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Crack Uses You; You Don't Use
Crack
by Norm Kent
In the next few days, I will have eulogized Brad Buchman at a memorial service to be held at the Unitarian Church. While Brad had AIDS, he also had an addiction to crack cocaine, which was devastating to his health and well-being. Since my days as a college student in the late 1960's, I have seen many of my peers fall victim to both experimental and self-indulgent drug and alcohol abuse. Decades ago the popular drugs were heroin and smack; today it is cocaine and crack. Every few years the names of the drugs and the victims of drug abuse change.
During the course of any life, whether it is rich with age, or ripe with youth, we will encounter difficulties and passages that measure our being, and mark our destiny. We will encounter passions and pleasures, problems and stumbling blocks. Sometimes they involve our family, or friends. Sometimes they involve our lovers, or employers. Sometimes we ourselves, become the one with the problems.
Like hills and valleys, problems challenge our lives, force us to become more creative, and intensify our drive to do better. The Talmud teaches Jews that "that which does not kill us makes us stronger."
As a criminal defense attorney, my job this past decade has often meant dealing with individuals whose recidivistic drug use has led to illegal activity, their inevitable arrest, and subsequent incarceration. Often, the addicted person uses and hurts the ones they love the most- sometimes simply because they are the most accessible target. What do you do when you are the victim of a love and lover that causes more pain than promise?
The toughest question a healthy lover will face in a relationship with an addict is just how much pain will they allow to be inflicted on themselves. First of all, it is foolish for you to believe that you can maintain any relationship with an individual who makes crack his master, and he, its slave. Care for that person as you might, his care for crack will be greater. It will sabotage and savage your mythical relationship. You will become the parent to a dependent child. If you wanted that, you could have been straight, married a woman, and had some kids. At least you would have gotten the tax exemption.
Relationships have to be spiritually enhancing. If they are a drain, then you are being taken to the toilet. It is a smelly, dirty place, and you need to pull away right away. Because many gay men are attracted to younger gay men, often providing emotional as well as financial support, you will find yourself in this position more often than you care to talk about. This is particularly true in an intellectual wasteland like South Florida, where more kids are likely to score higher at 825 than on their SAT's.
As an attorney, it is easy to clinically advise a parent or lover that a child or mate needs rehabilitation. But rehabilitation involves relapse and recovery. Recovery requires healing, and healing, even with its just rewards, still hurts. So when your lover leaves you in the middle of the night for a pack of cigarettes at the 7-11, and does not call or return for six days because he met his buddy and went on a crack binge, just what do you do?
What if it is worse than just a binge? How do you handle the lover who leaves with your car and sells it for ten rocks? How do you handle the call in the middle of the night when he is desperate and stranded in another city asking for a Western Union transfer to come home? Let me suggest this to you. Home is not just where you put your pillow down. Home is where the heart is. And a crack user's heart is only in the next rock.
Crack users who commit crimes can often wind up in a county jail woefully inadequate to meet the needs of drug users. Over 5,000 inmates, 40 % of them there on drug charges. Less than 100 beds for drug rehab. Not a good boat. But trust me when I tell you that you, too, cannot do in two weeks for a young man what parents, social workers, and educators have not been able to resolve in twenty years. This does not mean you do not care. It means you do not enable.
The crisis in your relationship, especially gay ones, could also be alcohol abuse. I am not trying to play that down. There are gay support groups that can help those in need. But those in need must first want help, as much as you want their love. Unfortunately, it is never going to be sufficiently reciprocal or mutual as long as they are using and abusing. For an addict, or alcoholic, use is abuse. They may be the abusers, but you have to prevent yourself from being the abused.
I close with the awareness that while my words make clinical sense, they do not make your situation any easier. If it is you, your lover, your mother, or your family member that is the alcoholic or addict, my words won't temper your pain, your conflict, or your anguish.
It is still going to hurt the abuser, especially in that lucid moment of sobriety when you realize all that you may have lost. It is going to hurt the partner, especially when you get that desperate call for help late in the middle of the night. If you are in such a bind today, begin thinking now about what to say when that call comes. It will come from someone you love and want to help.
All I can do is remind you that whoever is calling from afar, got there on his own. I hope you have the strength to tell your boyfriend, as I did, that he will have to come back the same way. The road to recovery, like the road to ruin, begins and ends from within. All you can ever hope to do is create the conditions for people to get better. The rest is up to them.