WANTING EVER MORE

Anyone who has tried to quit smoking will have an understanding of
addiction. Everyone knows the old joke, "Quitting is easy, why I've done it
hundreds of times."

Quitting is easy for the first fifteen minutes. Then all the treacherous
qualities of your mind and body go to work on your resolve to stay off
tobacco. The body yearns for some nicotine and the mind starts working up
all the good reasons why one quick, little smoke won't really do any harm.
It can get worse because if you travel in a circle of friends who all
smoke, they add to the pressure to join them.

The latest drug scourge to afflict our province makes quitting tobacco look
like a cakewalk. Methamphetamine has a number of street names including
'crystal meth', 'ice' and 'crank' but the one that captures its reality is
the term 'more.' When you've finished what you have, you always want more.
When you run out of money to buy more, acquiring the money by any means
becomes an overwhelming necessity. Users, given unlimited access, will use
it to the point where psychosis sets in. We have had a number of bizarre
and irrational crimes in our valley in the past year that were fuelled by
too much crystal meth. These included thefts where the thief was known to
and done in front of the victim and assaults that appeared without
reasonable motivation. In the extreme, users can be reduced to babbling
madness as they pick at imaginary insects crawling on their skin having
done irreparable damage to their brains and bodies.

Although there have been some successes in getting people off highly
addictive drugs like heroin, cocaine and crystal meth, the simplest and
most effective strategy is to not get addicted. This is not an easy sell,
particularly for parents, but can be made forcefully by those who have
experienced and survived an addiction. Getting this sort of testimony in
front of our young people can be effective. Parents and other authority
figures saying, 'no, no' isn't nearly as effective as a peer saying, 'This
is what happened to me.'