Back to School… Back to Addiction
Back to school means back to finals, back to midnight projects, parties and drugs. Some students feel a lot of pressure to excel while in school, while other students are there for the social atmosphere more than the academic, but still must keep their grades, at the very least passing, amongst all the partying. In high school, they feel pressure to get good grades and SAT/ACT scores to get into a good college; college students feel pressure to do well, pick the “right” major and get a good job. Everywhere they turn, another pressure mounts for them to succeed. In order to do this, many students experiment with drugs in order to help them through exams and papers and allow them to come out on top in the end. On the flip side, many students use drugs to “de-stress” and take the “edge” off.
Early in a person’s collegiate career, they may find that certain drugs help them on their way to the career they want. While many students don’t experiment with drugs and go through their exams and projects sober, some crack under the pressure and need an extra “boost.” Others need help “turning off” at night and a way to decompress from the day’s stress.
Frat parties, bars and clubs offer more alcohol and drugs than a person can possibly consume. Students party to forget the day and drink up, snort a few lines, take a few pills and just “check out” for a while.
Drugs easily become the go-to coping mechanism for students. Whether the drugs are used to give them an “edge” on the rest of the student body or to help them to deal with stress, they become the solution to their problems. Eventually, drugs become the solution to almost all problems. Hungover? Take a Percocet. Need to burn the midnight oil? Take an Adderall. Anxious? Have a couple Xanax.
What makes matters worse is the “don’t worry, take a pill” attitude of our society. It is socially acceptable to pop a couple pills to get the job done, or pop some other types of pills, chase it with a beer and relax, or numb out the pain and misery with strong psychotropic drugs. Any way you look at it, our high schools and colleges are breeding grounds for addictions that eventually bleed over into the lives of today’s young professionals.
Once graduating college, drug addicted students take their addictions with them, continuing the same coping methods, now as new professionals. Once on the job, they feel pressure to excel, move up the chain and end up in a nice, cushy position that will pay the bills to support themselves and their eventual family. Bosses give them deadlines, their clients can be demanding and their husband or wife at home is complaining about how much they work. Crack a beer, take a pill, snort a line and forget it. Or take something else, clean the house, meet the deadline and deliver the product to the client. Rinse and repeat.
What’s lacking here is the ability to properly deal with stress, anxiety and life’s problems. A person cannot constantly use drugs to deal with life. Eventually they burn out, crash and pull the proverbial scaffolding down on top of their heads. Drugs are thought to be an immediate solution for every problem, but, at the end of the day, they cause way more chaos and havoc than they’re worth. Lost jobs, destroyed marriages and torn apart families is the inevitable result. Had the student not made that fatal mistake… had they not taken that first pill, beer or line to deal with life, none of these future problems may have happened.
High schools, colleges and employers need to be aware of this growing epidemic and make real help available to students and employees for when the drugs overpower them and destroy their lives. It’s extremely common for professionals to graduate from college and continue the vices and solutions to pressure that they learned in college. Jobs don’t have to be lost and families don’t have to be destroyed in the name of “staying on top” or “numbing out.” While drug abuse prevention is hugely important, properly dealing with an already out-of-control addiction is too. Making the right help available is the most important thing any employer or school can do to help undo the damage addiction causes and allow people to have the skills to appropriately deal with life.
