Prescription drugs: Suburban crack

Brad Avakian / Columnist

When I heard that the next issue of The Pendulum would address the recreational use of prescription drugs, I felt compelled to offer my experience.

I admit that my expertise is not as extensive as some Elon students, and for this I am thankful, because I have seen too many peers, both here and in my Floridian hometown, meet their demise, or at least their decline, by way of narcotics.

This subject has inspired my complete honesty for some reason, so I will not let myself write hypocritically. While my experience has not been overly excessive, despite spans of heavy drinking and cannibus consumption, it has brought me in contact with a variety of substances, both legal and illegal, which I have experimented with on various occasions.

In high school I was prescribed Percocet to relieve post-operation pain. Before that time, I knew people sometimes took pills to "enhance" their drunkenness, but I was naive. As a high school student I learned to enjoy the intoxication that I experienced as I stumbled through the halls on my crutches after lunch, where I would pop up to five pills to make the last few periods of the day a bit less painful.

The most interesting thing that happened as a result of this was when I tried to stand up while under the influence of these little white pills and fell over with a cast on my leg and a desk around my waist (I was the only student in the class who laughed at the blunder).

The second time I was prescribed painkillers, they mysteriously disappeared after my parents had some friends over for a Christmas party, I guess the eggnog wasn’t potent enough to stir up the appropriate holiday cheer.

Brett Favre, the quarterback for the Green Bay Packers is also proof that responsible adults become abusers of these substances. A few years ago he publicly admitted to becoming addicted to pain killers.

And we all heard about Rush Limbaugh and his tragic struggle with prescription drugs. I’m sure many of you felt as much sympathy for this man as I did – none.

My most recent prescription of painkillers, this time Vicodin, made my popularity on campus suddenly rise. Somehow, people I did not even know found out that I was lucky enough to need my pain dulled and I learned that "pharmy fiends" are very similar to “crackheads.”

An Elon student found his way to my living room after a night of drinking in hopes that I would share my necessary prescription with him. I did not, and despite my roommate and I being quite hospitable to the young addict, he stormed out of our apartment in frustration.

Being a fan of “Chappelle’s Show” on Comedy Central, I immediately compared this disgruntled peer to Tyrone Biggums, Dave Chappelle’s impersonation of a crackhead who is always itching for a fix and willing to do more than any participant on “Fear Factor” to get it.

One distinctive difference between these addictions is that I do not receive e-mails that offer me crack, heroin, cocaine, or marijuana, but my mailbox is flooded with junkie advertisements for Oxycontin, Xanex, Zoloft, Valium, Vicodin, Viagra and penis-enlarging pills every single day.

This seems odd, considering that excessive amounts of marijuana can cause nothing worse than massive intake of junk food, excessive Playstation 2 use or a deeper appreciation for Marley, Hendrix, Garcia and the like, while overdosing on Oxycontin can often lead to death. Apparently the pushers on the street corners are far more friendly than those on the Internet.

All this convinces me that congratulations are in order.

Congratulations in regard to the joint efforts of the Drug Enforcement Agency, the United States government and all the pharmaceutical companies across this great nation. Congratulations on a job well done.

Drugs in the ghetto remain illegal, so minorities continue to be arrested and thrown in jail, clogging our courts, wasting our tax money,and increasing the divide between social classes and racial distinctions, while suburbanites (often resembling the skin pigmentation of most politicians) remain free to get high when life isn’t quite what they had hoped for.

Now that we have legal drugs to be addicted to like Prozac and Zoloft, we can all be as happy as the smiling clouds in the commercials and be free to enjoy life, without the burden of reality to bother us.

I would also like to congratulate the local authorities for the raids of college housing in the past few years. You have effectively diminished the use of marijuana (cough, cough), created a mistrust between students on campus and helped to support major pharmaceutical companies.

In closing, I’d like to make a public service announcement...

Calling all crackheads: put down the pipe and pop a pill, it could keep you out of jail.