Dear Angela,
What are your thoughts on cocaine? You seem like an anything goes kind of gal and I need some advice on this. I know someone who's been thinking about dabbling in it, but said person also has some reservations and is kind of freaked out by it. Do you think it'd be ok? Asking for a friend ...
Thanks,
I have a Question about Coke
Dear I have a Question about Coke,
Your insights have me pegged. I am an anything goes kind of gal. When it comes to life, I'm about as chill as it gets. Think of a really cool sloth, but like, a Puerto Rican sloth, with really cool red glasses. That's me 87 percent of the time.
But I'm a passionate sloth, and there are certain subjects that make this sloth turn into a jaguar-tiger-lion-liger type of animal because they grind my damn gears.
Cocaine is at the top of that list. Right after people who think Africa is a country and people who still wear Make America Great Again ball caps.
As I stated in a previous column, I strongly advocate for people to try new things in life. Try everything once. Try the things that scare you, things like cliff diving, swimming with sharks, jumping out of a plane (with a parachute obviously), trying Indian food, etc.
Try things that will force you to grow as a person. Don't try things that are bound to ruin your life.
I don't want to sound like that cringey coach from Mean Girls, but don't do coke. Because it will mess you up something fierce.
The main issue with cocaine, as with many other hard drugs, is that it's highly addictive. You snort a line and are transported almost immediately to Nirvana, a dimension far from the woes of reality. It's a place where you're always happy and it feels like there's not a damn thing in this world that could possibly bring you down. You feel confident -- like a peacock amongst pigeons. You turn into the social butterfly you always knew you were.
Weightless might be a good word for it. Euphoric is best.
But then it wears off. You don't float back down to earth, you crash-land face first into a pile of concrete. Your head feels like it's going to explode, your brain feels like it's sliding out of your ears and all you want to do is just have a little bit more so you can feel whole again, so you can feel happy again.
So you do some more. And just like that the world finally begins to spin the way it should. And then you come down from that. And the vicious cycle begins.
But I want to paint a realistic picture for you of what your fellow man looks like after trying cocaine once and becoming addicted to it.
I once knew a bloke who was addicted to coke.
He's a guy whose name means nothing now, but I knew him my freshman year and thought he was "the one." I had the blinders on when it came to his slew of issues, coke being one of the primary problems. It made him do some really stupid shit.
Person X had really nice eyes. They were this intriguing electric blue -- clear and piercing and always hiding a hint of mischief.
There was nothing scarier than waking up one day and realizing that his eyes weren't blue at all.
They were hazy and dark and heavy-lidded. They were emotionless and impervious to stimulation. The only time they'd spark at all was after he did a line, and even then they were dim. Then they'd look like I had remembered -- blue -- but it was always fleeting.
He cried to me one night, telling me he needed help, that he couldn't look at his own reflection. That was last year around this time.
To this day he hasn't stopped.
There's absolutely no way I can ensure that you never touch this drug. If you make the choice to do cocaine, I hope you do so responsibly, but I truly feel that there's no way to do coke responsibly.
There's absolutely no way me telling you that it's illegal will ensure that you never touch this drug, because it's way too accessible on this campus for people to actually care about consequences.
There's absolutely no way that me telling you about the side effects -- both long term and short term -- will ensure that you never touch this drug, either.
But you asked for my advice, so here it is.
Please, please, please stay the hell away from cocaine. It has shown me that people really can do the unthinkable. That people can become exactly who you thought they never were. That they can do things they shouldn't be capable of. If someone presents you with the opportunity to do a line, run in the other direction.
It's so hard to stop doing a drug like that. And I hope you never start.
Sincerely,
Angela
tmsaskangela@gmail.com