MANY VALID REASONS TO STAY AWAY FROM DRUGS

Editor:

To the young people of Carroll County, including the college students here;
recently I received news of the death of a third cousin of mine, a
24-year-old woman, due to a drug overdose.

Perhaps she was one of the "lucky ones," She could have survived this
overdose with brain damage, which would have left her a vegetable. Or, she
could have lived through this ordeal as a quadriplegic, unable to walk or
feed herself.

I have read that some young people say, "Well, my parents drink alcohol,
which is a drug, so what is the difference if I take drugs?"

The difference is that alcohol is regulated by the federal and state
governments. It is required by law that wines and liquor have stated on the
bottle the "proof" and/or percentage of alcohol in the contents. Domestic
beer is 4-6 percent alcohol.

But drugs, being illegal, are not regulated. The drug of your choice which
you bought last week (be it heroin, hashish, marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy,
PCP or whatever) may be more pure or less pure than what you bought this week.

And you have no way of knowing the purity of your purchase. Therefore you
don't have a clue as to how to cut the drug.

Do you think your drug dealer cares whether you know the purity of the
drugs he or she sells you?

If your answer to that is yes, then think again.

I want to make one thing brutally clear: you do not do drugs; you inject
drugs into your body. Whether you take the drugs by pill, smoke, inhaling,
by needle or whatever, you are injecting drugs into your body.

Many of us, who have never done drugs, consider druggies stupid fools. Do
you really want to be known as a stupid fool?

Charles K. Sheets

Westminster