COCAINE COLUMN WAS ACCURATE

Editor: This letter is in response to the letter written by Phil and Tracy
Bot (The Times, April 6) about the story "Langley has a dark secret."

They said they thought Kristyl Cahill's column (The Times, April 1) sounded
naive and ignorant. I don't agree.

Yes, a lot of "homeless addicts" end up on the streets because of social,
mental and financial issues. If they had said no to drugs in high school,
maybe they would not be there now.

My younger brother started doing drugs just before high school. His first
experience was at the age of 10. Our doctor said it was an overdose of LSD.
My brother swore to us up and down that someone had slipped it into his
soft drink. It took two days for him to come down from the high.

I stayed home from school to help my mom and dad out with him. He didn't
start drugs because of any social problems. He came from a family that
loved him. We grow up on the North Shore in a very nice neighborhood.

We always felt because of the overdose at a young age, my brother would
never try drugs again. Well, we where wrong.

Once he got into high school, all hell broke loose. He started using drugs
all the time. I was two years older than him and didn't realize how bad the
drug problem was in our school. There was little or no education about it.
This is back in the mid-1970s.

My brother Brad died last year in an East Vancouver home of an overdose.

As much as Phil and Tracy want to believe it doesn't start in high school,
it very well can. My son is in high school in the Langley/Aldergrove
district. He says drugs run rampant in the school system. Some of the kids
will smoke pot in front of the school's main office, just to get a rise out
of the teachers. And still we have no real education about the effects of
drugs on our children at the school level.

I am not worried about my son, because with the family history with my
brother he has witnessed far too much in his short life. I have been told
crack cocaine is so addictive that you are hooked almost the first or
second time you try it.

Do your children know how hard it is to get off drugs once they are hooked?
You have no idea what this does to a family. My brother was a great guy and
tried for years to get off drugs. He went through dozens of different
programs to help him get off. The night he died, he had been clean for over
four months.

Brad had told my mother that if he ever went back on drugs he would have to
take his own life because the need for crack cocaine was stronger than
anything else in life.

He died Jan. 6, 2004 of a self-inficted overdose of crystal meth and crack
cocaine at the age of 43. My mother has aged 20 years in the past year. If
we do not do something about this at the school level, there will be more
and more mothers like my own mother, suffering from the loss of a son or
daughter.

Most parents don't want to believe their children are drug users. Educating
parents to the signs of drug use in their children is also a great step.

I know the signs far too well, and have not worried about my own son. He
shows no signs yet of drug use and is a good student. At 14 years old, he
already has his pilot's licence to fly planes and is on the honour roll at
school. He would like to be a commercial pilot some day.

If we want kids to have dreams like this, they have to know drugs break
dreams, rip families apart and destroy lives.

Is there no turning back once a child takes this path? Most likely not.

Kelly Allen, Langley