Note: It's for drug possession, not anything super bad.
13 years ago, my now former best friend tried to first con me out of money and then did it to my mom instead because my daughter had just been born (which he knew) and money was tight. I always knew he had addiction issues, but I never thought he would actually stoop that low.
Today, my wife showed me that there was a public database where you could search Indiana court cases, so out of curiosity, I typed in his name.
21 court cases, mostly drug, vehicle and fraud offenses in the county where we grew up, went to college in, and which he eventually moved back to, stretching back to 1999! Note he didn’t even live there for 10 years!
He’s currently in prison until December because he was found in possession of methamphetamine. And it was not his first time in prison or the first time he had meth on him. He did drugs when we were in college, but the most serious one was cocaine and that was very occasional. I knew he had a drinking problem, and even that he was abusing prescription medication (he offered me Vicodin when I was visiting him in San Francisco and had a headache) but I had no idea he sunk as low as meth.
This was a guy who wanted to compose classical music when I met him in middle school. He was very intellectual and well-read even then. He eventually went to Indiana University, which has one of the world’s top music schools, for composition. He always was very full of life and cheer and how far he has fallen! I knew he'd sunk really low back when he conned me, but this was the first friend I ever made in middle school in the eighth grade after going through all of seventh grade with no friends and we could and did talk about anything for hours, so I kept him in my life for as long as I could.
After college, he got way into restaurants and cooking and was working at some really high-end places, so when he contacted me and told me he wanted to do a pop-up restaurant as a way of starting a full business and needed $400, I gave him the benefit of the doubt. We mostly talked to each other online at that point, so he gave me a pretty false picture of his life.
I’m honestly not sad about the end of the friendship anymore. I cut him completely out of my life 13 years ago and I do not miss him at this point. Would it have been nice to sit together on a porch in the nursing home in 40 years and spend hours talking about Kafka? Sure. But I'm not losing any sleep over it. In fact, when she told me about the database, it was the first time I had thought about him in ages, but he was the only person I thought of and I had to look.
So I'm not sad about it. I shouldn't even be surprised about it. But it's so weird knowing my former closest friend is spending a year in prison.
Have you ever found out anything like this about an old friend you lost touch with?
I didn't even have to find out. My friend was being hired to make web pages at $20/hour in 1997 when local minimum wage was still below $5/hour (until September 97 when the Federal Minimum got moved up).
He quickly got into cocaine and then in the following years as the money and his skills dried up, he turned to methamphetamines. I got to see the slow fall, I even got to see him do heroin for his first time.
He was one of two young brilliant men whose brains I would see completely added by meth in my life. Went from reading and understanding Stephen Hawking to scribbling incoherent drawings and writings in the margins like the fucking madman he turned into. He went from having a name to everyone calling him "Mumbles" because he could barely speak coherently anymore.
It's literally fucking wild how drugs can fuck you up and completely change the direction of your life.
What's worst, it's incredibly sad. While I also don't mourn the loss of the friendship because it's not my job to pick up after other people's broken lives, it is still incredibly sad and an indictment of the way our society works. I personally think it speaks to how lost many thoughtful and brilliant people there are who are beaten down by a system that doesn't give one flying fuck about classical music or Kafka. Knowledge and expertise is laughed out of the room and given a hearty 🤓 🤓 🤓 🤓 🤓 in response. We're living on the edge of a real Idiocracy. It's hard for me to not see that thoughtful and interesting people can end up broken by a system that never intended to let them follow their dreams. I certainly feel broken by this system, and I certainly am not "successful" in it. This doesn't mean that lies and theft are justified, they are assuredly not, but I feel like our system practically pushes people in desperate situations to pursue that, especially when you see the rich getting proverbial slaps on the wrist for far worse than the average criminal. Not justified, but understandable why that kind of behavior ends up arising.
I totally get how you feel, but I think in his case it's because his dad was an alcoholic who drank a case of beer a day, but despite that, he was rich and so my ex-friend grew up with a lot of privilege that totally ended when he was an adult and his parents divorced. It was sort of inevitable. I just didn't expect it to get this bad.
Drugs give an outlet. Coke costs about twice meth, as money runs lower and lower people start to mix a bit into their coke. Then that mix starts to slowly change ratios. Eventually someone gives in and just says why not. I've watched it happen to people. Mental health and financial security provide a stable slab to not need an outlet. We also can protect lives by simply verifying the outlets aren't tainted with things users weren't trying to use. Fentanyl deaths are a direct result of the war on drugs. I have never met someone who went somewhere and said "I'm going to do fentanyl."
Ironic side effects: fix the drug crisis, it hurts the cartels, once the cartels are hurt Mexico gains more control and can start to fix anything they need to. The border crisis slows down as Mexico recovers. That doesn't include the majority coming from South America and other counties like China but we get to have numbers down where we can assist in building up South American countries and insure they don't have mass inflation and don't need to leave. All the sudden the U.S. doesn't look like the only safe haven. Opportunities now exist for people to succeed and prosper and North and South America becomes larger global trade partners. That reduces emissions as we don't have to ship items across the Atlantic and Pacific that can be made in our countries.
I want to get into how plaguing opium into China resulted in Fentanyl plaguing the U.S, but that would require us to take responsibility for our countries past actions.