Who's Fault Is It?

Who's responsibility is this? Why is my child using drugs? Where does this crap come from? Who is doing this to my baby?

I bet I'm safe to say that every parent of an addict has ask themselves these questions. I know I spent many an evening thinking about these questions and even tracking down friends and dealers phone numbers on my sons phone. Calling friends that are police officers, one the chief of police in our city and another a friend I grew up with since 12 years old that is the elected sheriff of a major county in KC. All in a futile effort to control and fix this situation.

The question still remains, who is responsible for my child's addiction? To save every new parent of an addict I will provide those answers below so that you can move forward faster in this process than I did in my struggle.

First of all and probably the biggest suspect is Dad and Mom. Unless Dad and Mom are the ones supplying the drugs and pushing that needle in their arm we must rule out our responsibility. I'd wager that we have all told our children, "Don't use drugs, just say no." Many have gone much further than that and repeatedly educated our children about drugs and the danger. Could we have done more and had a different outcome, no answers for that but we did the best we knew to do at the time.

It's must be the fault of the police. They don't do enough to keep drugs off the street and unavailable to our children. Sorry to say but this problem is bigger than the police. Law enforcement is doing what they can.

Dealers are the scum of the earth. The drug dealers and drug cartels are poisoning our society and ruining life as we know it. You won't get an argument from me on that one but one Dad and Mom will not change a thing in this world. If I get my son's dealer arrested there will be another one standing in line to provide what he needs. The line of dealers will never end.

It's those friends he hung around with. We ALL knew they were no good. Teenagers make bad decisions. When two or more teenagers are together the amount of bad decisions multiply exponentially. That was happening when you and I were teenagers and it was happening long, long before us. That is just the nature of teenagers as far back as stories are told.

Big Pharma! This is the result of greed by pharmaceutical companies that produce these drugs. They don't care about our children they only care about putting another dollar in their pocket, they are no different than the dealers and drug cartels. With all their faults big pharma does have a place. Life saving drugs are produced and marketed by them. (discussion about excessive cost is for another blog) Even opiate based pain medicine has it's place. I'll speak from experience, I was grateful when I had them after a complete shoulder replacement surgery.

WHO'S FAULT IS THIS?!

Sorry to disappoint but spending time looking for fault is us living in the past. We want to know because somehow we think if we can answer that question it may somehow change the past or change our future. We may be able to learn from the past to share to with others to maybe help keep another mother's child from doing this but it will not help our situation.

Our addicted children live in the present. They live daily, hourly, and minute by minute with their addiction. As parents we must learn to live as our addict. We must learn to accept what is and deal with that reality. We do what we can to help them but we also must do what we can to help ourself.

The truth is as we begin focusing on ourself the answers we seek about how do we help our child becomes much clearer.