Smack talk
The Wife and I find ourselves occasionally sharing a bout of insomnia. We usually deal with this by staying up until absurd hours flipping through channels. Eventually we catch ourselves watching something we wouldn't ordinarily watch.

This is how we stumbled upon MTV the other night, which was running a follow-up on a documentary it did a few years ago on the run of heroin-related deaths in Plano, Texas. We found this interesting because we lived very near Plano -- and, in fact, the heroin story was enough to make us cross Plano from our real-estate list when we moved to the Very Large Metropolitan Area in 1999.

The documentary -- which was very well-done -- segued into the made-for-MTV movie Wasted, a horribly over-acted 2003 version of Reefer Madness. That said, I wonder if it shouldn't be required viewing for parents in Plastic White Suburbia who think their little darlings would never, ever do such a thing as black tar heroin. Nineteen sets of parents in Plano, Texas, certainly found out differently in the late '90s.

Nothing is ever as simple as it seems, of course, and this story certainly wasn't.

Because this is what I do when I get very interested in a topic, I logged on and did some research to remind me what the story was all about. It led me to two observations:

I got a kick out of the generalizations the news media will make in order to make the story, shall we say, more compelling. Plano was often described as "an affluent suburb of almost 200,000 mostly white, upper-middle-class people." Well, that's true for the western part of the city. The part of the city in which most of the heroin deaths occurred, however, was the eastern side, which leans much more toward middle-middle class and, in a few isolated cases, lower-middle class. These weren't all bored rich kids. They fit more closely to the profile of the average drug user I recall from high school. Which, of course, is not nearly as interesting. I find it stunning that, if you believed everything you read, the only people who use drugs are minority kids from desperate situations or bored rich kids. My observation, which comes directly from the middle, indicates drug use cuts across all class and racial lines pretty much equally. Plano often was described as "a suburban oasis," which conveniently overlooks the fact that it's 15 miles north of the nation's eighth-largest city. It's not a far stretch to believe that drugs are fairly accessible in Dallas.

A subculture exists which tries very hard to maintain a straight face while defending drug use on intellectual or medical grounds. These are not people who say, "Man, it's cool to get high, dude; go ahead and try it." These are people who have spent considerable time doing research in an effort to criticize the United States government's war on drugs, while, as a sideline, suggesting that illicit drugs are perfectly safe when used as directed. According to the smack sympathizers, people actually very rarely die just from using heroin. It's only the idiots who drink alcohol or use other drugs while they use heroin. And, if heroin was legal and regulated, its purity would be controlled by outside forces, which would make it less dangerous. Oh, OK. All heroin needs is a warning label. Trust me on this one: An attack on the "War on Drugs" is perfectly legitimate. Don't undermine it by making the completely stupid suggestion that heroin is safe as aspirin.

As a young person, I experimented with this and that, but my friends and I drew the line at cocaine, heroin and LSD. I actually tried cocaine, once, with a co-worker, and it was so damn good I was convinced I should never, ever do that again. My friends -- most of whom never met a joint they didn't like -- were very quick, in their ways, to express their abject disapproval of my having crossed the line that one time. I took that to heart, too.

As a parent, of course, all this scares the hell out of me. I am pretty much of the belief that if you mess with heroin or acid, you deserve whatever you get, be it jail, rehab or untimely death. I have to apply that belief to my own children, too.

I knew drug users as a teenager and young adult. Only one of them I'd classify as somebody who had a serious problem. She's a story I'll save for another time. Another talked about it a lot, but I suspect he talked a lot more than he did.

To my knowledge, most of you have little or no experience with heavy drugs. Here's the thing that, as a parent, I'm genuinely interested to know: What kept you from it? Do you credit your parents? Did you have better things to do? Not enough money? For me, the deciding factor was, quite honestly, the reverse peer pressure thing described above, although that certainly wasn't the only reason.

And if you did go through a phase, I sure as hell won't pass judgment. What pulled you out of it?

Leave a comment, or send a private e-mail (which, you have my word, will remain private). I realize the only thing I can really do for my children is pay as much attention to them as possible and spend the next decade-plus tiptoeing that fine, fine line between keeping them from stuff and driving them to it. But I'll take all the help I can get.