The Teen Addict/User

Once again I am in a rush, too much to do, read, straighten up, savor....gosh, I had expected to have more done on my book.  I'd best reserve special time each day or on the weekend to accomplish at least a good structure for my project.

For more years than i care to recall, I have been mentoring teens through a variety of travails, but of late I seem to be attracting kids with addiction issues; sign of the times??  My antenna picking up different energy that I am leaning into?

Perhaps my newfound openness to address the issues of drug usage came from that day at the Robin Ridge house when Ken and Roger Walsh sat with a house full of 20-somethings who wanted Ken's blessings in their continued drug usage.  I took notes on his wisdom, and it opened up the world to me, as usual---- the world of the user.  Having not been one myself during the sizzlin' sixties, I had a more amber orientation toward drug usage.  After all, if I could shift my consciousnesss to an altered state, why couldn't others do it as I did??  Why need exogenous additives when you could train your mind, or just "flick" it, and get as high as I wanted?

I had a ritual of putting on a yellow blouse, yellow slacks, and with my (then) natural blond hair and hazel eyes, I would "tweek" my consciousness into an altered state, and go about as if I were invisible.  No, this was not a neurotic aptitude; it was some type of ability that I just presumed everyone else could replicate.  I stayed "high" as long as I wanted, then just "readjusted" my consciousness and resumed my normal collegiate life.

That day in Boulder, Ken explained that no matter how "mindful", no matter the purity of intentions, the group would NOT achieve any type of enlightened state or mind while indulging in exogenous altered states.  There were folks from communities in the Amazon who had retired from the US to stay in intentional community and use ayahuasca for decades.  One refugee reported that the group was as dysfunctional at the end as they were at the beginning.  Ken warned the assembled 20-somethings that they could do whatever they wanted, but they should not fool themselves that they would achieve any stage shift ever.

I brought this teaching back to my students, and they began to come forward in private and in small groups to question me more.  About then, Erica was dating Steve, who was going to grad school in neuropsychobiology with a concentration on schizophrenia and the effect of drugs on psychosis.  I began talking to him and reading Scientific American about brain waves and acquainting myself with the UR areas; Stevve has become an on-going source of plain facts about drugs, and I have emailed him over the years with questions that my kids had about drug usage.  He clued me into the NIMH finding that even pot can trigger schizophrenia.

I'm going to jump ahead in my narrative to talk about the latest learning that I am doing in being the official counsel to "RR", a 16 year old addict who is now in my class.  I am pulling out all the stops to assist him.  He has flunked out of 2 private schools and 1 rehab residential school due to his multiple addictions.  Now he is here, living with another family where pot is smoked daily and often, without any hassle from the adults.  I am in touch with an Integral recovery expert, and will be looking at this as a case study of the effect of an Integral approach to teen addiction.

Much more later....