Ice

Everyone's addicted to something.

We all try to hide it; sometimes we succeed, sometimes the mania boils over like a pot of potatoes.  The heat produces a by-product that we can't explain.  We don't like to admit that we are addicts because it means that something else has power over us, in quasi-Lutheran terms, instead of alien righteousness, we encounter alien powerlessness.  That which produces the chemical effect in our brains, a euphoria, or a rush of adrenaline, cannot be contained or countered by anything else.  The addict must find a way to inject the foreign substance to escape from whatever form of life that is presently occurring.

I am an addict. 

It's part of the program, the first step is to admit that you have a problem.  I am addicted to baseball.  It might be kind of cute, I suppose, to put that in the same breath as alcohol or drug addiction, but there are times when I act like a drug addict.  Sometimes I wake up early in the morning to check the scores of my New York Mets.  It has been accentuated in the last few weeks because the Mets have made the playoffs, but there have been times throughout the last couple of years when I will sneak away from my family, phone in hand and connect to the constant source of info-addiction, the internet, and check the latest messages by other Mets fans on Metsmerizedonline.com. 

Sometimes when I jog, I think about who will be pitching next year, what the stats will mean, how will the Mets organize their budget for an extended dynasty after this year.  Just today when Christine reminded me that we are going to take Elsa to Toowoomba on Thursday to have her wisdom teeth pulled, what's my first thought?  Elsa's nervousness about the anesthesia?  Her pain management afterwards?  Maybe even organizing her homework from missing school for a couple of days? 

Nope - I grew morose because I was going to miss the first pitch of the third game of the National League Championship Series. 

So, I proclaim - I'm an addict.

True enough, addictions take all forms; the Greek words, so I've been told for 'addiction' is mania.  There are all sorts of manias:  Egomania (addiction to self), kleptomania (addiction to stealing) philomania (That's Robert Palmer's' addiction - to love), but the addiction to drugs that is sweeping the planet is the one that most frightens me. 

There are also sorts of reasons to be mortified about what drugs do to people: here are my top five just looking at the 'ice' (a form of crystallized methamphetamine.)

1.  Symptoms of ice included paranoia, schizophrenia, hallucinations, and violent, almost Hulk-like outbursts of rage.  The stories told in hospital emergency rooms would make Stephen King novels seem like Roald Dahl books.

2.  The devastating effects to the brain that occur from ice use actually creating holes, or gaps, in the brain that cannot be restored.  Unlike some drugs which the user, once reformed, can recover from, ice doesn't offer that 'self-healing' solution.  Kids don't understand this.  Adults don't recognize it.

3.  Drug dealers do not care whatsoever what happens to the user.  According to one of the police officers we worked with in Charleville, one thousand dollars of ice ingredients can make a product that can be sold to the general populace for a seventy-five thousand dollar profit.

In two weeks.

That being said, once hooked on ice, there is almost no return.  The time, money and resources spent on acquiring the drug are not the dealers' problem. 

4.  Drugs are becoming more and more glamorized in our media.  As of yet, ice isn't seen as the 'popular' drug like alcohol, tobacco or caffeine, but with the legalization of marijuana in some places and the eventual normalization of the drug culture at parties typified in almost all teenage movies, sooner or later young people begin to realize that drugs are simply the 'best way to escape from an increasingly desperate world.'  In the TV series, Breaking Bad, which has been described as a digital drug also, the main character, a science teacher, turns making meth and selling it to fund his cancer treatments.  This is one of the darkest (and most violent) TV shows ever produced and judging by the viewership, it has hit a chord.  The problem is, the viewer is left with the option for rooting for the 'common man' who has to sell drugs in order to survive.  Everyone else is the bad guy: the insurance companies, the school, the police - we are left to wonder...

Maybe selling drugs will make me a hero also.

5.  Everyone is doing it.  Perhaps the biggest lie of all.  The problem remains, though, because of our own technomania, we see the worst of the world every second of every minute.  Our social media encourages constant checks and updates regarding the world and its collision course with Megiddo.  What humans do best is to avoid fear and pain; it's a natural tendency, and drugs offer that momentary surreality - a false sense of well being that seems to give a rush of hope and pleasure followed by a crash into the abyss of pain and terror. 

Everyone is not doing it!  In fact, the statistics would prove it.  According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, in 2014, seven percent of Australians had tried ice.  That's definitely not a majority, but think about it: seven percent of the Australian population, even rounding it to thirty million people...

Is two million people. 

Imagine two million people displaying the symptoms in #1.


So, we've got this ice problem in Australia and it has nothing to do with global warming or cooling.  Ice is invading not only the cities, but the Outback also.  For those small town residents who assumed that distance would somehow create a buffer against the problem, their assumption is wrong.  Even in the villages of Cunnamulla and Charleville, the drug has spread like a disease.  Horror stories resonate in the Outback hamlets and the residents, even knowing that the plague is coming, seem to hope as if tomorrow will show up just like the yesterday of fifty years ago.

So in order to combat the problem, it seems that we need a superhero.

She wasn't what I expected.