SOONER OR LATER DRUG ABUSE WILL KILL

Death can be a good teacher. If there's anything good to be said about
death, it's this: Death can sometimes bring people back together.

Death can also be an urgent warning to those of us who want to live a
bit longer on this incredible planet.

On April 6, a friend from way back died at the age of 51. They found
Jim dead of an apparent drug overdose in his St. Cloud apartment. We
old friends were all stunned, but not really surprised. For three
decades, we had been warning Jim to stay away from drugs. It's not
that we were drug-free innocents. In the 1960s, in the hippy heyday,
drugs were considered to be mind-expanders, joyous and mysterious
openers of the "doors of perception." Back then, there was a group of
us who partied together, off and on, for years. We were good young
people, basically, who really did spend a lot of time wondering how to
make the world better. And it wasn't just talk. We went and helped
people, too.

But from the very beginning there was trouble brewing in Peter Pan
Paradise. Most of us tried drugs. Some liked them. Some didn't. I did
not like them, although alcohol (which I did like) is also a drug, and
(as I can testify) can also lead to plenty of trouble.

Throughout the years, we young but aging friends gradually went our
own ways. Those who indulged in drugs in that heady psychedelic season
gradually, one by one, realized (sometimes through the hard way) how
dope (aptly named) leads to nothing but dead-end alleys.

Jim never learned that. He refused to learn it. He kept doing his
drugs. He would take "downers" and other pills and then drink with
them. After a time, he became nearly dysfunctional and spent abysmal
seasons in and out of institutions. It's a sad story because anyone
who knew Jim knew what a good human being he was, at heart. We kept
wanting to save him. We kept begging him to stop. We kept warning and
warning him that sooner or later those drugs would rob him of his will
to live, that he would end up emotionally bankrupt with not a thing to
live for or long for. And, sad to say, that is exactly what happened
on a bleak night in early April when Jim went home, all alone, and
stuck a stupid needle in his arm.

In recent years, Jim moped how none of his old friends, including me,
ever visited him. One day, about a year ago, I told him bluntly on the
phone, "If you want to stay buzzed up, we don't want to visit you."

Since Jim died, I have been talking with old friends on the telephone.
Some of them I haven't talked with in nearly 20 years. It is eerie to
hear their voices, those same familiar voices, again. The twin
tyrants, time and distance, had separated us for so many years.

Happier and wiser, we're all doing fine, more or less, in our
far-flung places. Most of us had thought at one time, well, the past
is gone, might as well burn those bridges. What is sad but good, in a
way, is that it took Jim's death to bring us together again - however
briefly.

I wish, we old friends wish, that everybody could have known Jim. He
was the most likeable and the liveliest person, except for his
pathetic drug obsession.. And he was an example - a sad example - of
how drug abuse can ruin a perfectly loveable human being.

Jim's friends wondered at first how they would tell their children
what happened to him, how he died. But they decided to level with
their kids. Drugs killed him, they told their children. Jim let drugs
kill him. There it is - a stark fact.

Some of my nephews and nieces, who knew Jim and liked him so much,
have learned a shocking, sudden lesson: Drug abuse, in fact, will kill
you, sooner or later.