drug abuse is no joke at our house

We don’t joke about drug abuse at our house.
We know its pain, disappointment and cost, too well to laugh about it.
As my daughter told students in her high school classes who joked about getting high over the weekend, “It is not funny, not when it is your brother doing it.”
I don’t know how it started. I know that up close I watched – this child who helped me wash window with a joyful grin, this child who once seemed so full of promise – descend financially and socially as an adult, slowly shucking off everything he owned to get just one more hit.
I did not enjoy watching him as a father choose drugs over time with his daughters. To know that his child waited in tears for her father to pick her up to celebrate her birthday. I stood there looking at the gift he bought and wrapped for her and left on his dresser as I explained to the child’s mother that I did not know where he had gone. I thought he was with her.
Party food wilted on the platter.
The specially prepared dessert shriveled as the clock ticked off the hours with no call.
It didn’t happen just once. Two weekends in a row, the birthday girl swallowed her disappointment and her unanswered questions.
We did not tell her “he could not resist the drugs.” But it was the real truth of the situation.
Oh, the first weekend, we believed his story about just deciding to go fishing with the guy he picked up to go get his daughters.
The next weekend we just waited, not understanding until the police called to report finding his abandoned car crashed into a telephone pole.
The drugs cost him two marriages, dozens of jobs, a driver’s license, his health, unnumbered thousands of dollars and his car as well as his self-respect and his children’s respect for him.
He tried to escape the downward spiral. He came to live with us when he ran out of options where he lived. “Well he says he is coming to live with us to get his life straightened out,” I told friends. “I am taking that with a grain of salt – he used crack the night before my husband picked him up to come live with us.” He came with his clothing stuffed inside black garbage bags, with little else except a list of unpaid utility bills, bank overdraft notices and a stack of unpaid traffic citations and no driver’s license. We did not quite know what to do with him.
He told us about his years in the drug culture. Of drug dealers telling him to "slow down, you will blow up." Of his heart racing with the high.
His blood pressure registered twice that of his father’s. The doctor put him on medication to lower it.
We took him to Narcotics Anonymous until he found rides with other attendees.
He needed a job. We took him around for job interviews.
He started work as a clean-up man at a fast-food chain – and told us he fell asleep in the storage building.
He wanted to drive. We coached him through paying off his traffic fines in order to get re-instated with three different states’ motor vehicle offices. He woke many days saying "I’m sick. I don’t feel good." I believed him. His father told him he needed to get up and move around, he would feel better. Eventually he confessed he just wanted to sleep in. Questioned about his earnestness at staying employed, he told the supervisor to fire him but told us he had been fired for nothing. Later he clarified that she had simply asked for him to exhibit an earnest intent to work and he told her to fire him. We insisted he had to work either with my husband at projects around the house, in community service or find a job. He did a bit of all three.
Other volunteers looked askance at his slow movements and inability to do the simplest job without supervision.
He mentioned several times that the factory line moved too quickly for him to keep up. Finally, even though he knew the supervisor, he lost his factory line job. They needed a faster worker.
He lived off his disability check until he landed a job at a local sheltered workshop where he did menial, repititve work at minimum wages for five hours a day. That sustained him through several months.
He said he wanted to go to college. His social worker did not think he was ready to tackle college classes. We urged him to take charge of his own life, to go to the college and sign up without the permission of the people at the sheltered workshop.
He didn’t try.
I had higher hopes and expectations for this loved one. I expected him to succeed in a job, to make a go of life as he had when he had a paper route as a child.
At that age, he was the first one out, the first done and rarely complained about all the little details of doing a job. I am astounded at the loss of motivation he has experienced with drug abuse. I am astounded at his loss of ability to take charge of his life and do something about it – his passivity to everything – and none of it not came back.
Instead, this spring he plunged back into drugs with an eagerness the shoved us all aside and ignored every thing we said about  what he had going for him. All that mattered at that point, was another hit.
Initially, we did not know about it. We continued to cheer him on in what we thought was his quest for a drug-free life. In time, he quietly, secretly, found a lot of reasons for his payee to give him $20-$40, enough for another cache of crack.
For another bit of crack, he turned his back on his cash, his kids, his job, his place to hang his hat in our home, his credibility as a family and community member. None of that mattered as long as he could get crack. He left his children waiting on him three weekends in a row.
He let others borrow his car  for a couple hits of crack.
They crashed the car against a telephone pole.
 He let others tell him how to write his checks and spend his money, while they smiled and stole from him.
He did not care about any of that. He just wanted the crack.
We said he would be welcome back after he had spent a year in a drug abuse program. He gave us a silent, defiant look and checked into the Salavation Army.
A few days later, the staff at the Salavation Army told him he could not stay because he was obviously high on drugs. He bunked with a friend but quickly wore out his welcome there.
Friends who once offered him a place to stay quickly disappeared from his life, unwilling to share their homes with an active drug addict.
Then, and only then, did he check out a drug-rehab program. While he waited to go, he got more cash for another few hits of crack. He did not last long in the drug program.
Homesickness, the isolation from all that was familiar sent him into a suicidal spin. The social worker checked him into the hospital in the psyche ward. He stayed there for nearly two months. The doctors tried several medications to get him to move into reality, to calm down, to become ‘normal.’
Finally, they concluded he needed long term residential care. The weekend before he was moved to the residential care unit, the social worker told me, "this is how he will probably be until they come up with newer medications that works for him. His short term memory is not reliable enough for us to recommend that he drive. You should consider this a permanent placement. It is the best placement, the closest to your home that we could find."
I hung up the phone in shock – a year and half of hoping he could turn it around was crushed under the heel of another $20 hit of crack-cocaine. I wanted something better for him, but drugs robbed him of his ability to reach out and try to get something better.
Drug abuse left us with the shell of the person we all knew and loved. He will be drug free now. He lives in a residential care unit where he gets a total of $27 a month to spend. "But," the social worker cheerfully told us, "he can earn points by going to class and cooperating with the program and get treats and snacks like a PopTart or cigarettes."
I cannot believe he has been reduced to that level of life.
So, no, I don’t find drug abuse jokes funny. It hurts way too much to laugh.