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You can clear your conscience by letting your friend know you care and you wish he'd try to stop soon.
Say what you have to say once, then you might need to say goodbye for a long while. You don't want to get caught up in the drama that an addicted person will create in the lives of those around him. Best to find something else to do.
People that do drugs do it because they don't care about themselves (low self-esteem), and they sometimes are under the impression that they don't matter (to anyone) and no one would miss them if they're gone.
I'm not suggesting an "intervention" ... but maybe you could go to your friends house (just drop by) and tell him you wanted to check up on him because you care. Let him know you care. Tell him that. Let him understand that he's on a path to an early death, and how much it would hurt you and his family.
Sometimes you just have to confront things head-on and the other person will listen. I had a good friend once that did drugs. We'd been friends since we were 11 yrs. old. I found out he was into drugs when we were 18. I told him that I cared, it would kill his family, etc.
He did give up the drugs, but sadly, he was killed by a drunk driver just 1 year later.
It's better to have tried and failed than to have never tried at all. What do you have to lose? If you succeed, you save your friends life. IMO, that's worth giving it a try.
I agree with this one. It never hurts to let someone know you care, and people who are trying to commit suicide are usually under the impression that no one does care. And believe me, people who do highly addictive drugs are just taking the medium suicide route. (The fast route being a gun or poison and the slow route is eating yourself to death or smoking cigs. )
Heroin scares the bejesus out of me. Do people come back from that? I know people who used to do coke and used to smoke weed and used to eat shrooms and used to drop acid, but I don't know anybody who used to shoot heroin.
I have a family member through marriage who's been a drug addict for well over 30 years now. He's never held a job to speak of and he lived with my mother in law right up to the age of 54. He does everything he can get his hands on except pot (go figure). I have always been the one to suggest taking the tough love approach while my wife (his sister) and my mother in law have always coddled and babied him. Over the years he bled my mother in law dry through various run ins with the law and stealing from her to support his habit. One time he broke into a pharmacy down in Florida and she bailed him out of jail to the tune of about 10K including legal fees and etc. Of course he skipped bail and she never saw that money again. One other time he was caught stealing checks from her check book. I beat the living crap out of him after that one. Of course I ended up being tagged as the bad guy. My wife didn't speak to me for a week or more and it was tons of fun sitting accross from him at Thanksgiving a few months later. Not long after that my mother in law called my wife in tears because he had stolen from her yet again.
Through all this she still allowed him to live with her and hardly ever did anything about it. The years went on and as she grew older she would suggest that she needed him living with her to take care of her as she aged. After she passed away and we got into her affairs it became more than evident that she was taking care of him rather than him taking care of her. To top it all off she left everything to him in her will and all of his siblings got nothing. She figured he needed it more. We're talking about a house and what ever money she had left. So now because he was a burden and a total loser all his life he gets everything and his sibblings get nothing. Pretty good deal for him huh?
So the point I'm trying to make here is there may not be much you can do but you have to try to do something. Don't be an enabler. I would get the family involved. Let them know that there's a problem. Don't allow his family to be enablers if you can help it. They can do more than you will ever be able to. Don't let his life become a total waste like my loser brother in law's has always been.
when i was young it was explained to me to stay away form druggies. no matter how smart charming or successful. they will eventually crash and take you with them.
if you like somebody and they shoot up you will eventually shoot up with them.
Exactly!
Not to mention OP, if you are involved in an illegal activity such a pot/cannabis smoking, you will be viewed as a big hypocrite.
Clean up your own act (no matter how small) first. Then, become an example and offer help & support when/ if your pal asks for it.
If he does not, prepare for a funeral in the near future.
I've watched too many friends and family die of heroin, and unfortunately there is not much you can do if they aren't ready to get clean. I exhausted myself with trying to help friends get clean. A heroin addict is the biggest liar in the world. They'll tell you straight to your face they quit, they're clean, and have no desire to use again, and five minutes later they're chipping away at their next fix. Just short of handcuffing them to their bedpost, you aren't going to get them clean until they want to do it. If he doesn't quit he'll probably be dead by the time he's in his early 30's depending on how deep his addiction is and how much he's using.
People that do drugs do it because they don't care about themselves (low self-esteem), and they sometimes are under the impression that they don't matter (to anyone) and no one would miss them if they're gone.
They may be true in some cases, but there are far more resaons than that.
Heroin scares the bejesus out of me. Do people come back from that? I know people who used to do coke and used to smoke weed and used to eat shrooms and used to drop acid, but I don't know anybody who used to shoot heroin.
Yes they do, but they don't talk about it (unless they become hard core AA/NA types). I personally know 2 people who used to shoot heroin and now have been off it for over 10 years. Heroin was kind of "in" during the 90s, when I was in my twenties. If you are an upstanding citizen leading a "normal" life, to tell people that you were once a heroin addict would be career suicide.
However, I would not share this fact with the OP's friend; its too easy to use this as a rationalization to continue destructive behavior.
Yes they do, but they don't talk about it (unless they become hard core AA/NA types). I personally know 2 people who used to shoot heroin and now have been off it for over 10 years. Heroin was kind of "in" during the 90s, when I was in my twenties. If you are an upstanding citizen leading a "normal" life, to tell people that you were once a heroin addict would be career suicide.
However, I would not share this fact with the OP's friend; its too easy to use this as a rationalization to continue destructive behavior.
That makes sense. The only impressions I've gotten from it are images of wasted junkies (wasted in every sens of the word) and dead celebrities. Heroin has such a stigma of deterioration and death. I don't feel the need for that stereotype to change ... it seems useful to me, to discourage people from trying it.
Crack and meth are like that too for me. Mostly bad images, but I do know a few people who dabbled for a while and then stopped. They still scare me. I just want to stay far, far away.
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Lead by example!
