Neichu Dz. Angami
Kohima
The fourteen year old son has been giving all signals of adolescent drug abuse. He was sneaking out at night. He was skipping school and missing classes. When he did go to school he was usually late and his grades started to drop drastically. He changed his hair style and the way he dressed. His attitude changed. He became irritable, sarcastic and argumentative. He ate huge amounts of food and often demanded special diet. He would not eat with the rest of the family. His personal hygiene deteriorated. He began spending most of his time in his bedroom with the door closed. He changed friends and when his friends came home, he would take them to his room and closed the door. When he talked on the phone, he would face the wall and whisper. He stopped making eye contact. He avoided the rest of the family and when he goes out of the house, his mobile phone would switched off. He also started lying to his parents. He broke every rule that was set for him. When his parents confronted him, he threatened them that he would leave and never come back.
This narrative, I believe, is familiar to many families. When one member of the family gets into drugs, the whole family gets affected. Parents started to blame each other. Then they blamed the peers, saying because of bad company that their child has drifted into bad habits. Then they decided that it is boredom at school or lack of special attention from teachers. Sometime they even want to believe that it is because of some black magic that evil people have done against their child. Other siblings in the family started to withdraw from their usual way of life. They turned angry and resentful for the behavior of their addicted brother or sister.
Whatever may be the cause, we need to seriously understand that we are now living in a drug-filled world. Mood altering chemicals are abundantly available and widely used in all sections of the society and in every social domain. Children growing up in this situation are extremely vulnerable. They would experiment it, many would like it and will continue to use it.
Every drug user would say, ‘ I didn’t think it would happen to me’. We must understand that when they tried it, they believed that it (addiction) won’t happen to them. ‘All my friends do drugs, its nothing abnormal’, some would say. Others will say, ‘people I admire the most use drugs’. Some would dare enough and say, ‘its forbidden, that’s why I wanted to try’, while others would say, ‘I wanted to be somebody else’, ‘it makes me believe in what I want to be’.
We all know that media also has a very big role. Television is a ‘drug pusher’, someone said. Whats the pusher meant to do? Glamorize the product and get someone try it, right? They may not directly glamorize the product, but they glamorize the people who use them. In a cinema, just before the scene of a violent or outrageous act, there would be the lighting of a cigarette and the gulping alcohol or even injecting or snorting a drug.
There is one very common reason for using drugs. It makes them feel good. When I say this many parents would caution ‘Don’t say that. That will just put ideas into their minds. There is nothing good or attractive about drugs’. I think my response to that would be ‘know your enemy’. Alcohol and drugs can make kids feel good and they know that. When we ignore or deny that, we run the risk of destroying our credibility with these children and putting further distance between them and us.
We must prepare children to enter a drug-filled world by talking about the influence of drugs, by listening to them and the issues that they face everyday, by helping them with a plan to say ‘No’ to drugs and by creating a loving and supportive environment for them. For children who have no supportive families, neighbors and church community must step-in and help.
