By Dixie 
I get it. As a young person, your life is stressful. Every day you have multiple decisions to be made about the direction of your life: money, relationships, career plus all the daily decisions about what to wear, what to eat and where to live. When you were younger your parents made decisions for you. Now it’s all on you. It’s scary.
Important decisions should never be made on the spur of the moment and most take time and a lot of thought and consideration. But there is one decision you must make right now. When someone offers you a pill, a snort of something or a smoke, what will you do?
Why decide now?
In that moment you may have had a few drinks. The people around you may all be participating and you will likely feel like you have to go along to get along. Your partner may be interested and may pressure you too.
Please say no. Please. Don’t even experiment. Not. Even. Once.
Why listen to me?
I was your age back in the 1980’s. Watch the 80’s based Scarface sometime and you will see a lot of cocaine snorting, pill popping and needles. I went to a lot of parties back then where it was common to see lines of cocaine on coffee tables. Some people ate pills like candy along with drinks or smoked pot and the really ‘bad’ drug people went to the bedrooms to shoot up. I never did pills, needles or smoked but I did try cocaine, and it did nothing for me that I could tell. I was told that the coke that night probably was cut with baby powder, which was commonly done, so that’s why I didn’t feel any different. Thank you, God.
So what is different?
The dealers back then thought they could make a few extra bucks if they cut their drugs before selling. These were small dealers who likely bought from several different people who were also cutting the drug to sell more. Their end of the line customers would get mad at them for selling weak drugs and would move on to the next dealer. Same stuff, different day.
That day is over. Drug dealers now are much smarter. They know if they sell uncut drugs they will make more money over time because the customer (aka, you) will keep coming back for more. If they can get you hooked you will pay literally anything to keep the drugs coming to feed your addiction.
But that wasn’t enough for the drug dealers.
In the past few years the drug dealers have upped their game. They are not only selling uncut drugs like cocaine and heroin but add ingredients to make the drugs even more potent…and incredibly addictive. Ingredients like a drug called Fentanyl.
Sound familiar? That’s the drug that killed Michael Jackson a few years ago. Heroin and Fentanyl together create an intense high that the human body simply was not made to withstand. It likely feels incredible but it immediately can turn on an addiction switch for a whole lot of people. They almost never recover. Their lives become all about chasing that first high, which never is repeated. The drug literally changes the brain chemistry and the addict becomes someone they never would have chosen to be–a liar, a thief, a prostitute, homeless, you name it. One hit is all it takes to create a full blown addict in many people.
But that can’t possibly happen to you, right?
Maybe you think this could not possibly happen in your area. You live in the ‘good’ part of town. But it does. The drug dealers are everywhere–and they are looking for anyone with money. They do not care about your plans or goals. They just want a customer.
There was a story a news station recently did regarding a 4,000% increase in heroin deaths in a certain part of Atlanta. No, it wasn’t in downtown Atlanta. These deaths happened in the wealthy suburbs of North Atlanta where the buyers text the dealers and the drugs are delivered right to the front porches of million dollar homes. Local emergency rooms have reported that they have found the addicts’ bodies had heroin laced with…Fentanyl.
So what is your decision?
Are you going to let the drug dealers play Russian Roulette with your future?
Or decide right now that when you are faced with the choice (and you will be) you will say, without a shred of doubt…NO.
Not. Even. Once.