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The Daily Dish - 2006-2011 archives for The Daily Dish, featuring Andrew Sullivan

Addiction In The Heartland, Ctd

By The Daily Dish
Jan 25 2010, 8:05 AM ET

A reader writes:

There's one other factor in rural drug use.  There's nothing to do in small towns.  Growing up in New Mexico, we were bored.  When you're a teenager, you can only watch so much TV.  My best friend and I would get high on meth and drive around all night just talking, but we felt great because we were high.  All of my friends and a huge chunk of my high school did a lot of drugs and had a lot of sex.  When I moved to Seattle and talked about my past drug experience, my new friends looked at me like I was Tony Montana. 



Genuinely puzzled, I asked if they'd ever done drugs, and the responses were generally along the lines of, "No, I was too busy with my theater group/after school job/non-traditional sports team/other socially acceptable activity."  Weird as is, I think Seattle's dumbass dodgeball league on Capitol Hill is keeping more kids off drugs than all the efforts of all past Drug Czars combined.

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