Drugs and Alcohol

Drugs and Alcohol

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both.” Recent surveys have conveyed that drug use among teens have declined by more than twenty-three percent over the past five years. Most drug use begins in the preteen and teenage years, these years most crucial in the maturation process. During these years, adolescents are faced with different tasks of discovering their self identity, clarifying their sexual roles, asserting independence, learning to cope with authority, and searching for goals that would give their lives meaning. These are my experiences as well as those of others around me.

I remember my first drink at the tender age of thirteen. It was a forty ounce of Olde English malt liquor. That night was the first time I threw up. Of course the “homies” took care of me. As time went on, and I began to hang out with them more and more, I finally decided that I wanted to be a Crip like them. The alcohol consumption was vast and I began to envy my Crip members’ state of euphoria. So alcohol unknowingly led to me wanting to smoke weed. We would break up the weed buds and roll it in a grape Philly blunt or a strawberry flavored blunt. Quite honestly, it was not all that it was cracked up to be. I really just felt stupid just sitting around smoking and doing nothing. Even though I felt how I felt, I did regress and fall under the peer pressure to smoke “recreationally”.

One of the older members of my new gang family just ironically happened to be my real cousin. Everyone called him Snoop and he was four years older than me. He is one of the higher ranking members of the Crips, but he only stood four foot eleven. But his stature should not or didn’t dictate his role as a leader. He was definitely a hardcore banger and he wasn’t afraid to show it. He always had his crisply folded blue rag in his left back pocket. Even though this was true, he was quick to help out his family. He always warned me about the use of other illicit drugs because of his own wrong doings and experiences while on one of his “trips”. He always told me I was lucky I didn’t live in Stockton, California. Just him being so real and blunt about the adverse affects of the drugs was enough to deter me from even trying any other drug that is other than marijuana and alcohol.