Recent cases have made me realize I must have just been lucky with the meth addicts I've known.
My favorite Aunt was a meth addict for years.
She still would have given you the shirt off her back and she adored my kids.
Her son (my favorite cousin) was always the same way.
He put others before himself and never would have dreamed of hurting a child.
In fact, he's in jail now because he beat the crap out of a friend (not meth addict) who abused a child (shaking.)
I literally would have trusted these people to babysit before I would have trusted my own mother.
(Not that I ever trusted ANYONE to babysit anyway!)
My mother was a pill addict and was very mean to just about everyone.
I guess my meth addict experience has just been very fortunate. :twocents:
Thanks for that reminder. We see so many stories here where the people addicted to drugs are complete villains. But good people get addicted, too. My uncle was an alcoholic who died of liver failure and he was a really decent guy who never hurt anyone.
What addiction does to good people, is take away their ability to do the good they would normally have done; their addiction is sucking away their energy and their focus and keeping them either high or on the hunt for more of their drug. When someone does something like killing little Owen, we can't say, "Oh, they're meth addicts; it was inevitable," because we'd have to ignore all the meth addicts who don't kill their kids, all the people who are just addicted and trapped and wouldn't hurt an innocent child no matter how high or desperate they got.
There's a third variable here, one that makes people more likely to do meth
and more likely to hurt others--call it sociopathy, call it inability to understand consequences, call it impulsivity.... It's the mindset that says,
I care about me, now, and I don't think about anyone else, or even about my own future. That's something that makes people vulnerable to drug addiction as well as more likely to commit violent crime. But it's those decisions, that personality type and lack of caring, that causes both things. Drug addiction alone, without that "I don't care about others" mentality, won't turn anyone into a violent criminal. It may ruin their lives, but it won't make them a cold-blooded killer.
