I wanted them. They were a symbol of social status and irreverence and I went looking for them.
I lost my first friend to drugs when I was a teenager, and my 11th a few weeks ago. We were lied to. We were not shown the real-life consequences of addiction. Now we see it and we are adults with little patience and less time. We look away because we have to.
But, maybe if we could have seen addiction as our first brush with drugs, when we are young and our hearts still break for those in pain, maybe I wouldn’t have sought them out, and maybe we’d all have humanized, compassionate feelings toward addiction.
The ‘would someone think of the children’ attitude of the Ontario government is repeating the Reagan-esque rhetoric that has proven to fail. I think if we’re real with our kids, they might grow up to create real solutions, instead of blinders.
Aaron Switzer
Orillia
