I used to hate drugs. I thought they were the root of all my families problems. Now that I’m older I’ve found out that a lot of what I thought I understood isn’t true.
This is the story of a societies exaggeration of minor felonies and the hypocritical and unjust justice system for drug felonies.
I can’t remember much of my life from the ages seven to nine. Much of that is due to the fact that I blocked it all out of my head. Those years were filled with yelling, screaming and me covering my head with the pillows and comforters.
Society.
That’s what it is.
So, the story-the inaccurate one. The one I’ve spent the past 6 years believing.
I was seven when it started. My brother got in trouble for doing drugs. What drugs, I don’t know, mainly Mary Jane, but I thought that it had been much, much more for him to have to be sent to rehab.
During the trouble, before he was sent to rehabilitation, there was constant fighting in my home. Constant screaming. The first few years months whatever they tried to keep it under wraps, tried to keep it quiet...I don’t remember that era of my life very well, I don't differentiate the times. All I remember is that it escalated quickly and I missed my family very much.
After my brother got back from rehab for the first time, I was so happy. Maybe we could be a normal family again. I hated my brother at times, but I loved him more than anyone in the world.
Skipping ahead. My brother got kicked out of his alternative high school for drugs. He was sent to rehab again.
I thought that he had done something really really bad. Again. I thought that he had a really bad problem. That he was really fucked up and that he was dealing and stealing and vandalizing and I don’t know how many other thoughts people and society and my father had stuck in my head about how bad bad bad and wrong wrong wrong my brother was.
These thoughts have haunted me for the past six years. I've been haunted by the thought that my brother had to go through all of this. When I was younger, a part of me blamed him for putting me in this state of depression and darkness. I was broken, I was, am so young and I was broken. And I blamed him.
Just this past year, at sixteen, have I started to realize that most of those stories were exaggerations proposed by my mind and my friends and my family.
No drug other than Marijuana was ever found in my brothers drug tests.
He was never accused, or persecuted with dealing.
He only was accused of stealing once, and it was never proven.
He had vandalized a school bus, but it wasn’t with spray paint and it wasn’t on the outside, which was what i had thought for the past few years. It was with a felt tip marker on the back of a seat.
Many other students were doing the same thing, he was the easiest one to trap.
When I grew up, I realized that I couldn't blame him. It wasn’t his fault. It was society. It was my father. It was his circumstance. And in turn, it brought his downfall which pushed our already teetering family over the edge, breaking it apart. But that wasn’t his fault, it was bound to happen. He had a father who didn’t understand him and a society which he didn’t fit into. He was outcast and he was just trying to find a way. A way that many of us have tried out in the past. These dilemmas were a cry for help, maybe stopping something that could’ve turned into something worse.
Now, onto the serious and opinionated stuff:
The juvenile court system for drugs in alaska is and has been shit. They [not singlehandedly, I admit] tore apart a family for two joints. Two fucking joints. There are kids in my class today who show up tripping on ecstasy and adderall and xanax and pot. People get in trouble but it’s been a long fucking while since I’ve heard of someone going to rehab for two joints.
Detention and criminalization and the court system is inconsistent. If they did this to everyone who has done shit worse than he did, Juvies would be filled, and rehabs would be rich. Again, This whole era of my life has torn me apart, most of all the doubts of what my brother had actually done because no one would explain to me completely what had happened, so I created stories, stories that seemed to fit the bill. That, I admit, was mainly my fault. But they weren’t guesses, they were exaggerations that like I said were fed to me by society and the like.
My brother was persecuted. He was less than sixteen years old, and he had gone through is fair shair of shit already. Kids make mistakes, and rehab really didn’t help any, at all. The police didn’t help any at all.
This wasn’t justice, this was bullying at a legal level.
People and families shouldn’t have to go through this because of a minor offence. A small amout of weed.
People shouldn’t be torn apart by this.
There is no ‘No child left behind’. The system moves aside the troubled kids so they can focus on the ones that they think have the best chance of being making it. The Man cares more about us being present in school than or grades. They care more about us being under their control than our education.
There are more important issues in our schools, in our societies, that a boy with two joints. This isn’t no child left behind, this is kicking out the children who don’t fit in the box of ‘the Systems’ idea of education.
I wanted to write this today because of this, because I want people to understand that not everything is what it seems, that there are more people involved that just the perpetrator and the school.
Our ideas of criminalization for drugs are warped and can easily be warped by the system and by society. Problems aren’t fixed, they are removed.
Is that the way society should be handled?
Is that really the way humans should be handled.
