MUSINGS AND MISHAPS

Author: Lindsey Whitton

I found out last night that an old friend had been found dead in New York City from a drug overdose. He was 18 years old. My mom spent this morning at his relatively poorly attended funeral, surrounded by anonymous elderly parishioners who seemed to have accidentally gone to the wrong service.

Now, as I try to concentrate on writing a history paper, all I can do is wonder how this boy could have drifted from bouncing around the back of a yellow school bus just four years ago to his lonely death in some small dingy room in New York. I keep wondering, as I stare at my blinking cursor, if his cheeks had still been red and chubby and if he had still giggled in that goofy way with his addict friends. Suddenly, it occurs to me that he may not have had any friends. It appears as though they didn't show up at the funeral.

A few Middlebury students who I mentioned this terrible incident to expressed the same shock that I felt. Do kids in our generation really die from drug overdoses? Of course, we know it happens, but I thought of drug deaths as only black and white statistics on a glossy magazine page, a product of the 1980s that we still study because it used to be an issue. It seemed that in real life even the worst cases find their way to the hospital and are saved by modern medicine and modern addiction therapy. The deaths, I thought, were mostly over the drug business — late night drive-bys and tragic inner city clashes over bags of cash.

Our generation, dubbed the Millennials, has been hailed as "the next Great Generation," and President McCardel reminded my class of this esteemed prediction in his Convocation speech last year. We have been told that we are conservative, choosing chardonnay before vodka and Advil before heroine. The most popular drug at my high school seemed to be different kinds of Ritalin that were ground up and snorted — not for a high but for concentration when the desire to succeed went beyond the body's ability to stay awake. Millennials are told that we look and act like our grandparents' generation, only with a little more diversity and a lot more stress. We don't want to be bad to stand out — we want to be the best.

So where does that leave us with the drug problem? Was my friend's death just an anomaly, an insecure upper middle class disaster that shouldn't be used as an example of a trend or a significant problem?

In the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) 27th annual study conducted in the spring of 2001, their organization found that for the fifth consecutive year elicit drug use has remained the same or declined in certain cases. Although the use of ecstasy has been rising over the past couple of years, between 2000 and 2001 the rise slowed significantly for students in all three grades studied. The use of heroine, which had also been rising slightly over the past few years, decreased conspicuously between 2000 and 2001 among 10th and 12th graders. Inhalant use also fell, especially among 12th graders.

Cocaine abuse in general has fallen off since the mid '80s, when the NIDA estimated that 5.7 million Americans age 12 or older were using the drug. Now the organization estimates that 1.5 million Americans, or .7 percent of the population, use cocaine.

In Vermont, however, the state's heroine problem was highlighted recently, especially after the thirteen deaths as a result of the drug in the year 2000 and a recent article examining the issue in The Burlington Free Press. Experts cite the relatively new, more pure form of heroin as the cause of the drug's comeback. Since needles are no longer necessary and heroin can be snorted or smoked, some potential users may find the drug less daunting and may consider it less dangerous.

When I went through the brief biographies of the 13 Vermonters who fell victim to heroin in 2000, however, I noticed that the vast majority of them were older I calculated the average age to be 35. There were two 19-year-olds that died, one of whom was a student at Bennington College, but the next two youngest victims were 26 and 30. Only one of the victims was a college graduate.

I went to see the movie "Traffic" three times in one week last year. My friends and I were fascinated by the cinematography, the interwoven plot lines and the concept. We all agreed, however, that the idea of upper middle class successful students in the year 2001 falling victim to cocaine and heroine seemed foreign. The use of hard drugs among the Millennial generation seems to be less prevalent and less popular than it may have been for the generations preceding it.

I do, however, want to stress that although my generation may be less likely to shoot up heroin or snort cocaine, this is only a positive trend and not a uniform phenomenon.

As I learned yesterday, some of my peers still seriously abuse hard drugs and let the habit drag a chubby-cheeked, goofy little boy under the crushing wheels of addiction. Maybe I shouldn't have been so surprised. Maybe the current achievements and sunny forecast for the future of the Millennials made us and our parents less aware of drug deaths than teenagers and parents in the '80s and early '90s. Maybe the only people who weren't surprised were the elderly parishioners who filled the pews at his funeral.