So...You Think You Can Write?

Winner of the 2018 Western High School Red Ribbon Week Essay Contest

Chase Grooms

Why Drugs, Alcohol, and Tobacco Are Dangerous

One day I was playing video games. The next day I was smoking weed. I was the kid who sat in his room watching gamers on YouTube and doing my best to move up the ranks in Call of Duty. I stayed up all night trying to become the best and slept all day. I even joined tournaments online and went to Portsmouth to compete in tournaments there. I actually won $375 online and in Portsmouth I won $200. I was good. Very good. My mom would actually come in my room and yell at me to clean it up or tell me I needed to shut off the game and go out and be social. But I didn’t care about having friends. I had my video games and I had football. That’s all that mattered to me.

Football was a big thing to me. I played football since I was in 3rd grade. Besides video games, football was all I knew. I was fast. I was good at getting out of tight spots and the crowd would scream my name and it was a good feeling. I felt like a star. 

But then, I wasn’t.

One night after a football game, I let my friends talk me into smoking a blunt. At first I said no. I used to get mad at my sisters for drinking alcohol. I hated it when my mom smoked cigarettes. But I wanted to be cool. I was afterall a football star. What would my friends think if I said no? So, I said yes. 

Soon, I realized I liked it. I liked the feeling of being high. Not only that but it made me feel popular. I wasn’t shy anymore. I was more outgoing and things seemed to come easier for me. Weed made me feel good. It erased the negativity I felt. After a while, I fell in love with the girl of my dreams. I guess you could say she was the same person as me. We had the same personality and we connected quickly. She made me feel happy and good about myself. I soon found out that she smoked weed, too. I found the courage to talk to her when I was high and text her all the time after I had smoked. I had no idea, though, that she was uncomfortable with it and eventually got annoyed by that. Everytime we hung out, I asked her to smoke. She was annoyed because who wants a relationship with someone who wants to smoke everyday? But she really liked me and didn’t know how to tell me that she wanted me to stop. Eventually, she let me know how much it bothered her and I would stop smoking sometimes or lie to her and tell her I did when, obviously, I didn’t.

But I fell in love with her. Really in love. So I decided to try and quit. But my body wouldn’t let me. I started to go into really bad withdrawals. Anger took over and it seemed like every waking moment, I was yelling at everyone around me, and I wasn’t myself. I didn’t know who I was or who I had become. Then, it got worse...the bad happened. We broke up and it devastated me. I was in denial. I couldn’t believe she left me. To cover up the hurt I was feeling, I started doing more than weed. Once I realized that we weren’t going to get back together, it got the best of me and I didn’t care about anything else except getting high.

Weed is definitely the gateway drug. It wasn’t enough for me anymore. I needed to erase the pain I was feeling. I started experimenting with other drugs. I was spiraling downhill fast. I changed my thought process, my style of clothes, I blocked out my family, my old friends. I walked around in a haze, my grades started dropping, and I started missing school. I stopped coming home because I no longer got along with my family and wanted to be somewhere else getting high. This was my senior year, and all I cared about was getting high. It clouded my mind to the point that I didn’t know what I was doing. I messed up my football career because I thought I wanted to go to another school and didn’t think about the effects it would have on football. The day my coach told me I had to sit out the first five games, I quit going to practice. I felt like I was practicing for nothing. I lost my motivation. I figured I would wait the five games out and then play when I was allowed. 

Just when I was allowed to finally play football, the team voted to kick me off the team. My senior year, and after all the years I played football, I couldn’t finish my senior year. I was 640 yards away from breaking the school record, and I couldn’t play. 

One day, however, I suddenly realized that I no longer wanted to continue living the way I was. I wanted back what I had lost and what had once made me happy. I wanted my life back. My girlfriend, even if it was too late, I realized that she was my strength, my happiness. I realized that I hurt her and it killed me to think I was the reason for her unhappiness. “Fewer than 10% of people who smoke marijuana become addicted” (Marijuana Statistics), and I become one of those numbers. I became part of that 10%. The “friends” I had became people who only wanted to be with me to smoke. I realized they were not my friends and I no longer wanted to surround myself with them. I realized that I was wasting my senior year, and I had no plans for my future. 

Marijuana, alcohol, and other drugs may be drugs that take away the pain and make a person forget. But it’s a temporary thing. These drugs do more than take away the pain. They take away your life. They change you mentally, physically, spiritually, emotionally. They hurt you and the people you love, the people who love you. I never wanted nor tried to be the person I was, but I can’t take it back. I can’t take back the first time I said yes when someone offered me a joint. I can’t take back all the days of school I missed. I can’t take back the way I hurt my girlfriend or family. I will never break the school record in football. 

But I can, and I will, change my future. I will look at each day as a new beginning, a new chance at life. I will become the person I was meant to be. If you let it, drugs will control you. But for me, they will never have that chance again. Don’t make the same mistakes I did. Drugs are controlling and additive, and they will try to take over your life. I want my experience to be a motivating force for anyone who is doing what I did. Drugs tried to ruin my life and people started to think I would get nowhere with my life, but now - now - I will write my own story.