"They're not escaping reality. They're escaping the pain of living in it."
I watched my friends turn to drugs. Not because they were weak, not because they lacked morals, but because they lacked options. When every door is closed, when every tomorrow looks like yesterday, when pain is the only constant—people seek an escape.
First it was just to numb the pain. To forget for a few hours that they were hungry, that they were failing, that they were invisible. But numbness becomes need. Escape becomes addiction. And suddenly, the thing they used to cope becomes the thing destroying them.
"I started using because I couldn't handle being awake anymore. Every sober moment was a reminder of everything I wasn't, everything I'd never be. The drugs didn't make me happy—they just made me feel nothing. And nothing was better than the constant ache of being alive."
This isn't about moral failure. This is about systemic failure. When you create a society where young people have no future, no support, no relief from suffering— they will find relief anywhere they can. We created the desperation. The drugs are just a symptom.
It starts with trying to fit in. Then it's about escape. Then it's about survival. Then you can't stop even if you want to. The addiction owns you.
Society calls them junkies, lost causes, statistics. But they're sons, daughters, friends—people who needed help and got judgment instead.
Families destroyed. Futures erased. Potential buried. And still, no one asks why so many young people would rather be high than deal with reality.
I've been to too many funerals for people who should still be alive. Overdoses. Suicides. Lives cut short not by fate, but by a society that failed them. Each one was preventable. Each one was predictable. Each one was ignored until it was too late.
They weren't bad people. They were hurting people in a world that offered no relief. They were drowning in plain sight, and everyone just watched them go under.
People say our generation is soft, that we can't handle hardship. But they don't see what we carry. They don't understand the weight of inheriting a broken world, of being told to fix problems we didn't create, of watching opportunities that existed for our parents vanish for us.
We're not weak for struggling. We're human for breaking under pressure that no generation should have to bear alone.