Maybe You're Better Off This Way

So I knew this girl, let's call her Melanie*. She was in my sister's sorority and always seemed like a perfectly nice, down to earth girl. One day my sister called me, short of breath and clearly shaken by something. This is how the conversation went down:

Me: Jenna, what's wrong?
Jenna: You remember Melanie? You met her at the Heaven and Hell party?
M: Yeah, is she okay?
J: I guess she went to this rave in Vantage this weekend, and she tried acid.
M: Oh no, Jen, she didn't... die? (Jenna had lost a good friend earlier that year to an Overdose)
J: No, but she lives with Rose* and I guess after she got back she was acting really weird. She took all their pictures off the wall and drew designs on them, and threw away all her clothes and said she's done with material possessions. Rose said she gave her a day to be a little weird, but it's been like 4 days and she's still in lala land.
K: Oh my God... Jenna what's going to happen?
J: Rose called Melanie's mom, she's taking her to a psych ward to get evaluated...

A week later I found out that Melanie had been admitted to the mental institution for an indefinite period of time. I had always heard stories about people doing acid and "never coming back," but I thought it was an urban legend. Melanie had a hereditary mental illness in her family that changed the chemistry in her brain and caused her to have a permanent reaction to the drug. After about 3 weeks in the mental institution, she was released and given medication to help her "normalize" her life.

Here's the truly twisted part though. Melanie likes her life better now. She'll frequently stop taking her pills because she prefers her drug-addled psyche to her previous life. So my question is, who's to say what is better for her?

In class we discussed the idea that people infected with parasites might be happier that way. Melanie was infected with what I find to be one of the most interesting parasites of all: drugs. She liked who she was on a permanent acid trip, much like the sex-crazed hosts of the Shivers.

Perhaps this constant struggle to be "normal" or "sane" is a parasite in itself. Maybe Melanie feels more like herself than she ever has before. Even if the happiness she feels is a side-effect of the drug, she doesn't know any differently.

On the other side of the spectrum, I have dealt with an older brother who struggles with an addiction to Crystal Meth. I have known this since before I truly understood what drugs were. I knew he was "sick" and "different." He was considerably older than me and by the time I was aware of his condition, he had moved out of my parents house and into some drug den on the West side of the mountains. I became interested in my brother's struggle, because at this point I still believed that he could change.

This is when I read one of the most powerful books that had the biggest effect on me. It is called "Crank" and it is written by the mother of a meth addict in the daughters point of view. This opened me up to the realization that many meth users create alternate personalities to somehow justify or explain their use. This helped me understand why my brother sometimes called himself "Samuel," which was not his name. When he was Samuel, he was high. You could see it in his eyes, or rather see nothing in his eyes. He looked like any trace of his soul was gone.

I have never been an anti-drug crusader or anything, but I have seen how drugs can change people and turn them into someone completely different. Samuel was not my brother. Melanie will never be the same. The drug parasite is one that I would like to further understand, but I don't know if I will ever truly be able to grasp the way it can permanently alter your personality, because I will never make the mistakes that have been waved in front of my face.